David K. Shipler's Blog, page 10

How to Love America

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Americans who want to love their country have to do it unconditionally, the way a parent loves a wayward child. Not to overlook flaws but to believe that correcting them is possible. Not to ignore the racial hatred, the murderous wars, and the impoverished children, but to cultivate the opposites that coexist with the injustices: the embrace of pluralism, the repugnance to violence, the passion for opportunity. This requires clear eyes to see what is and clear vision to see what can be.

                America needs a Carl Sandburg, who in the poem “Chicago” could honor struggle alongside raw virtue:

On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger 

. . . Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong  and cunning.

                America needs a Langston Hughes, who could embedwithin a verse both grievance and desire:

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be! . . .

We, the people must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

America needs a Martin Luther King, Jr., who could lament and challenge and believe within a single sentence: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

America does have Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead House Manager prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachment, who said this in his closing statement:

“In the history of humanity, democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and transitory thing. . . .  For most of history, the norm has been dictators, autocrats, bullies, despots, tyrants, cowards who take over our governments. For most of the history of the world, and that's why America is such a miracle.”

How do we love a miracle betrayed? How do we love a nation tarnished? This is now a task for all citizens from the left to the right, from the depths of deprivation to the heights of wealth, from sea to shining sea.

The acquittal of Trump does not teach us how to love a broken country. Nor would conviction have done so, no matter how warranted. Either path would have turned millions of Americans of one persuasion away from millions of others. Justice could not be done in the Senate chamber. Justice has to be done in the hearts of the people. Justice has to arise naturally from whatever inner values have been sown in every citizen, whatever affection we hold for the cacophony of democracy, whatever beauty we can see in the messy differences among us.

 Love of country is the energy of reform. The Republican Party has made sure that Trump will continue to use his perfect pitch for propaganda. He will fix his marksman’s eye on whites who are alienated and outraged and frightened—and violent. He will not be vanquished from America any more easily than Voldemort from the world of Harry Potter.

The remedy to Trump’s toxic spell is a disapproving, combative love for an America wounded but capable of recovery—in short, an unconditional love full of contradictions. It is a pragmatic, persistent idealism and realism. It is a love not for a leader, not for a party, not for one policy or another, but a love for that miracle of self-government that has been, as Raskin noted, such an aberration in the course of human history.

This is not an easy prescription. The Republican Party has become a gateway through which an authoritarian, far-right insurgency has entered the halls of democracy. The party does not seem poised to remake itself or to collapse, contrary to political reporting that might better be called wishful reporting. Even with sharp internal disagreements and looming battles, the party is not in upheaval. Instead, it shows signs of purging itself as moderates depart, leaving more openings for radicalism.

Whatever secret affections for democratic norms lurk buried in the minds of Republican politicians, few are willing to reveal them to their voters if that means repudiating Trump. All but ten of the Republican House members and all but seven of its senators voted to exonerate the former president after his years of cultivating distrust and fury against the pillars and institutions of liberty. Some who voted to impeach or convict have been censured by their Republican state committees—the latest being Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Imagine what would have happened—what could very well happen next time—with radical, right-wing extremists as secretaries of state, election committee members, and other officials ready to throw wrenches into the works of voting and counting. This was just a dry run. The Republican Party has cased the joint and knows the points of vulnerability.

There is plenty of cause for gloom. We are in an era of political cannibalism, where our leaders devour one another. It should be no surprise, then, that the United States does not elect its best people to high office, with rare exceptions. We are often governed as a kakocracy, a system run by the least qualified and most unscrupulous. Some exceptions were on view during the impeachment trial, as Raskin and other principled Democratic managers led a brilliant prosecution. They summoned up the finest political morality.

Americans who watched and were proud—proud of the historic idealism, proud of the open system that allowed a former president to be tried, proud that democracy had survived Trump’s multiple assaults—Americans who felt redeemed despite the acquittal have every reason to love their country.

In dark times, the light of decency looks brighter. Watching good people rally to democracy here reminded me of Israel in September 1982, after the Israeli army in Lebanon stood by and allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangists to massacre hundreds of Palestinian women, children, and men in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israel’s shame ran deep, and some 400,000 people, one out of every ten Israelis, took to the streets to demand an accounting. I witnessed the outpouring with wonder at the well of moral decency that had been tapped. Oddly, the moment brought euphoria. And the demonstrations worked: A commission was formed that held then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre. He was forced out of office.

The American outcome has not been as pure, of course. And its ambiguous result comes amid a global surge toward authoritarianism, as Anne Applebaum documents in her book Twilight of Democracy.

“The appeal of authoritarianism is eternal,” she writes. She cites the research of Karen Stenner, a political psychologist, in describing an “authoritarian predisposition” among people who “are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity. A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry. They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.”

American society is certainly diverse and divided. That’s the reality. To love America, you have to love that raucous pluralism. “Liberal democracies never guaranteed stability,” Applebaum concludes. “Liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens: participation, argument, effort, struggle.” Note that she uses the past tense. Hopefully, years from now, the past tense will look like a typographical error.

MACA: Make America Competent Again

 

By David K. Shipler 

The first in an occasional series 

                Perhaps the word “again” should be put in quotes or parentheses or followed by a question mark, because while the United States has done a lot of things very well through its history, incompetence has also plagued governmental behavior in areas ranging from foreign affairs to poverty. A frequent hallmark of failure has been the unwillingness to apply what we know to what we do. Expertise does not get translated into policy.

                The most obvious recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration’s floundering cost lives and worsened economic hardship. But the gap between knowledge and practice inhibits problem-solving in many fields. If you add up all of society’s accumulated understanding about the causes of poverty, for example, or about the sources of conflict in one or another region of the world, and then compare that knowledge with the actions being taken, it looks as if knowledge gets filtered out through a fine sieve before it gets to the policy level.

The Vietnam War was such a case. The US government saw North Vietnam as a Chinese and Soviet proxy in the vanguard of communism, and therefore a threat to American security. But historians knew that Vietnam had resisted China for centuries. And so could any American soldier or diplomat in Saigon who bothered to notice how many streets were named for Vietnamese heroes in the long campaigns against Chinese occupation. It should have been no mystery to American policymakers that the war, for Hanoi, was the continuation of a long anti-colonialist struggle, not one fought to spread global communism.

The dilution of expertise in making policy can be seen in the Middle East, Russia, China, and other parts of the world. The same is true at home. Much is known about how to treat prisoners to reduce recidivism rates, how to prevent police from extracting false confessions, how to provide good defense attorneys for indigent defendants, how to curtail global warming, how to clean up air and water, how to make workplaces safer, how to reduce suicides (gun control), how to treat mental illness, and on and on.

Accumulated knowledge about poverty is not put to good use. We know how to alleviate housing problems in America; it’s a matter of money. We know how to eliminate malnutrition—also a matter of money. We know how to raise workers’ skills and make work pay enough to sustain a family. We know how to provide decent medical care. We know how to improve education. True, some of our abilities diminish along the more difficult part of the spectrum—we are confounded by child abuse, drug abuse, gang violence, racism, white supremacy, and harmful parenting. But we know how to ease many other hardships.

Why don’t we apply our knowledge? For at least two main reasons. One is the lack of will. We’re not good at playing the long game by paying for remedies that don’t show immediate results. We are stricken with impatience; deferred gratification is not our thing. We elect timid officials, not true leaders who dare to educate and inspire. Alarmist sound bites about higher taxes strike a chord. Blaming the victims is a professional pastime on the political right.

Another reason is widespread unawareness. In some quarters, experts are derided as elitist and disparaging. Research isn’t sufficiently shared among disciplines, so the silos of information don’t get blended and communicated to the general population. Specialists’ insights are often left hidden in obscure corners of the scientific or academic world. As a result, known lines of cause and effect are invisible.

An important illustration of the failing is the relationship between housing, malnutrition, brain development, and lifelong cognitive impairment that leads to learning disabilities and school dropouts. The chain reaction is well understood by experts but hardly at all by legislators who vote on housing subsidies, much less by the public at large.

It works this way: Take a low-income family way down on the waiting list for the inadequate government programs that reduce housing costs. On the open market, the family might pay 50 to 60 percent of monthly earnings for rent. That is not an optional expense. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay for electricity, heat, and phone. If you’re part of the vast majority of Americans who have to drive to get to work, you have to make the car payments and the insurance premiums. These are not choices. They cannot be squeezed. What can be squeezed is the part of the monthly budget for food.

And that is what many poor families confront. Research on low-income households has found a high correlation between a lack of housing subsidies and malnourished children.

Malnutrition impairs the immune system, making kids more susceptible to illness.

More seriously, decades of study by neuroscientists have shown that malnutrition during critical periods of brain development—notably the last two trimesters of a woman’s pregnancy and the first two or three years of a child’s life—can cause lifelong cognitive damage. The early deprivation can leave indelible marks even if it is followed by years of improved nutrition. Teenagers who suffered iron deficiency during periods of critical brain development score lower in math and written expression, motor function, spatial memory, and selective recall. They display more social problems, attention deficit, anxiety, and depression.

Facing such disabilities, they are candidates for the ranks of school dropouts, who earn less money, pay less in taxes, suffer more health problems, and encounter the criminal justice system at higher rates. Food insecurity now hits an estimated 27 percent of American adults without a high school diploma, compared with only 5 percent of college graduates.  

Obviously, not all cognitive deficits can be traced back to inadequate housing subsidies. But inadequate income can be felt indirectly as well. Childhood food allergies cannot be addressed without access to well-stocked grocery stores, which are sparse in poor neighborhoods that are often called “food deserts,” where 19 million Americans now live.

Nursing a child’s food intake cannot be done well without consistent adult supervision, often lacking when parents work odd hours for low wages and rely on neighbors or relatives as caregivers. New immigrants are sometimes fooled by advertising into thinking of American junk food—Coke and chips, for example—as nutritious. All this and more is witnessed by doctors and nutritionists in America’s malnutrition clinics. Yes, there are malnutrition clinics in the United States of America.

And the pandemic has only made the situation worse. With people out of work and schools closed, depriving kids of school lunches, a companion epidemic of food shortages has spread ominously. The incidence of households reporting inadequate food has risen from 10.5 percent in 2019 to estimatesof 23 percent or more. Among families with children, rates are 27.5 to 29.5 percent, affecting over 13.9 million kids.

Do we not know the devastating brain damage being done to children? Yes, we know. That is, neuroscientists know, pediatricians know, some of us who have being paying attention know. If those who make policy knew, the idealist would say, we would spend more on housing. We would spend more on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, which is underfunded and a perpetual target of Republicans. (Trump tightened the rules and reduced some benefits, which President Biden has reinstated.) If we were true to what we like to believe about ourselves, we would not be consigning millions of children to lifetime cognitive impairment.

When government fails, the society fails. That sets up a circular pattern, for alienated citizens tend to drift toward populist demagogues such as Trump, who devastated government agencies designed to render help. Republicans who cultivate distaste for government, and who deprive government of the tools necessary for effectiveness, reinforce the syndrome that will elevate the next Trump—on the backs of those who go hungry today. 

Next: Private efforts to Make America Competent

The Religion of Democracy

By David K. Shipler 

                If America has a state religion, the historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. Among all the rancorous arguments across the American spectrum, no compelling bid to abandon the Constitution can be heard. No rhetorical attack on democracy is made. No threat to the nation, no fear of insecurity provokes such apostasy.

Even those who would undermine the Constitution, including the Capitol rioters, have acted in its name. Thus did Donald Trump’s appeals to “stop the steal” of the election intone the mantra of democracy, not the authoritarian rule he was attempting to install. Democracy was hailed by rioters who believed that they were fighting to defend it even as their insurrection moved to take it down.

That profound hypocrisy becomes less puzzling when Constitutional democracy is seen as religious. For religion can be perverted. It can be rationalized into destruction, as a world full of religious violence has witnessed. A creed can be selectively interpreted, twisted to fit parochial interests, and ignited as a call to arms. A religion’s righteous purity can be contaminated with hatred, which is then fueled by religion’s righteous certainty. No secular reasoning can rebut the divine inspiration, the holy cause. If it is for good, then that is good. But it is not always so.

American democracy is often elevated with religious language: “sacred,” “desecrate,” “temple.” Both sides in the Capitol invasion of January 6 used the terms. The lone police officer who tried to coax rioters out of the Senate chamber saidgently, “Just want to let you guys know, this is the sacredest place.”

As the mobs roamed the halls searching for legislators to kidnap or kill, Trump tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots. . . . Remember this day forever!”

 Once the Senate was taken back, Senator Dick Durbin declared on the floor: “This is a sacred place. But this sacred place was desecrated by a mob today on our watch. This temple to democracy was defiled by thugs, who roamed the halls — sat in that chair, Mr. Vice President — one that you vacated at 2:15 this afternoon.”

President Biden, in his inaugural address, hailed the survival of democracy against those who sought “to drive us from this sacred ground.”

These are not mere metaphors. They are words of devotion. They are statements of reverence that strike a chord with people’s need to believe in something bigger than themselves. For many secular Americans, that something is the state religion of constitutional democracy.

“Democratic” is an abused term around the globe. Among authoritarian regimes are the Democratic Republic of Congo, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

There is a risk of abuse in the United States as well. “Democracy” has become a facile term among certain Americans, too. It is an empty platitude like “God” and “Jesus” to some who practice immorality. They include those in the religious right who piously embraced Trump as a God-given savior while he separated immigrant children from their parents, sped last-minute executions, stirred hateful racism, and the like.

The extreme right has also forged an amalgam of Christian and democratic symbols to fortify their un-Christian, undemocratic agenda. As the “great patriots” moved to storm the Capitol, at least one man was seen in The New Yorker’svideoraising a Bible above his head. Some in the mob flew Crusader flags.

 At the Senate dais, where Vice President Mike Pence had presided, a long-haired man who seemed in religious ecstasy raised his fist, looked upward toward the heavens, and shouted: “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name. Amen!” A chorus of “Amen” came from the other rioters.

Then Jacob Anthony Chansley, shirtless and wearing a bearskin headdress with horns, picked up the theme, announcing from the dais through an electric megaphone, “Let’s all say a prayer.”

He yelled loud enough to be heard in heaven: “Thank you, Heavenly Father, for giving us this opportunity. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for giving us the opportunity to stand up for our God-given rights, our inalienable rights . . . We will not allow the American way, America, to go down. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists and globalists and traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you, in Christ’s holy name we pray.”  

 The man who had prayed first held both hands out, open palms, eyes closed, head bowed, seemingly transported. He raised his hands toward the ceiling, shouted, “Yes! Yes!” and clenched his fists. A lusty cheer of “Amen!” rose from the small crowd that occupied the Senate chamber, a chant for a false prophet. 

Limiting Speech in a Free Country

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.                                                                                                                --The First Amendment 

                The First Amendment restricts what government may do, not what may be done by private entities such as Twitter and Facebook. So the internet platforms that have banned Donald Trump and many of his conspiracy-minded supporters do not run afoul of the Constitution. They are private companies, no more prohibited from silencing unwelcome viewpoints than any printed newspaper would be.

But American society needs to be careful about privately-imposed censorship—for that’s what it is, no matter how justified in the current state of emergency. As seen since 9/11, practices adopted to  counter threats can spill beyond the immediate risk, stifle diverse opinions, and outlast the period of danger. It’s a tricky balancing act to preserve freedom of speech and also contain wildfires of lies and verbal extremes that ignite violence.

The real conspiracies—not those fabricated but those organizing armed attacks—need communication to recruit and plan, so disrupting open lines of contact can impede them for a while. Yet in its quest for security against what might become a burgeoning insurgency, the country could harm itself. Extremist movements are already being driven underground to fester out of sight, elusive to law enforcement. If the parameters of acceptable debate are narrowed and marginal ideas are exiled from the public square, the society cannot be self-correcting. That depends on robust discussion across a broad spectrum, facilitated these days on the internet.

The map of free speech in the United States is defined by two overlays: fairly clear legal limits imposed by government on the one hand, and on the other, shifting boundaries drawn informally in the larger culture of peer groups, employers, news organizations, social media, and so on.

On the governmental level, the law’s limits on speech are so minimal, so distant from the places where most people go, that the landscape of freedom is probably the most expansive of any country in the world. It is very hard to break the law by merely speaking, although perhaps President Trump   managed when he fired up his supporters before some of them stormed the Capitol.    

                Many Americans know a version of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous prohibition against shouting fire in a theater, but many who quote it omit a key qualifier: the word “falsely.”

                “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic,” Holmes wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court. “It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.”

                Trump’s speech seemed to fit those criteria. He falsely claimed that the country was ablaze with election fraud, and falsely led his supporters to believe that the results could be corrected by the Vice President and Congress if only the mob would march on the Capitol. And while subsequent court rulings have tightened the definitions of incitement, requiring the words to be “immediate” and “imminent” to the resulting violence, Trump probably met that test as well. He told the masses that he would go with them to the Capitol—a lie within a lie—and they set out even before his final words. He went back to the White House to watch the assault on television.

Holmes was writing in 1919 to uphold the unjust conviction of Charles Schenck, general secretary of the Socialist Party, who had been imprisoned for mailing leaflets urging that the military draft be resisted and repealed as a despotic method by the rich to force the poor to fight World War I on behalf of Wall Street. “When a nation is at war,” Holmes wrote for the Court, “many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.”

While Holmes reversed himself in later cases, he had acknowledged a sobering truth: The freedom to speak expands and contracts with the nation’s sense of security—and in addition, history shows, with an input of emotion and bias.

Some speakers have less latitude than others. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American Muslims had little safe space for rhetoric. An illustration came five days after planes were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A group of young Muslim men gathered at a dinner in Virginia to hear remarks from a native-born American computational biologist and lecturer on Islam named Ali al-Timimi. According to some present, he made three points: that 9/11 augured the imminence of the end of days, that Muslims and their families ought to leave the United States, and that jihad could be waged if his listeners went to fight in Kashmir, Chechnya, or Afghanistan.

Four of the young men present that evening went soon after for weapons training in Pakistan but never joined the Taliban or any other terrorist organization. They returned after several weeks to the United States, where they and seven others were charged under various conspiracy and anti-terrorist laws. The FBI pressured some to turn on Timimi in exchange for avoiding prison, succeeding in getting three of them to testify. Their recollections of Timimi’s evening talk were taken as fact. Although neither he nor the men he spoke to engaged in terrorism, a jury drawn from the Pentagon area in Virginia convicted him of a very indirect crime—not committing violence, not even conspiring to do so, but for inducing the young men to conspire to levy war against the United States. Sentenced to life in prison plus seventy years, Timimi served fifteen until provisionally released last September pending his appeal.

It remains to be seen if Jan. 6, 2021 introduces another era of government restrictions on free speech. That is already happening in the cultural and private landscape, the other overlay on the map. There, the region of speech grows and shrinks even more dramatically with the moment.

In the last decade or so, racist comments online have gotten some people fired from jobs but rarely banned from social media. For years, internet platforms have permitted anti-Muslim posts, websites, and conspiracy theories based on faked scholarship alleging that American Muslims pose an internal threat of terrorism and government takeover through their mosques and community centers in the United States.

During the Obama administration, the major platforms allowed virulent racist images and epithets against President and Michelle Obama, including doctored images picturing them as gorillas and chimpanzees. Local Republican Party officials who posted or retweeted the bigotry were sometimes dismissed, but not always.

When social media companies have denied service, their motives have not always been pure. Bias plays out in various forms. Last June, Facebook abruptly shut down the page of Black Zebra Productions, a Black-run journalism organization, after a video was posted showing Sacramento police using violence against demonstrators. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California noted that “years of irreplaceable video and documentary footage” disappeared and declared, “Black users have long complained that Facebook incorrectly flags or censors content that discusses racism and activism, while at the same time failing to remove hate speech posted by white supremacists.” The page was reinstated after a few hours.

Last fall, Facebook repeatedly rejected a promotional video by a music duo, Unsung Lilly, as “sexually explicit,” presumably because the two women, who are married to each other, appear briefly at the beginning with their foreheads touching.

Back in 2007, Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, was denieda request by Verizon Wireless to use its sign-up texting program, a system through which people register to get informational texts from politicians and non-profit organizations. Most recently, conservatives have charged that they are being singled out for silencing. If so, it’s a very recent phenomenon.

For most of the Trump administration, the blatant lies of the President and his supporters were left online unchallenged by the internet companies. Only gradually during the last year did Twitter and Facebook begin to flag some of his posts as factually inaccurate, then remove them. His fabrications about a stolen election spread relentlessly for two months after the voting.

While Trump was addicted to Twitter, he has other means. So do QAnon, the Proud Boys, and other right-wing groups who attacked the Capitol. Their widespread expulsion from Facebook and Twitter, and the shutdown of their main alternative, Parler, has driven many of them to encrypted apps such as Signal and the Dubai-based platform Telegram, which have been downloaded tens of millions of times in the last week.

So, every solution creates at least one new problem. Yes, removing them from the most accessible platforms might interfere with their ability to disseminate their messages and attract more adherents. But monitoring encrypted forums is harder for law enforcement. As Sheera Frankel of The New York Times has explained, the FBI and local police often get tipped off on upcoming actions when they see dates mentioned on public sites and can then mine the darker parts of the web. But those regions are fragmented, protected by layers of passwords and gateways, and effective in concealing users’ real identities.

 Smothering speech that is considered dangerous does not always work against motivated radicals. Canada, Australia, and Germany outlaw hate speech, but they have plenty of hate. Most European countries prohibit Holocaust denial, the display of Nazi symbols, and other forms of anti-Semitic speech, but they have plenty of anti-Semitism, and right-wing extremists are on the rise throughout the continent. The Soviet Union banned speech containing ethnic hatred and separatism, but there was lots of it in private, and the country broke up into fifteen separate countries along national and ethnic lines.

Free speech works when the public is aware enough to see through absurdity. In that utopia, free speech presents no threat, because citizens don’t fall for radical fabrications and authoritarian demagogues. QAnon’s lunatic notions of Democrats as Satan-worshipping pedophiles get laughed into oblivion. Trump’s deranged insistence that he had won a landslide is ridiculed by the entire nation.

With a critical mass of Americans who understand and embrace their own democratic values and mechanisms, who know the Constitution and the sordid histories of dictatorships elsewhere, the right-wing fantasies get no traction, none at all. But that is not the America we have.

The Democratic Party vs. the Anti-Democratic Party

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

                If Donald Trump were solely responsible for the whirlwind that the United States now reaps, his departure on January 20 would bring calm. But the wind was sown long before Trump and will blow a long time after. It gnaws away at beliefs essential to a free people, even as Americans take pride in their democracy’s survival through the latest Day of Infamy, Jan. 6, 2021.

                Notwithstanding the democratic-sounding platitudes by Republicans since the riots, their party has not favored true, open democracy, but rather a kind of semi-democracy at best. The Republican Party has conducted nationwide operations to prevent minorities and other likely Democratic voters from casting ballots, efforts now ramping up in some state legislatures poised to restrict the early and mail-in voting that broadened turnout last November. It has eagerly worn the mantle of racism inherited from Southern Democrats. Its assertions of fraud in the presidential election have mostly cited heavily Black cities. And it has become the gateway through which right-wing authoritarian movements are entering the political landscape.

                Trump is the facilitator and the current figurehead, the “accelerant,” as former President Obama has called him. But he could never have done it as a Democrat. It was among Republicans that he found resonance for his multiple hatreds and autocratic impulses.

                Yale history professor Timothy Snyder likens the Republican Party to authoritarian parties of Eastern Europe: Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary. Fascist methods, he notes, depend on a Big Lie, as in the claim of election fraud, and on faking election results, as Trump sought to do. “The people who stormed the Capitol building were fascists,” Snyder says.

The Republican Party is far from homogeneous, and some pundits and politicians are thinking wishfully about a split. Yet the core of the party apparatus remains Trumpist, as do most of its constituents. Even after he incited rioters to storm the Capitol and shut down Congress, sixty-five percent of the Republican House members voted to reject electoral votes from Pennsylvania, and the next day National Republican Committee members applauded when he phoned into their meeting.

QAnon, which labels Democrats as Satan-worshipping pedophiles, has considerable following among Republicans, 56 percent of whom said in a September poll that they believed part or all of its conspiracy theories. The FBI has identified QAnon as a potential terrorist movement, but a number of Republicans who endorse its radical fantasies and calls to violence won primaries for Congress, including for the US Senate from Oregon.

Primary victories by such extremists made them losers to Democrats in most cases, as in Oregon. Yet the winners of House seats included two Republicans who have embraced QAnon: Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Boebert, who owned the Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado, where wait staff pack sidearms, announced that she would take a handgun into the Capitol.

The party’s dwindling moderates seem as helpless against this tide as the outnumbered Capitol Police did against the horde that crashed through barricades and occupied the seat of democracy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked a sharp rise in hate groups since Trump entered office and “energized white nationalists who saw in him an avatar of their grievances and their anxiety over the country’s demographic changes,” the center’s latest report declares. Hundreds of movements are “targeting immigrants and refugees, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Blacks, and other people of color.” The FBI has documenteda growth in hate crimes, committed mostly against Blacks, Jews, and gay men, to the highest levels since 2008.

 None of this has triggered much Republican comment or concern. Trump has mostly gotten away with his winks, nods, and outright praise for the fascist-like activists, who now complement the party’s traditional anti-democratic election practices.

Placing obstacles to voting has long been a cause of a Republican Party that acts as if it can’t win elections with high turnout among people of color. As seen in Georgia, where two Senate seats were just flipped to Democrats, that might be the case. In 2018, the ACLU reports, 70 percent of voters purged from Georgia’s registration rolls were Black. Nationally, minority neighborhoods have fewer polling places, forcing voters to travel farther and wait in longer lines than whites. Nearly 8 percent of Blacks are blocked from voting because of restrictive laws, including ID requirements, which disenfranchise an estimated 21 million Americans who lack such identification.

These and other methods have been facilitated by Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices, who in 2013 threw outthe list of states and localities required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to get preclearance from the Justice Department for any changes in electoral procedures. For decades, the preclearance requirement had helped preserve voting rights for minorities.  

Given this sordid background, any breath of support for democratic norms from Republicans feels like fresh air, and granted, there is reason for pride these days alongside the shame. After the presidential election, the institutions held. Thousands of election workers counted votes honestly, Republican state officials withstood pressure from Trump’s deranged rants about a fictitious victory, and some ninety judges—including some Trump had nominated—tossed out his frivolous lawsuits. The Congress, after being shut down by his armed supporters’ invasion of the Capitol, duly reported the electoral votes in Joe Biden’s favor.

But Trump persuaded millions of citizens to distrust the voting process, the keystone of democracy. He whipped them into frenzies of rage and hatred, not just on January 6 but throughout his presidency. What’s more, his party collaborated. With rare exceptions, elected Republicans greeted his malfeasance with silence, excuses, or approval.

                It’s tempting to engage in rhapsodies over Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s eloquent, belated denunciation of election denial as several of his colleagues were about to ignore his pleas and challenge the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side,” he declared, “our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again.”

                That could still happen. The admonition came too late to quench the fire, after weeks of McConnell’s dithering and evasions, and the parroting of the Big Lie by much of the Republican Party. The exceptions are so few that they stand out heroically: Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse, for example, principled democrats—small d—who highlight the desperation of a country hungry to celebrate endorsements of democracy by members of a party that works against it.

The Next Trump

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Whether Donald Trump runs again in 2024 or fades from politics, his enigmatic hold on tens of millions of Americans will be a lesson to the next demagogue. Much will be learned from Trump’s successes in manipulating huge swaths of the public, and also from his failures to translate his autocratic desires into practical power.

                Just the fact that 72 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that they believe Trump’s discredited claim that he won the 2020 election is a mark of his perverse success in selling the Big Lie. His outsized personality, his ridiculous assertions, his coarse and insulting talent for channeling resentments felt by masses of alienated citizens placed him so far above reproach in so many minds that his obvious corruption and damage to the country’s reputation and national security made no impact on the committed. After four years of falsehoods, incompetence, and immorality, he won eleven million more votes than in 2016 (up from 63 to 74 million).

                He has deftly played the dual role of tough guy and victim, of swaggering bully and persecuted prey. This is a skillful embodiment of the wishes and fears of the millions, mostly white working class, who feel marginalized and dishonored while yearning for the wealth and strength that Trump appears to possess. He has given them the dignity that many feel they have been denied by the liberal, urban, multiethnic society that their country is becoming.

Despite his serial fabrications, his lack of moral boundaries made him seem authentic and unscripted. He was a paradox: an outsider but a pampered part of the corporate elite, a non-politician whose every move was politically calculated for his own benefit, a drainer of the “swamp” who wallowed in corrupt self-dealing. He was right when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.  

But because Trump did not understand government and antagonized authoritative agencies, he was often stymied as he tried to rule dictatorially, above the law. He crudely attacked the intelligence agencies, the military, the FBI, and other power centers, precisely those that an autocrat would need to muster under his control. His impatience and incompetence stymied many of his efforts to shortcut the due process built into the regulatory system.

He managed to execute conservatives’ goals of dismantling many protections of workers’ rights and safety, consumers’ health against harmful chemicals and pollution, and natural environmental assets. And the hostile atmosphere he and his minions created drove many skilled experts out of scientific, legal, and diplomatic posts. But courts blocked his attempts to impose or reverse regulations by rolling over the legal requirements for waiting periods, public comment, and impact assessments. And his ineptitude at massaging Congress into significant legislative change meant that the landscape of the law was not extensively revised in the short run—although long-term effects will be felt through his numerous appointments of conservative federal judges.

Seeing this record, a sophisticated would-be autocrat could adjust accordingly. Large sections of the American public have proved remarkably gullible, as if batteries in their Nonsense Alarms have died. They are ready to believe the most absurd conspiracy, fall for the most transparent con artist, and sign on to the unhealthiest cult of personality. A Gallup poll just recorded Trump as 2020’s most admired man. This, amid a pandemic soaring largely because of Trump’s bungled responses.

A grim question arises from the fact that the adulation of Trump persisted after Russia created false identities online to inflame America’s divisive politics: How much collaboration would an invading enemy enjoy? It seems a crazy thought, but some European countries learned hard lessons in World War II. An aspiring American autocrat might be smart enough to take notice.   

A next Trump, a successful Trump, is likely to be a slick purveyor of empty dreams and encrypted hatreds. He or she would be a suave authoritarian populist who whipped up fear about internal enemies. Rough, Trump-like edges would be smoothed. The platitudes would flow like honey off the tongue. The outright misogyny that repelled many female voters would be veiled, and thinly encoded racism would mask explicit bigotry and invite quiet applause.

To gain autocratic power, this future Trump would not display every whim of outrage online but would conceal malevolence behind a screen of propriety. Much can be accomplished in secret, as American history has shown. So our hypothetical president would have to be an even better actor and entertainer than Trump, surreptitious while conveying a deceptive impression of candor to followers who value iconoclastic rulers.

Furthermore—and this is perhaps most important—he or she would be clever enough to coopt, not alienate, the centers of governmental power. Trump attacked and derided them. The would-be dictator would cultivate them, harnessing the intelligence and undercover operations of the CIA and the FBI, the formidable surveillance tools of the National Security Agency, the investigative apparatus of the IRS, the prosecutorial clout of the Justice Department, and perhaps the ultimate threat of the military.

Impossible, you say? We need look no farther back than the 1970s, when decades of domestic spying, harassment, and political prosecutions against dissenting citizens came to an end after being investigated and exposed by the committee chaired by Senator Frank Church. It is worth reading the report.

Beginning in the Cold War and stretching through the Vietnam War, agencies targeted such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., labor unions, antiwar activists, and others who challenged the status quo. Against constitutionally protected free-speech the government mounted surveillance, disinformation, dirty tricks, and politically-motivated prosecutions. One effort is depicted in the new film, “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” on protest leaders arrested unjustly in 1968.

The FBI routinely requested tax files on activists, the IRS audited citizens and groups “of predominantly dissident or extremist nature,” an internal memo declared, including the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NSA intercepted millions of private telegrams, and the CIA secretly opened and photographed nearly 250,000 first-class letters. Phones were wiretapped without warrants, homes were broken into clandestinely, and the FBI even sent anonymous letters to wives of Black Panthers alleging infidelity, which destroyed at least one marriage. The FBI compiled a list of some 26,000 “suspicious” Americans who were to be rounded up in case of a “national emergency.”

After the investigation, Congress passed laws to impede such abuses, but some restrictions were evaded or diluted after the 9/11 attacks. Given what the United States has learned about itself in the last four years, some form of recurrence seems possible one day, given the right circumstances: a “national emergency,” a compliant and fearful public, and a charismatic demagogue who ignores the rule of law just as President Trump but with a deft hand on the levers of power.

As former President Obama saidto the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”

The next Trump could be more appealing, and therefore more dangerous.

The Dynamics of Democracy and Dictatorship

 

By David K. Shipler 

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel 

                The 2020 election and its aftermath have exposed the fragility and resilience of democracy, making this an opportune moment for national introspection by the United States. It is a crisis so serious that it calls for a non-partisan 911-style commission to help Americans wrench free of their myopic politics and look clearly in the mirror. Nothing less than the country’s constitutional freedoms are at stake.

Significantly, both Democrats and Republicans agree on one argument: that the other side is jeopardizing democracy. Each side contends that its opponent is only pretending to support free and fair elections, that either Republicans want to overturn the people’s vote, or Democrats want to win by fraud—take your choice. The antagonists, whether cynical or sincere, still put the ballot box on a pedestal. Democracy is still the lodestar.

But that is where equivalence ends. This is a clash between reality and unreality, a study in the power of manipulation, propaganda, and popular gullibility, which are ingredients of dictatorship. Rarely if ever in U.S. history have so many citizens fallen for such a grotesque fiction as President Trump’s evidence-free claim of a stolen election. Rarely if ever before have election officials been threatened with violence. And rarely if ever before have calls been heard for a new election under martial law, as voiced by a group calling itself “We the People Convention” and supported by retired General Michael Flynn, the pardoned felon who served as national security adviser and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  

Currently, the risks to democracy exist inside minds more than inside institutions. There are systemic problems, obviously, but the process held up well in this difficult election. By contrast, thoughts and beliefs did not.

Trump is blamed, and rightly so. But as his post-election fantasies cast their spell over millions of Americans, the country would do well to consider how autocracies depend on those below the leader. In reality, there is no such thing as “one-man rule.” The most heinous dictators have never had to go it alone. Hitler needed the Goerings, Stalin needed the Berias. They in turn relied on the uniformed and civilian functionaries of the secret police and the sprawling administrative apparatus to arrest, round up, transport to camps, and execute. Autocracy requires the cooperation and labor of millions, including masses of citizens, not just those who are forced and afraid but also those who are spellbound.

                Even authoritarian systems that are less severe, such as the Soviet Union after Stalin, depend on the acquiescence of a population that believes in the cause and its virtue. Between Stalin in 1953 and Gorbachev in 1985, control came not only vertically from the top but also horizontally, from low-level peers who enforced political orthodoxy and punished minor deviance, not always with prison but more typically by denying privileges—a trip abroad, a promotion, better housing. Many Russians internalized the limits, sometimes subconsciously, so that in everyday settings, policing devolved into self-policing and censorship into self-censorship. When broad belief finally flagged, so did the scope of state power.

                How susceptible are Americans? You’d think that our flinty individualism would work against a herd mentality, that the suspicion of government left over from the Revolution of 1776 would still inoculate us. Our anti-collectivism is sometimes taken to the extreme of countering the common good, as in owning guns or resisting masks during the pandemic.

                But the Trump phenomenon has revealed that alongside the recalcitrance runs a yearning for a strong hand at the top, a leader, a hero, a cult figure. For many, the support for Trump goes far beyond what a healthy democracy can tolerate. It veers into idolization, even a conviction among some that he is God’s chosen. That he attracted nine million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 says as much. He was defeated, but millions overlooked or discounted his obvious failures as president, his corruption and contempt for the rule of law, his vilification of opponents as enemies, his cruelties of family separation on the border, and on and on.

                The capacity of a Trump to bend millions of minds should awaken Americans to the possibility that reverence for a leader might one day infiltrate thoroughly enough to promote autocracy in some form. The possibility might seem remote in the wake of a free election that drew more voters than ever before. It might seem unthinkable after honest middle- and low-level election officials—including Republicans—held the line against their party’s false cries of fraud. It might seem precluded by the independent judiciary, whose judges across the political spectrum saw through the tissues of lies that Trump’s lawyers used to paper over his loss.

                We are entitled to be proud but not complacent. We are wise to be worried. We need a thorough truth commission to draw up an apolitical agenda of warnings and remedies in education, legislation, and public discourse. We need every citizen who loves the country, which means every citizen, to make sure that what is happening in 2020 will be the end of an erosion, not the beginning.       

The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanksgiving is the most universal of American holidays. It either transcends or embraces religion, whichever you choose. It brings family together. It invites reflection on the nobility of gratitude. What’s more, in election years, after the people raise their voices to determine how they are to be governed, the celebration can contain an offering of thanks for the precious right of democracy.

                Not quite so this year. Family gatherings have been impeded by a pandemic much worse than it need be. Unbridled pride in the power of the vote has been stolen by invented charges of fraud, a fabrication that has taken root like a malignancy among millions of Americans. President Trump has grouchily damaged America’s faith in its democratic birthright.

This should be a moment of thanksgiving for the system that held the line against a president’s assaults. We should be buoyed by the poll workers, vote counters, election boards, courts, and local officials who maintained a bulwark of honesty against the Republican assaults on the vote. As Tom Friedman wrote today, “It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with ‘Team America,’ not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.”

Yet Trump allows us no delight in our achievement. He drains our pleasure in seeing more citizens vote than ever before. He makes it hard for us to congratulate ourselves for running a free and efficient election amid a devastating pandemic. He doesn’t even permit a bow by his own Department of Homeland Security for repelling foreign hackers and domestic manipulators. He seeds the electorate with cynicism and will surely fertilize that weed of faithlessness in the coming years.

It is way past time to have stopped listening to him. It is time instead to absorb the civics lesson we’ve just received--in the critical roles of the foot-soldiers of democracy, in the key responsibilities placed on secretaries of state and other officials hitherto unknown, and in the virtue of the federal system’s ingenious dispersal of political power from the center down to the states and counties and municipalities. Rigging an election would require rigging multitudes of elections. That’s one beauty of a decentralized structure that can stay the hand of an autocrat in Washington.

Dr. Seuss’s Grinch had a softening of heart at the end of the story of his stealing Christmas. Don’t expect that in Donald Trump. The best answer to him lies in the hearts of Americans, if on Thanksgiving Day enough of us raise a glass in tribute to the great American treasure of democracy, which has survived, at least for a time.

Trump's Winning Strategy

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Donald Trump has been so successful in convincing tens of millions of Americans that he won the election that he plans to market the strategy to sports teams, lawyers, and gamblers, according to remaining sycophants in the White House.

                “He’s very upbeat about this,” a Senior Sycophant disclosed. “He’s already contacted Dan Snyder, who might buy a license to use the Trump Method as early as this season. Snyder considered testing it last Sunday by declaring that Washington beat Detroit—it was so close, decided in the final seconds, just like the stolen election! But Mr. Trump wouldn’t let him do it without a subscription to the service up front. The President is a very canny dealmaker, as you know. He’s created many problems that only he can solve, and he’s actually solved a few. He just wishes that Snyder hadn’t changed his team’s name from the Redskins. What was racist about that? The President’s orange skin makes him look handsome when he smiles—even a Biden voter said so. The Washington Football Team? What a dumb name. But President Trump has made the best of that, too, as he does of everything. He gets a kick out of screwing around with the team’s initials. He calls it the WTF team.”

                The Senior Sycophant descended into peals of laughter so severe that he had to excuse himself to get a glass of Kool-Aid.

                Time is of the essence for the WTF team, whose abysmal 2-7 record, with only seven games left, can be inverted only if it begins to declare victories immediately. “Then, on to win the playoffs and the Super Bowl!” gushed the Senior Sycophant.

With that model, Trump is sure that other teams will subscribe. The Baltimore Orioles come to mind. “Baltimore is not his favorite place,” said a middle-level official, “but he’s a man of principle, as you know, so is willing to put aside race and politics for money.”

 Lawyers ought to be prime customers, but so far Trump’s own attorneys haven’t signed up—except for Rudy Giuliani, according to internal emails intercepted by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and leaked to The Shipler Report. “These lily-livered lawyers can’t see the writing on the cave,” Giuliani told Trump (as translated from English to Russian to English), “so they won’t use the Trump Method, even for free. I suggest that you bypass them and start declaring victories yourself.”

Gamblers constitute a large potential customer base, and Trump is considering a 3-day free trial, enough to get them addicted to winning. Promotional material is already being prepared with the logo, “I WON!” which is presumably the opening gambit once the dice are thrown or the roulette ball clicks into a number. Customers are promised a handbook and an encoded online strategy for demanding that the wheel and dice be tested, the deck of cards be thrown out and replaced, the cries of “Fraud!” be echoed by ringers planted strategically around the casino. Since Trump knows how to go bankrupt repeatedly, he is sure that casinos will just pay up.

So far, his fellow casino owner and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson has been kept in the dark about this plan. If Mr. Adelson reads The Shipler Report, President Trump might be hearing from him by the end of the day. 

This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

In American Politics, the Uses of Soviet Humor

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A man walked into a medical clinic and asked for an eye and ear doctor.

                “We don’t have an eye and ear doctor,” said the nurse. “We have an eye doctor. And we have an ear doctor.”

                “Not good enough,” the man insisted. “I need an eye and ear doctor.”

                “Why?”

                “Because I keep hearing one thing and seeing another.”

                So went one of the myriad jokes that kept Russians mentally afloat under communism in the Soviet Union, where they were bathed in the good-news propaganda of a government adept at concealing problems—except for problems that citizens could see with their own eyes.

                I confess to a limited imagination back then, in the late 1970s: I never conceived of Soviet jokes being applicable to the United States one day. But here we are, with a president who has lied or exaggerated some 22,000 times, according to a running tally by Washington Postfact-checkers. And thousands of his supporters at rallies cheer his fabulations.

                “Just remember,” Trump toldan audience last summer, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”

What a relief. COVID-19 cases seemed to be spiking until Trump reassured a rally that the country was “turning a corner” in the pandemic and his son, Donald Jr. declared that deaths were down to “almost nothing” the day they hit 1,000. Trump’s White House recently listed“Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic” first among his accomplishments in science and technology.

At rallies last week, Trump covered his failure to get Mexico to pay for his border wall by claiming that it’s happening. In Sanford, Florida on Monday: “And by the way, Mexico is paying. They hate to say it: Mexico is paying for it.” In Johnstown, Pennsylvania on Tuesday: “And Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way. You know that. I've been saying it. They hate to hear that. But they're paying.” In Des Moines, Iowa the next day: “And as I said, Mexico is paying for the wall.” The eye and ear doctors must be doing a booming business.

I keep wishing a reporter would ask Trump whether, when he tells a lie, he realizes that he’s lying or thinks that he’s telling the truth. I wished Biden had asked him that in the last debate.

It doesn’t take much editing to put Trump into some of those old jokes. In one favorite of politically irreverent Russians Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are on the train to communism when it grinds to a halt. When it does not move again, Stalin orders the crew taken out and shot. That done, the train still doesn’t go. So Khrushchev orders the crew rehabilitated posthumously. Still, the train doesn’t move. So Stalin and Khrushchev turn to Brezhnev. He pulls down the shades and says, “Now let’s pretend the train is moving.”

As Peter Baker writes in The New York Times, “Born amid made-up crowd size claims and ‘alternative facts,’ the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.” The same was true in the Soviet Union, except that in the communist dictatorship, joke-telling needed a sanctuary, often around the kitchen table, secure among trusted family and friends.   

We have not come to that in the United States, mercifully, where the safety valves of humor are very public, and the release of laughter spews out daily from professional comedians and amateur Americans alike. Still, it’s distressing how smoothly Trump’s dissembling can be slid into Russians’ lampoons of their Soviet government’s pompous spins into unreality. Let’s end with this one:

At a medical conference, three doctors compared notes.

“I treated a patient for pneumonia, and he died of cancer,” confessed a physician from France.

“That’s funny,” admitted an American. “I treated a patient for cancer, and he died of pneumonia.”

The two looked expectantly at their Russian colleague, who straightened, puffed out his chest defensively, and declared: “Gentlemen, when we treat a patient for a disease, he dies of that disease!”