Tag Archives: Political Violence

Democracy, Donald Trump

Police and service members in Capitol mob raise security questions for Biden inauguration

The U.S. Army said that Jacob Fracker – one of the two off-duty Virginia police officers who have been arrested on federal charges related to the Capitol riot – is a corporal in the Virginia National Guard.

Fracker is the first known active military service member charged in the assault on the halls of Congress.

The disclosure of Fracker’s status as a guardsman comes as thousands of National Guard service members, some of them armed, provide security in and around the Capitol in the wake of the deadly riot Jan. 6.

Yes, police “have First Amendment rights.” And in a well-disciplined police force, as in a well-disciplined military unit, organizational solidarity may matter more than a member’s attraction to groups and ideologies on the extreme fringes of society. The center holds.

Before separating from the Army in 1991, Timothy McVeigh used to wear a T-shirt he got as part of a trial membership in the Ku Klux Klan. In his Army barracks, in full view of Black soldiers, McVeigh advertised his adherence to WHITE POWER. In his spare time, McVeigh frequented gun shows, where, in addition to amassing and selling weapons, he hawked copies of the seminal white terror-manifesto novel The Turner Diaries.

McVeigh, a decorated Gulf War vet, didn’t blow up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, until after leaving the military. That explosion was 25 years ago: before the nation’s first Black president served two terms, before Donald Trump’s election and (nearly complete) one term, before white terrorist groups became emboldened and increased their numbers, before QAnon was even a thing, and — yes — before a Republican president embraced, energized, and enabled white nationalists.

The violence at the Capitol on January 6 (with all that came in the months before) raises the live possibility that the police and the national guard may harbor potential security threats to the president-elect and other officials, as well as guests, at the inauguration.

Mark this as one more consequence of the campaigns, election, and tenure of Donald Trump. The once unthinkable has become a ghastly possibility.

[Update:] “Twelve National Guard troops deployed to Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration were flagged during background checks and have been sent home, Defense Department officials confirmed Tuesday, offering scant details as to what raised suspicions about them.”

(Image of Jacob Fracker and Thomas “T.J.” Robertson from CNBC.)

Democracy

Being black in America, street protests, voting or not bothering to vote, and the 2020 election

● The murder of George Floyd is disheartening, enraging, even disorienting. It is jarring to reflect on how near the racial regime in 21st century America is to the United States of the Jim Crow era. In 2020 being a black American carries extraordinary risks, especially in encounters with the police. Meg Guliford (“We are not okay. And you shouldn’t be either.”) reflects on the burden of these racial realities.

● In the course of an interview, a political scientist who has studied how protest affects politics, says this:

There has been a debate in social science for a long time about whether there was a backlash to the waves of violent protest in 1967 and 1968. Commonly, people will say “riot,” but I am using “violent protest” and “nonviolent protest” as the two categories.

Most of the destruction we’re witnessing doesn’t fit into either category. The opportunity for looting, not protest, drew many people into the streets. They look like protesters, but they’re not:

Two groups emerged more distinctly later in the day: one ransacking shops, the other rallying on message. In Santa Monica, they were often blocks apart. Looters in the shopping district on 4th Street appeared organized, smashing windows with crowbars and skateboards and loading the stolen goods into waiting cars. Some ran or drove off as sirens approached, but mostly continued as they passed. Dozens stole shoes and gear from a Vans shop, while bike after bike was pulled out a hole in the front door of an REI store. Fires were lit, with at least two squad cars burned.

● Research suggests that violence can diminish the prospects for successful protest, and many commentators have recalled Richard Nixon’s successful law and order campaign for president, after urban unrest struck scores of cities in 1967 and 1968. Michael Cohen casts doubt on the idea that the violence of the past week must benefit Trump, because “the advantage that Biden has – and Nixon had in 1968 – is that he seems like a calming force; someone who will bring normalcy in a time of division and chaos.” (Nixon also had a secret plan to win the war, which had spiraled tragically out of control under LBJ.)

● Regarding the 2020 election, what concerns me most is not the Americans who are tired of Trump, but may stick with him because they are anxious about disorder. It is the millions of voting age Americans who are tired of Trump, but see no reason to vote. They are disengaged and cynical.

Jon Favreau, who conducted focus groups with swing voters in four American cities, observes:

More than anything else, what stayed with me after the focus groups was the overwhelming cynicism these voters have towards almost every American institution. What unites most of them isn’t just disgust and disappointment with Trump, but with a political system that only seems to work for a shrinking number of people who aren’t them. 

The research of More in Common revealed the same phenomenon among a group of “passive liberals” (15% of voting age Americans) who are “would-be Democratic voters,” but generally don’t vote: “They’re younger, more urban, more female, more black and Hispanic on average and have a clear orientation toward the Democratic Party. . . . But they feel disaffected and cynical toward the system so they are less inclined to vote as a whole.”

Systemic racism isn’t going to budge much in the next few months. What happens as young protesters (and others watching the protests) see personnel changes at the local level, but no reform at the federal level? Do they double down on their commitment to change and cast votes against the candidate who sees very fine people among white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and the political party that sustains him? Or do they grow disaffected and walk away, cursing the whole corrupt system?

Republicans thrive when faith in government falters, which is assured as long as Trump is in the White House. Dysfunction, gridlock, polarization, even corruption and incompetence, all count as victories for the GOP. They make responsive, effective governance impossible. That works for the deep-pocketed individuals and corporations that benefit most when change can’t happen.

The steep challenge for Democrats, Favreau notes, is to present a vision of progressive politics that would make a tangible difference in the lives of people against whom the system is rigged — and to convince voters that they can deliver on their vision.

(Image from a local TV broadcast of folks with cellphone cameras chronicling the vandalism and looting going on as they pass by.)

Democracy, Donald Trump

Two perspectives on white nationalism: a few disturbed individuals or a broad, violent social movement?

March 18, 2019 update:

“It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.” – David Leonard, New York Times (He offers a good review of Trump’s repeated appeals to violence. Compare this previous post from Agenda Twenty Twenty.)

March 17, 2019 updates:

Original post:

Q    Do you see, today, white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t really.  I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.  I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case.  I don’t know enough about it yet.  They’re just learning about the person and the people involved.  But it’s certainly a terrible thing.  Terrible thing.

(Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, March 15, 2019)

Judy Woodruff: Kathleen Belew, again, you have also spent time studying this. What are — what should we be learning from this by now, after all these incidents?

Kathleen Belew: You know, this is a social movement.

I think this is the most important thing to understand. This is an action carried out by the white power movement. It has decades of history in the United States and beyond. It is part of a social groundswell. Its members are deeply connected with one another. And they’re ideologically driven, as my co-panelists have said.

That means that we have to think about how to connect these disparate acts of violence together into one story, so that we can start to think about formulating a response to this as a movement. These aren’t lone wolf attacks. These aren’t individual errant madman. These are political actors who understand what they’re doing to be motivated and purposeful.

And the other thing about acts like this — and I — again, I’m a historian. I study the period from the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is the moment of sort of formation of this movement and its kind of first wave of intense radicalization and anti-state violence.

When we think about acts like the New Zealand shooting, the Oklahoma City, the massacre in Charleston, the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue, these actions are not meant to be end, in and of themselves. The violent action, the mass attack, that’s not the end point of this ideology.

These actors envision these acts as purposeful political statements meant to awaken a broader white public to the urgency of their ideology and to race war.

Judy Woodruff: And race war, literally?

Kathleen Belew: Yes.

That’s why I think it’s important to call this what it is, which is the white power movement. I think, when people say white nationalist or white supremacist, it serves to sort of soften the very radical and revolutionary nature of this activism.

White nationalist makes people sort of think that the nation implied is going to be the nation of the United States or the nation of New Zealand, when, in fact, these activists think about a white nation that transcends national boundaries. They’re pursuing an Aryan nation.

And they’re often doing this violently, with the end goal of ethnic cleansing and race war.

. . .

Judy Woodruff: Kathleen Belew, back to you.

I mean, how do you see, whether it’s the United States or Australia or other countries — but, clearly, we’re a program in the United States — what should, what can this country be doing about this now?

Kathleen Belew: So, when we think about this kind of a movement, it is a fringe movement. It is a comparatively small group of people.

But the thing is that people in fringe movements have outsized capacity for violence and outsized capacity for spreading ideas into other circles. I think that this is a movement — and the history shows this — that has really done a lot of work to disguise itself and to appear as sort of scattered, lone acts of violence.

And we see over and over again the idea of the lone wolf attacker, the madman, a few bad apples, when, in fact, these are coherent and connected actions.

So, the work of contextualizing them, putting them in conversation with one another, and understanding these events as connected is absolutely crucial, if we want to mount any kind of public response.

This movement uses a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is effectively very much like self-styled terror. The idea is that a cell or one man can work to foment violence without direct communication with leadership.

And this was implemented, of course, to stymie prosecution in court. And that’s one level of response. The larger consequence of leaderless resistance has been that our society as a whole has not been able to understand this violence.

(Why alleged New Zealand mosque killer represents a broader ‘social movement,’ PBS Newshour. Kathleen Belew is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and has written extensively about white supremacy movements. )

(Image: screen grab of New Zealand killer.)

Donald Trump

“Politicians … don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work…”

Four prominent villains appear in Trump’s closing ad – titled, “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” released just before the November 2016 election: Three are Jewish; the fourth is the 2016 Democratic nominee for president:

George Soros, favorite Trump punching bag – “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington …”

Janet Yellen, then Chair of the Federal Reserve – “… and for the global special interests.”

Hillary Clinton – “They partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”

Lloyd Blankfein, then CEO of Goldman Sachs – “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

Josh Marshall, who posted this ad on November 5, 2016, commented at the time:

“These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary lined up with high profile Jews as the only Americans other than Clinton who are apparently relevant to the story….

This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms ‘white hands’ ad or the Willie Horton ad were anti-African-American racist ads. Which is to say, really anti-Semitic…. This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas….

This is intentional and by design.”

Fast forward to today, in the aftermath of what is “likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.” Julia Ioffe raises the question, “How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?” and observes: “Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood.”

She writes of Trump’s campaign:

Trump had so much to say about the Jews that his Jewish son-in-law has had to publicly defend him as “not an anti-Semite.”

But the anti-Semites have not been convinced. A month after he had ordered his trolls to attack me, white supremacist Andrew Anglin told the HuffPost what he thought of Trump’s refusal to denounce them. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” he said. To his readers, he wrote, “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” When Trump blamed “both sides” for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: “I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever,” Anglin said. “Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I’m not disavowing him.” Many others in the alt-right praised Trump’s statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump’s first year in office.)

Image of July 2016 Trump tweet (subsequently deleted) featuring Star of David.

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans, Tribalism

“Violating norms” = deliberately undermining institutional practices that protect and preserve our democracy

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have devoted scholarly careers to the study of the first branch of the federal government – Congress, established in Article I of the Constitution – have drawn attention to increasing violations of political and governing norms; this assault has diminished legislative effectiveness and eroded public trust.  In their first book, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, they lamented the decline of Congress as an institution fit for the Founders’ vision – and (while reviewing Democratic transgressions before the party relinquished its majority in 1994) they pointed to the Republican Party as chiefly responsible for crippling the capacity of the House of Representatives to do its job.

Meanwhile, what began in the House has spread to the U.S. Senate (and throughout state governments across the country) and additional observers – political scientists, journalists, and others – have explored the erosion of democratic norms and acknowledged (often reluctantly) the key role of the Republican Party in these developments (as “both sides do it” has become abundantly less tenable for reporters and scholars alike).

The Republican Party has aggressively and relentlessly trashed norms (traditional civility, respect for ones opponents and for institutional safeguards, embrace of rules and practices that had heretofore been accepted by both sides) in order to attain political advantage over Democrats. That – and more careful discussion of these issues, including the consequences for representative government – will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will simply point to a number of areas where we can see that things have gone off track, where we can say, “That’s not normal,” or at least: That is something that was, until the recent demolition of democratic norms, just not done in our country.

In just the past week, numerous violations of democratic norms (which were respected and embraced by elected officials across the political spectrum, until Republicans jettisoned them) have been in the news. The list illustrates the nature and extent of the problem.

1. Falsehoods, concoctions, and whoppers.

Donald Trump has a prodigious capacity for lying. That’s not exactly news, but the fabrications have come in greater numbers than ever before, as the leader of the Grand Old Party has rallied his followers in advance of the midterm election.

“Donald Trump is waging one of the most inflammatory closing arguments of any modern campaign, lacing his midterm rhetoric with easily disprovable claims that are building on the fact-challenged foundation of his presidency. With just two weeks to go before the midterm election, the President is doing what he does best, seizing national attention with a flood of outrageous and improbable lies that drown out rivals, leverage his brawling personality and rip at fault lines of race, identity and patriotism.”

“With less than two weeks before the highly contested midterm elections, Donald Trump has been amplifying the Republican message on key campaign issues from immigration to trade at rallies across the country. But many of the president’s statements are ringing false, as fact checkers find that he made as many as 170 false claims during the second week of October, according to The Star Online.”

“Calling the president of the United States a liar used to be no small thing, but Trump’s record for lies, falsehoods and general untruths is genuinely impressive. Still, even the folks who fact-check Trump for a living have been surprised at just how bald-faced his recent lies have been.”

The two previous links illustrate falsehoods about healthcare policy – that Republicans will protect Medicare and guarantee insurance coverage for preexisting conditions, while Democrats will deny coverage – which are belied by Republican campaign promises and legislative activity going back eight years, executive actions taken since Trump’s inauguration, and numerous court battles (which are ongoing). These lies, as outlandish and insupportable as they are, have been embraced not just by the President, but by many Republicans on the November ballot.

Jonathan Cohn characterizes this as peak absurdity. The spectacle of Republican ads presenting topsy turvy Alice in Wonderland revisionism on this signature issue prompts incredulous laughter from former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough (in the video clip in Cohn’s post).

2. Democrats are the enemy.

Set aside the mammoth servings of untruths and whoppers, which have been catalogued by a number of observers. While this is unprecedented for a president, there is something more darkly disturbing – and damaging to our democratic institutions: demonizing the opposition party (which is embraced by half the country).

“It’s not just the whoppers or the particular outrage riffs … It’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters. Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster.” – Susan Glaser, after binge watching the first six Trump rallies of October.

Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman describe the President’s dystopian vision, which he lays at the feet of Democrats, who – he says – are embracing “mob rule” and rioting in California. They quote an evangelical Christian who served three previous Republican presidents: “Most of what Mr. Trump says these days is literally made up,” Peter Wehner, a veteran of both Bush administrations, wrote in a tweet following Trump’s Houston rally. “He’s trying to construct a world of make believe and fairy tales, of myth and fiction, of illusion and hallucination. It’s a world increasingly detached from reality. The rest of us must refuse to live within the lie.”

Invoking violence at the hands of Democrats is a theme Trump sounded earlier this summer:

I think we’re real popular, but there’s a real question as to whether people are going to vote if I’m not on the ballot. And I’m not on the ballot. A lot of people I don’t like Congress. People say I’m not voting because the President doesn’t like Congress. It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that they will overturn everything that we’ve done andthey will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence. When you look at Antifa — these are violent people. You have tremendous power. You were saying in this room, you have people who preach to almost 200 million people. Depending on which Sunday we’re talking about.

Hate and hostility directed at political opponents – and false ascriptions of violence to those who voice opposition – have become White House talking points.

3. Hostility to national unity, even in the face of domestic terrorism.

After incendiary devices were mailed to nearly a dozen prominent Democrats (including two former presidents) and Trump critics, the President veered from his rally-the-base persona briefly to read a prepared statement from his teleprompter: “In these times we have to unify. We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

On previous occasions when called upon to offer consolation or reassurance to the nation (as previous president’s have done), President Trump only grudgingly articulated a unifying message – and not very convincingly. On this occasion, his conviction didn’t last even 24 hours. He quickly returned to attacking the media:

The President is not simply indifferent to the traditional role of presidents to unite the country at times of national peril: he deliberately seeks to divide us. His chief partisan strategy in rallying his base (against all comers) is an imperative that conflicts with bringing the nation together.

4. In the aftermath of the brutal murder, beheading, and dismemberment of a journalist at the Washington Post by a foreign government – Saudi Arabia – inside their consulate in Turkey, the President adopted the Saudi talking points.

On a day when foreign policy experts worldwide were almost uniformly accusing Saudi Arabia’s government of murdering a prominent dissident, President Donald Trump spoke to the Saudi king and then offered an alternative theory: “Rogue killers” may be to blame.

Trump’s suggestion drew widespread scorn and ridicule, including charges that he could be complicit in a Saudi cover-up.

The episode brought “into clear relief President Trump’s double standard on the proof he demands on political issues.”

It also called to mind Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin, whose word he accepted over his own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats,  at Helsinki:

“My people came to me — Dan Coats came to me and some others — they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be …”

5. Republican leaders in the Senate discard generations-long practices that served to ensure a modicum of bipartisanship in selecting judges.

“Prior to the Trump administration, there was plenty of tit for tat in the escalating partisan wars over judicial nominations. But the tactics were aimed at blocking nominees. Since President Trump was sworn in, however, the GOP Senate leadership has moved aggressively to speed confirmation of new judges, in the process ignoring or tossing aside rules that have long existed to ensure that there is some consensus in picking judges. Gone for all practical purposes is the rule that prevented action on a judicial nominee who was not approved by his or her home state senator. Gone is the practice of not holding a confirmation hearing until the American Bar Association has completed its professional evaluation of the nominee. Gone is the general practice of not piling up nominees in one hearing. And now, for the first time, the Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings during a Senate recess over the objections of the minority party.” – Nina Totenberg

She counts four normative rules that Senate Republicans have discarded. A word about ‘blue slips‘ (the first rule mentioned), which have represented an institutional norm in the Senate going back generations. David Hawkings offers a good explanation of the practice – and Republicans’ shredding of the practice – in the Senate.

Essentially, there was a consensus that presidents (who were elected to represent all Americans) would have wide discretion in selecting judges, but not carte blanche; that the judiciary was more or less set apart from the political branches of government, so presidents would confer with senators when making nominations to ensure general agreement (as opposed to blunt partisanship); and that a blue slip would signify that the home state senators of a nominee were on board with the president’s selection. Conversely, without the blue slip, the nomination would not go forward.

Long story short: the most recent Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, respected this process, while the current Republican Chairman, Chuck Grassley, has discarded it. This institutional norm, which held sway for decades as presidents and Senate majorities shifted from party to party, stands in the way of the Republican goal of filling the federal bench with ideological partisans.

One morning during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Senator Leahy objected to the norms – including blue slips – being rejected, among the first words out of Senator Grassley’s mouth in response were “Judge Bork.” This exchange provides a lesson in partisan rationalization and hypocrisy. If Democrats abused the process (and institutional norms of the Senate) during the Bork nomination, then every instance of trashing institutional norms by Senate Republicans going forward can be justified by reference to Ronald Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (which was voted down when Democrats ruled the Senate). That was 31 years ago. On Senator Leahy’s watch, blue slips were still in place during the 113th Congress – not yet 4 years ago – when Democrats were in the majority.

The deliberate, ongoing repudiation of institutional norms is not tit for tat. If it were, one of many previous Republican tits would have evened the scales for the initial Democratic tat. The injury would have been repaid. (When one country expels diplomats and another country responds in kind, even if the number of expulsions on each side is not identical, an equilibrium is reached. The incident does not come into play three decades later when another diplomatic dispute arises. It is history. Fresher tits and tats come into play.) But such offenses are never repaid in the GOP ledger. Senate Republicans have retaliated against the Democrats many times over for whatever injury they believe they suffered when Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate. But – forevermore – Republicans will use the rejection as a pretext for throwing out another rule or practice that heretofore enjoyed bipartisan agreement.

In no area of political life is the assault on institutional norms more evident than in the selection of federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court. Virtually none of the items listed as consensus views four paragraphs above is still in play. Republicans are ready and willing to use scorched earth means to achieve their end – domination of the judiciary by right-wing ideologues.

I’ll skip rules 2 and 3, which are clear enough, and comment on the 4th rule Nina Totenberg lists: the Judiciary Committee is holding hearings while the Senate is in recess:

“No other Senate committee has been holding hearings during the recess. But for judicial nominees, the Senate confirmation train keeps on running even though – and likely because – Senate Democrats are defending a near record number of seats in the election and have to be out on the hustings. Indeed, just two Republican senators – Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is retiring, and Mike Crapo of Idaho – showed up at yesterday’s hearing for two appeals court nominees, a hearing that lasted just 19 minutes and featured one controversial nominee talking for several minutes about his wife, parents, children, even his cat.”

Note: there are 21 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When Totenberg asks Senator Hatch (who did not hold hearings during Senate recesses when he chaired the committee) why he was doing so now, he responded: “Well, I don’t know why. All I can say is that, you know, we have to move ahead. And if they’re not cooperating, you just go ahead and move ahead. And so far, we haven’t had a lot of cooperation.”

6. Voter suppression (the rule during the Jim Crow era, which stretched from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 into the 1960s), while it did not entirely disappear after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, was supplanted by robust voting rights. This – the right to vote – was the norm in most of the country during the past half century. Many of us who watched Congress enact civil rights legislation in the 1960s, thought that this right – especially for black Americans in the South, but for everyone, no matter what color, creed, or ethnicity – was securely in place. We were wrong.

Republicans have waged furious battles in state after state to disenfranchise voters who are generally supportive of Democrats. Richard Hasen, an expert in campaign and election law, reports on ongoing legal conflicts:

” There’s North Dakota, which changed its voter identification law after the razor-thin election of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in 2012 to make it harder for Native American voters living on reservations and lacking a residential street address to be able to vote. There’s Georgia, where Secretary of State (and current gubernatorial candidate) Brian Kemp has been holding for administrative review up to 53,000 voter registration cards for failing to have an exact match (like a missing hyphen) between the official record of a person’s name and the name appearing on the registration card. And there’s Dodge City, Kansas, a Latino-majority city with only a single polling place for 27,000 people—a polling place that was recently moved out of town and a mile from public transportation for the 2018 midterm elections.”

In Georgia, county election officials have been eyeballing signatures on mail-in ballots. If an employee in the county clerk’s office decides that the ‘match’ isn’t near enough to the signature on a voting registration card, the ballots have been thrown out. A federal judge has ruled that this process for determining eligibility is flawed and that voters – who have cast their votes and returned their ballots – should have a chance to verify that the ballots are theirs.

Yes, it has come to this. If Republicans can’t win elections if everyone votes, they have no compunction about enacting laws that restrict the number of folks allowed to cast ballots. This stratagem, while perhaps no more cynical than the rejection of other governing norms, is especially offensive. Nothing is more central to democratic government and the principle of majority rule than the right to cast a ballot. I will return to this issue in future posts.

That is James Madison’s portrait at the top of this post.

 

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

The President of the United States creates a laugh riot at a rally by celebrating a physical attack on a reporter who asked a question

During a week when the world’s attention (“This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately.”) is focused on the apparent murder, beheading, and dismemberment of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the President of the United States (who has been bending over backwards to excuse the Saudis), is revving up a crowd of his supporters with a gleeful account of Congressman Greg Gianforte who (as a candidate) assaulted a reporter for asking questions.

https://twitter.com/BCAppelbaum/status/1053110947580203009?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1053096082069164032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Democracy, Donald Trump

“Is this the most divided you have ever seen the United States?”

Jamie Dupree, a reporter whose career began during the Reagan administration, reports hearing that question frequently.

His response: “My answer is always – no, this is not the most divided that our country has been, even in my lifetime.”

He points to events of 45 to 50 years ago (1968-1973).

I was a freshman in college in 1968, a year the nation experienced two political assassinations – of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the My Lai massacre; and brutal clashes between protesters and the police at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, which paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.

The nation was engulfed in the Vietnam War abroad and protests in the streets at home. In 1970, National Guardsmen fired on protesting students at Kent State University, killing four of them. (Dupree’s post features a soundtrack of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio,” with a photo montage from that year to illustrate the social chaos the country was experiencing.)

We don’t have half a million troops fighting a war in Southeast Asia today with high casualties and a military draft. We don’t have the level of violence in the streets that we had 50 years ago. So Dupree’s conclusion that we are less divided today than we were then is not unreasonable.

Nonetheless, this conclusion leaves something out. Since the late ’60s and early ’70s, our politics has become much more tribal. We are more separate than before in many ways. And in 2016, we elected the first president in my lifetime who, in Jonathan Bernstein’s words, “doesn’t even attempt to be president of the whole nation.” Even Nixon, who kept an enemies list – but kept it private, often spoke to the country as a whole and sought to appeal to – and to represent – both independents and Democrats, not just the Republican base.

Donald Trump began his political ascent as the chief proponent of the birther theory – intending to delegitimize his predecessor in the White House. His political rallies in 2016, and the Republican National Convention that nominated him, featured frenzied chants of “Lock her up!” directed at his Democratic opponent.  So (although for many months following his election, pundits predicted, and often professed to see, a pivot – the turning point where Trump adopted the norms and mores of recent – and distant – presidents) his approach to governing has been of a piece with his campaign. It’s either all-in with Trump; or excluded and excoriated.

The 45th president has, in effect, championed factional government. (Josh Marshall makes this point.) He has done so very deliberately and for all to see.

The phrase, “factional government,” is something we are accustomed to hearing applied to unstable regimes, or where opponents control separate regions – in the Middle East, for instance. When sectarian divisions exist, and there is no shared conception of the national interest, then insular, zero-sum tactics predominate. When one faction gains the upper hand, however precariously, disfavored groups – and a common, overarching public good – suffer.

The concept of factions has a special place in American political thought. James Madison – who feared that democratic society could be ripped apart by factionalism – wrote, in Federalist 10: “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

The stubborn refusal of our president to embrace America whole – all of our citizens; our country’s abiding national interest; what we share in common, not what divides us – sets this era apart from the divisive years that Dupree recalls.

(Post revised July 13, 2018 to introduce Josh Marshall’s reference to factional government.)

(Photo from video montage – CSN&Y’s “Ohio.”)