Out of Afghanistan

 

By David K. Shipler

                There is a whiff of familiarity in the promised American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The parallels are uncanny, bringing to memory my one brief foray to the country, in the spring of 1988, as Soviet troops prepared to leave after nearly nine years of bloody warfare that ended in their defeat. Their departure opened the way for a fundamentalist Islamic movement to take power, now poised to take power once again.

                “One week from now, I’m going home,” Pvt. Yuri Moshnikov told me then, a grin lighting up his face. He was in a bush hat and light khakis and leaned casually against the gate of a base outside Kabul. Then the smile faded. He had lost friends during combat in Kandahar. “This war is evil,” he said bravely—bravely, for freedom of speech was not established in the Soviet Army. “No one needs this war. Afghanistan doesn’t need it. We don’t need it.” Yet, he continued, “I fulfilled my duty.”

Defeat in Afghanistan comes gradually, like a slow realization. For the Americans, it has taken nearly twenty years as mission creep evolved into mission impossible. For the Russians, it was spread by the US-supported mujahideen, the Islamist forces that received weapons from the CIA via the Pakistanis. These included shoulder-launched Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, so deadly that when I flew into Kabul from Moscow aboard an Aeroflot passenger jet, we had to spiral down tightly in a falling-leaf approach while Soviet helicopters whirled around us firing flares to deflect any heat-seeking Stingers heading our way. For a guy with a US passport, being defended by the Soviet military against American weapons felt truly bizarre.

It was also odd, especially in retrospect, for the United States to be arming the wrong side, the side that oppressed women and barred girls from going to school. That side was the one that morphed into the Taliban, which harbored Al Qaeda, which struck on September 11, 2001, which prompted the United States to invade in order to—yes—oust the Taliban, the younger generation of fundamentalists who ruled the country with religious totalitarianism.

Pretty soon, they are going to be back. President Trump wanted out, so in a rare spasm of good sense he hired the skilled Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. But the agreement is turning out to be reminiscent of the Paris accords, which covered the US departure from Vietnam, leaving South Vietnam to fight and lose alone, as the Afghan government is likely to do as well.

America Hurtles Forward--and Backward

 

By David K. Shipler 

                According to Sir Isaac Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—a principle of physics, of course, but also true in politics and policy, at least currently in the United States. The country is moving in two directions simultaneously, as if two revolutions in thinking and practice are taking place, one progressing into a new era mobilizing government for economic and social reform, the other pushing hard into an old indifference to social injustice marked by blatant racial and class discrimination.

                Although the two revolutions frame their respective arguments around the size and role of government, they are driven by more fundamental clashes of concept. At root is the question of how inclusive a democracy should be, what problems it can solve, how the common good should be defined, and how near or distant the horizon of vision should be drawn.

Joe Biden, the 78-year-old Washington insider, did not raise radical expectations when he took office just over two months ago. He was forecast as a caretaker president who would decompress the political atmosphere with boring normalcy. Instead, he has quickly emerged as the unlikely catalyst of the most imaginative Democratic movement in at least a generation, perhaps since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His aspirations are broad and intensely sophisticated, forming an agenda that would apply expansive ideals in mobilizing the nation’s expertise and financial power against the most vexing problems of race, class, health, education, climate, environment, energy, communication, low-paid work, elderly care, aging transportation networks, and just about every other failure in the American landscape.

The opposite revolution would leave all the failures in place, unresolved, and would add to them. It is more than a counter-revolution, led by Republicans who have become more than the Party of No. They go beyond saying no to every advance—no eased voting, no true help for malnourished children, no cleaner air or water, no safer workplaces, no better health care, no sufficient funding for schools, no mandatory wages high enough to support families. The new Republicans—for they are new in the history of the Republican Party—do not merely stand still and block. They are moving at speed back in time.

How Republicans Mainstream Far-Right Radicalism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                In the mid-1990s, a conservative named Joseph Overton devised a brochure with a cardboard slider showing how the parameters of acceptable political possibilities could be shifted. Called the Overton Window, it has helped explain the changes over time in society’s views on women’s suffrage, prohibition, racial segregation, gay rights, and the like. And now the window has been slid open to the flow of monstrous ideas from the white supremacist right into the public square of political discourse.

The conduit is the Republican Party, which is serving to normalize radical visions by reshaping them just enough to make them seem slightly less shocking. “Ideological beliefs once thought of as extreme have—with relative speed--become more widely accepted by the general public,” writes Cynthia Miller-Idriss in her book Hate in the Homeland.  “Mainstreaming is critical to the growth of far-right movements globally, because it helps them recruit, radicalize, and mobilize individuals toward violence, while reducing the likelihood that the public will raise the alarm about their efforts.” She was prescient: Her book was published even before the January 6 invasion of the Capitol.

A professor of education and sociology at American University, Miller-Idriss has made a specialty of studying right-wing extremism in Europe and the United States. Her catalogue of far-right themes, theories, fantasies, fears, and apocalyptic remedies offers an instructive lens through which to see the mainstream arguments of many Republicans and their supporters. Conservatives’ statements that initially look merely controversial jump into focus as menacing once your eyes adjust. You can see in many Republican declarations the features of dangerous extremism.

Those features include: anti-government and anti-democratic ideas; exclusionary beliefs that dehumanize “others” such as Jews, blacks, Muslims, Asians, Latinos, and immigrants; geographical identity that attaches historical purity to a land; existential fears of “white genocide” in a “great replacement” of Christian whites by non-Christian nonwhites; hypermasculinity; and conspiratorial fantasies culminating in violence to accelerate the rise of a new order.

When these convictions are taken from the margins and reshaped by Republicans into policy positions and political assertions, they slide into the public square in a pattern of ominous normalization. By placing Miller-Idriss’s depiction of far-right movements next to Republican and conservative themes, the symbiotic relationship becomes clear:

Anti-government, anti-democratic: The far right’s distrust of government was echoed by former President Trump’s repeated sloganeering against Washington corruption (“Drain the swamp!”) and his denunciation of governmental actions and agencies, including trade deals, the Iran nuclear agreement, the judiciary, the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Then, exploiting the far right’s anti-democratic suspicions, he assailed a Congress controlled by his own party and undermined faith in the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. That appealed to far-right beliefs that the system must be destroyed. The alternative--gaming the system—is being advanced nationwide by state Republicans, bent on power above all, who are flooding legislatures with bills to reduce access to the ballot box. That approach coincides with far-right goals of exclusion.

Of course railing against Washington is a perennial campaign theme with such a long tradition that decades ago, James Reston quipped that politicians who excoriate Washington often end up living there after retirement. Yet Trump took the polemics to unprecedented levels, channeling a populist antipathy for government. In this he led less than he followed; he heard and amplified the resentful chants of his supporters.

 “Drain the swamp, look at that sign. Drain the swamp in Washington, DC.” Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally. “I didn’t like the expression, drain the swamp in Washington. So I said it three days ago. The place went crazy. I said, you know what? I’m starting to like that expression.” It did not seem to matter to the far right that Trump wallowed in the swamp. The slogan inspired.

Exclusionary beliefs and white ethno-states:  “Places and spaces are fundamental to a sense of belonging and identity,” Miller-Idriss writes, “and are imbued with emotional attachment and meaning.” That has been true historically of Nazism and other far-right movements into the present. “Space and place are constant backdrops to contemporary far-right fears of a ‘great replacement’ and conspiracies about Europe turning into Eurabia.”

At the extreme right, she notes, “issues of territory, belonging, exclusion, race, and national geographies are foundational for imagining collective pasts as well as anticipated futures.” The remedies of “border walls, along with language about national defense, incursions, and invasions” reinforce the sense of existential threat. The 2017 white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia, included chants of “Jews will not replace us.”

Those themes play harmoniously into the Trump Republican anti-immigration rants. They have gone way beyond rational policy arguments. Instead, they ignite far-right fervor by demonizing immigrants as mortal dangers to the very nature of America. “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Trump tweeted as convoys of Central American families approached the border in October 2018. On another occasion, he declared, “If we can save American lives, American jobs, and American futures, together we can save America itself.” At a rally in Panama City Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, he wondered aloud what to do, cleverly suggesting violence while rejecting it. “We can’t let [border officers] use weapons,” he said. “We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?”

“Shoot them!” a woman yelled. The crowd cheered. Trump gave a slight smile, then said, “Only in the Panhandle you can get away with that.” Cheers, applause. “Only in the Panhandle.”

In accord with some of his staff’s affinities for the far right, Trump also fed the yearning for a white ethno-state by explicitly naming the racial and religious components of his anti-immigration stand. He banned entry from seven Muslim countries. He derided immigrants from Haiti and Africa. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he asked. Nigerians won’t ever leave, won’t ever “go back to their huts.” He expressed preference for immigrants from countries like Norway. He went as far as to tweet that four congresswomen of color, three of whom were born in the US, should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Republicans did not object to the tweet.

Apocalyptic Imagery and the Great Replacement: The far right’s fears that minorities will replace whites through demographic change or genocide were cited by Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh Synagogue, and Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 at an El Paso Walmart frequented by Latinos. The anxieties have found resonance in some Republicans’ remarks and retweets.

Speaking at the 2020 Republican convention, Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old head of Turning Point USA, declared: “Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life.” (Kirk founded a think tank with Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University.)

 The country’s demographics are a grave concern. One of the far right’s goals, Miller-Idriss says, is to get whites to have more children, a theme picked up by Representative Steve King of Iowa in a 2017 tweet about immigration: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” In a follow-up CNN interview, he declared, “You’ve got to keep your birth rate up and teach your children your values and in doing so, you can grow your population and you can strengthen your way of life.”

King’s record is significant. He flirted with the far right for years before the Republican establishment and its funders finally had enough. In 2018 he gave a long interview to the magazine of the rightist Austrian Freedom Party. He retweeted comments by Lana Lokteff, a white nationalist who argued for a white ethno-state, saying, “Alt-right is the fight for a white future and white lands, free of invaders and traitors who actively seek to ruin us, to make us feel guilty for the success and might of our ancestors as a means to conquer us.”

He also endorsed a Canadian white nationalist, Faith Goldy, for mayor of Toronto. She had recited “the 14 words,” a catechism that reads: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

After a long history of this, King began to lose corporate campaign donations, but only some. In October 2018, Land O’Lakes stopped contributing, but others continued, including AT&T, Nestle Purina, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Citizens United, the National Association for Gun Rights, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the American Association of Crop Insurers, and the American Soybean Association.

He won reelection in 2018, though barely, but was stripped of his committee assignments by fellow House Republicans in 2019 after saying in a New York Times interview, ““White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in class teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” He lost the 2020 primary, 45.7% to 36%.

Of course there’s a lot of rhetoric at both ends of the spectrum about saving or losing America, and Republicans have no monopoly on specters of Armageddon. The difference is that Trump and Republicans have spoken to a set of far-right movements that sees a race war as essential to a new world order very much like the ISIS drive to recreate the Caliphate, Miller-Idriss writes. “In this sense, Islamist and far-right extremists share a similar apocalyptic vision and use the same kinds of violent terrorist strategies in an effort to accelerate the process toward the end times.” The fastest path, according to the most extreme believers, is by “speeding up polarization and societal discord as a way of undermining social stability overall.”

Whether Trump was acting deliberately or instinctively or inadvertently in fueling the far right through polarization and instability is an open question. But he did it nonetheless by hyperventilating right to the end of his administration. Two days before the Senate runoff elections in Georgia last January, Trump told a rally, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.” Three days later, at the Save America March, an insurrection of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and halted the Electoral College vote count in Congress.

Hypermasculinity: Gyms and mixed martial arts centers are important youth recruitment sites for the far right, Miller-Idriss reports, and physical fitness, strong masculinity, bravery, and toughness are promoted as central values of patriotism and ethnic purity. Trump has keyed into these themes. He tweeted a doctored video showing him body-slamming a man who had a CNN logo over his head. He posed as the tough guy recovering from Covid-19. Back in 2000, he effectively rescued from bankruptcy the organization sponsoring mixed martial arts competitions, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, by inviting them to hold two tournaments at his Atlantic City hotel. “Today,” Miller-Idriss writes, “the UFC broadcasts in over 150 countries to more than a billion households.” The far right champions such combat sports “as a perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defense, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets. Hitler himself had advocated for the importance of combat sports for training Nazi soldiers.”

In the vein of faux masculinity, the right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently disparaged women in the military: “Pregnant women are gonna fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military. While China’s military becomes more masculine, as it’s assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.”

All this huffing and puffing might be written off as comical fringe warfare if it weren’t reflected in real-life attitudes on a broad scale. Some of the crazies are now in Congress—and they didn’t get there by breaking in past Capitol police. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has bought into the conspiracy theories that school shootings were faked and space lasers owned by the Jewish Rothschild family started the California wildfires. Before her election, she had also endorsed the notion of executing Democrats. But only 11 Republicans joined Democrats in removing her from committees.

Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who spoke at a white-nationalist conference last month, was “scheduled to appear on a QAnon conspiracy-supporting talk show,” MSN News reported. The Arizona Mirror said that the conference organizer, 22-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes, followed with a speech calling the Jan. 6 riots “awesome” and demanding that Gosar and others pass legislation to protect America’s “white demographic core.’”

The penetration of the far right’s ideas was documented in a Vanderbilt survey taken in 2020 before the election. A slim majority (50.7%) of Republicans agreed with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” A plurality (41.3%) agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” Others said they were unsure, and only 20 to 25% registered disagreement with those statements, which can be read as prescriptions for insurgency.

The Fleeting Euphoria of Racial Progress

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Again and again, we are cheated. Those of us who celebrate the embrace of justice are allowed elation only for a while. Then the inevitable bigotry awakens from what turns out to be a shallow slumber.

                The saga of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is the latest to lift the mood and then crush it. Their royal wedding in 2018 drew an estimated 1.9 billion viewers worldwide, not only for the splendor but also for the elevation of racial inclusion: a biracial American joining the British royal family, an expansion past ancient limits into the broader world. And how fitting, given the United Kingdom’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity. We were entitled to our euphoria, as naïve as it was.

                Barack Obama gave us that, too. On election night in 2008, television screens radiated with tears for the healing of history, notably the streaming eyes of Jesse Jackson, no fan of Obama but a courier of reform. Who will forget his face? But then, the first “black” US president—also biracial—became the target of ugly caricatures and epithets, facilitating the prejudices that Donald Trump rode into the White House eight years later. Euphoria, it seems, is always stalked by hatred: Emancipation by Jim Crow, Obama by Trump, voting rights by voting suppression.

                Last year, the murders of blacks by police—nothing new, but now recorded for all to witness—propelled the largest outpouring in history of white Americans demonstrating for racial justice. In big cities and small towns across the country, week after week, whites went with blacks into the streets, driven by the terrible, long video of the white Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling fatally on the neck of the unarmed black man George Floyd.

                Not since the brutality of segregationists against nonviolent civil rights demonstrators in the 1950s and 60s had the conscience of white America been animated so intensely. It was uplifting. It brought a kind of indignant ecstasy, a declaration that Black Lives Matter, meaning of course that black lives also matter, that black lives matter, too, not just white lives, that too often have black lives been seen as not to matter. Pride in this arousal of morality was not allowed to last long enough.

MACA: Make America Competent Again Part 2

 

By David K. Shipler

The second in an occasional series 

                A great American paradox is playing out dramatically on the Texas stage following the destructive winter storm: millions are unemployed, and millions of skilled jobs are vacant. Texans cannot find enough plumbers, electricians, and other hands-on specialists to restore life to decent levels of comfort and safety. The state—and the country at large—simply does not have enough men and women trained in the panoply of manual professions needed to keep an advanced society running.

There is a solution to this, and it’s recognized by labor unions, employers, and economists. It fits the general proposition, which I heard some twenty years ago from a leading economist, Robert Lerman: If a good idea exists, he said, you can be sure that it is being tried by somebody somewhere in the United States.

And for more than those twenty years, Lerman has been on a campaign to expand an idea already proven in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere. It is the ancient institution of apprenticeship—not in the medieval form but in a modern combination of in-class study and on-the-job learning that enhance practical skills for Americans who do not finish four years of college.

The hard fact is that if you don’t go to college or, once there, don’t get a degree, you’re in danger of falling through a hole in the economy. Unless you’re a whiz kid like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you’re likely to be lacking the skills necessary to sell your labor competitively in a free economy. You could end up in dead-end, underpaid jobs that can consign you to a life near or below the poverty line.

And you will not be alone. Although 90 percent of Americans over age 24 have completed high school, only about two-thirds go immediately to college, and 40 percent of them drop out. Especially vulnerable are the first in their families to attend college. Their drop-out rate is 89 percent. Lerman reports that just 28 percent of all students and 17 percent of black students who began community college in 2016 graduated within three years, a slight increase over earlier years.

Rush Limbaugh and Encrypted Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Rush Limbaugh, the witty, right-wing propagandist who died this week of lung cancer, gave his millions of listeners formulas for expressing anti-black bigotry without seeming to do so. Here is a description of his methods as directed against President Obama, in an excerpt from my book Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword:

                Given that blatant racial slurs are broadly unacceptable in twenty-first-century America, you could say that freedom of speech has its limits, restrained here not by law but by culture. And the punishments are inconsistent. People may lose jobs, promotions, reputations, and their chances for political office—or they may not. They can’t predict with confidence. Therefore, either instinctively or deliberately, people inclined to indulge in racial stereotyping find ways to disguise their messages in raceless terminology.

That leaves much room for disagreement over what is really being said. Is it encrypted prejudice or honest commentary? Which criticisms of Obama should be taken at face value, and which reverberate with echoes of age-old racial contempt? How can hidden implications be identified? Bias is agile and from time to time shifts into keys that sound race neutral to some Americans but are “dog whistles” audible to those who hear the notes of bigotry.

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 embed within 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.

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.

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 said gently, “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.”

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. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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 Post fact-checkers. And thousands of his supporters at rallies cheer his fabulations.

                “Just remember,” Trump told an 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!”

The Criminal Justice of Amy Coney Barrett, Part Two

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, writes much better than most of her new colleagues, and she knows how to tell a story. In the area of criminal justice, including defendants’ and prisoners’ rights, she begins each opinion with a narrative vivid enough for a crime writer to treat as a synopsis for a novel. And her rulings, founded on clear legal argument, are hard to categorize along a liberal-conservative spectrum. She stands willing to decide against police, prosecutors, and trial judges when she sees the facts and the law demanding as much.

                That was her record during three years on the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals. But she was restricted by the precedents of earlier rulings by her circuit and the Supreme Court. In many cases, she wrote for unanimous three-judge panels that included two liberals who surely had significant influence over the shape of the opinion. The highest court’s culture with a conservative majority will be different. Its authority to reinterpret the law and the Constitution exceeds that of appeals courts. With such license, she could shift to the right in cases involving the Fourth Amendment, for example, where she has been fairly tough on law enforcement. On the other hand, as a supporter of the Second Amendment right to own firearms, she gives close scrutiny to police searches that turn up guns and to sentence enhancements for gun possession.

                Following are several of her most interesting opinions that were described more briefly in Part One:

                United States v. Watson—“The police received an anonymous 911 call from a 14-year-old who borrowed a stranger’s phone and reported seeing ‘boys’ ‘playing with guns’ by a ‘gray and greenish Charger’ in a nearby parking lot.” The caller said the “boys” were black. “A police officer then drove to the lot and blocked a car matching the caller’s description. The police found that a passenger in the car, David Watson, had a gun. He later conditionally pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm as a felon.”  Watson then moved to suppress the gun evidence as the fruit of an unconstitutional search.

                 Under the Supreme Court’s application of the Fourth Amendment dating from Terry v. Ohio in 1968, Barrett noted, “an officer cannot stop someone to investigate potential wrongdoing without reasonable suspicion that ‘criminal activity may be afoot.’” She also cited later cases spelling out factors justifying reasonable suspicion, including a particularized and objective basis for suspecting a certain individual of a specific crime. Reasonable suspicion is a lower bar than the “probable cause” required to get a search warrant from a judge. A warrantless search also requires urgency, in that a pedestrian or a driver could depart with evidence before a warrant could be issued.

In Watson’s case, the police claimed that blocking the car and doing the search were justified under those rules. Barrett quoted the first officer as describing the neighborhood as a heavy crime area and worrying that if there were “three or four guys displaying weapons, they might [be] about to shoot somebody.” A second officer said, “any time you have males with weapons, there’s always a sense of urgency ‘cause anything could happen.”

But Barrett found precedents derogating the reliability of anonymous tips in establishing reasonable suspicion. Furthermore, she declined to apply a Supreme Court precedent granting a 911 call considerable credibility because here, she observed, it came from a borrowed phone by a boy whose identity was unknown and could probably not be traced. Furthermore—the clincher—“his sighting of guns did not describe a likely emergency or crime—he reported gun possession, which is lawful.” Her panel suppressed the evidence and vacated the judgment.

The Criminal Justice of Amy Coney Barrett, Part One

 

By David K. Shipler 

             For all the close scrutiny of soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s writings on the hot-button issues of abortion rights, gun rights, and Obamacare, little attention has been paid to her rulings on the rights of criminal defendants and prisoners. She has issued opinions in thirty-four such cases and signed on to other rulings in her three years on the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, a rather thin record, yet one demonstrating a willingness to rule both for and against police, prosecutors, and trial judges.

At times she conveys compassion for the convicted and a robust regard for the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on the police power to search. She is occasionally willing to strip officers of their “qualified immunity” from lawsuits. But she can also adopt extremely narrow interpretations of legal language to uphold questionable convictions and heavy sentences.

           In the general area of criminal justice and related civil suits, she has issued only five dissents—four going against inmates and defendants and one arguing that a non-violent felon should be allowed to own firearms, which current federal law prohibits. In another dissent, in Sims v. Hyatte, she opposed the exoneration of a man whose attempted murder conviction relied entirely on his identification by the victim, who turned out to have been hypnotized before his trial testimony—a fact not disclosed to the defense. Two of the three judges overturned the conviction, and the man was released after twenty-six years in jail.

Otherwise, she has written for unanimous three-judge panels, putting her in the mainstream of her court. It is fair to say that most of her opinions in criminal cases have been slam dunks, not even close calls given the facts and the precedents. Some appeals that reached her court seemed like stretches by defense attorneys; others exposed such egregious behavior by authorities that a contrary ruling would have shocked the conscience. (More detailed descriptions of key cases will appear next week in the second part.)

Trump Reveals America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

Michelle Obama has observed that being president does not change who you are. It reveals who you are. The same could be said of the nation: that its president does not change who we are but reveals who we are. And what Donald Trump has revealed about America has taught us sobering lessons about ourselves.

                The United States is a highly segregated society, not only by race and class but also by politics. So little respectful conversation occurs across political lines, so few circles of friendship contain citizens of differing views, that many Americans have remarked in these last four years on how little they understood their own country.

                What has been uncovered is shocking and worrisome, but it can also be constructive if the revelations inspire a curriculum for self-improvement. The test of any society, its capacity for self-correction, has been passed by the United States repeatedly, if erratically, over two and a half centuries. Win or lose next month, Trump will have presented the country with its next challenges. Here are some of the major lessons: 

                1. The Fragility of Democratic Values. When Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election, he should be instantly disqualified in the mind of every American citizen who understands that nonviolent transition is the linchpin of democracy, setting free societies apart from dictatorships. No president of the United States has ever before raised such a question about this hallowed principle. He was finally dragged into a begrudging “yes, I will” under tough questioning at last week’s televised town hall, then seemed to add a condition: “But I want it to be an honest election.” He attacked its honesty in advance with fabricated stories of discarded and altered ballots. No president of the United States has ever before campaigned against the legitimacy of the electoral process. And while impediments to voting have plagued this democracy since its founding, the Republican Party’s national strategy to silence the people’s voices through myriad means ought to be cause enough for alarm and rejection.

That Trump’s dismissal of democratic norms has not decimated his support suggests that some 40 percent of Americans who still register their approval have blind spots to the essentials of a pluralistic political system. They seem either not to recognize the threats it can face or not to value it in the first place. The lapses extend into the Republican establishment. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah tweeted on October 8. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Does it need to be said that liberty cannot be preserved without democracy? Evidently so.

The Method to Trump's Madness

 

By David K. Shipler 

                President Trump’s critics see him as impulsive, willfully ignorant, devoted to immediate self-gratification, and even mentally deranged. He is all of that. But he is something more, too. He is canny and calculating, more skillful at playing the long game than generally recognized.

                Even as he appears candid and unscripted, Trump has cleverly laid the groundwork in managing both public opinion and government for enhancing his power and shielding himself from the consequences of his ethical and legal corruption. And for an heir to moneyed privilege, he is remarkably perceptive about the anxieties and grievances that have driven millions of working-class Americans into his cult of personality. Many thought they were voting for a non-politician, but they got a president with the political instincts of a marksman—at least when they are his target.

                In his first significant play, beginning even before his election, he took a hammer and chisel to chip away at whatever trust Americans retained for news organizations that inform citizens on the workings of society and government. “Fake news!” he cries whenever a press report exposes his lies, incompetence, bigotry, self-dealing, spasmodic policies, defiance of law, and the like. “The enemy of the American people!” he brands the news media, reviving the wording employed by Mao, Lenin, Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels, and Stalin. To anyone who knows history, the phrase is chilling, for millions of Russians under Stalin went into the Gulag or before firing squads after conviction of the charge “enemy of the people.”

Supreme Court or Supreme Legislature?

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the immediate swirl of politics surrounding a choice of her successor ought to remind Americans of what they are losing in their stressed democracy. The Supreme Court, designed to transcend bitter political divides, now reflects them instead. This is obviously the doing of the justices themselves. But it is also the sin of presidents and senators who nominate and confirm them.

 The judiciary has been the only one of the three branches of government of late to function with reasonable responsibility. The executive branch under President Trump has defied the law, induced chaos, promoted ethnic hatred, and ignored expertise from its own scientists and generals and diplomats. The legislative branch has deadlocked in divisive bickering over police reform, voting rights, prescription drug costs, renewed economic aid during the pandemic, and a host of other urgent matters. Federal judges, meanwhile, have steadied the ship on numerous occasions—though not all—by restraining some radical efforts to curtail immigration, abortion rights, and voters’ access to the ballot box.

But the judicial branch has never been entirely apolitical, if politics means the advocacy of certain policies over others, whether in the law or in social values. Judges ascend to the bench carrying their particular legal and social philosophies. The question is how much they can put aside in the interest of upholding precedent, interpreting the law, and applying the principles of the Constitution. The question is how much they can evolve over years in those exalted positions. And the question is not whether, but to what extent, the courts stand resilient against the vicissitudes of politics and the commands of ideologies.

It is no accident that countries careening toward authoritarianism—Hungary and Poland come to mind—are compromising the independence of their judiciaries, and that longstanding dictatorships—China and Russia, for example—never had true judicial independence in the first place.

As many politicians from Trump on down seek judges whose opinions echo their own, they risk scoring short-term victories at the cost of eroding what the Framers erected as a precious pillar of pluralistic democracy. The latest example is the unseemly struggle over Ginsburg’s replacement.

A Quiz for Trump Supporters

 

By David K. Shipler

 

                Dear Trump Supporter:

                                Here are some questions to consider and then answer for yourself.

                1. Do you tell multiple lies a day about matters both large and small?

                2. Do you cheat on your spouse?

                3. Do you antagonize your friends and suck up to your enemies?

                4. Do you think up mean, derisive nicknames for people you don’t like?

                5. Do you spread rumors and conspiracy theories without knowing if they’re true?

                6. Do you think that Americans who join the armed forces are “suckers?”

                7. Do you think that American soldiers who die in battles for their country are “losers?”

                8. Do you encourage violence against people you dislike?

                9. Do you disparage women?

                10. Do you think that you can grab any woman’s genitals whenever you wish?

                11. Do you ridicule people with disabilities?

                12. Do you harbor and express distaste for non-white Americans?

                13. Do you excoriate illegal immigrants and then hire them?

                13. Do you resent legal immigrants who come to the U.S. to seek a better life?

                14. Do you ignore laws and encourage others to do so?

                15. Do you fail to pay people who have done work for you?

                16. Do you ignore and criticize your doctor’s advice on life-and-death medical conditions?

                17. Do you gather people together in ways that you know will endanger their health?

                18. Do you think it should be difficult for citizens to vote?

                19. Do you think federal officials should be able to profit financially from their decisions?

                20. Do you like dictators more than democratically elected leaders?

                21. If you answered no to these questions—or even to most of them—why do you want such a man to lead your country?

Policing and Poverty

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine walking into a police station for help as a victim of crime and also getting help as a victim of poverty. Think how policing would change if, under the same roof, assistance were available for the problems of hunger, housing, health, addiction, and joblessness.

                This sounds like pure fantasy, especially as unjustified police shootings continue, the country erupts in protests, and white supremacists threaten Black Lives Matter demonstrators with violence that turns deadly. In many black neighborhoods, the police are seen as the enemy—just another gang, as some residents have said.

But the constructive reform of policing need not be lost in the fog of fury. It needs to be kept as a focused goal whose achievement will take unprecedented cooperation among community activists and law enforcement, including police leadership and officers in the ranks.

The problem has two parts. One is the use of force by cops who are scared or bigoted or poorly trained or all of the above. A great deal of study and thinking has gone into that issue, and lots of sound policies have been proposed, though too rarely adopted, in scattered jurisdictions among the nation’s 18,000 police departments.

The other part has been mostly neglected, however: the clustering of diverse services so that officers can be relieved of onerous tasks for which they have no expertise. It’s a good bet that you won’t be able to find a police officer who loves being called to a “domestic dispute,” where parachuting into a home without context can mean encountering unpredictable, split-second dangers. Nor do cops relish dealing with people suffering from mental illness, who account for a large number of encounters. In short, police are confronted by issues they cannot address, and need tools and training they do not have.

The Golden Rule of Politics

 By David K. Shipler

 

                According to the Golden Rule of politics—Do Unto Others  As They Have Done Unto You—Democrats now have an opportunity to smear all Republicans, just as Republicans have smeared them, with a fringe candidate likely to go to Congress. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Republican primary in a Georgia district so extreme that she’s bound to be elected to the House of Representatives in November, and then carry into the halls of the Capitol her anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist rants about Trump’s opposition by Satan-worshiping child sex traffickers. She is an aficionado of QAnon, the inchoate association of conspiracy theorists that the FBI regards as having the potential for domestic terrorism.

The fact that Greene’s attitudes are not shared across the Republican spectrum—albeit the narrowing Republican spectrum—would not deter astute Democratic campaign operatives from casting them as representative, as they’ve already begun to do. “Georgia Republicans, and Republican candidates running across the country, will have to answer for her hateful views in their own campaigns,” said the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Cheri Bustos.

In this they’ve had help from President Trump, who called her a “future Republican star.” So too, the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, first denounced her statements but then rebuffed pleas from some of his colleagues to support her opponent in the primary, John Cowan, a conservative physician. The minority whip, Steve Scalise, did campaign and raise money for Cowan. Still, funding help for Greene reportedly came from other prominent Republicans, including Mark Meadows, now Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, and Congressman Jim Jordan, the outspoken Trump defender.

Democrats have traction here to discredit the Republican establishment as moving in the opposite direction of most Americans in an age of heightened consciousness about racial injustice and yearning for national healing. Should they do it?

Beware of a Cornered Trump

By David K. Shipler

                As President Trump’s poll numbers slip four months before the election, he and his frenzied staff have launched an end game of wild thrashing that could bring further damage to a country they pretend to love.

The closer defeat looms, the more desperate the death throes of a deranged administration. It lunges for levers of power and propaganda. It undermines institutions that stand above politics. It smears physicians who work for the public’s health. It attempts to conceal pandemic data, Soviet-style. It issues absurd decrees to local school boards to open in the fall or else. It dispatches unidentified federal forces to kidnap peaceful protesters. It flails out against measures to ease voting. And these are only the omens. A final spasm—if it is final—seems likely.

                Insurgencies, dictatorships, and the like often tend toward untamed outrages as they are backed into a corner and face annihilation. Similar impulses appear ascendant in Trump’s criminal government, where the rule of law is a minor irritation and self-enrichment at taxpayers’ expense is routine. He has shed his White House of responsible advisers, replacing them with cruel dogmatists whose ideology of ignorance is a plague on the nation. It’s hard to see impediments to the abuses. Trump has no moral brakes. His values are those of a mafia boss who rewards and punishes those who protect or oppose him. Never in U.S. history has a president commuted the prison sentence of the chief witness against him, as Trump did for Roger Stone, who defied every legal requirement to testify on Russia’s alleged collaboration with the Trump 2016 election campaign. No “snitch” was Stone. His silence stymied Robert Mueller’s investigation and enabled Trump to crow, “Hoax!” The full truth may never be known.

Where are the Republicans who chant “law and order” when their party leader ignores the law and sows disorder? Where are the conservatives who don’t fight to conserve the American constitutional system that Trump and his accomplices try to shred? If there is a glaring lesson from the Trump era, it is how easily compromised are the nation’s founding principles, how deferent to autocratic aims are those who wear the camouflage of liberty: Congressional Republicans, right-wing broadcast personalities, self-righteous evangelicals, flinty citizens who make a show of individualism and resistance.

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a state militia loyal to the eventual fascist president, Buzz Windrip, “considered him their general and their god.” The militia was a precursor to the Minute Men, his private troops in black capes or white or khaki shirts, who beat, arrested, and confined—and thereby purged books, manuscripts, and thinkers from the political landscape. In 2020 America, armed right-wing vigilantes have already attacked Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and have been encouraged by the Trump campaign to “monitor” polling places in November. The smell of political violence is in the air.

This fear could be overdrawn—let’s hope so. Trump’s incompetence as a manager might save us. But he has a zealous base and a compliant coterie of collaborators. Consider this passage from Lewis and its familiar ring, describing the fictional Windrip’s supporters before a rally in Madison Square Garden: “Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was packed with drab, discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the hashish of hope. . . . they were people concerned with the tailor’s goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby’s diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. . . . Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.”

Trump’s mental and emotional disabilities have infected many under him, and they in turn create a loop of reinforcement for his most destructive impulses. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos parrots his dangerous insistence that schools reopen entirely in the fall or risk losing federal funds. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf adopts a callous plan to deport international college students whose classes proceed online (before uproars and lawsuits force a reversal). He and Attorney General Bill Barr begin to mobilize elements of law enforcement for political ends, specifically to tout “law and order” in Portland, Oregon, where the U.S. Marshal’s Service has been deployed in violation of local officials’ demands to depart and halt their violent harassment and false arrests of demonstrators. It would be wise to see Portland as only the first stepping stone toward as much repression as this administration can muster in the coming months.

 Pity Trump and the country he leads. Raised in a family rife with emotional abuse, as his niece Mary Trump has documented, he suffers from narcissism and a fragile ego that deliver him to an unending reliance on lies, conflict, and bullying. His obvious brain dysfunctions prevent him from processing information, reasoning logically, remembering what he said a minute earlier, and governing effectively. He cannot stand anyone smarter or more popular than him, so his economic adviser, Peter Navarro, and anonymous acolytes try to take down Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose credibility in polls far exceeds Trump’s.

The president of what is supposed to be the greatest country in all of human history cannot tell the difference between image and reality, or cares more about image than reality, as he orders a halt in reporting Covid hospitalizations to the CDC and laments the increase in Covid testing because it makes the case numbers go higher. Is it possible that his mental defect means that he doesn’t realize that the actual incidence of infection is a fact independent of how many are detected by tests? Or is he just trying to fool his fellow Americans? And how many will be fooled? Or frightened?

We’ll find out in November.