Politics & Stuff

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Trump's new rallies prove that a con man doesn't have to be smart if his victims are stupid enough.

blast from the past to drive this point home:

 

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The soft underbelly of British politics

A by-election in northern England highlights the corrosive atrophying of the UK body politic, Paul Mason writes.

https://socialeurope.eu/the-soft-underbelly-of-british-politics

 

Last week’s by-election in Batley & Spen, an old Yorkshire manufacturing town with a Labour tradition and a large postwar south-Asian Muslim population, has opened up a new chapter in post-Brexit politics.

With Labour trailing badly behind a Conservative government, seemingly untouchable despite its lies and corruption, the script seemed clear. The party would lose in a straight fight with the Tories, Keir Starmer would face a challenge to his leadership of Labour and the disintegration of British social democracy would accelerate.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. Labour won—just—by 323 votes. Starmer emerged rejuvenated and all talk of a leadership challenge evaporated. And the government remains mired in personal and financial scandals.

But the intervention of a populist candidate, George Galloway—once a Scottish Labour MP and now the main British voice on the Russian government propaganda channel RT—appealing primarily to the Muslim vote, disrupted the whole process. Indeed it cast a shadow over the future of British democracy, further complicating the post-Brexit upheaval.

‘Anti-woke’ campaigner

Galloway arrived in Batley & Spen fresh from a prior intervention in the elections to the devolved Scottish parliament in May. He had stood as an opponent of independence for Scotland, waving the Union flag and attacking the ruling Scottish National Party—which supports independence and an associated reapplication to the European Union—advising his supporters elsewhere in Scotland to cast tactical votes for the Conservatives. The SNP won and he received a derisory 5,521 in the South Scotland constituency—targeted for the strength of its support for UK unionism—or just 1.5 per cent of the vote.

Galloway had been sacked by the right-leaning, London-based radio station TalkRadio in 2019 after making anti-Semitic remarks about Tottenham Hotspur football club, a team strongly associated with north London’s Jewish community. Galloway pledged that there would be ‘No #Israël flags’ on the Champions League cup (the diaeresis over the ‘e’ apparently signalling his refusal to acknowledge the country’s English title).

In the past Galloway had painted himself as a left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’, famously leading the Respect Party—which he had joined after his expulsion from the Labour Party—to victory over Labour in a largely Asian seat in Bradford in 2012. In his latest apparition, however, Galloway has become an ‘anti-woke’ campaigner, railing against transgender rights, lesbian and gay education in schools, and ‘the endless obsession with race’. So when Labour was forced to call a by-election in Batley, because the sitting MP had become the region’s mayor, Galloway’s anti-woke machine descended eagerly on the town—where he had a residual network from the days of Respect.

Tensions already high

Thus began one of the dirtiest campaigns in modern British politics. Tensions were already high after a teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding, having mistakenly shown images of the prophet Mohammed to pupils. The area’s previous MP, Jo Cox, was murdered in 2016 by a far-right terrorist, and the far right had an established local presence.

Galloway’s modus operandi is to ‘canvass’—knock on doors—with a large group of followers, which has been perceived by his opponents as intimidating. He made inflammatory speeches, telling an outdoor meeting: ‘I don’t want my children taught about sex; I don’t want them taught how to masturbate; I don’t want them taught about anal sex … this liberal identity politics is anathema to me.’

But as with other right-wing populist challengers, from Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi in India, it was through WhatsApp that his supporters are alleged to have stoked the most tension. Labour activists reported stories circulating among Galloway’s followers claiming (correctly) that Labour’s candidate—Kim Leadbeater, sister of Cox—was a lesbian and lived with another woman. They also claimed Starmer was a ‘Zionist’, being (this part also correct) married to a Jewish woman and his children being raised in the faith.

Soon Labour-supporting Muslim women, in an anonymous letter circulated to the press, were claiming they faced ‘harassment and intimidation, both online and in the streets’. Galloway’s supporters were alleged to have torn down rival posters and verbally harassed Labour councillors who tried to re-erect their own.

When the Jewish Chronicle conducted interviews with pro-Galloway Muslim voters, it recorded a disturbing mixture of prejudice and conspiracy theory—such as that Leadbeater wanted gay sex taught in schools and had ‘spoken against Palestine’, whereas Jo had been covertly killed by the British state because of her support for the cause.

Video reverberated

Days before the vote, tensions escalated. Leadbeater was harassed on the street by a Muslim anti-gay activist. Video showed that, as she retreated, her (male) opponents shouted: ‘You are the colour of blood.’ Though Galloway was present at a distance, claimed not to know the activist who led the harassment, and condemned it, the video reverberated through the community.

Then one of Galloway’s organisers, Shammy Cheema, was outed as a Holocaust denier by the Daily Mail, triggering widespread concern among local mosque leaders who had made genuine efforts at intercultural dialogue (Cheema was immediately axed from Galloway’s team). And in the final weekend of campaigning, there were at least three incidents where young men purporting to support Galloway harassed and threw eggs at Labour campaigners and shouted homophobic abuse. In one incident, a Labour supporter was allegedly kicked in the head.

Labour organisers told me that, after this, Galloway’s support tangibly deflated. Yet when the votes were counted he had scored 21.9 per cent—8,264 votes—the majority assumed to be from former Labour supporters in the Asian community.

Though the public, and to an extent the media, regarded the Galloway campaign as a circus, his success has shocked the political establishment. Since the collapse of the United Kingdom Independence Party once led by Nigel Farage and the self-immolation of his Brexit Party, there has been no serious right-wing populist leader in the UK. Instead, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have soaked up the votes of the populist right.

But here is a man, out of nowhere, capable of garnering 21 per cent with a socially conservative message aimed at Muslim voters while, because of his strong support for Brexit, attracting some white working-class voters previously attached to UKIP. 

Galloway has not only used anti-Semitic language in the past and attracted a Holocaust denier into his campaign. He dismisses the 2013 chemical attack on eastern Ghouta by the Syrian regime as a hoax and likewise presents the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang by the Chinese dictatorship as an imperialist fiction.

Labour’s leadership

Much of the responsibility for handing Galloway this political opportunity has to be assumed by the Labour leadership. It permitted an unnecessary election. And though its formal position was critical of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, no Labour frontbencher attended the two massive, pro-Palestinian demonstrations stemming from it in London. Attendance was left to the former leader, Jeremy Corbyn—suspended from membership of the parliamentary group—and his backbench allies.

After a report on Islamophobia inside the party was delivered to Labour’s headquarters last December, campaigners claim little action was taken. And HQ has suspended numerous branches and officials which challenged Corbyn’s suspension. It was thus easy for Galloway to portray Labour as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians and to mobilise Muslim voters on that issue.

According to those charged with leading the Labour fightback, however, the pervasive trope within the online campaigns backing Galloway was social conservatism—opposition to sex education, LGBT+ rights and ‘transmania’. Responding to the flurry of violent intimidation, the Muslim women’s group wrote ‘to the Muslim men involved’, saying ‘you do not represent the Islam we practice, you may be the loudest voices but you are not the majority’.

By mobilising women, and by getting out the vote using the formidable machine built during the five years of Corbynism, Labour managed to win, despite the desertion of at least a quarter of its traditional vote to Galloway. An unnamed Labour official told the Times that in six weeks the party had basically built a new electoral coalition: ‘Lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine, and won back a lot of 2019 Tory voters.’

Scant comfort

If correct, this assessment can be of scant comfort to anyone concerned about the state of British democracy. Out of nowhere, Galloway was able to descend on an area with a history of division and far-right violence, stoke polarisation and garner 21 per cent of the vote. He used UK electoral law, which requires the BBC and others to give candidates equal prominence, to appear on UK-wide television. He has pledged to stand in every upcoming by-election where there are significant Muslim votes—and his current vehicle, the Workers Party GB, may decide to stand more widely in the 2024 general election.

Not only did Labour find itself ill-equipped to deal with this new, amorphous, right-wing but ‘anti-imperialist’ populism; it found its local support networks very weak in the face of it. Meanwhile both the London-based media and the local police struggled to formulate a response, as a flurry of incidents were captured mainly by alternative media, with law enforcement struggling to catch up.

Galloway makes no secret—and is indeed proud—of the support he gets from RT (formerly Russia Today) on which he appears. Yet the Conservative government has refused to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, before and after which there were multiple meetings between officials of one of the Leave campaigns and high-ranking Russian officials. Johnson suppressed an official intelligence report on Russia’s involvement and there remains no demonstrable surveillance of its interference in UK democracy.

In this context, Galloway has just provided proof of concept for one of the most effective campaigns to degrade and destabilise UK democracy in living memory. Neither his anti-Semitic language in the past nor the open support of the Russian state broadcaster—nor the clear evidence that his tension-inducing strategy had tainted his supporters—deterred 8,000 people from backing him.

If replicated elsewhere in Britain, bringing racial and religious tension to communities situated on its cultural faultlines, Galloway’s intervention could have a negative impact on the quality of democracy across the whole UK.

This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal

 

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The formula for a social Europe

https://www.wsi.de/de/faust-detail.htm?sync_id=HBS-008050

Free Download

https://www.wsi.de/fpdf/HBS-008050/p_wsi_pb_57_2021.pdf

The strengthening of the social dimension of the EU is back on the agenda of European politics. The European Pillar of Social Rights, the revision of the Posted Workers Directive and the initiative for a European minimum wage are interpreted by some as a turning point. However, the road to a more social Europe is still very long. Against that background, this paper formulates social Europe thus: social minimum standards plus a reconfiguration of the internal market and economic and monetary union in a manner compatible with the pillars of the European social model.

 

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What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?

Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of politics in facing down the threat to the planet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/ezra-klein-climate-crisis.html

Of late, I’ve been obsessing over a single question: What if political systems, in the United States and internationally, fail to curb climate change?

It can seem an impolite question, even as it’s the path we’re on. President Biden’s climate agenda is both ambitious and, on its own, insufficient. Its political prospects are mixed at best. The international picture is little better. Only a few countries are on track to meet the goals laid out in the Paris agreement, and none of the major emitters are among them.

That is not to say there is no reason for optimism or hope. Clean-energy and battery technologies are outpacing even the brightest projections from a few years ago. Activist movements worldwide are gathering strength and flexing newly won power. A rising generation understands the urgency of the moment, even if their elders do not. The trends are, broadly, going in the right direction. But they need to move faster.

And so we convened this panel of climate experts with different backgrounds — technological, literary, political, academic — to try to reconcile the reality of our political progress with the scale of the emergency. Ezra Klein

 

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The Participants

Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.

Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of “The Ministry for the Future.”

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Are our political systems even capable?

Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden’s infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration’s big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn’t clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?

Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That’s more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn’t entirely the Biden administration’s fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there’s still a lot of room to improve.

Saul Griffith: It’s not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we’ll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don’t know all the answers of where we’re going.

Now you see, basically daily, the news stories of automobile companies bringing forward the date of the last time they’re going to produce the internal-combustion-engine car. It’s gone from 2050 for most companies last year to 2030, and some are talking 2025. We might just be at the very beginning of the reinforcing cycle of ambition begetting more commitment, which begets more ambition. We are absolutely not even remotely on track yet. But this, I think, is what it feels like as you start to ramp up.

Gunn-Wright: I mean, there’s definitely momentum, but there’s still a lot of desire to do this work in ways that look and feel familiar and keep power relationships the same as they have been for a very long time. There is a reason that we are talking about moving climate policy through budget reconciliation — not straight-out legislation. It’s because certain people don’t want to get rid of the filibuster. With the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration was comfortable using deficit spending because it was an acute crisis. That is not the case for the infrastructure package. They don’t actually consider climate to be that type of crisis. And there is still a real desire to have this transformation happen in a way that is painless, and painless for particular people, and to have the same type of people bear the pain that often bear the pain of the system — largely Black, Latino, poor communities.

Klein: Sheila, from your perspective, as someone who thinks about how societies reason and how ideas get legitimacy, do you think we have a process for generating sustainable climate policy nationally or internationally, really at all? Are we looking at a political challenge? Or are we dealing with some deeper absence than that?

Sheila Jasanoff: That’s a huge question. When one hears what Rhiana just had to say about making do with the tools that are already around, one can’t avoid thinking about moving deck chairs on the Titanic. The challenge for politics, I think, is what we in the social sciences call reframing. That is: Are we looking at the problem in the right way at all? And if you were to begin with climate change that way, you’d have to start with the fact that the per capita contribution of greenhouse-gas emissions is not the same across the globe; it’s orders of magnitude different in some parts of the world than others. So if there are people today who contribute next to nothing, shouldn’t we aim to reproduce their lifestyles at scale? Or should we say that those are the lifestyles of the impoverished and that they have to live like people in more developed countries do, and then turn to technology to fix the consequences? There’s something a little absurd in that idea — that after some portion of us poisoned the planet through a set of consumption practices, now we must worry that another six billion people will want to make that same transition by adopting the lifestyle changes that produced the problem in the first place.

Griffith: The historical contributors to the carbon in the atmosphere — the United States and Western Europe — are not going to produce a majority of future emissions. One of the biggest determinants of our climate outcomes is how elegantly India, China and Africa do this transition. That’s four billion people. The U.S. is 300 million people. America has a big role in helping those countries leapfrog some of the mistakes we have made in developing, particularly India and Africa. China is doing a pretty good job by itself.

In the United States, everyone is optimistic because the Ford F-Series trucks, one of the most produced vehicles ever in human history — nearly 40 million of them so far — are now going electric. That’s great news for those people who wish to continue the F-150 lifestyle. But in the background, more is happening. Some 25 million of the 74 million two-wheeled scooters that sold last year were electric. That is far more relevant to Africa, to Asia, because that is the reality of the transportation systems there.

Klein: Optimists say that because of advances in technology, maybe even if the politics fails here, there’s a technological path where we avert the worst consequences of climate change just because innovation is beginning to accelerate so rapidly. Do you think there’s some possibility of that?

Griffith: I think it’s very unlikely that you get there with technology alone. Our politics co-evolved with a century of fossil fuels, and so a huge portion of our regulations still favor the incumbent, which is fossil fuels. I have a lot of optimism that by around 2024 the cost of solar, electric vehicles, batteries, wind and heat pumps convincingly give us the opportunity to save money on everything, basically everywhere. In Australia, where I’m calling in from, one kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar costs about a third of what a kilowatt-hour of grid-delivered electricity does in the U.S. We can make everyone’s energy future cheaper, but politics has to work with technology, which has to work with finance.

‘There is still a real desire to have this transformation happen in a way that is painless, and painless for particular people.’

Klein: Stan, imagining outside the current context is your specialty as a science-fiction novelist, so I’m wondering what you think the weaknesses of our current systems are.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, we are stuck in an international system of nation-states, and we don’t have time to invent and institute any kind of alternative world governance, so we have to use what we’ve got. But we also have the Paris agreement, and climate equity was written into it so that developed rich nations were tasked with paying more and doing more and helping the historically disadvantaged and even colonized nations. Executing all that is, of course, a different story.

Jasanoff: We recently had a president of the United States who simply decided overnight to bow out of the Paris agreement.

Robinson: It is a fragile system. It could become like the League of Nations. In the future, to the extent that there will be historians, they may look back and say it was a good idea that failed. People may look back to our time and say, Here was a crux, and then they blew it. This is the power of the basic science-fictional exercise of looking at our own time as if from the future, thus judging ourselves as actors in creating history. From that imaginary perspective, it can sometimes become blazingly obvious what we should do now. Parochial concerns over quarterly returns or the selfish privileges of currently existing wealthy people fade to insignificance when you take the long view and see us teetering on the edge of causing a mass-extinction event that would hammer all future living creatures.

What happens when the system is under stress?

Klein: Covid functioned, in some ways, as a test run for how our political systems would handle the disruptions of climate change. It was a crisis that experts had warned about for years and years. And we didn’t really prepare at all. And then it hit. And so you’d imagine that the last year has led to a tremendous sharpening of our catastrophic imagination, that the idea that the perils we are told will come are not abstract, that they really do come and they really transform our lives. On the other hand, you can read it the opposite way: It’s a potentially scary lesson in how much external destruction the rich countries, if they can protect themselves, will get used to. How has the pandemic changed your model of how societies will envision and then respond to true catastrophe?

Jasanoff: I have spent 16 months thinking about almost nothing other than what you’re talking about. There was an interesting moment in France when the health minister was being questioned about why the initial modeling of the spread of the disease in France failed. And she said in public testimony that one point their modelers hadn’t reckoned on was that there were direct flights from Wuhan to Paris. This was not in their model. Just pause for a second to consider that: In modeling the spread of the disease, the advisers to the health minister of France didn’t know that there were direct flights from Wuhan to Paris. So, these are moments that make one reflect on the hubris of so-called knowledge. What is it that people are seeing, and what is it that they’re not seeing when contemplating the next catastrophe? And why? Those are, I think, the questions that we should be confronting as well.

Gunn-Wright: I think it’s important to note that in the United States, that resistance to masks and social distancing was not equally racially distributed or equally distributed by class or income. And I do think it’s important when we have takeaways like that to actually note and wonder what that means and what drove that, because it wasn’t happening across the board.

Griffith: I worry that America might learn the wrong lesson from Covid. There’s a lot of optimism there now, because magically the vaccines arrived. I think that’s a fairly natural response. But a similar level of success with climate change — let’s say, staying under two degrees of warming — won’t be easy. The existing machines in the world that burn fossil fuels — the coal plants, natural-gas plants, cars, furnaces and boilers in people’s basements — if they’re allowed to live out their natural life spans, they will emit enough carbon dioxide to take us very close to two degrees. We need very close to perfect execution: When we retire anything that emits carbon dioxide, we must replace it with the thing that won’t emit carbon dioxide.

And that will only get us under two degrees if we have a World War II “arsenal of democracy”-style intervention in the economy. Back then, American manufacturing was ramped up to make the materials to win the war: bullets, tanks, airplanes, Liberty ships. The bullets to win this war are batteries, electric vehicles, offshore wind platforms, wind turbines, solar, rooftop solar and heat pumps. All those industries are about 10 times below the production rates we need to hit this target. No better time to do that than coming out of the pandemic, when unemployment is high and we need to put people back to work.

‘Living in fossil fuels was to live in a smaller world, cocooned in crap. Decarbonization can actually make us more alive.’

 

Jasanoff: The research team I’ve been leading has looked into this, and it turns out that military victor countries tend to use war metaphors for confronting climate change and not military nonparticipants. So the war metaphor was reportedly not used in Sweden at all. That’s quite interesting. It was occasionally used by Angela Merkel, but only to get citizens to remember what a period of shared suffering had been like. So we’ve been talking about imagination. And there’s a serious question: Who is doing this imagining of our collective future?

In the United States, for instance, we favor individual and technological solutions for social problems. In Cambridge, Mass., where I live, we have reconfigured practically every major road in town to make it very difficult for cars and very easy for bikes. But why cars and bikes if the problem is mobility for all? I’m a senior. I’m not going to go riding around Cambridge, doing my shopping at Whole Foods, then bringing it back on a bicycle. So I’m supposed to use Uber — I mean, is that the solution?

Griffith: I am all in favor of public transit, but it is not the only answer. The per-passenger-mile energy consumption of these two-wheeled scooters and mo-peds and electric bicycles, this is far lower than the per-passenger-mile energy cost of public-transit systems. We’re seeing experiments run all over the world in what new mobility options can look like.

I think the great Zoom experiment is going to be more significant than public transport. A huge number of people have realized that an enormous amount of the traveling we do is tedious, expensive and time-consuming and can be eliminated. So there’s a piece of our imagination that was released by the experience of the pandemic. Honestly, I think Stan is on the vanguard. In your novel “The Ministry for the Future,” I particularly loved how you imagined people in the future using dirigibles and slow air transport as the solution to noisy, fast jets.

Robinson: We’re already seeing companies developing airships for short hops between cities, which would greatly reduce the carbon burn for this form of travel without adding too much to the trip time. And speed itself is not of the essence when you can both work and enjoy yourself during these transits.

Because we absolutely have to decarbonize civilization as fast as we can, if that involves slowing down supply chains — meaning profits — and slowing down the economy generally, and slowing down our own personal travel around this planet, so that the planet grows bigger for those of us who do travel, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to understand that living in fossil fuels was to live in a smaller world, cocooned in crap. Decarbonization can actually make us more alive.

 

And what if politics does fail?

Klein: Stan, in “The Ministry for the Future,” you imagine the aftermath of a heat wave in India that leads to 20 million deaths. The country begins blasting particulates into the air for a period of time in a desperate effort to bring the temperature down. Violent movements arise that put pressure on political systems by causing property damage and assassinating people who are seen as responsible for climate change. Now, your book is a work of fiction, but of course some people believe that you need more extrapolitical action to prevent the worst from happening. The Swedish scholar Andreas Malm just published a book called “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” arguing for direct property damage as a way to impose pressure on the system and to make the costs of the status quo more visible. Stan, what do you think will happen if politics fails?

Robinson: You can never say politics has failed. It never goes away. I read Zachary Carter’s book about Keynes, “The Price of Peace.” After World War II, everyone realized that a new world had to be set up. They got Bretton Woods. And in the Depression, there was the New Deal. At the time, everybody supported the idea that the rich should pay more in taxes. In 1944, the top marginal rate — above $200,000, which is about $3 million now — was 94 percent. And this rate remained above 90 percent through Eisenhower and a Republican Congress, because after World War II people felt that excessive wealth was morally wrong. I think that should come back if we want a sustainable future.

I feel we’ve got momentum in 2021 that is simply stupendous compared with 2019. It’s like 1978 compared with 1982. It’s one of these rapid cultural transitions that happens from time to time, and I don’t see why there would be any turning back if the momentum gathers even a little bit more.

Klein: The idea about India putting sulfates in the air to cool off the planet isn’t pure science fiction. It is actually pretty frequently invoked as an example of the sort of geoengineering that we may need to do to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change. Stan, you imagine a number of these in your book, including pumping out water from beneath glaciers — can you talk more about that?

Robinson: I mean, sea-level rise is going to happen. We’ve already baked in a certain amount of sea-level rise, and it will be devastating to the coastlines. I was intrigued by this suggestion of a glaciologist — that if we just suck the water out from underneath the big glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, we might go back to an ordinary level of sea-level rise, or at least a much lesser one. And this pumping out of meltwater from underneath glaciers is a known technology that in fact uses similar methods to the oil industry, and might even be something the oil industry could be set to doing, given that it is going to be an ex-industry because of the need to keep oil in the ground.

Klein: As somebody thinks about the science-fiction scenarios for the future, do you think there’s a chance that we don’t act fast enough but do discover and implement subsequent interventions that spare us the worst of the consequences?

Robinson: Throwing dust up into the atmosphere would be, I think, an emergency gesture on a temporary basis, in effect imitating a volcanic eruption and hoping that five years of slightly lower temperatures would save us from brutal heat waves. And if one nation suffers a catastrophic heat-death event and then decides to go this route, no other nation will have any legal or moral standing to object to it. Nor is it clear that it would be bad for civilization or the biosphere. Arguments about moral hazard become irrelevant in such an emergency, and worries about secondary effects are speculative and not supported by what has actually happened after real volcanic explosions.

Klein: Rhiana, geoengineering hasn’t traditionally been part of the Green New Deal. Should it be?

Gunn-Wright: Not in my opinion. And I say this based on the opinions of frontline activists. I don’t live near places where geoengineering would happen. But people who do are very afraid of the ecological consequences. Given our general orientation toward a desire for a silver bullet that doesn’t require much change in how power is distributed, I fear that a lot of money will go there and not toward other things that we know would help but are more difficult to do. So, no, I don’t think it’s right for the Green New Deal.

Jasanoff: I wanted to raise the question of responsibility, which hasn’t come up. I think people around the world see very clearly that we are not equally responsible for emissions. The word “Anthropocene” imagines that there’s a single anthropos and that the ages of humanity are measured according to its collective actions. And I think people’s lived experience is not of a singular humanity but of one that’s very much stratified and unequal. So, will people mobilize on a sufficient scale to make the hard choices? For some people, it’s not a hard choice. They’re already living at a subsistence level. So what are you going to tell them to do?

In a way, these geoengineering ideas are the solutions of the supersaturated mind. Having conceptualized the planet as one, having conceptualized humanity as a unitary anthropos, having conceptualized climate change as a global phenomenon, now all it can think of is a global technological solution.

Klein: But for a lot of people, it is a hard choice, including people who were looking forward to choices that they may now not have. And so let me end on this question: Does the future really have to be one of less? Or can climate change be solved within a context of abundance?

Griffith: I am optimistic that materially all of our lives can improve. It doesn’t mean we have a higher volume of things in our life. We will have more things that last longer and far, far fewer disposable things. But that doesn’t mean you have an empty house and a boring life. It probably means you have beautiful objects that you have a lot better relationship with. We have concepts like the Polynesian mana, in which the value of the object comes from its age and its history, not because of its shininess and newness. I am optimistic that we can bring billions of people up the quality-of-life ladder, but we don’t get there with our existing notions of property, ownership, debt and land use.

Gunn-Wright: I have never figured out a way, particularly as a Black woman, to tell people who have been oppressed and who have seen, you know, different things held up as luxuries or standards that will come to them eventually, that that is not the version of life that they should or can seek. That they have borne all sorts of ills to not get the thing that they thought might be their reward. I think that is incredibly difficult. And I don’t know how one delivers that message or even, as a person, takes that in.

Jasanoff: And no matter what happens, there will be a class of people, all over the planet, who will have the money, the political connections, the insurance to move their houses inland or up the hill or whatever. And who knows, maybe the kind of thinking that we had in the United States back in the 1970s, about the population explosion and the need to control the global population, could make a return. You know, who cares if there is a winnowing out of global humanity if Noah’s ark can be made available for the rich?

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This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews.

Illustrations by Francesco Muzzi.

 

 

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THE ETHICIST

Should I Hang Out With Someone Whose Political Views I Hate?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether it’s hypocritical for a liberal to socialize with an increasingly extreme conservative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/conservative-friends.html

 

I am a liberal in a blue city in a red state. One of my friends is married to a man who has become increasingly conservative over the past year (an “anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-abortion, Democrats are all idiots and socialists are taking over the country” mind-set), and his posts on social media are becoming more and more extreme. We occasionally socialize as couples. When we are together, I am friendly with him, and we avoid overt political talk, but as his social media becomes more and more extreme, I feel conflicted about continuing to accept invitations to socialize with them. Is it hypocritical of me to socialize with them when I find his personal political views so abhorrent? Name Withheld.

When I was 15 and in Britain for school, I came to know a neighbor of my English grandmother’s. Then in his 60s, he was a right-wing member of Parliament whose views on the major issues of the day were utterly remote from mine. All the same, we enjoyed spending time together — when he took me trout fishing, it always involved more talk than trout — and though politics was far from the only thing we discussed, it wasn’t a topic we avoided. Once, when he drove me to visit the college he had attended (and that I would too, just as he hoped), I spent two full hours trying to persuade him to support an upcoming resolution to maintain the abolition of capital punishment for murder. We must have made an odd pair — a reactionary M.P. with the strapping build of the heavyweight boxing champion he was as an undergraduate; a willowy brown teenager who kept up with what was then known as The Peking Review. Still, as we whizzed past the hedgerows and incurious sheep of the Cotswolds, we carried on a vigorous debate over an issue we both cared a great deal about.

I do understand why people prefer to limit their socializing to people who share their view of the world and to steer clear of the maddeningly misguided. In recent years, certainly, America has reshaped itself in ways that accommodate the tendency. With the rise of “assortative mating,” bankers — to paint in broad strokes — no longer marry secretaries; they marry other bankers. Doctors no longer marry nurses; they marry other doctors. And so on, up and down the lines of income and class. (Although social scientists have argued that this trend has deepened economic inequality, it also reflects substantial and welcome gains in gender equality in the workplace.) More to the point, the United States has become politically sorted: Increasingly, your neighborhood will be predominantly red or blue, not mixed. If racial segregation has diminished somewhat over the past generation, partisan segregation has risen.

And so have partisan identities. Your friend’s husband, that is, has the political views of his tribe. These views, as with any tribal shibboleths, will often matter to him because they are signs of his membership. Maybe a few of his views were arrived at by careful reflection, but he probably couldn’t argue effectively for most of his opinions before an open-minded audience. The trouble is that the same is almost certainly true of you. You have the liberal tribal beliefs and commitments. And — as a substantial body of social-science research suggests — you probably did not acquire them by deep and thoughtful analysis, because you are like most of us. Identity precedes ideology: Who you are determines what you believe.

I’m happy to stipulate that your views are enlightened and his benighted. Still, it’s possible that you and this fellow are in one respect allied — that you are both committed, as citizens, to participating together in the governance of this battered republic of ours. Despite the forces that would keep us socially and even geographically isolated from one another, you each have a reason to try to understand the other tribe; to figure out what its members believe and (to the extent that there are arguments involved) why they believe it. Democracy falters not when we disagree about things but when we lose interest in trying to make sense of the other person’s point of view and in trying to persuade that person of the merits of our own.

Identity precedes ideology: Who you are determines what you believe.

If you took no pleasure in hanging out with this person, you wouldn’t be asking me whether you can go on doing so. And yet you write as if there are only two options here — tolerating his views in silence or cutting him off. Here’s a third option: Stick with this fellow but speak up for your politics. Encourage him to do the same. When we stop talking even to people we know and like because of political disagreements, we’ve abandoned the deliberative-democratic project of governing the republic together.

Not that we should delude ourselves about our prospects for shifting the other person’s shibboleths. At the end of that car trip, my burly interlocutor got out of the car, stretched his legs and told me, almost ruefully: “You may have won all the arguments today. I’m still voting against the resolution.” It passed anyway. And there were many other topics to discuss, from village gossip to high politics, the next time we went fishing.

[NikkiCFC 7,943]

13 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Should I Hang Out With Someone Whose Political Views I Hate?

Absolutely not. That would be hell!

[Vesper 28,795]

20 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Absolutely not. That would be hell!

I have people I interact with across a huge spectrum politically, BUT I draw the line at open neo-nazis, (although I have been in social settings with some, especially Nordfront members here in Sweden, and the conversations we had were, shall we say, interesting, lol, and thank fuck did not escalate to violence), and also numpty, brainwashed fools who are incapable of any original thought and just spew out talking points. I detest braindead parrots, no matter what their politics are.

[Vesper 28,795]

Cop beats and tasers a disabled man. Absolutely sickening.

 

[Vesper 28,795]

Boris Johnson yet again avoids paying the price for his cavalier attitude

Analysis: despite his exoneration, Mustique freebie is just the latest example of a lifelong disdain for rules

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/08/boris-johnson-yet-again-avoids-paying-price-cavalier-attitude-mustique-freebie-exoneration

 

Boris Johnson has been formally exonerated for his freebie holiday on the island of Mustique at the expense of a Tory donor. But the convoluted case is just the latest evidence of the prime minister’s apparently cavalier attitude to money and where – or whom – it comes from.

He appears to give little thought to how his lifestyle will be funded – “friends” have told journalists of his financial struggles – after a costly divorce from his second wife, Marina Wheeler, and without the £250,000 a year he once earned from writing Daily Telegraph columns.

The prime minister thought the matter of accepting £15,000-worth of accommodation from the Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross almost too trivial to mention, insisting he had only declared it voluntarily.

It fits a pattern of behaviour that saw a Conservative peer, Lord Brownlow, initially meeting the costs of the lavish refurbishment of the Downing Street flat by the designer Lulu Lytle, before questions were raised about the arrangement and Johnson declared that he was meeting the costs himself.

Johnson’s new independent adviser on ministers’ interests, Christopher Geidt, called the prime minister’s approach to that project “unwise”. The prime minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings claimed the initial plan for paying for the refurbishment had been “possibly illegal”.

Even in the last parliament, the committee for standards said Johnson had “an over-casual attitude to obeying the rules” – uncannily echoing the sentiment of his Eton housemaster, who wrote to the prime minister’s father in 1982: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”

Almost 40 years later Johnson still appears, at best, unconcerned about following the rules – or, now that he is a public figure, about the importance of appearing to act with propriety.

His former close friend Jennifer Arcuri – who claims to have had a romantic relationship with him – received taxpayer-backed support for her tech business and accompanied the then mayor of London on a trade mission. Johnson has insisted there was “no interest to declare”.

He awarded a peerage to the Conservative donor Peter Cruddas despite the House of Lords watchdog having suggested Cruddas – who had previously been implicated in a cash-for-access scandal, something he has consistently denied – should not be eligible. Cruddas gave the Tory party £500,000 several days after receiving the peerage.

Johnson declined to sack Matt Hancock last month despite the health secretary having apparently failed to declare a personal relationship with a non-executive director at his own department – not to mention being snapped busting lockdown rules.

It followed the prime minister’s defence of Priti Patel in the face of a finding from his previous ethics adviser, Sir Alex Allan, that her conduct “amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying”. Allan subsequently resigned.

Johnson also defended Robert Jenrick after he was accused of skewing a planning decision in favour of a Tory donor; and Gavin Williamson, who was sacked by Theresa May for leaking security secrets – something he staunchly denies – but restored to a place in the cabinet after helping Johnson to whip MPs into line during his 2019 leadership race.

Johnson’s supporters insist there has been no wrongdoing, pointing to the various official reports, including on the Mustique break, that have formally cleared him of rule-breaking. They put the financial chaos down to mere scattiness, and the defence of his cabinet colleagues to loyalty.

Received wisdom at Westminster says Johnson’s ambiguous relationship with the rules the little people follow is priced-in politically. Certainly, his colourful private life was no secret when he swept to a landslide majority in 2019.

But opposition parties are beginning to see a glimmer of hope that the sheer accretion of stories such as these will eventually help them to topple the caricature of the prime minister as a harmlessly lovable rogue.

Edited July 8, 2021 by Vesper

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NHS England waiting list reaches record high for second straight month

Experts warn 5.3m backlog could exacerbate burnout with staff facing ‘unprecedented levels of exhaustion’

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/08/nhs-england-waiting-list-reaches-record-high-second-straight-month

 

The number of patients waiting for NHS treatment in England broke records for the second month in a row to reach 5.3 million, official figures show, prompting warnings the huge care backlog could exacerbate health service staff burnout.

It means the waiting list has grown by 606,501 over the last three months as patients have started using the NHS again, renewing fears it will hit 7 million before the end of the year.

The figures showed that two-thirds (67%) of patients received treatments within 18 weeks in May, far below the standard the NHS sets itself of treating 92% within this timeframe.

Healthcare leaders said the figures showed there was an “immense task ahead” for healthcare workers, who were “valiantly firefighting on multiple fronts” as they faced “unprecedented levels of exhaustion and stress”.

The NHS said it was investing an additional £1bn in extra operations and treatments to restore services and cut backlogs. Patients waiting longer than 18 weeks for elective care dropped by more than 80,000 compared with April. Close to 337,000 patients are waiting more than a year though this that figure has fallen by 50,000 for the second month in a row.

Average wait times have been falling since February, with June the second lowest since before the pandemic started, at 10.8 weeks. However, experts predicted that the situation could deteriorate over the summer due to the unfolding third wave of Covid.

Nigel Edwards, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said the risk of 100,000 new Covid cases a day within the next few weeks would result in “inevitable and significant demand for Covid-19 hospital beds”, which would slow efforts to catch up on waiting lists.

More than 2.1 million people attended A&E last month, making it the busiest ever June. Attendance figures collapsed during the early months of the pandemic, but they have been steadily returning to normal levels.

The figures came as the NHS Confederation said that “unsustainable numbers of people are now visiting A&E, seeing their GPs and calling ambulances. Overwhelming demand is putting severe and unprecedented strain on the urgent care systems.”

“A significant Covid surge this summer will place even more strain on an urgent care system struggling to cope, and this will have a direct and immediate impact on the care the NHS can provide to patients,” said Matthew Taylor, the confederation’s chief executive.

Nearly one in four people attending major A&Es waited more than four hours to be seen. Data on cancer patients also showed long waits after initial referrals, with just three-quarters of patients seen within two weeks of an urgent GP referral, falling far below the 85% target, with the same proportion seen after an NHS cancer screening against a 90% target.

In particular, the data showed that waiting times for a number of different treatments were especially long in the first half of 2020 as the health service grappled with the effects of the pandemic.

Analysis by the Macmillan cancer charity suggested the number of people who had seen a specialist for suspected cancer since the start of the pandemic was almost 300,000 lower than expected, while there were 35,000 missing patients starting treatment.

The charity estimated that the NHS in England would need to work at 110% capacity for 18 months to catch up on missing cancer diagnoses, and for 14 months to clear the cancer treatment backlog.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, accused the health secretary, Sajid Javid, of prioritising a top-down reorganisation of the NHS over implementing a plan to bring down Covid infections, clear the backlog and properly support the NHS.

Pat Cullen, the Royal College of Nursing’s acting general secretary and chief executive, urged Javid to immediately address nursing vacancies and introduce a significant pay rise to retain experienced staff.

The NHS England medical director, Prof Stephen Powis, said: “Despite the huge disruption we have seen to care caused by the pandemic and the more than 405,000 Covid patients in our hospitals over the last 15 months, it is reassuring to see in today’s figures significant reductions in waits for routine operations, and for the first time this year a reduction in the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment.”

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more RW shitbaggery put paid to

Western Heat Wave ‘Virtually Impossible’ without Climate Change

Global warming made such an event at least 150 times more likely a new rapid analysis finds

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-heat-wave-virtually-impossible-without-climate-change/

The blistering heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest last month would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of climate change, scientists say. In fact, it was nearly impossible even with it.

That’s according to a new study from World Weather Attribution, a climate research initiative that investigates the influence of climate change on individual weather events.

“We’ve never seen a jump in record temperature like the one in this heat wave, as far as I can remember,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and co-leader at World Weather Attribution, in a briefing yesterday.

The heat wave, which swept through Oregon, Washington state and western Canada in the final days of June, sent temperatures skyrocketing throughout the Pacific Northwest (Climatewire, June 28).

Seattle hit an all-time high at 108 degrees. Portland also broke a record at 116 degrees. And the tiny village of Lytton, in British Columbia, made international headlines when local temperatures soared to an eye-popping 121 degrees. Just days later, the village was all but consumed by a devastating wildfire.

Throughout the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the heat. Experts say many more additional fatalities are likely yet to be reported.

The new study, completed over the course of just 10 days, set out to quantify exactly how remarkable the event was. It concludes that the heat wave would have been, at the very least, 150 times less likely in a world without climate change—but potentially far more rare than that. The exact amount was difficult to quantify with models, in part because this event was so far outside the typical range.

“Basically, without climate change, this event would not have happened,” said Friederike Otto, associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a co-leader at World Weather Attribution.

In fact, the event hardly seemed possible even in today’s warming world.

Statistically speaking, there are upper limits to the kinds of temperatures scientists expect during heat waves. Those limits depend on the local climate, historical warming rates and the levels of extreme heat that have been observed in the past.

When the research team evaluated the Pacific Northwest heat wave using a standard statistical model—which uses past observations as a kind of benchmark for what should be possible—the model suggested that it should not have been able to happen at all.

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good little podcast about Sweden society and politics

https://www.thelocal.com/podcasts/sweden-in-focus/

A weekly, behind-the-scenes look at the biggest news stories in Sweden with the journalists who know them best. Every Saturday with The Local Sweden.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,839]

Two billionaire press barons now own half of the top 10 daily newspapers. Every day they peddle 'stories' that divide people.

Fake controversies that create division between people with shared economic needs - and they distract the public from a low tax, low regulation, libertarian worldview that few in Britain support. Elections expert Professor Sir John Curtice claimed that the Conservative Party are now seeking to "tap into" a wider set of values held by those who voted to leave the EU in 2016 through an "anti-woke agenda".

Culture war pedlars often use contrived stories to pit working-class communities against one another and caricature movements for racial and LGBT equality.

We need to have the confidence to call out what they are doing so we can build on the public demand – especially amongst working-class people up and down the country – for action on jobs, climate change and building a better future for the next generation.

[Vesper 28,795]

The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/religious-right-america.html

The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”

Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.

“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.

Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.

As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”

Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Vesper

[Atomiswave 6,072]

3 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Two billionaire press barons now own half of the top 10 daily newspapers. Every day they peddle 'stories' that divide people.

Fake controversies that create division between people with shared economic needs - and they distract the public from a low tax, low regulation, libertarian worldview that few in Britain support. Elections expert Professor Sir John Curtice claimed that the Conservative Party are now seeking to "tap into" a wider set of values held by those who voted to leave the EU in 2016 through an "anti-woke agenda".

Culture war pedlars often use contrived stories to pit working-class communities against one another and caricature movements for racial and LGBT equality.

We need to have the confidence to call out what they are doing so we can build on the public demand – especially amongst working-class people up and down the country – for action on jobs, climate change and building a better future for the next generation.

HAs always been so, though more now than ever. Divide and rule is the mantra and sadly its working cuz we are allowing it.

[Vesper 28,795]

The Rise of Anti-history

The Trumpist wing of the GOP uses history as a bludgeon, without regard to context, logic, or proportionality.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/republicans-anti-history-marjorie-taylor-greene/619403/

 

In June, Marjorie Taylor Greene visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The visit was, by her own account, revelatory. Earlier in the spring, the Georgia member of the U.S. House compared Food City, a grocery chain that identified vaccinated employees on their name tags, to the Nazis, who forced Jews to wear Stars of David. A few days later, she compared Democrats to Nazis.

Now she was contrite. “When you make a mistake, you should own it. I have made a mistake, and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, so I definitely want to own it,” she said. “The Holocaust—there’s nothing comparable to it.”

The lesson wore off in less than a month. When President Joe Biden announced plans to send public-health workers door-to-door to encourage people to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, Greene tweeted: “People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.”

David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP

Another museum visit would probably be futile. For Greene and others in the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, anti-history has become a shibboleth. They drop historical references and facts into political debates, but without regard to context, logic, or proportionality. Their villains include Adolf Hitler, but also Mao Zedong and Joseph McCarthy; the Holocaust was bad, but also, Jewish people control the weather. The pose is more than the simple historical illiteracy that’s endemic among American politicians. In this GOP faction, members are willfully ignorant of history, which they view in purely instrumental terms, as a bludgeon to wield even as they do not bother to understand it.

As usual, Donald Trump himself has led the way. In 2018, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had to give the then-president a capsule lesson about interwar history and which countries were on what side of the two world wars, according to a new book from the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael C. Bender. “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump reportedly replied, citing the improving German economy in the 1930s. (Trump denies this.) “You cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler,” Kelly replied. “You just can’t.” He was right, though he somehow didn’t see this as a reason to quit on the spot.

Trump’s ignorance of history is well established. In the first fortnight of his presidency, he cited Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice,” evincing no awareness of who Douglass was. A few weeks later, Trump mentioned Abraham Lincoln at a dinner. “Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” he said. “Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that.” Who? Then in May 2017, Trump mused nonsensically that if Andrew Jackson had lived later, the Civil War might have been avoided.

Read: Trump’s peculiar understanding of the Civil War

Predictably, many of the most egregious examples of the anti-historical approach involve Hitler. Another notable case occurred in Washington State, where a Republican state legislator wore a Star of David to an event in order to protest vaccine mandates. (“It’s an echo from history. In the current context, we’re all Jews,” he wrote on Facebook, before later apologizing.) American conservatives have often argued that the Nazis were actually leftists, noting that the party’s full name included the words National Socialist, but the anti-historians have moved from this smirking sophistry to a reflexive recourse to the Holocaust, no matter how ill-fitting or ill-advised, in nearly any debate.

The contradictory views of Hitler from the anti-historians might seem like ideological confusion. But they actually demonstrate how the anti-historians’ use of the past is purely opportunistic. These politicians aren’t interpreting history to bolster their views, but cherry-picking isolated, misunderstood examples to fit whatever argument they happen to be making.

Anti-history is not restricted to peculiar views of Hitler. Earlier this week, the former Trump spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News viewers, “We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers, were against slavery, recognized the evils of it.” (Several Founders expressed ambivalence about slavery while enslaving people, but that’s not what McEnany said.) Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina is fond of citing American history and is often wrong, creating his own anti-history canon.

Read: Donald Trump’s narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass

Many legitimate disputes exist about the facts of history and its interpretation: Consider some—though perhaps not most—of the debate over The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. Political figures might also make dubious or mistaken statements about history without participating in anti-history.

Conspiracist thinking, another hallmark of Trumpism, is anti-history’s natural partner. Each snatches isolated facts or claims out of their proper context, fabricates new contexts for them without regard to reality, and fashions them into partisan weapons. That Greene (found espousing bizarre anti-Semitic theories when she isn’t comparing anything she dislikes to the Holocaust) and Trump are leading proponents of both anti-history and conspiracy thinking is not a coincidence.

In 1955, the founding father of a new strain of conservatism, William F. Buckley, promised that his magazine, National Review, would “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” The rising Trumpist strain in the conservative movement stands athwart slop, yelling, “History!”

[Vesper 28,795]

TUCKER CARLSON’S MANUFACTURED AMERICA

The Fox host has a new daytime show, and he’s using it to poison the meaning of patriotism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/tucker-carlson-today-americana-fake-log-cabin/619411/

First comes the piece of timber. Then the strip of leather. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson.

This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. Tucker Carlson Today features interviews, one-on-one and in-depth, with Carlson’s preferred guests—skeptics of multiculturalism, skeptics of science, skeptics of “the system” as it currently operates. The show is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, save for one thing: It takes place in a Foxified version of Frontierland.

It begins, episode after episode, with that reel of images. And Carlson hosts it from a gaudy facsimile of a log cabin. The set is constructed almost entirely of wood, or a wood-like substance. Just behind Carlson’s chair is a backlit American flag. The space is otherwise spare: a shelf with a display of tattered books, a sepia-toned globe, a rug, a large desk (made of thick glass, the set’s one concession to cable). A screen mounted on the wall sometimes serves as a portal for the guests who do not come to Carlson’s cabin in person. Its default image, however, offers a window into the cabin’s imagined environs: a farmhouse and a field, overlaid with the words—rendered in lowercase, because all things are casual in the daytime—tucker carlson today.

Log cabins, those mainstays of American iconography, typically suggest hardiness, homeyness, humility. Carlson’s version, though, is a show of force. Tucker Carlson Today, a homestead on a manufactured frontier, is one of the spoils of Fox’s deep investment in its star, evidence of the trust the network has placed in him to continue its basest and most basic project: insisting that some Americans are more American than others. Fox has long reinterpreted manifest destiny as a media product, treating the American mind as a vacant space upon which any dream, or any delusion, might be constructed. The network’s webward expansion continues that effort. Tucker Carlson, spewer of marketable mistrust, has conquered prime time. Now he is coming for the rest of the day.

On the june 16 episode of Tucker Carlson Today, Carlson hosted a man the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an extremist—ideology: white nationalism—on the basis of his use of “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the Black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” Carlson spoke with Charles Murray for nearly an hour. He flattered. He fawned. “We are honored to have you,” Carlson told him.

Murray, who disputes the SPLC’s assessment of him, spent the episode issuing the kinds of claims that have made him infamous. At one point, he stated as fact that white people are more qualified for cognitively challenging professions than Black people are. Carlson did not push back on the assertion. He nodded appreciatively as Murray dismissed Fox News’s latest manufactured threat, critical race theory, as “a repudiation of the American creed.”

The Carlson of the evening is overt about stoking his audience’s anxieties; a recently updated intro reel for Tucker Carlson Tonight features a Border Patrol vehicle and a person holding a sign that reads freedom over fear!! america. The Carlson of daytime is more casually branded: just Carlson and a pal, the whole thing suggests, chatting in his cabin after a day of hunting or fishing—a little bit cable, a little bit Cabela’s. The setting helps hide the propaganda in plain sight. It takes the argument implied in most everything that Carlson broadcasts—they are coming for you—and recasts it as a natural outgrowth of rugged individualism. The April 26 episode of Tucker Carlson Today, an ode to the AR-15, is titled “I Will Not Comply.” The May 12 episode warns of the American education system leading to the “complete indoctrination of all kids K through 12.” The June 21 episode takes a stand against the “climate consensus.”

Read: Do you speak Fox?

Fox News, at this point, is a fantasy factory, churning out historical mythologies in real time. Cancel culture gives way to woke culture gives way to critical race theory, the terms denuded of their true meanings and summoned as metonyms for people Fox does not include in its vision of “real America.” The pilot episode of Tucker Carlson Today featured Douglas Murray, an editor at The Spectator in the United Kingdom and a critic of identity politics as Fox defines it. He claimed that the path to success in today’s America is “to show that you are an oppressed minority.” He cast aspersions on “race hucksters and oppression-mongers” and proceeded to offer the kind of insight that can get one booked on the inaugural episode of a Fox News talk show: “The American people are proud. They have a lot to be proud of.”

America deployed as an easy branding exercise is not new. What is new, though, is the insistent ahistoricism of this version of America. Also new—and given the way propaganda has worked in the 20th century, this should serve as a dire warning—is the notion that the facts of the past should be sources only of national pride. Many conservatives, the historian Matt Karp recently argued, are abandoning the old rhetoric of the Lost Cause in favor of a more flexible form of nostalgia. “People on the right seem to be sort of sacrificing the Confederacy, to some extent, because it doesn’t do the work they want it to do,” Karp told Slate’s Rebecca Onion. “What does work is laying claim to the nation at the heart of the idea of America. Not in the old-school ‘the founders were geniuses and set aside universal freedom from everyone’ Lynne Cheney kind of a way, but in a new school way that just says, ‘America, fuck yes!’”

This approach to America is so enamored of its own woozy mythology that it treats reality itself as unpatriotic. QAnon’s followers aren’t conspiracy theorists, they insist; they’re patriots. This is the version of America that is summoned when Fox hosts, in reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s protests, express more indignation about “the flag” than they do about violence done against their fellow Americans. It is the America that is evoked when the ultraconservative Prager University sends a since-deleted Fourth of July tweet noting that “You should NOT be ashamed to #FlytheFlag,” accompanied by an image whose flag contains the wrong number of stars. It is America seen not as a nation but as an ongoing work of fan fiction.

Over several decades in the 1900s, the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco traveled around the United States. He embarked on a tour a bit like the one that the French mega-tourist Alexis de Tocqueville took—but this journey was focused not on what America was but on what it wasn’t. Eco produced a travelogue that explored Americans’ “faith in fakes.” He went to Disneyland, Hearst Castle, Las Vegas. He marveled at the American habit of turning illusion into architecture. Even in those days, Eco diagnosed an underlying quality of American culture: an assumption that the best kind of art and entertainment is that which is “realer than real.”

Watch a little of Tucker Carlson Today and you might be reminded of Eco’s insight. The artificiality of the show’s set—its shiny wood walls, its backlit flag, its screen that acts like a window into a lost American naturescape—channels that faith in the fake. In Carlson’s world, the news itself operates as hyperreality.

Carlson describes cities on fire, quaint towns invaded, Stalinist reeducation taking place in kindergartens. His 2018 book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, is replete with claims about an illusory America. Among them: “Girls thrive when boys fail: this is the underlying assumption of modern feminism,” or “The main reason elites no longer talk about unfairness is that they don’t believe it exists.” No provocateur has gone wrong challenging the hegemony of the “elites”—even when the provocateur in question, the product of boarding school and generational wealth, is a member of the class he denigrates. Carlson claims that he is speaking for “America.” He refuses to be hindered by the fact that the America he is speaking for quite often doesn’t exist.

Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point

Carlson recently told an interviewer that were he to do it all over again, he’d move to Montana or Idaho. “I wouldn’t participate in the system at all,” Carlson said. “It’s a dead end. It’s collapsing. It certainly doesn’t want people like me.” The line is classic Carlson. Here he summons the majesty of the American landscape only to decry the corruption of the American “system.” He punctuates it with casual grievance. By “people like me,” Carlson means his viewers; he means “real Americans,” as Fox has taken pains to define them. Why are the “Dems” and the “libs” to be feared? Because they are not what you are. Why are the media to be mocked? Because they tell lies about your country. They are false flags in human form. And they are coming for you.

You might read this sort of rhetoric, fairly, as a form of neo-McCarthyism. It is on display in many episodes of Tucker Carlson Today: the Un-American Activities Committee not of the House, but of the Performatively Rustic Cabin.

Carlson, too, long ago abandoned any semblance of decency. He makes claims—claims that are bigoted, cherry-picked, fabricated; claims about the dirtiness of immigrants, about the danger of vaccines, about the existential threats posed by those who are not white or male or Christian—and answers the objections with a ready reply: He is not a journalist. He is merely an entertainer. This is the cynical core of his daily performances; people who criticize him, he insists, are missing the joke. People who believe him are missing the point. Carlson’s new set codifies that logic. Yes, Charles Murray came on his new show and argued that white people are more qualified for cognitively challenging professions than Black people are, but he did so from a Log Cabin syrup bottle brought to life. Can’t you recognize lighthearted entertainment when you see it? Why so serious?

The trick works. It has elevated Carlson to a position of direct influence over American hearts and minds. He is using the platform to do more than anyone, including quite possibly Donald Trump himself, to continue the grim work of Trumpism. He is, in that way, transcendent. A recent iteration of the Fox Nation site laid out five topic-oriented verticals: Fox Politics, Fox History, Fox Justice, Fox Religion, and … Tucker Carlson.

Many historians describe the election of 1840 as the first modern presidential contest, a race fueled by the assorted cynicisms of political-image management. Many, too, describe it as the “log-cabin campaign.” The Whigs, attempting to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren, spun their candidate as hale and humble, living off the land and within, yes, a log cabin. Supporters of William Henry Harrison, some cosplaying as “frontiersmen,” built decorative log cabins on wheels, parading them around town. Harrison rallies amassed huge crowds—despite the fact that the candidate they celebrated declined to declare major policy proposals. The emptiness served the endeavor. Harrison’s still-famous campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” said nothing, lyrically, and his carnivalized humility lent itself to easy merchandising: log-cabin-branded shaving soap, log-cabin-stamped coins, an ad hoc campaign newspaper called The Log Cabin.

The branding was also a fiction. Harrison, the person, was the wealthy son of a onetime governor of Virginia. He was 66 years old when he was nominated for the presidency, and not notably hardy. He lived in a mansion. But the fantasy was more fun. As often happens in American politics, then as now, the lies won.

You might see, in the log-cabin campaign of 1840, the primordial outlines of the current moment. You might see Tucker Carlson, a member of the elite he finds it convenient to decry, fabricating his own version of Frontierland. Carlson is constantly rumored to be considering his own presidential run. If so, the setting would serve the attempt. Americana, in Carlson’s vision, is its own justification. The patriot does what he must, not for Americans but for America, the ideal. “Left untended,” Carlson remarks in the concluding chapter of Ship of Fools, “democracies self-destruct.” He continues:

There are two ways to end this cycle. The quickest is to suspend democracy. There are justifications for this. If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility.

Who does Carlson mean by you? What does he mean by irrational populations and responsible conclusions? The answer is, like so much of what Carlson says, both teasingly vague and wincingly clear. “America,” in this vision, is permission. You can draw a direct line from Carlson’s spin on “America” to the radiating ferocity of the Big Lie; the attempts by state legislatures to suppress—and, in some cases, invalidate—Democrats’ votes; the January 6 Capitol insurrection. When you become convinced that your only cause is “America,” you can convince yourself of much else along the way. “America,” the Capitol rioters screamed, as they readied their nooses. “America,” the legislators shrugged, as they restricted Americans’ votes. “America,” Carlson cajoles, from his fabricated frontier, as he helps bring the country to a breaking point.

 

 

[Vesper 28,795]

The Biggest Threat to Democracy Is the GOP Stealing the Next Election

Unless and until the Republican Party recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/democracy-could-die-2024/619390/

The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.

In 2018, when we wrote How Democracies Die, we knew that Donald Trump was an authoritarian figure, and we held the Republican Party responsible for abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper. But we did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic party. Four years later, however, the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an antidemocratic manner. Solving this problem requires that we address both the acute crisis and the underlying long-term conditions that give rise to it.

Addressing the short-term threat

Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories, calling for armed insurrection and assassinations, and ultimately implicated in the Capitol assault. Few Republicans broke with Trump after his incitement of the insurrection, and those who did were censured by their state parties.

From November 2020 to January 2021, then, a significant portion of the Republican Party refused to unambiguously accept electoral defeat, eschew violence, or break with extremist groups—the three principles that define prodemocracy parties. Because of that behavior, as well as its behavior over the past six months, we are convinced that the Republican Party leadership is willing to overturn an election. Moreover, we are concerned that it will be able to do so—legally. That’s why we serve on the board of advisers to Protect Democracy, a nonprofit working to prevent democratic decline in the United States. We wrote this essay as part of “The Democracy Endgame,” the group’s symposium on the long-term strategy to fight authoritarianism.

Read: Democracy is already dying in the states

As we argued in How Democracies Die, our constitutional system relies heavily on forbearance. Whether it is the filibuster, funding the government, impeachment, or judicial nominations, our system of checks and balances works best when politicians on both sides of the aisle deploy their institutional prerogatives with restraint. In other words, when they avoid applying the letter of the law in ways contrary to the spirit of the law—what’s sometimes called constitutional hardball. When contemporary democracies die, they usually do so via constitutional hardball. Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality.

This is precisely what could happen in the next U.S. presidential race. Elections require forbearance. For elections to be democratic, all adult citizens must be equally able to cast a ballot and have that vote count. Using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of this principle is strikingly easy. Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters. Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party’s stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election.

Republican officials across the country are laying the legal infrastructure to do just that. Since January, according to Protect Democracy, Law Forward, and the States United Democracy Center, Republicans have introduced 216 bills (in 41 states) aimed at facilitating hardball electoral tactics. As of June, 24 of these bills had passed, including in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Approved measures allow Republican-controlled state legislatures or election boards to sideline or override local election administrations in Democratic strongholds. This would allow state legislatures or their appointees to meddle in local decision making, purge voter rolls, and manipulate the number and location of polling places. It would also allow Republicans in Arizona, Georgia, and elsewhere to do something Trump tried and failed to do in 2020: throw out ballots in rival strongholds in order to overturn a statewide result. Finally, the new laws impose criminal penalties for local election officials deemed to violate election procedure. This will enable statewide Republican officials to compel local officials, via threats of criminal prosecution, to engage in electoral hardball. Throwing out thousands of ballots in rival strongholds may be profoundly antidemocratic, but it is technically legal, and Republicans in several states now have a powerful stick with which to enforce such practices.

Republican politicians learned several things in the 2020 election’s aftermath. First, Trump’s failed campaign to overturn the results revealed a variety of mechanisms that may be exploited in future elections. Second, Republicans discovered that their base would not punish them for attempting to steal an election. To the contrary, they now know that efforts to overturn an election will be rewarded by Republican voters, activists, local and state parties, and many donors.

The 2020 election was, in effect, a dress rehearsal for what might lie ahead. All evidence suggests that if the 2024 election is close, the Republicans will deploy constitutional hardball to challenge or overturn the results in various battleground states. Recent history and public-opinion polling tell us that the Republican activist base will enthusiastically support—indeed, demand—such tactics. The new state election laws will make that easier. Democratic strongholds in Republican-led swing states will be especially vulnerable. And if disputed state-level elections throw the election into the House of Representatives, a Republican-led House would likely hand the presidency to the Republican candidate (no matter who actually won the election).

The American system has faced crises before—including the disputed elections in 1824, 1876, and 2000. Given the considerable authority that the Constitution grants to state legislatures, the processes of voting, vote counting, and even the selection of electors can easily be subverted for partisan ends. Electoral guardrails must therefore be hardened through federal legislation prior to the 2024 election.

To save democracy, democratize it

Beyond the acute crisis facing American democracy, however, is a deeper problem: the radicalization of the Republican Party. Unless and until the GOP recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk. Each national election will feel like a national emergency. Therefore, the de-radicalization of the Republican Party is a central task for the next decade.

Chris Hayes: The Republican party is radicalizing against democracy

Normally, in a two-party democracy, if one party veers off course, it is punished at the ballot box. Electoral competition is thought to be a natural corrective for political extremism: Parties that stray too far from the average voter’s positions lose votes, which compels them to moderate and broaden their appeal to win again. When a professional sports team loses, it fires its coach, acquires new players, and regroups. The same should hold for political parties. Indeed, if you ask moderate or Never Trump Republicans what will get Republicans back on course, they will almost invariably answer “devastating electoral defeat.”

They may be right. There is a hitch, however: Competition’s effects are being undermined in the U.S. today by what political scientists call countermajoritarian institutions. We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities. Consider these facts:

• Republicans have won the popular vote for the presidency only once since 1988,  yet have governed the country for nearly half of that period.
• The Democratic and Republican Parties each control 50 seats in the U.S. Senate, even though Democratic senators represent 40 million more voters than do Republican senators.
• The three justices who most recently joined the Supreme Court were appointed by a president who did not win the popular vote—and were confirmed by Senate majorities that did not represent a majority of Americans.

Countermajoritarian institutions shield Republicans from genuine competition. By allowing Republicans to win power without national majorities, this constitutional welfare allows the GOP to pursue extremist strategies that threaten our democracy without suffering devastating electoral consequences. Most Americans oppose most of the Republicans’ current positions. But if we do not reform our democracy to allow majorities to speak, expecting the GOP to change course would be naive.

Americans tend to view countermajoritarian institutions as essential to liberal democracy. And some of them are. In the United States, the Bill of Rights and judicial review help ensure that individual liberties and minority rights are protected. But many of our countermajoritarian institutions are legacies of a pre-democratic era. Where they pervade the electoral or legislative arenas, they do not protect minority rights so much as empower partisan minorities and, in some cases, enable minority rule.

Peter Wehner: The GOP is a grave threat to American democracy

To save our democracy, we must democratize it. A political system that repeatedly allows a minority party to control the most powerful offices in the country cannot remain legitimate for long. Following the example of other democracies, we must expand access to the ballot, reform our electoral system to ensure that majorities win elections, and weaken or eliminate antiquated institutions such as the filibuster so that majorities can actually govern. Congress is considering limited democratizing reforms, such as banning legislative gerrymandering. But those proposals pale in comparison with the extent of the problem.

Serious constitutional reform may seem like a daunting task, but Americans have refounded our democracy before. After the Civil War and during the Progressive era and the civil-rights movement, political leaders, under pressure from organized citizens, remade our democracy. Always unfinished, our Constitution requires continuous updating. American democracy thrived because it allowed itself to be reformed. Given the scale of the threat, reforming our democracy over the next decade is among the most pressing challenges we face today.