David K. Shipler's Blog, page 6

Putin's War Shrinks and Widens

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Russia’s war in Ukraine might be one of the strangest in history. Even while his army is being pummeled into retreat, President Vladimir Putin expands the goals of the conflict into a messianic campaign against the entire West. As his military holdings shrink on the ground, his strategic ambitions spread into a miasma of self-delusion. It is a dark comedy with monstrous effect.

                Not only does Russia aim to retake the Ukrainian part of the lost Soviet empire, according to Putin. Not only must Russia parry American military threats to preserve its very existence, he claims. But also, more deeply, Russia must fulfill its mission, borne of its thousand-year history, to lead toward a multipolar world: to defeat the arrogant West’s “faltering hegemony”; its “neo-colonial system”; its “enslavement” of the less wealthy; its “pure Satanism,” its “radical denial of moral, religious, and family values.”

                That is a tall order for a country with a limping economy, few international friends, and an army that looked formidable until the first shot was fired. It also suggests a war in search of an ideology—or at least a rationale trying for resonance in both Russia and developing countries that feel exploited.

In a way, it seems a lame throwback to the communist era of Russian evangelism for worldwide social justice. But it also reveals something more significant.

Putin seems to fancy himself a brilliant global analyst. He has been holding forth in various writings and several long speeches, most notably on September 30in annexing Ukrainian territory that his troops didn’t entirely hold, and then on October 27in a three-hour session at the Valdai International Discussion Club—an annual gathering of fawning Russian and foreign guests who lob softball questions after he pontificates at length.  

Several conclusions can be drawn from this disconnect between solid ground and atmospherics. First, Putin is not stupid and he is not unaware. He is Donald Trump with a sheen of sophistication. He is a cunning wordsmith who weaves lies and truths together into webs of alternative reality.

Second, he is a chess player with the long view, cognizant of historical trends and able to think several moves ahead. But he does not play well when he is emotional; emotion is not helpful in the logic of chess. And despite his steely pose, Putin reveals his emotions with a mystical reverence for Russian destiny. It has thrown him off his game.

And that leads to the third conclusion, perhaps the most important. Whether in sincerity or opportunism, Putin is tapping into a strain of ethno-nationalism that has endured through upheavals of state rule from czarist monarchy to Soviet communism to transitory pluralism to post-communist autocracy.

Call it Russianism, the label I settled on when I first encountered the phenomenon under Soviet rule in the late 1970s. A liberal writer saw it as the country’s only mass movement, and the most dangerous.

It was a form of quiet dissent then, its adherents sometimes imprisoned by Soviet authorities but most often tolerated as they circulated their underground samizdat—self-published essays—condemning Marxism and the Bolsheviks, the country’s non-Russian influences, and the restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church. They regarded Russians, the dominant ethnicity among a very diverse population, as the most pure and enlightened and entitled, carrying the nostalgic honesty and simplicity of rural peasantry.

Unlike the pro-democracy movement of Andrei Sakharov, however, Russianism’s ethnic nationalism embraced autocracy. As its main apostle, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, prisoner and then chronicler of the Stalinist prison camps, thundered in a 1973 letter to Soviet leaders: “Russia is authoritarian. Let it remain so.” Then, with the publication abroad of The Gulag Archipelago, he was exiled to the United States.

He was quoted approvingly two weeks ago by none other than Putin, who cited Solzhenitsyn’s sneering denunciation, delivered at Harvard’s 1978 commencement, of the West’s “persisting blindness of superiority, [which] upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present-day Western systems.”

Solzhenitsyn also infused the Russianists’ anti-communism with ethnic-cultural resentment, describing Marxism as a “dark, un-Russian whirlwind that descended on us from the West.” His disciples in Moscow wrote acerbically of the Jewish and non-Russian genealogies of Trotsky and some other Bolsheviks in the original Politburo, including Lenin’s Kalmyk father and his German (perhaps Jewish) mother.

If you diagramed those Russianist sympathies, they would not have formed limited circles like the Sakharov movement for democracy or the Jewish push for free emigration. Instead, Russianism would have made a vertical line reaching from outcasts vulnerable to arrest, up into the Soviet hierarchy, which tolerated some well-placed figures who shared the views.

Indeed, since Putin was a KGB agent and Communist Party member in those Soviet days, it is worth noting that Communist officialdom and Russianism overlapped in key areas of belief: in authoritarianism and political unanimity, in chauvinistic insularity, and in social conservatism averse to Western permissiveness. Soviet Communists outlawed homosexuality, for example, as Putin’s government does today. Here is what Putin said at the September 30 ceremony annexing parts of Ukraine:

“Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, ‘parent number one, parent number two and parent number three’ (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.”

Sound familiar? Putin could win a Florida election in a landslide. Indeed, he speaks of “two Wests,” one “of traditional, primarily Christian values, freedom, patriotism, great culture and now Islamic values as well – a substantial part of the population in many Western countries follows Islam. This West is close to us in something. We share with it common, even ancient roots. But there is also a different West – aggressive, cosmopolitan, and neocolonial. It is acting as a tool of neoliberal elites. Naturally, Russia will never reconcile itself to the dictates of this West.” The word “cosmopolitan” has often been used as code for Jewish.

Since Putin sees such affinities, it’s no big leap to think that he has been influenced by his supporting ideologue, the historian Aleksandr Dugin, who has urged that Russia “destabilize internal political processes in the U.S.” Hence, the fake social media sites created by Russian operatives posing as Americans to exacerbate divisions.

What is the impact of Putin’s Russianism internally? Does it resonate enough among his citizens, and especially in Moscow’s elite, to shape long-term policy toward the West? It’s hard to assess amid the clampdown on Russians’ ability to speak their minds. Will it counter the growing disaffection with the reverses on the battlefield, the doubts about the war’s purpose, the fear of being drafted that has propelled an estimated 200,000 men to flee abroad? Will Putin’s call for vitriolic chauvinism keep his country’s will intact? Will it keep him in power? And if he is deposed, what then?

Whatever the answers to the immediate questions, Russianism coincides with a longer global retreat into ethno-nationalism, seen in Italy and Israel, Hungary and France, and in right-wing streams of American politics. These trends have momentum, not easily reversible.

The fundamentals of Russianism have proved durable enough to outlive Putin, as they have his predecessors. That suggests a post-Putin Russia as still testy, wounded, and confrontational, with a hawkish posture toward the U.S. and its democratic allies—a dangerous scenario.

A Race to Extinction: Right Whales or Maine Lobstermen?

 

By David K. Shipler 

              A significant struggle, invisible to most Americans, is occurring along the northern New England coast to save both an endangered species of whale and an endangered way of life. It is a clash of priorities, values, and even basic facts, that could leave both North Atlantic right whales and Maine lobstermen as victims. You can see the high stakes when tough men of the sea have fear in their eyes.

              New federal regulations, enacted and in the works, are being challenged by Maine officials and lobstermen as unjustified. And the private sector has now escalated the conflict with a call to boycott lobsters. Issued from the other side of the country by the Monterey Bay (California) Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, it is based on information that is far from conclusive about the danger posed to the whales by ropes used in lobstering. The move seems wildly excessive, has undermined the conservationists’ credibility, and has further polarized the players in an effort that cries out for sensible solutions.

Also, by the way, boycotting lobsters won’t save the whales.

              The problem looks clearcut on its face. The estimated number of North Atlantic right whales has declined precipitously from about 480 in 2010 to under 350 today. Their mortality rate is high, mostly because of interaction with humans: many are struck by ships, and many others are entangled in rope from both gillnets and lobster gear, which can open wounds and lead to lethal infection. The demise of females has led to a decline of newborn calves below the 50 per year neededfor the population to recover. Fifteen have been born so far in 2022.

              From here, the problem gets complicated. Climate change contributes, because as the Gulf of Maine warms faster than any other part of the earth’s oceans, the whales have followed their main food source—the tiny shrimplike calanus finmarchicus—northward into Canadian waters, notably the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a shipping area where collisions are likely.

A speed limit of 10 knots in certain areas has been imposed on vessels over 35 feet by both Canada and the United States. Right whales are notoriously slow—and maybe a little dumb—one reason they were easy targets for whalers in the old days: the “right whales” to harpoon and also pick up, since they float after death. I once watched several swimming so ponderously off the Canadian island of Grand Manan that they’d obviously have no chance of getting out of the way of a big cargo ship or a fast boat.

In full disclosure, this is an appropriate place to confess my competing biases. I love to go whale-watching. When the Gulf of Maine was cooler, I occasionally took my boat out to Mt. Desert Rock, about 18 miles offshore, where minke and humpback whales liked to roam before they mostly moved north.

I’ve watched whales from Alaska to Antarctica, from offshore near Washington State down to the coast of California, from eastern Canada down to Cape Cod Bay. So, like everyone else—including lobstermen, I might add—I’m partial to whales. There might be nothing on this planet as majestic as two gargantuan humpbacks out in the Gulf of Maine breaching together in the early twilight, propelling themselves completely out of the water in unison, dancers in an ancient pageant.

I’m also partial to the lobstermen I’ve grown friendly with during the part of each year I live on an island off the coast of Maine. They are flinty individualists—about 5,000 altogether in the state—who own their own boats, go to sea hours before the rest of us know that a new day is dawning, and take on weather that should make a mortal tremble. The gender walls are gradually breaking down, with some men encouraging their daughters to go lobstering, and more and more women setting out.

Like farmers, they’re at the mercy of elements they don’t control. Some years are good, and they make big bucks. Some are lean. The catch rises and falls, and the market is fickle. Last year, in a post-pandemic surge of demand, lobstermen were getting $7 to $8 a pound at the boat; this summer, it was down to $3.25 or so. The costs of bait and diesel fuel have soared, so just to break even each day, they have to haul a lot of traps with a lot of pounds. Some fishermen were taking days off to save on the expenses.

The gear is expensive, too. A three-foot trap goes for nearly $90, a buoy around $10, plus swivels, bait bags, and thin rope (called “pot warp,” priced by the pound), all adding up to some $150—more if you have multiple traps on each trawl, as the federal government is now requiring. So losing all that to a whale is no delight for either party.

Lobster traps sit on the bottom, and the pot warp that runs up to buoys on the surface is the alleged culprit. Those vertical lines can entangle whales, including those that spend summers in Canadian waters but migrate south along the Maine coast to breeding grounds off the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

The dispute is this: When a whale is found dragging rope, or with scars showing a past entanglement, whose rope is it? Where did it come from? Canada? Maine? Massachusetts? Maine was not a location of any observed incidents of death or serious injury from 2017 to the present, listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Twenty-one of the 33 dead right whales in that period were found in Canada, and the remaining 12 scattered in waters off Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Florida. The same with seriously injured whales: eight in Canada and 12 from Massachusetts to Georgia.

 The lack of solid proof of Maine involvement is cited by the Maine Lobsterman’s Association, backed up by Maine’s governor, two senators, and two House representatives—Democratic, Republican, and Independent—to assert that not a single death of a right whale has ever been attributed to Maine lobster gear, and that no entanglements with rope from Maine waters have been documented in the last 18 years.

Yet the lobster fishery has been hit with a series of federal regulations aimed at reducing the prevalence of those lines and to require breakaway rope that releases more easily, at 1700 pounds, with more restrictions to come that will make lobstering even more difficult, risky, and costly. Areas offshore totaling 1,000 square miles are being closed from October 1 to January 31, and 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 traps per trawl are being mandated in various Maine areas to reduce the amount of vertical line.

Splicing in breakaway line is labor intensive, and large numbers of traps on a trawl are expensive, since it’s too dangerous to have 25 traps aboard at once without extra hands. When the traps are cast off and sink fast, the line whips out with them; a lobsterman can get an ankle caught and be dragged overboard; it happens. So, where a captain once hired a single sternman, he would now need two for safety, and sternmen get a percentage of the take.

Then, there is talk of ropeless technology to be used in areas otherwise closed. It is not yet perfected: The trap would have a buoy bound to it on the bottom, to be released when the lobsterman activates a coded sonar signal.

This sounds clever, but lobstermen give lots of reasons why it won’t work. One explained to me the other day that buoys tell him where other traps are located; without them, he might set his on top of somebody else’s: a reasonable concern, since multiple lobstermen tend to set traps near one another in promising areas. Also, who will pay the added cost of the gadgetry?

These regulations make many Maine fishermen feel as entangled as the whales, and as threatened. One of my friends, out on his boat this summer while I came alongside to talk, told me how glad he was that his son was not following in his footsteps.

But what are the facts? I put the question to NOAA—citing the lack of hard data—and got an interesting answer from a spokesperson, Katie Wagner.

First, she said in an email, “in most years, only one third of right whale mortalities are observed,” according to a Duke University mammal density model. So the causes of death are not known.

Second, when dead or injured whales are spotted, determining who owned the rope has been nearly impossible. “Entanglement injuries are often observed without gear remaining on the whale,” Wagner wrote, noting that 85 percent of all right whales have scars from the lines. “When gear is remaining it is rarely retrieved. In those rare cases when gear is retrieved, it usually carries no area-specific marking and can only be identified to a geographic area fewer than half the time.”

 NOAA’s conclusion?

“We cannot dismiss the likelihood that Maine buoy lines, which make up the majority of buoy lines in waters where right whales occur, are responsible for some of the serious injuries and mortalities.”

Not dismissing the likelihood is not proof. It’s what a court might call circumstantial evidence, which is sometimes used to convict someone of a crime—but sometimes produces wrongful convictions.

Wagner went on to provide a significant fact that strengthens the case, though. In the last two years, Maine lobstermen have been required to use purple and green line inserts or paint to identify their trawls. Since then, although no right whales have been found entangled in such rope, other large species have been.

“In 2021, a humpback whale was disentangled from gear fished by a Maine fisherman in Federal waters (purple and green marks),” she said. “In 2020 and 2021, two dead minke whales in rope with purple marks, and two disentangled minke whales in rope with purple marks were documented. Given the low number of right whales, documented entanglements are more rare, but even one serious injury or mortality exceeds” the level at which eventual extinction can be avoided.

              The Seafood Watch boycott has so infuriated Maine’s congressional delegation that Sen. Angus King and Representative Jared Golden have introduced a bill to block federal funding to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has received almost $197 million since 2001. My requests to the aquarium for detailed evidence to support their position on lobstering went unanswered.

              In the end, though, global warming might kill lobstering before boycotts or right-whale regulations do. Lobsters like cold water. South of here, lobstering has declined. Several years ago, when an environmental lawyer lectured at the local library on right-whale regulations, he ended by warning that the lobstermen in the audience should be more worried about climate change. That is where I saw fear in their eyes.

The Age of Absurdities

 

By David K. Shipler 

              In the last week, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have treated the world to fantasies and fables so pernicious in their implications for global freedom and security as to defy satire. Both men, aided by sycophants, have anchored us firmly in an era practically unmatched in modern times, where completely fabricated narratives cause wars and shape governments.   

In a televised speech, Putin declared the West guilty of designs on Russia’s very existence, implicitly threatened nuclear war if Russian territory is attacked, then made sure it would be attacked by orchestrating a forced “referendum” to annex Ukrainian territory in the Donbas region, thereby converting it into Russian land worthy of the ultimate defense!

Trump told Fox News that he could declassify the nation’s most sensitive secrets just by thinking to himself that they are no longer secret, and that the FBI—in its raid on his luxury club Mar a-Lago—was really after Hillary Clinton’s emails! And, of course, elections should not be trusted (unless he wins), because the 2020 election was stolen.

Late-night comedians cannot laugh away this parallel universe, because millions of Russians believe Putin, and millions of Americans believe Trump. We are on the brink of a wider war between Russia and the West because of Putin’s imaginary tale of American and European preparations for attack. We Americans are on the brink of losing our precious democracy because of Trump’s imaginary tale of election fraud and his Republican Party’s calculated program of placing partisans in official positions to create actual fraud next time around.

It almost doesn’t matter whether Putin and Trump are convinced of their own lies, or whether they are just clever manipulators. Enough of their citizens are spellbound by their rhetoric and charisma to intoxicate the two men with the illusion of broad and righteous support. Neither the recent cracks in Russia’s enforced unanimity nor the polarized hostility of American politics has induced moderation in either of the fabulators. Each has doubled down into his manufactured world of unreality.

Dogmatic fictions are endemic to human foibles, of course, and some have impeded knowledge, inflamed hatreds, and produced warfare. The earth is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. This or that ethnic or racial or religious group controls, schemes, exploits, corrupts, rapes, or betrays and must be imprisoned, expelled, or exterminated. Witness China, Myanmar, Rwanda, and on.

Nazi Germany’s phantasmagoria about Jews as the clandestine, all-powerful force behind the country’s interwar hardships defied all facts. But many people—including Germans then, Russians and Americans now—have efficient fact-filters to purify their perceptions according to their predilections.

Russian families have fractured because relatives in Russia have refused to believe what relatives in Ukraine have seen with their own eyes. Americans enthralled with Trump are unwavering in their devotion even as his wrongdoing is documented by the January 6 committee and his unlawful possession of classified documents.

Pollsshow Trump’s 44 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable ratings stable as the investigations unfold. The testimony of his own Republican aides that he was told clearly that he had lost the election, and the carefully reasoned rejection of his fraud cases by more than three score judges—including some of Trump’s own nominees—have not shaken the conviction by about 70 percent of Republicans that they were cheated out of a presidential win.

Acceptance of such enormous fictions is the product of careful methodology. In both Russia and the United States, the groundwork for the people’s credulity is laid by contaminating the sources of information with chronic lies and censorship.

One of Putin’s first acts after his February 24 invasion of Ukraine was to threaten and close the remaining independent (hence skeptical) news media, block certain truth-telling websites, and enact a 15-year prison sentence for disputing the virtue of the “special military operation.” Russians and foreigners in the country risk prison time for calling the war a war.

In the United States, where government doesn’t control the press, private businesses have undermined the modern tradition of fair journalism. The profits are in the polemics, and Fox News has been the most successful in reaping the bounty of aggrieved alienation, tribalism, and powerlessness among the mostly white working class.

Trump seems to understand, perhaps instinctively, that to cultivate credulity for his fantasies he must dislodge Americans from connections to the truth. He calls the mainstream media by the Stalinist term “enemies of the people,” incites supporters to jeer and menace the news crews covering rallies, and cultivates a miasma of skepticism about traditional (read: elite) sources of accuracy. When you’re adrift, you hang onto whatever flotsam you can grab.

Every demagogue surely knows that controlling information is a key to power. And if you can make people feel good in the process, if you can make them feel as if they are really streetwise and smart enough see through the pretenses and self-serving deceptions of the powerful, you’ve got them.

So, the mass media are first. Then come the schools. The Russians have imposed a Russian curriculum in the Ukrainian schools they have occupied. Ukrainian national history is taboo. The rightwing Republicans are imposing  curricula in bright-red states where teachers are being silenced by new laws barring discussions of sexual orientation and the legacy of racism. The stains of American history are being scrubbed clean. Books that don’t fit the dogma are being removed from school and public libraries.

Anyone who has watched the working of autocratic systems can see the pattern clearly. Ignorance is taught, and into ignorance flow fantasies. And now, on the surge of Putin-Trump fantasies, ride the peril of war and the fragility of democracy.    

The Democratic Party's Cynical Caper

 

By David K. Shipler

 

              Now that the mid-term primaries are over, the cynical wing of the Democratic Party can tally its “wins.” Those are the radical right-wing election deniers and Pro-Trump fans of autocracy whose victories in Republican primaries were owed in part to Democratic-funded ads.

Six of thirteen such candidates won and are headed to the November election, where Democrats hope their extremism will be repulsive enough to the broader universe of voters that their Democratic opponents will prevail. That could happen, but it would be a sordid achievement.

              First, as some leading Democrats have warned, it’s a risky proposition. Some of those crazies could get elected, as Trump himself did after Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran as if Trump’s own flaws would defeat him.

Second, even where Democratic candidates prevail in the general election, the Republican radicals and their nonsensical conspiracy slanders will have been given more of a platform courtesy of Democratic money.

“Many of these candidates develop a much larger following, even if they lose the current race,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist. “What we have seen is, they come back and win for school board or state legislative race or for city councils because of this new awareness and this new recognition.”

Third, spending $53-million in nine states has broken faith with Democratic donors who thought their contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would be going to—duh—Democratic campaigns.

Fourth, and perhaps most important in the long run, to work against principled Republican House members who had the courageous patriotism to vote for Trump’s impeachment after January 6, is to help undermine the prospects for a reformation in the Republican Party. The country needs two responsible political parties, and the Democrats have now helped enhance the dangers of embracing decency.

 For example, Democrats spent $435,000 to advertise the rightist credentials of election-denier John Gibbs in Michigan—“too conservative for West Michigan,” one ad said—which surely helped him defeat Peter Meijer, who had voted for Trump’s impeachment after the Capitol riot. Gibbs has defended anti-Semites and accused Democrats of satanic rituals; the Democratic contributions far outweighed his own fundraising.

“You would think that the Democrats would look at John Gibbs and see the embodiment of what they say they most fear,” Meijer wrote the day before his defeat, “that as patriots they would use every tool at their disposal to defeat him and similar candidates that they've said are an existential threat.”

 In California, Democrats tried to defeat David Valadao, another Republican who voted for impeachment, by spending $200,000 promoting his opponent, Trump loyalist Chris Mathys, whose own campaign spent just $80,000. Valadao beat Mathys, but just barely, giving Mathys a case for continuing in politics.

The political risks of extremism seem to be grasped by some of the radicals supported with Democratic money. As they face the wider spectrum of voters, they are trying to foil the Democrats’ game plan by looking less extreme. Some have downplayed their adoration of Trump and their anti-abortion zealotry. And their election denials.

Retired general Don Bolduc, who benefited from Democratic ads attacking his moderate opponent as “another sleazy politician,” underwent an epiphany after winning the New Hampshire Republican primary for the Senate.

Before: “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election, and, damn it, I stand by my letter,” he said in a primary debate. “I’m not switching horses, baby. This is it.”

After, on Fox News: “I’ve done a lot of research on this, and I’ve spent the past couple weeks talking to Granite Staters all over the state from every party, and I have come to the conclusion — and I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.”

              Whether enough New Hampshire voters will be fooled by Bolduc’s conversion is an open question; the DCCC obviously hopes not. But embedded in the Democrats’ strategy is a kind of quaint faith in the good sense of the country’s citizens, despite the millions more who voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, after four years of political ugliness and damage to the nation’s global standing, democratic norms, and national security.

Some of the extremists might have won without Democratic money. But the races were picked carefully to tip the balance in districts where radicals were in close contests, and where the general electorate seems averse to Trumpism.

The strongest argument for boosting the right-wingers over more moderate Republicans rests on the legitimate fears for democracy. With a majority in Congress, this newly radicalized Republican Party could raise havoc with voting rights and electoral procedures nationally, as Republican-led state legislatures are doing. Blocking that outcome, according to the rationale, is worth sacrificing some upstanding Republican legislators. They have negligible influence anyway in a party not only beholden to Trump, but increasingly infiltrated by champions of vote manipulation, autocracy, and white supremacy.

It’s probably correct that only if the Republican Party is obliterated at the polls can it be shocked into remaking itself in the image of Liz Cheney instead of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. If that ever happens, the Democrats who thought up this unsavory means to an elusive end will crow in vindication.

To be fair, there are more leading Democrats who have decried this tactic than Republicans who have assailed their party’s Trumpist fetishism. But going forward, watch for Republicans to play the same game by supporting unelectable far leftists in Democratic primaries. Can they grit their teeth and work against their principles as well as Democrats have? Oh, of course they can.

The Promise and Failure of Gorbachev's Legacy

 

By David K. Shipler 

            On March 15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev swore himself in as president of the Soviet Union. The country had no transcendent institution with constitutional authority, so Gorbachev administered his own oath as he touched his right hand to a deep red binder holding the constitution, newly amended to contain some of the checks and balances that would be necessary, but not sufficient, to create democracy.

It was a culminating moment of his rule, which he had begun five years earlier as General Secretary of the Communist Party. He stood on the broad dais of the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, facing more than two thousand delegates who had just completed fractious days of argument over how much power an executive branch should retain.

That he died early this week, at this pivotal moment for both Russia and the United States, reminds us what the landscape looks like at the intersection of authoritarianism and democracy. Russia is descending. The United States is at risk of doing so.

When it came to executive authority, Soviet conservatives faulted Gorbachev for wanting too little, and for courting disorder in the land. Liberals attacked him for wanting too much, and for his canny parliamentary evasions to frustrate their demands. Watching from the gallery and hearing the fears from both sides, I wondered how he and the country could navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of dictatorship and anarchy.

Those were the twin specters of Russian history. Lurching from one to the other, the society had endured unruly transitions, leaving a residue of apprehension about pluralistic politics and a fondness for the strong hand at the top. Gorbachev was trying to lift this weight of the past, but with a restraint that proved untenable. In the end, the center did not hold. Reactionaries kidnapped him but failed to unseat him, and their abortive putsch accelerated the centrifugal force of ethnic identities that broke the country apart merely nine months after Gorbachev had recited his oath.

Left was a great vacuum of national esteem, a ravaged sense of dignity that now helps drive policy in Moscow.

Gorbachev came out of a subculture within Soviet Communism, a quiet, reformist impulse that ran parallel to the self-glorifying propaganda of the party apparatus. He came of age as Nikita S. Khrushchev, in his so-called secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, stunned officialdom by revealing and denouncing the demented abuses of Stalin. Party members whose parents had disappeared into the labor camps knew of the atrocities, but mainly on the limited territory of their own experience. The larger scope, now disclosed, suddenly gave the lie to the reverence for Stalin that had animated patriotism and nourished cohesion.

Khrushchev thus wrote the first chapter of de-Stalinization. Thirty years later, Gorbachev wrote the second.

Free speech is risky in a system long closed to introspection, and Gorbachev did not appreciate its uncontrollable fluidity. At first he allowed the press to examine current ills: alcoholism, corruption, drugs, prostitution, homelessness, teenage runaways, police brutality, street crime—most discussion of which had been previously taboo. Then came increasing candor about the Stalinist years: the 20 million dead in the purges, the decimation of the officer corps, the cruelties of collectivization, the atrocity of famine, the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

It was a dizzying time of truth-telling that infected individual citizens as fear drained out of them. Once guarded behind a glass shield of formulaic conversation, many relaxed into honest discussion, flexing their minds and searching themselves for their own thoughts. Their stories from the past poured into newspapers and magazines. The journal Ogonyok published a letter from a prison camp guard who had lost his health and his honor, prompting a confession in reply from a former secret police investigator who begged forgiveness from those he had tortured, whose faces still haunted him at night. His letter went unpublished because it was anonymous—“My children and grandchildren do not know the whole truth about me,” he wrote.

Gorbachev evidently meant to liberate discourse and contain it at once, and specifically to insulate Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution from the onslaught of irreverence. To stop the ruthless examination of history at the Stalinist era proved impossible, however, and soon the flood of criticism and reexamination coursed backwards into the past until it consumed Lenin and the revolution as well, hitherto sacred tenets of the country’s pride.

A poster boy of professional emancipation was Yuri Afanasyev, once a compliant historian, who began to denounce Lenin until, at the congress that approved the constitution, he condemned the Bolshevik leader as responsible for “the institutionalization of the state policy of mass violence and terror.”

            An echo of this was heard in 1993 from an unlikely figure: Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Politburo member and chief architect of Gorbachev’s policy of openness. At a conference, I asked if they’d known where they were going when they began. No idea, Yakovlev replied. They had the mistaken notion that they could reform the system. If it had been a socialist system, he said, it could have been reformed. But it was a fascist, totalitarian system, he continued, and a fascist, totalitarian system cannot be reformed, only destroyed.

            When did Gorbachev realize that? Yakovlev answered at the time: He still doesn’t. That’s why we no longer speak.

            Stripping away the myths of a brutal history looked exhilarating from the West, and to some Russians as well. The country was alive with nervous excitement. But the truth-telling also eroded Russia’s pose of historical honor. It stole from Russians their foothold in their past, as if Americans were to lose pride in the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Constitution.

Adrift, humiliated, and without a sense of national purpose, Russians have since searched for points of dignity. Some fix on the country’s heroism during World War II or reach back to the imagined glory of the czars. Nostalgia for something that could be called Russianism—a purity of culture, language, and religion—feeds a xenophobic ethnocentrism, a yearning for a single truth and a firm autocracy, and a strong distaste for the West. In making war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin plays to some of these reactionary impulses, while also trying to hold them in check.

So, Gorbachev leaves a contradictory legacy. The history written in the West will cast him as a pivotal figure whose bold liberalization led, inadvertently, to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In Russia he is detested in many quarters, precisely for the same thing. Without a basic reformation there, he will not be treated kindly as Russians write their own history. Taking myths from people is never popular.

The Waning of America's Mission

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

              Here is the problem: The United States cannot campaign for democracy around the globe when too few Americans are willing to defend democracy at home. And since one of the major political parties has internalized Donald Trump’s authoritarian desires, making them its own, no serious foreign leader or activist can look upon the United States as a reliable model. No matter what President Biden says about the worldwide contest between dictatorship and democracy, the age of American evangelism appears to be over—or at least headed for a long pause.

              During the First Cold War, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the late 1980s, Soviet communism and American democracy staged an ideological rivalry across international boundaries in practically every region of the world. These were two irreconcilable theories of government and economics, both driven by strong moral arguments and deep cultural beliefs.

              Few Americans would have seen the Soviet Union as a moral enterprise, but that is exactly how many Russians saw themselves, as carriers of a torch of social justice. All countries, all peoples, would be better off in socialist, centrally planned economies, so the argument went, which would level the gross disparities under capitalism. And that could be done only with a one-party system, not the messy chaos of pluralistic democracy.

The Soviet Union itself had achieved nothing close to communism’s shared wealth, of course, with warrens of privilege reserved for the few at the expense of the many. Karl Marx would have been appalled. But no matter: Myths can be inspiring, and Moscow worked feverishly to spread that one to allies and client states, often as a condition of aid. After the Vietnam War, for example, it successfully pressed North Vietnam to snuff out the vibrant private entrepreneurship of the South Vietnamese, which took many years to recover.

The United States, meanwhile, was crusading for both private enterprise and pluralistic democracy, also as a moral enterprise. Not that either country neglected its national security interests; both Moscow and Washington were circling each other warily in many corners of the international arena, jockeying for influence wherever possible. The U.S. didn’t mind cozying up to dictators that were anti-communist, and even helping overthrow duly elected leftists who threatened Western business interests, as in Chile, Iran, and Guatemala, for example.

Many pro-democracy activists abroad saw through the hypocrisy yet also counted on the U.S. to support human rights, at least rhetorically. Inconsistency, a hallmark of foreign policy, doesn’t erase basic lines of belief. And the First Cold War was marked by an intriguing symmetry: Both the Soviet Union and the United States were inspired by the evangelical drive to spread their own systems for what each saw as the good of humanity.

Now, as the Second Cold War takes shape, the ideological landscape is quite different. The United States is losing faith in its own democracy. The Republican Party is placing partisans in key positions to undermine future elections, which will make the U.S. look familiar—but not inspiring—to those in countries where voting is manipulated by strongmen.  

Post-Soviet Russia has abandoned utopian communist dreams. Moscow no longer proselytizes to the world but mostly to itself, nursing a grievance-laden, ethnocentric nationalism whose main tool is territorial expansionism. Its most prominent proponent and influencer of President Vladmir Putin is Aleksandr Dugin, whose 29-year-old daughter was assassinated by car bomb outside Moscow last weekend. He might have been the intended target.

Russian nationalism shares key attributes with Soviet communism, including chauvinism, authoritarianism, an appetite for territory, and paranoid suspicion of the West. But while communist and socialist ideas had international appeal in certain quarters, the new Russian ideology cannot be readily layered onto the global terrain. Its anti-Western and anti-democratic components attract supporters, even in European politics, but reestablishing the Russian/Soviet empire doesn’t get a lot of takers outside Russia’s borders.

Dugin has popularized the notion of “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” exciting part of the Russian elite demoralized by the country’s loss of global stature following the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1991. The yearning to revive Russia’s greatness is pitched as a bulwark against what is seen as Western aspirations for world domination. While the ingredients of the greatness include Russian Orthodox religion and a spiritual pride, its primary tool has been military and its prize, territorial.

Ukraine has been a focal point of those aspirations. Back in 2008, Dugin advocated the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, and even after Putin did just that in 2014, Dugin nudged him to do more. Speaking in English in a BBC interview, Dugin called for a more aggressive posture, urging Putin to send troops directly into eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin was fomenting a civil war.

“The liberals are against Putin,” Dugin told the BBC, “and the patriots support him, but only if he continues with his patriotic politics. While he is hesitating, he is losing the support of both sides. It is a dangerous game. But maybe he has a solution.” We now know his “solution.”

Much of Dugin’s historical passion for a greater Russia found its way into a long essay by Putin last year arguing that Ukraine and Ukrainians were essentially Russian, which set the conceptual stage for the invasion six months ago.

Putin is trying by force, not persuasion, to create a “New Russia” that would look very much like the old, but without any pretense of human betterment broader than its own borders, however expansive he can make them. This is a threat, but geographically constrained, not one likely to filter into the politics of farflung nations in the manner of Marxism.

 China, too, while preaching the virtues of socialism and disparaging political pluralism, appears less interested in proselytizing to the world than in expanding its economic ties and securing itself against any infection by Western reforms. Indeed, both Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping appear motivated by a danger that no longer exists, namely, the missionary spirit of America to spread its democracy, capitalism, and military power. For both leaders, demonization of the U.S. mobilizes their own citizens’ patriotism.

There is no such mobilization of Americans, though. To be an ideological missionary probably requires an ideological adversary. The U.S. doesn’t really have one now. Both Russia and China are adversaries, but they pose risks that are more about state power than global ideology, despite their anti-democratic forms of government.

And Americans are pulling inward, drawn into their own domestic problems, weary of foreign wars that are never won, inflamed more by hatred of other Americans across political lines than of foreign enemies.

Furthermore, it has become clear how many Americans are naively unaware of democracy’s vulnerabilities. It is as if the schools systems’ mandated courses in history and civics had not bothered to teach how democratic government functions, how it needs to be preserved, and how dictatorships have arisen elsewhere in the world. As Trump and his Republican collaborators have worked to erode confidence in the electoral process, and to corrupt the process, they have exposed America’s ignorance about itself.

Democracy is not the natural state of humankind. Authoritarianism is the default, generated by apathy, alienation, and fear--all allies of the dictator. To revive America's mission for democracy, it needs to be done on its own soil.

The Two Joe Bidens: Performer and Policymaker

 

By David K. Shipler 

              Every modern president needs acting skills alongside constructive policies. It’s not enough to run the government and shape the affairs of state.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt mobilized and comforted Americans through his wartime fireside chats on the radio. Harry Truman projected a down-home frankness. Dwight Eisenhower combined a victorious general’s solidarity with a quiet posture of visionary decency. John F. Kennedy used inspirational rhetoric, self-deprecating humor, and the demeanor of royalty. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s flattery and threats worked miracles in Congress to pass civil rights bills, which his display of passionate conviction helped sell to the country at large.

Richard Nixon lacked acting ability, though, and he looked bad on television. Gerald Ford failed to exude strength. Jimmy Carter had a whiny voice and too much honesty about America’s malaise. Ronald Reagan’s acting profession gave him perfect timing, witty quips, and a persuasive illusion of warm sincerity.

George H. W. Bush was a verbal fumbler and gave an impression of much less gravitas than his solid policy credentials warranted. Bill Clinton had a silver tongue and an infectious charm. George W. Bush seemed like a nice guy you could enjoy having a beer with. Barack Obama’s eloquence first carried him into national politics, and then into the White House, where his oratory stirred idealism among large numbers of citizens. Donald Trump’s direct insults, saying aloud the ugly things that many Americans thought, conveyed an image of brutal candor even as he spewed incessant lies, a technique that still mesmerizes millions.

              And now, Joe Biden. He personifies the dissonance between the performative and policy dimensions of the presidency. His approval ratings have plummeted even among voters who agree with him on major issues. The policies he supports don’t seem to matter; his manner of presentation is everything.

He is not a forceful orator, there is no song in his lyrics. He is, perhaps, too calm for the moment, even when he tries to hammer home a point or use sharp language. He fumbles, he digresses, he misspeaks—an ailment left over from his youthful stuttering—and does not excite. At 79, he acts his age and does not project the charismatic strength that many Americans seem to value, especially in a time of tension and hardship. He is often described as “weak.”

              Yet his supposed “weakness” is a mirage. In practice he has been as tough as nails in foreign policy, extremely ambitious domestically, and an activist user of executive power to further a liberal agenda—to the extent that the courts will allow.

That is not to say that all his policies deserve unanimous applause, nor that they have been free of colossal failure. “Weakness” seemed to be graphically illustrated by the precipitous, mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, based on the misreading by U.S. intelligence of how long the Kabul government could hold off the Taliban. His administration’s immigration policy—is there a policy?—is a tangle that had a sensible idea that has been inadequately pursued: to help Latin American countries address the violence and economic catastrophes driving people north.

But Biden has been resolute in critical areas: Russia, China, and Iran, for example. He has not conceded Russian President Vladimir Putin an inch since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Where the tougher-seeming Trump disparaged and undermined the North Atlantic Alliance, Biden has done the opposite: mobilized NATO allies to pour weapons into Ukraine, lined up a broad array of other countries to sanction Moscow economically, and aimed to make the war costly enough for Russia to deter future aggression.

Biden has also named Putin as a war criminal. Overall, the American approach might lack nuance and finesse, since there will still be a Russia to engage with after the war. But weak? Hardly.

His administration has also focused on China as a growing danger to American interests. He has tried to revive the nuclear treaty with Iran but also threatened military action to prevent Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Weak? Reckless, maybe, but not weak.

So, when Biden’s public manner on TV deviates from his concrete practice, he is being misread. Domestically, progressives are rightly frustrated by Democrats’ inability to enact their policies, but they often misplace the blame. Biden has applied intense efforts to advance a liberal agenda, thwarted mostly by Republicans in Congress but also by some in his own Democratic Party. He managed to get through a colossal infrastructure bill to make up for decades of national neglect—deferred maintenance of bridges, roads, ports, and the like—and stimulus payments to rescue millions of Americans from the aftershock of the pandemic.

Indeed, the ingredients of Biden’s low approval scores among progressives include a reality he can’t control: the political polarization that reinforces obstreperous Republicans in their opposition to anything that gives the Democratic president an achievement. And how they have succeeded by blocking expansive legislation on climate change, voting rights, child tax credits, food and housing subsidies, and other important social justice measures.

The good old days of Lyndon Johnson buttonholing recalcitrant legislators and cajoling, warning, and wooing them his way are long gone. Even getting the vote of one of Biden’s own Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, is like trying to nail a custard pie to the wall. You think you’ve got him, and then he oozes away.

Then there’s the weird economy with unemployment low, inflation high, job creation going like gangbusters, the stock market stumbling, and Americans worried sick. It’s a perfect storm of the pandemic’s aftermath: disrupted supply lines, a flood of government stimulus, a surge of pent-up demand, hoarding by manufacturers afraid they won’t get essential components, and of course the war in Ukraine and its impact of energy prices. There’s nothing to stoke the summer of discontent like those big numbers on every gas station’s signs. You can’t miss them.

But is the president responsible? Economists like to say that when the economy is good, the president gets more credit than he deserves, and when it’s bad, he gets more criticism than he deserves. The White House has very few levers it can pull—Biden released oil from the nation’s strategic reserves to increase supply and dampen prices, and recently fist-bumped with the vilified Saudi leader to urge him to raise production.

Otherwise, though, Americans who blame the president for the inflation seem to forget that we live in a private, free-market system, not a socialist, government-command economy. Do they want  a country where the president has so much control that they can legitimately hold him responsible when things go sour? I don’t think so.

Then, too, if you have to choose, would you rather have a president who’s a skilled practitioner of good government, or a talented actor? Remember the demagogue with stage presence we got last time? And might get next time?  

How to Evade The Supreme Court

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

              With radical regressives on the Supreme Court trying to drag the country back to the 1700s, the case is being made for ignoring, defying, or deftly evading rulings that clash with the values of modern society. These include abortion, guns, government regulation, voting rights, religion, and affirmative action.

Both legal and illegal approaches are on the horizon. Already, to parry the extremist justices, New York has taken advantage of loopholes in Justice Clarence Thomas’s sloppily written gun-rights opinion. The Democratic governor and legislative majority enacted into law restrictions on concealed-carry licenses that the Court’s majority surely hadn’t imagined, and a list of “sensitive places” where guns would still be prohibited—a much longer list than the Court presumably envisioned.

Similar efforts are underway in progressively-dominated state legislatures to enshrine abortion rights in statutes or amendments to state constitutions following the Supreme Court’s ruling (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) that overturned Roe v. Wadeand magically erased the right to abortion that the Court had earlier found existed implicitly in the United States Constitution.

The game now is going to be to outwit the justices, legally or otherwise. Some methods likely to be tried are in plain view, some under the radar.

 In the blatant category, nearly ninety elected district attorneys across the country announced in a joint statement that they would not prosecute violations of anti-abortion laws in their states. More unspoken refusals can be expected from prosecutors whose offices are already overworked with street crime and don’t want the cruel optics of jailing women and their doctors.

Civil disobedience by clinics willing to risk penalties to oppose the Court might be attempted if brave souls exist. And in some other areas of the law, surreptitious defiance or passive resistance is probable.

For example, after the Supreme Court strikes down race-based affirmative action, as it is certain to do next term in a case involving Harvard University, admissions officers will have little trouble continuing to give preference to minorities in the cloistered discussions that occur when picking the next freshman classes.

Those choices are pretty subjective right now. Grades and test scores have never been the whole story, especially at elite schools, which also look for the unquantifiable attributes of social commitment, community leadership, perceptive self-awareness, and personal success in rising above hardship, among other characteristics. A former Ivy League admissions director once told me that his department valued students who had worked for change, albeit just in their limited circles of school and neighborhood. Absent such qualities, even some class valedictorians with sparkling SAT scores were being rejected.

Since colleges are moving away from requiring or considering SATs, they’ll be able to disguise their racial preferences more easily, if they wish, to create the diverse classes many schools now see as benefitting not only students of color but also whites, who are exposed to the variegated features of the real world they will enter after graduation. University lawyers won’t approve, noted a friend in the legal profession, since they don’t want their clients to get sued. But that risk might not deter the entire generation of admissions officers who have worked hard to recruit bright kids from poor and minority backgrounds. (The Court could leave economic affirmative action intact, allowing colleges to give preference to low-income applicants without considering race.)

Both sides of the progressive-regressive (Democratic-Republican) divide can play this game, of course, and the ultimate loser is the rule of law. When the American Bar Association established the World Justice Project in 2006, it made its main task an annual Rule of Law Index, measuring each country’s health by an array of factors in the legal arena.  Last year, the United States was ranked only 27th among the world’s nations, behind South Korea. (Denmark was No. 1.) This year, after Republican officials have defied subpoenas and the Supreme Court has discarded precedents to make the law less predictable, the American rank seems likely to drop.

The Court has been defied before. After unanimously ordering public schools desegregated in its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the justices—who have no battalions at their disposal--could do nothing against the Southern districts that simply refused to allow Blacks and whites to mix. Some districts evaded the ruling by opening private schools instead.

After the Court found school prayer unconstitutional in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale), public schools in parts of the country ignored the ruling and simply continued with prayers and Bible readings in their morning routines. In fact, just a few years ago, I heard a parent in a small town complain that applicants for teaching jobs were being asked about their religious denominations.

Police themselves are often deft violators of Supreme Court rulings. Cops sometimes ignore the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination by putting detainees in coercive settings to elicit confessions—whether true or false. (The confession can be suppressed as evidence by the trial judge, but the Supreme Court just ruled that police cannot be sued for failing to give the Miranda warning that a detainee has the right to remain silent.)

The body of judicial opinions on other civil liberties looks less sacrosanct on dark streets than in bright courtrooms. During deep nights in the nation’s capital, I watched a police unit I traveled with for my book, The Rights of the People, overstep the Supreme Court’s limits on warrantless searches, violating the Fourth Amendment as cops in Black neighborhoods frisked pedestrians without reasonable suspicion. They were searching for guns. I suspect that police in lots of places will continue to do so—mostly out of sight.

The Court’s recent gun decision, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, extends its interpretation of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms to public places, striking down a century-old New York law that required applicants for a handgun license to demonstrate a security need. But in acknowledging that “sensitive places” could be off-limits to guns, the Thomas opinion, signed by six justices, left a path for Democratic legislators in New York to act.

So the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a new law that listed among “sensitive places” airports, courthouses, daycare facilities, playgrounds and other places where children gather, education facilities, domestic violence and homeless shelters, entertainment venues, bars and restaurants where alcohol is served, government buildings, medical facilities, houses of worship, libraries, polling places, demonstrations and rallies, mass transit including subways and buses—and Times Square! Guns can be taken onto private property only if the owner posts a sign saying that weapons are allowed.

 In addition, the statute requires applicants to undergo extensive firearms training and to open their social media to inspection by licensing officials. Whether the law will survive court challenges is a question, but it got smiles from gun-control advocates.

Indeed, it’s tempting for each side of the political divide to cheer its canny escapes from judicial decisions it deems obnoxious. But the Court has only the good will of the people and institutions to enforce its rulings; it relies on popular acquiescence to its wisdom, decency, and fairness. That regard is gone now, probably for a generation, given the years left in the expected lives of the five or six radical regressives whose voices cannot be stilled but only evaded where feasible.

This is not a good place for the country to be, especially at a moment of democratic fragility. Disrespect for the Supreme Court undermines the rule of law, which is an essential ingredient of a stable, free society.

The Dying Constitution

 

By David K. Shipler 

              Conservatives like to deride liberals who believe in a “living Constitution,” which has stayed alive by applying its core principles to the evolving conditions of society. But the opposing view, that the Constitution must be interpreted only as the Framers supposedly intended, will not conserve anything. It will, if taken to the logical end now pursued by Republican extremists in legislatures and courts, strangle the founding document by cutting it off from the present, from the oxygen it needs to nourish the rights it is meant to preserve.

              The radicals on the right have formed a continuum of anti-constitutional movements that run from street thugs to election workers to politicians and to Supreme Court justices. Paradoxically, they cite the Constitution as their guide: the January 6 insurrectionists shouting their affection for a Constitution they’d obviously never read (in particular the Twelfth Amendment on Congress’s vote-counting process). Republican state legislatures organizing myriad ways to undermine the next elections. And the Supreme Court justices who are orchestrating an insurrection of their own by twisting the Constitution to fit their personal ideologies.

The “conservatives” in robes say they are keeping the Constitution as written, but they are actually making it all too malleable. They are turning it into a blank check for whatever policy they wish to inflict on American citizens, whether erasing women’s abortion rights, establishing in the public square a state-sanctioned Christianity (not Islam, for sure), or expanding practically everyone’s right to carry deadly weapons. All this has provoked accusations from the left that the Supreme Court is forfeiting its legitimacy, but the larger danger may be to the legitimacy of the Constitution itself.

In the field of the law, the Constitution is what the courts say it is. If judges are intellectually or ethically corrupt, then so is the Constitution—an instrument of narrow self-service to politics or preferences. If judges are faithful to unbiased principle, even when it goes against their wishes, then the Constitution remains a beacon.

As conceived with its first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights—the founding document is beautiful in its humane and practical ingenuity. True, it was the product of political compromises during that hot Philadelphia convention of 1787, and its authors—all white men—were hardly all pillars of propriety, with slaveowners among them. Yet somehow, schooled by the injustices of British colonialism, they codified values of governance and liberty that were greater than themselves, reaching far beyond what they could have imagined in their time.

Their Constitution creates bulwarks: a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and impediments to government’s intrusions into individual rights. Unlike most other constitutions in the world, the U.S. Constitution does not grant specific rights from on high; it conceives rights as natural possessions of the citizenry, and not only those rights enumerated in the document, but also “others retained by the people,” the Ninth Amendment states. For the sake of the future, the Framers were avoiding the sin of omission.

Last week, however, the Ninth Amendment was nearly killed off as six right-wing justices, in Dobbs v. Jackson, discarded the 49-year-old precedent of abortion rights. It was the culmination of a lifelong cause of Justice Samuel Alito, who took obvious pleasure in writing for the majority that neither abortion nor privacy is mentioned in the Constitution. Apparently, “others retained by the people” exclude those rights displeasing to the radical Republicans who now rule the Court. That bodes ill for decades of reasoned jurisprudence that have gradually recognized a panoply of rights as constitutionally protected.

Alito argued that Roe “was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned. . . . And that privacy right, Roe observed, had been found to spring from no fewer than five different constitutional provisions—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.”

True, the word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution. But is the concept of privacy really absent? Is one’s religion not a private matter, and so is the First Amendment’s protection of “the free exercise” of religion not in deference to personal privacy? Is not the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” a codification of the right of privacy? Is private property not the subject of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against a person’s deprivation of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law?”

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible," Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared from the bench during oral argument in the case overturning Roe v. Wade. The stench pervades the Court, yes.

Most of the six justices committed something close to perjury in testifying under oath at their confirmation hearings that they respected Roe v. Wade as precedent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused by Republican Senator Susan Collins of misleading her in their conversation before the vote; misleading is a euphemism for lying. She also believed him when he swore that he had never attempted to rape Christine Blasey Ford while in high school. Collins’s vote was crucial to getting him onto the Court.

Then, too, Justice Clarence Thomas insisted he had never sexually harassed Anita Hill. So we have at least two Supreme Court justices credibly accused of treating women as objects, now effectively treating women as objects once again, using their awesome powers from the bench.

We also know something of Thomas’s regard for the Constitution by his failure to recuse himself from a case relevant to an effort by his wife, Virginia, to help overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. When the Court ruled that Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had no executive privilege to shield their official communications, Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. Among the files were emails from Virginia Thomas to Meadows exhorting him to act—to act, as the House January 6 committee is reminding us, unconstitutionally.

Everyone has personal opinions about lots of things. But judges with life appointments are ethically and judicially required to partition themselves, to exercise discipline of mind by recognizing their biases and walling them off. When judges go to chambers and courtrooms, they need to leave their individual political and social views at home. That goes for liberals as well.

If they do not—and those on the extreme right obviously do not—then the “stench,” as Sotomayor put it, might eventually cling to the Constitution itself. If it comes to be seen by the country as a threat rather than a guardian, how can it command reverence? The people must believe in it, trust it, be confident that its righteousness is so powerful that it ultimately prevails.

Uplifting evidence of its power has come during the House January 6 committee from other Republicans, a different and vanishing breed of Republicans, who testified again and again that their oath to the Constitution fortified them in their solid resistance to President Trump’s pressure to overturn his 2020 election loss. The Constitutional guarantees, it seemed, were still lodged in their bones.

But the mainstream of the Republican Party, peddling Trump’s Big Lie that he won, erodes Americans’ faith in the electoral system, which is the foundation of a constitutional democracy.

Republicans are laying the groundwork to manipulate the Electoral College procedures next time by using the Constitution’s general provision granting state legislatures the authority to decide how elections are held: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors,” reads Article II.

The goal is to let Republican legislatures pick slates of presidential electors even if the voters go for the Democrat. Supreme Court precedent would seem to preclude doing an end run around the voters, which might run afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But as we’ve seen in many cases, most recently the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the highly partisan Republican justices are not big on the Fourteenth Amendment—which was one underpinning of abortion rights—and showed no deference to precedent in overturning Roe. So it’s not impossible to imagine this Supreme Court rationalizing the unthinkable, throwing the Constitution itself into disrepute.

That people have no right of privacy is a formidable and ominous ruling for the Supreme Court to make. It diminishes the Constitution, shrinks it to a pinched inventory of reduced freedoms, and carries sinister implications. The justices do not seem to understand that a powerful tool in one hand can be used by another hand. If a woman has no privacy regarding her own body, if big government—for big government is what the Court has now allowed—can intrude into her most intimate region of life for one purpose, then big government can intrude for another purpose.

On the basis of this constitutional finding, if government can prevent a woman from having an abortion, it can also require her to have one. Her pregnancy is not a private matter, because “privacy” does not exist in the Constitution. So the state can decide: She is mentally defective, she is physically disabled, she has too many children, she is of an “undesirable” race. This is not as absurd as it might seem, for history is replete with forced abortions (China) and forced sterilizations (the U.S., in 32 states into the late 20th century).

 Narrow-minded people rarely look past the immediate horizon, though, and the authors of the majority opinions in the Court’s abortion and gun cases—Alito and Thomas—have two of the narrowest minds in the federal judiciary. They are also shamelessly hypocritical when it comes to whose “intent” they consider.

When interpreting a law, Alito and other conservatives don’t like to consider “legislative intent.” They prefer to rely on the final text alone. “Even when an argument about legislative motive is backed by statements made by legislators who voted for a law,” Alito wrote in his abortion opinion, “we have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legislative body as a whole.” Nevertheless, he and his fellow conservatives embrace the “original intent” of the Framers long gone, and documented not by transcripts of extensive debate, as in modern legislatures, but mainly by James Madison’s notes taken during the Constitutional Convention. Imprisoning the Constitution in the shackles of an imagined “original intent” is a way of starving it to death.

In both the abortion and gun decisions, the Supreme Court invented a time machine to take the country back to the 1700s. Conservative justices had already gone through grammatical contortions in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, to decide that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia’ actually meant all by yourself as an individual. That opinion allowed people to keep guns in their homes.

Now, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the six conservative justices expanded that to guns in public. In writing the opinion striking down a century-old New York law requiring evidence of need before licensing a person to carry a concealed weapon, Thomas reached back earlier into regulation-free history. A century was not old enough.

Alito, too, traveled back in time to show how abortion was long prohibited. Evidently, what was must continue to be. It’s amazing that, because “telephones” are not mentioned in the Constitution, the Court nonetheless regards the Fourth Amendment as protecting phone conversations from wiretaps without warrants.

Liberals have decided to call themselves “progressives.” Conservatives should be called “regressives.”

Guns Are a Symptom

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The United States of America is now without any sacred places. Churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues are not sacred. Worshippers have been shot to death in Iowa, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, New York, Ohio, Georgia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Schools are not sacred. Children have been shot at 27 schools so far in 2022. Hospitals are not sacred. This year and last, in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois,and Minnesota, patients and staff at hospitals and clinics have been targeted. There is no sanctuary.

                The vulnerable spaces are not only physical. They are also conceptual. They are areas of ideas and practice where democracy’s shared beliefs used to be protected by moral barriers—bulwarks that are now eroding. High levels of authority and influence openly corrupt the reverence for honest elections, the deference to the rule of law, the integrity of facts and truth. The society reels under a shroud of menace. There is a sense of disorder, instability.

                No wonder Americans rush to buy guns whenever a mass shooting makes the country recoil. People have grown afraid of one another. A great retreat from common ground is underway, a pulling back into individual sovereignty, where the gun is a tool and a talisman. Far from the fields and forests of the responsible hunter or the shooting range of the careful sportsman, the gunman who harbors fear or hatred buys a firearm to kill human beings, as many as fast as possible. Whether to defend his home and family, or to take revenge, or to serve a demented cause, he wields his weapon in a wilderness of distrust.  

                And so the gun is a symptom of a breakdown in America. The symptom could be treated, obviously; guns could be restricted in availability and capability. That is a task readily accomplished if citizens elected people who valued human life over political life. But even if that miracle occurred, the underlying society would not be healed sufficiently to obviate the gun as an object of desire.  

                Gunowners do not make up some homogeneous tribe bent on mayhem. And guns in the hands of kids can be instruments of learning, part of growing up. That’s how it was for me as a nine-year-old. A farmer friend, Joe Vanek, up the hill from my aunt’s country acreage in Connecticut, taught me how to clean, carry, load, and shoot a .22 rifle with strict respect for safety. The first time I fired it, at a tin can, I was awed by the power, not thrilled. The crack of the shot, the kick against my shoulder, the clanging murder of the can were humbling. I got a little wiser in that moment.

                Years later, when I was 23, my mother wrote me this recollection: “The day Joe said a very small boy was ready to go out alone with his gun, I hung over the split rail fence and watched with trepidation a sturdy youngster carrying a gun which seemed to me larger than he, trudge miles across the field all by himself. 'Now watch,' Joe said, as that small boy came to the fence. 'He’ll shove the gun under first, just as I taught him, and then climb over and pick up the gun on the other side. He’s ready.' And you were and I never would have stopped your going. I just had a moment being—what? a mother? a woman?”

                But more years later, a small boy in Baltimore, where I was researching a book on poverty, told me that he carried a handgun to school every morning because his neighborhood was so dangerous. He stashed it in a secret place outside the building, then picked it up on the way home.

                American society has always struggled in crosscurrents of individual versus collective benefit. It is a healthy contest at its best, for neither the personal nor the community can thrive without honoring the other. The tension is seen in abortion laws that have neither prohibited absolutely nor permitted limitlessly, a balance about to be swept away by a Supreme Court ruling for what right-wing justices regard as the greater good against the preferences of individual women.

Imbalance, though, is treacherous. Soviet Communism placed the collective above all else, drowning individual rights and personal ambitions under a reign of moral judgment and persecution.

The United States seems poised to tilt precariously in the opposite direction in most areas other than abortion rights. By submerging the common good under a flood of personal preferences—some disguised as religious, some as constitutional, all as noble resistance to authority—sanction is given to harming others. The right to discriminate against gay couples, the right to be unvaccinated and unmasked, the right to ignore lawful subpoenas, the right to storm the Capitol and defile the democratic sacrament of a peaceful transfer of power—sacred no longer—are elevations of parochial interests at broader expense.

Americans immersed in violent video games and virulent Fox News fantasies might be forgiven for confusion about where reality and unreality begin and end. Some, failing in relationships and schooling and careers, might take up the gun as a substitute for virility. Some, feeling powerless, might brandish the weapon as their solution.

But solutions to the society’s ailments can be found only in reality. The gun is a symptom, and a fantasy.