“The world is not learning anything,” Elie Wiesel told fellow Holocaust survivor, biologist Georg Klein, in an interview after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. “You and I went through certain experiences,” he continued, “If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we would have to fight again, we wouldn’t have believed it: Racism, antisemitism, starvation of children. I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn’t. The victims died, but the haters are still here. New ones.” 

 Americans of all political persuasions hold dearly to a steadfast belief in progress. Perhaps, it goes beyond American borders and implicates all of human nature. Still, even as the elderly wax nostalgic about the “good old days” and the young confront the world’s problems as if they are novel, people prefer to believe that the world advances toward a triumphant apex. While Martin Luther King Jr. often contradicted the idea of a continual climb, his most hopeful moment of cosmology has become his most oft-quoted: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Elie Wiesel, the brilliant author, teacher, and Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to combating hatred and fanaticism, did not believe that the arc of the moral universe would bend toward justice. After witnessing the destruction of his neighborhood in Hungary, breathing the ashes of his mother and sister in the sky of Auschwitz, and seeing his father starve to death in Buchenwald, he lost faith in humanity. During a conversation with Primo Levi that he recalls in his memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, the atheist Holocaust survivor challenged the Jewish faith of Wiesel. “How could you believe in God?” Levi asked while positing that the crucible of their own experience acts as the ultimate verification of the problem of evil. Wiesel replied by asking, “How could I believe in man?” Wiesel asserted that Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and all the scenes of death and torture of the Holocaust—which he referred to as the capital ‘E’, “Event,”—vanquish the ability to have faith in humanity. All that remained was faith in God, but not a normal faith. Wiesel called it a “wounded faith.” Despite his adherence to the rituals of Judaism, he explained that if he asked God to answer for Auschwitz, and God granted his request, he would reject the answer. “I believe in God, in spite of God,” he said.  

 In the past year, I’ve turned to books by and about Elie Wiesel for answers. Observing the victories and encroachments of the “new haters” has initiated a psychic process of suffocating the voices of hope that live within my head. The new haters offer nothing original. Their malevolence, prejudices, and paranoia are outdated, obsolete, and even ancient, but in an evolutionary stage of predation, they’ve adapted to modern terrain. The political adaptation is a consequence of their ability to deliver their decrepit ideologies in the shiny, exciting new packages of digital media. As Christian Piccolini, a former neo-Nazi turned anti-racist leader, told me when I interviewed him in 2021, if someone wanted to join the hate movement in the 1980s or ‘90s, when he was proselytizing, they would have to physically meet someone, which, given the taboos over overt expressions of racism and antisemitism, was a challenge. Now, all one has to do is pull a smartphone out of their pocket and tap the screen a few times.  

 The cancer of hate reaches every corner. One of the most despairing developments of recent years is the reemergence of antisemitism as a mainstream toxin. The most popular podcast hosts interview intellectual crackpots and neo-Nazis; the president of the United States gives his approval. On the left, protest against the actions of the Israeli government, which, if they were solely about disagreement with policy, would be legitimate, often morphs into blood libels, hateful tropes, and brazenly antisemitic language. Throughout 2024, America’s best universities tolerated open hostility toward Jewish students. Hassaan Chaudhary, the political director on the transition team for New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, has called Israel a “cancer which will be eliminated soon.” Mamdani himself refused to vote for Holocaust remembrance legislation as an assemblyman, posted videos mocking Hanukkah celebrations, and recorded rap songs in tribute to financiers of Hamas. Hamas, of course, was responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a provocation of war that was all but forgotten in the ongoing debate over Israel’s responsive conduct.  

 The political rhetoric, spread on social media and all around the podcast sphere, is hardly inconsequential. According to the Anti-Defamation League and other organizations, antisemitic hate crimes have increased to unprecedented levels since the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel. In the past month, so-called “pro-Palestine” protestors have harassed worshippers outside of synagogues in New York and Los Angeles, calling Jews “Zionist pigs.”  

 Meanwhile, the Trump administration uses state power to terrorize, assault, and disrupt the lives of millions of Latinos, most of whom do not have criminal records, through mass deportation, neighborhood raids, and systemic harassment.  

 Elie Wiesel lived through the apotheosis of antisemitism. Given what he endured and observed—man’s capacity for cruelty and torture at its worst and most frenzied—he could have resigned from public life, forever rejecting any notion of solidarity. He said, “I’ve had the right, for almost my entire life, to say ‘goodbye’ to society—‘goodbye’ to humanity—and I choose not to.” 

 His choice is profound, disquieting, and instructive. If he rejected apathy, where does that leave us who have not suffered even a scintilla of his experience? One must proceed with humility, but it is not presumptuous to assert that, in Wiesel’s absence, it leaves us with an obligation to amplify nonviolence, solidarity, universal human rights, and even love. One of Wiesel’s most famous maxims was, “Anyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness.”  

Elie Wiesel wrote 65 books and spent a lifetime in the classroom and the lecture hall. Those of us who read and listened have transformed into witnesses. In my review of his work, I’ve learned an ethos applicable to our troubled times.  

It is essential to begin with the foundation that stories possess a value transcendent of ideology and argument. Wiesel is best known for his international bestseller, Night, a bare-bones account, in Hemingway-esque prose, of his Holocaust experience. The book’s length is under 100 pages, down from an astonishing 1,000. Wiesel’s initial intention was to surround his story with political, philosophical, and theological speculation as to how such barbarity and bloodlust were possible. The original title was “And the World Remained Silent.” Eventually, he understood the horror and profundity of his story should speak for itself.  

“What does it mean to remember?” Wiesel asks in his memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, when reflecting on his decision to begin writing, “It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it.” He also warns himself and his readers, “words must never be uttered lightly.” 

The purpose of Wiesel’s words was to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. He wrote that “the truth must be stated and restated: The suffering of the survivors did not end with the war; society wanted no part of them, either during or after.”  

Wiesel believed that the Holocaust deniers would prevail—not the psychotic neo-Nazis who simultaneously claim that six million Jews did not die at the hands of Hitler and that the genocide was necessary—but those who forget and those who, because they never learned, come to believe that it was a mere historic, small-‘e’ event like any other that fills the pages of boring textbooks in high school classrooms. It would lose its power to silence and shame. It would no longer function as an ultimate mystery of man’s capacity for evil, nor would the slogan, “never again,” act as a bodyguard against the march of hate.  

In 2018, an extensive survey discovered that two-thirds of millennials “don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Ignorance breeds cruelty and apathy. It is a prevalent belief among the progressive left that Israel is a “colonial state,” hardly any different than a white supremacist, settler project. According to the misperception, its goal is the displacement and execution of the Palestinian people. The genesis of Israel, as a sanctuary for a people always on the run and under threat of death, has faded. It’s not that Israel is without sin, but its birth, like the dozens of new nations that emerged after World War II, was a mix of the noble and profane. It ended up enshrining rights for its Arab minority that vote, pray, and serve on the Supreme Court and the IDF in a way that would be unthinkable for a non-Muslim minority in, say, Saudi Arabia. And yet it did, through defensive wars, become an occupying power over Palestinians who lack the franchise. Efforts to create a state for Palestine’s Arabs have been rejected for decades by everyone from Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti to Yasser Arafat.  

All prejudice is ugly, but antisemitism, it’s often said, becomes a conspiracist worldview where Jews are simultaneously behind capitalism and Bolshevism; simultaneously parasitic and all-powerful. History is dotted with secret codicils and paranoid theories from the bubonic plague to the fall of the Kaiser’s army. A contemporary iteration posits that the “Israel Lobby” dictates US foreign policy, and that, as Mamdani implied to a grinning Trump in the Oval Office, the reason that American streets are full of homeless people is due to the relatively small amount of money that the federal government spends on aid to Israel.  

Meanwhile, some on the right, such as Rod Dreher and Ted Cruz, have raised alarm over a large number of their fellow travelers on the right who have turned brazen antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Candice Owens into heroes, even as they recast Winston Churchill as the villain of the Second World War and decry the supposed “Jewish influence” over Western institutions.  

Through Wiesel’s story and the stories he told and created, two truths become inescapable. The first is that it is naïve, if not catastrophic, to underestimate the power of hatred. Before he died in 2016, he spent his life cautioning against “fanaticism,” but fanaticism typically appears in the political realm wearing a brilliant disguise. In Wiesel’s novel, The Time of the Uprooted, the narrator remarks, “The gods of hate hide behind slogans of brotherhood; they fool everybody, including themselves.” Those who wave Hamas and Hezbollah flags in New York and London claim that they are for “peace.” Those who applaud the deportation of law-abiding Latinos to a brutal super prison in El Salvador say they are “making America great again.” 

Wiesel implores us to take seriously those who suffer and struggle. The story that haunts Night, and to which Wiesel obsessively returned throughout his life, is how everyone in his Hungarian village dismissed Moishe the Beadle, a “jack of all trades in a Hasidic house of prayer” who was “as awkward as a clown.” One day, he disappeared. Months later, he returned to the village, recalling how Hungarian police transported him and others into Poland, where the Gestapo forced prisoners to work, and regardless of their diligence, often shot them in the head. He escaped by a miracle. Few took him seriously. Even fewer believed him.  

It is not only the living who ask us to see impending atrocities, but also the dead. When Wiesel gave Oprah Winfrey a tour of Auschwitz for a broadcast, he said, “Some voices are still here. The souls are here. They listen. They cry. They warn.” 

The language of Wiesel dances with mystery, not only the “mystic chords of memory,” to borrow from Abraham Lincoln, but also the inquiries of human experience. Unlike the arrogance that insists that everything can be understood, Wiesel, despite his brilliance, stood in awe of the immensity of evil and the possibility of connection. “The cynics are wrong,” Wiesel wrote in a novel, “David Hume and Nikos Kazantzakis are right: Everything that happens in our human universe is mysteriously linked to everything else.”  

Howard Reich, the veteran jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and son of Holocaust survivors, felt the link when the Tribune assigned him to interview Wiesel on Wiesel’s acceptance of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2012. Reich’s plan to keep his own link to the Holocaust private and focus solely on Wiesel crumbled when Wiesel asked multiple questions about why the newspaper would assign a music writer to interview him. That exchange led to a close friendship that lasted until Wiesel died in 2016. Reich writes with insight and deep, but controlled feeling about Wiesel in his rich and enlightening book, The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel. 

I asked Reich about Wiesel’s beliefs about writing and education, knowing that many Nazis were cultured and learned men.  

Reich told me: 

I believe that though Professor Wiesel devoted his life to language and learning, he came to realize that education alone was not enough to save humanity. Many SS leaders, he pointed out, had acquired advanced knowledge. ‘Yes, philosophy was there,’ Professor Wiesel said to me, but ‘ethos was not. They did not study ethics. Therefore, I go around America and the world, really, lobbying in every university: you must include lessons on ethos, ethics, because without it, all the other things are almost meaningless.’ Professor Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors paid a high price for this understanding, and we benefit incalculably from their hard-won wisdom. 

Through his devotion to philosophy, ethics, and education that could withstand human corruption, Wiesel developed a profound philosophical temperament and disposition. In his conversations with Reich, he called his motivational worldview “Active pessimism.”  

“Active pessimism is pessimism that therefore moves you to action,” Wiesel said. “The other view says, ‘Ach, since it’s so terrible, what can I do?’ The active one says, ‘Oh, therefore I can do something. And even if I can do nothing, I will do it anyway, just to prove that I’m doing it.’” 

Reich writes that “active pessimism” provides the means for “finding hope amid sorrow.”  

The cumulative effect of bad news is often demoralization. If Wiesel could marshal his “active pessimism” toward striving toward a freer, more intelligent, and more peaceful world, then the rest of us can also “do something,” even if only to prove that we are doing so.  

Speaking for myself, reading Wiesel’s work is sad but also a joyful testament to the human capacity for resistance, triumph, and even in the face of horrendous odds, agency to serve the good. It makes me want to do more, including writing, even if, like most writers, I wonder who is reading and what effect it is having.  

In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel claims, “To write is an act of faith.” It is a wounded faith. But is there any other kind? 

The post Elie Wiesel’s “Wounded Faith”  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a sitting governor who ascended to power as a feminist hero is running for the U.S. Senate. She has a record of service in the interest of shared prosperity, social liberalism, and the environment. As governor, she expanded Medicaid, terminating work requirements for the poor to access healthcare, and easily won reelection. She eliminated tuition at community colleges, making a long-standing goal of Democratic politics, articulated by everyone from Jesse Jackson in the 1980s to Barack Obama in the 2010s, a reality in her state. Meanwhile, her record on climate change earned enough international accolades for her to become the first U.S. governor to address the United Nations General Assembly. During her speech, she delineated a plan to make her state carbon-neutral by 2045. At a moment of crisis when political courage is a necessity, she advocated for transgender rights, challenging Donald Trump, to his face, at the White House on his bigotry and ignorance. She refused to relent even after Trump threatened to freeze federal funding for agricultural projects in her state, eventually winning a court decision to restore those subsidies.

Her opponent is a former Marine, mercenary, and bartender with no political experience, and judging from the way he speaks, a similar vacuity of knowledge. He has admitted to making a series of racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks, even blaming rape victims, if they were drunk, for their own trauma, not as a rebellious teenager, but merely five years ago. On his chest, he has a tattoo of a “Totenkopf”—a “death skull” that became prominent in Nazi iconography. SS guards had the same skull on their uniforms. He claims that he was unaware of the history or meaning of the symbol when he got the tattoo. He was drunk, which, according to his moral philosophy, absolves him of blame, unlike women who are raped, and in his words, “should take responsibility for getting so f**ked up that they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” His campaign manager has resigned, claiming that the candidate was aware of the tattoo’s significance.

Now that I’ve set the stage for the experiment, here is the question: Who do self-identified “progressives” support?

Anyone not suffering from the aftereffects of a severe concussion would assume that any so-called progressive would not only support the first candidate but reject the second with contempt. Health care equity, access to higher education for the poor, combating climate change, LGBTQ+ allyship, and defiance of Donald Trump are supposedly top-tier goals of the progressive left. At the same time, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and the brandishing of Nazi emblems should unite everyone on the left in opposition.

It turns out that the thought experiment is not hypothetical. Instead, it is an actual Senate primary campaign in Maine where the first candidate, Governor Janet Mills, is vying for national office against Graham Platner, an SS-tattooed amateur. Those who believe that we live in a world where words have real meaning, where a rational public evaluates politicians by their record of achievements and failures, and where all prominent progressives demonstrate fidelity to their stated values, would be wrong to assume that leftists are rallying behind Mills. Instead, Senators Bernie Sanders and Martin Heinrich have endorsed Platner, as has Representative Ro Khanna. The United Auto Workers has declared its support for Platner, and so too have popular “progressive” media personalities, such as Emma Vigeland, Cenk Uygur, and Ryan Grim, who chastised objection to Platner’s repeated assertions that Black customers don’t tip, his repeated use of the epithet “faggot,” and the Nazi imagery above his nipple, as “hall monitor BS that makes the Democrats toxic.”

Support for Platner, despite his various embarrassments and humiliations, is likely to grow in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York and the progressive anger over Senate Democrats’ compromise with Republican leadership to end the government shutdown.

The shrinking category of rational political observers might wonder if they’ve fallen into the pages of a Lewis Carroll story. Another author could explain the imbecilic inconsistency of the progressive left. On the opening page of The Society of Spectacle, philosopher Guy Debord writes, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation.”

Later, he asserts that the “spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images[…]It is a worldview.”

In the society of spectacle that is the U.S. under the epistemic tyranny of social media, “progressives,” like Sanders and Grim, care about the “working class” and despise “the establishment.” In a society of reality, caring about the working class would mean supporting policies that raise their standard of living and increase their opportunities for upward mobility, such as expanding access to Medicaid and making community college tuition-free. In a society of spectacle, “working class” depends upon the imagery that mediates social (and political) relations, meaning that the invocation of the demographic phrase calls to mind someone like Platner—a gruff, “man’s man” with a military record who works on a farm, with a voice like voiceover from a pickup truck ad—not someone like Mills, an elderly woman with a successful legal career. Women, from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris, and now Janet Mills, cannot register with the working class because in America, “working class” means a man holding a shovel or wearing a hard hat. It certainly doesn’t mean a Latina home health aide or Asian American pre-school teacher, even if, in post-industrialization, women in low-wage service and retail occupations are much more predominant among the proletariat.

Another term that the society of spectacle has emptied of all substance is “establishment.” Mills fought the patriarchal and Republican establishment in her state to earn tangible victories for women, low-income residents, and Maine’s indigenous population, filling a vacancy on the state-tribal commission and passing stricter water quality standards for tribal rivers. But because she is 77 years old, experienced, and a she, her candidacy represents the decadence of the “establishment.” Were Mills suffering from the effects of aging like Joe Biden or Donald Trump, fleeing her candidacy would make sense. But like Sanders himself, she projects well and is, after all, challenging Senator Susan Collins, who will be 73 on Election Day 2026. Rebecca Traister, in a story on the Democratic Party for New York, met with Mills and described her as a “fireplug of a woman,” who “demonstrates none of the frailty of her chronological peers.”

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that Platner, unlike Mills, offers nothing to voters. He is little more than an image—a central casting call in a forgettable blue-collar soap opera. Even his backstory, as reported in the New Yorker, confirms the triumph of spectacle over substance. Labor and progressive advocacy organizations searched for a candidate to run in the Senate race. Instead of finding someone with impressive experience and a reputable background, they reacted to a video featuring Platner that warned against a commercial salmon farm. “They decided that he was exactly what they were looking for,” the New Yorker details, “a working-class guy with a military background.”

An appearance in an online video is now the only prerequisite to becoming one of a hundred United States Senators. This is politics according to the rules of the influencer, and according to the habits of a teenager who spends all day staring at a six-inch screen, confusing political efficacy with what trends on TikTok.

It is not only dumb, but in the case of Platner, destructive. It has left Sanders saying things like, “He’s a great working-class candidate” and “He went through a dark period. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to go through a dark period.” Yes, but do they all have Nazi tattoos? Sanders also said that Platner said “many stupid things” but that he’s a “brilliant guy” and a “great fighter for the working class.” Mills, evidently, is not a fighter for the working class, despite providing them with healthcare, a cleaner environment, and free community college.

Ro Khanna also boasted of Platner as a “working class candidate,” while denouncing the “politics of personal destruction.” “Working class” appears to function as an abracadabra spell that can make any ethical considerations instantly disappear. It erases all transgressions. But its cynical invocation is also insulting to the millions of working-class Americans who do not make racist remarks, defend rape, or get Hitler-approved imagery carved onto their chests.

As far as the tortured logic of Drop Site’s Grim is concerned, if the real problem with Democrats is their “hall monitor BS,” why not find a Klansman (or, in the case of Drop Site, a terror mouthpiece) willing to shout “Medicare for All” and rebuke the “billionaires,” and run him for office? That would undoubtedly show that Democrats are no longer woke.

Another question: Why did working-class Americans support Brahmins like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy? Could it be that they don’t hold their wealth against them and don’t fetishize their own class the way the wealthier do? Any why do so many voters in the much-vaunted “white working class” revere a man with his name encrusted in gold on planes, golf resorts, and penthouses with the interior decorative stylings of Liberace, even if he is notorious for fleecing employees and contractors? Perhaps Theodor Adorno was correct with his assertion that many low- and middle-income workers do not even conceive of themselves as belonging to a class.

Platner, caught with his shirt off so to speak, is defending himself with pablum about how “this Marine won’t back down from a fight,” the establishment isn’t coming for me, they’re coming for you, etc., etc. Redemption and recovery are admirable, but a U.S. Senate seat is not an AA coin. As my colleague Bill Scher put it before Skullgate broke, Platner could seek a different office, befitting his experience. But with the soft bigotry of low expectations, the consulting class has elevated a bartender into a national figure and convinced him, like Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, that he’s a leader and redeemer.

It shouldn’t be that surprising that in the Trump era, Democrats would confect their own unqualified, morally obtuse political apprentices. A few of the worst aspects of the Trump-dominated era of American politics are misogyny, stupidity, and the elevation of gimmickry over actual accomplishments. With chauvinistic dismissal of Governor Mills and thoughtless celebration of her unseasoned, unqualified, and odious opponent, progressives have cosigned hateful MAGA nonsense. They’ve also stained the political movement that they claim to champion.

The post The Magical Thinking Behind Graham Platner’s Rise appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Under threat of imprisonment, torture, and death, Dmitry Muratov and the staff of the Russian dissident newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, continued exposing Vladimir Putin’s corruption and violent abuses of human rights. Even as their fellow journalists were manhandled into dark and danky cells, bankrupted, or “disappeared” from the waking world, they continued to report, comment, and publish.  

Novaya Gazeta strikes a humiliating contrast with the American press, as the leading journalistic institutions of the free world have subordinated themselves to the Trump regime out of cowardice, greed, or a combination of both. Motives aren’t nearly as important as the chilling effect of each surrender on dissent, critical thought, and the First Amendment.  

CBS News seems close to installing Bari Weiss, the editor and founder of conservative-leaning The Free Press, who recently gave a slobbering interview to Amy Coney Barrett, as its “bias monitor.” Under pressure from the Paramount-Skydance merger, the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. More recently, MSNBC fired Matt Dowd, who helped lead George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, for expressing “offensive” views about Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his murder.  

No act was so craven in its capitulation as the shocking, indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC. On his September 15th program, Kimmel speculated that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s killer, was “MAGA,” which the evidence does not support, and opined that the White House was attempting to take advantage of the awful crime, which is inarguably correct.  

Three days later, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, appeared on a far-right podcast to issue a threat straight out of the script of a cliche-ridden mafioso movie, a point even Senator Ted Cruz brought to light. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said, before promising to review ABC’s broadcast license agreement if the network doesn’t change its ways. By the end of the business day, after affiliates seeking regulatory approval for mergers added fuel to the fire, ABC announced the indefinite suspension of the late-night host, electing to do things the easy way for profit, and the hard way for democracy.  

Republican parrots immediately launched into their defense, insisting that ABC, and its parent company, Disney, merely made a “business decision” in the interest of its “fiduciary responsibility.” Kimmel offended too many viewers, and therefore, would hurt the bottom line. Pretending as if the timing of the suspension with Carr’s ultimatum was a mere coincidence is absurd enough, but reporting from the Daily Beast confirmed that ABC executives initially supported Kimmel. They only reversed themselves after hearing the ultimatum from the commissioner of the FCC. A later report indicated that when Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent company, heard that Kimmel planned to dig in on his critique, he and ABC executives decided to suspend Kimmel indefinitely which is where things stand. 

Carr’s first response to the news was to share a popular meme of characters from the sitcom, The Office, celebrating with the “raise the roof” dance move. The world’s oldest democracy is now under the rule of malevolent 13-year-olds.  

While we’re on the subject of democracy, it appears as if it is on life support in a hospital under the authority of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the most troubling lessons of the past eight months is the extent to which avaricious self-interest, short-term thinking, and apathy have made our society weak. Michel Foucault titled a series of lectures, “Society Must Be Defended.” Who is defending our society? 

The Fourth Estate is paralyzed, big law firms cave to Trump’s demands, and universities cut deals to save their federal funding. Even Trump-friendly Republicans are revealing how intimidation is the principal generator of obsequious submission. Indiana Governor Mike Braun recently explained his willingness to call a special legislative session to redistrict the congressional map in Republican favor, in the middle of the decade, with the self-damning admission, “If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have the consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should.”  

ABC didn’t drag its feet. It leapt at the chance to demonstrate obedience to the thought police. The problem is not only timidity, but also media conglomeration. Nexstar, a media company owning 28 ABC-affiliated stations, is acquiring local media company, Tegna. The $6.2 billion merger requires FCC approval. The Kimmel debacle follows ABC settling a ridiculous lawsuit that Trump filed after George Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll (the jury found him liable for sexual assault), and firing journalist Terry Moran for tweeting that Stephen Miller is a “world-class hater.” It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Nexstar, Disney, and ABC executives want to remain in Trump and Carr’s good graces, even if it means sacrificing an independent press and freedom of speech.  

In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90 percent of the U.S. broadcast media market. Now, it is down to six. In such a narrow landscape, conformity becomes a virtue. The recently deceased academic and media critic, Robert W. McChesney, summarized the crisis with the title of his study of corporate journalism, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.”  

The expanding reach of the corporate octopus’s tentacles is likely why even the superstars of so-called “liberal Hollywood” have failed to defend their friend Jimmy Kimmel. George Clooney, who couldn’t raise his head fast enough to sabotage Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has remained silent since the Kimmel incident, is one particularly illustrative example of how cowardice is contagious.  

The White House’s assault on free speech is pitched as a necessary discouragement of “political violence,” a term that the mass media has appeared to just discover in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Even those dubious grounds crumble when one learns that most of those who have lost their jobs, including Kimmel, never celebrated the murder. They certainly did not advocate violence. They either criticized Kirk’s politics or those who used Kirk’s horrific killing to pursue their own agendas.  

Meanwhile, under a reasonable interpretation of the English language, the actions of ICE constitute “political violence”—raiding peaceful neighborhoods and places of business, abducting and assaulting immigrants (in some cases, American citizens) and holding them in allegedly abusive conditions without due process. Fourteen migrants have died in ICE detention facilities since the inauguration of Donald Trump.  

The Department of Homeland Security has advanced its attack on free speech, warning “the media and far left” to “stop the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS Law Enforcement.” Representative Jasmine Crockett, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu are three officials the statement targets as guilty of “demonization.” One should reply to the admonition with the obvious question, “Or what?” 

The answer will determine to what extent Americans still live in a free society. Trump and Carr have both promised action against other television networks and personalities who display more critical thinking than the court jesters at Fox News.  

Another question: How much degradation will the American people tolerate?  

After the forced closure of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov said, “In Russia, political repression will continue against all opponents of the regime.” He added that his hope rested in the “people who see the world as a friend, not an enemy.”  

His words echo close to home.  

The post Surrendering to MAGA Isn’t Just a Broadcast Media Problem appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump’s policies have caused and will continue to cause large-scale death. According to Dr. Brooke Nichols, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health who oversees a running impact tracker, the destruction of USAID and the various food and medical aid programs under its umbrella has already caused nearly half a million preventable deaths in the developing world. Trump’s destruction extends to domestic operations. In just seven months, he and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have significantly weakened the country’s public health system, moved to cut medical research at universities nationwide, and promised to cut Medicaid substantially. 

One of the leaders fighting to protect public health in the Trump era is the National Medical Association, the largest and oldest organization representing Black doctors and their patients in the U.S. On July 22, the NMA inducted Dr. Roger Mitchell as its new president. Mitchell is board-certified in anatomic and forensic pathology by the American Board of Pathology. He is also a tenured professor of pathology and serves as chief medical officer for the faculty practice at Howard University, his alma mater. He is the co-author of Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do About It, a study of preventable deaths in jails and prisons. 

I recently spoke with Mitchell on the phone about the Trump regime’s attack on public health, higher education, and DEI. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

DM: In your position as a forensic pathologist, a medical doctor, and president of the National Medical Association, how do you assess Trump’s war on public health, especially how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is executing it through the Department of Health and Human Services?

RM: One of the things we prioritize at the National Medical Association is evidence-based care, whether that relates to the care of an individual patient or the larger community, which we define as “public health.” Medicine is a science. Therefore, it needs to be science-based. However, what we’re finding is that the decisions being made by the Trump administration—not properly collecting data, putting expertise on the back burner, the response to the measles outbreak, and the undermining of vaccinations, neglecting the need for Medicaid coverage and supplemental insurance for the disinherited—these are not evidence-based decisions. They are political decisions.

You say it is a “war.” I used similar language in my inauguration speech when I was installed as the 126^th president. I noted that physicians have a red cross on our helmets. Our job is to serve and fight for those on the battlefield. The war waged on public health is intentional and will lead to many deaths in communities across the United States.

DM: If the administration isn’t making decisions based on evidence, what are their criteria, as far as you can tell? Who is most at risk due to what you call their “intentional war on public health”?

RM: The most endangered are the most in need. Those individuals who currently need Medicaid are not going to seek care when disease and injury are preventable, but will only seek care when disease and injury are inevitable. Inaccessibility to preventive care leads to higher morbidity and mortality. Then, those who take the opinion of political officials without a medical background, who do not give evidence-based advice, place themselves at higher risk and are also in danger. We see that with those who refuse vaccinations and even refuse to vaccinate their children.

Those without access are the most vulnerable, and when I say “access,” I mean it in the W.E.B. DuBois sense of access as education, economics, housing, and environmental justice. Those who suffer from disparities in access are most at risk. But this is not a risk that only affects poor folks. It is going to affect all Americans. That is how public health works.

I cannot read the minds of those making these decisions, but as an outsider, I can only suggest that the decisions are based upon how to enrich a small few. Let me give you the evidence for that conclusion. As a public health official and someone who has worked in medicine for two decades, I know that healthcare’s finances have ballooned. There is no way in the world that we can allow the cost of health care to continue on this trajectory. Value-based care, promoting prevention, and rewarding providers, medical care associations, federally qualified hospitals, and patients for engaging in necessary education and practice for prevention—that is the work that decreases the cost of health care. What decreases the cost of health care is more healthy people. Healthier people will need expensive care less frequently. So, when you remove people from having access to prevention and the care to treat disease and injury, individuals will choose to eat, take care of their families, and pay their mortgage. They will let disease and injury fester in a way that they need care later, and that care is more expensive. So, the care that is going to be delivered in this country if the Republican plans continue will increase costs and decrease life expectancy.

DM: Another battleground is higher education. You are also a professor at Howard University, your alma mater. What are the dangers of Trump’s assault on higher education?

RM: I come from a middle-class family. My family wasn’t poor—a college-educated mother, a father who was a businessman. When I went to medical school, my loans were about $180,000. That was more than tuition, but I had to take the loans out because I had to live. I could not work in medical school. I tried. I was an FBI forensic scientist. I was trained as an evidence technician, planning to work in the local field office while attending medical school. That lasted two weeks. There was no way that I could work and study as much as one needs to study to do well in medical school. I lived in a very small apartment above a barber shop. Rent was $400 a month. You can imagine what type of accommodations I had for $400. Today, graduate education loans are capped at $100,000. If that rule had been in place before, I couldn’t be a doctor today—not because I wasn’t qualified, nor even because I couldn’t pay for medical school. I’ve paid the loans back.

So, those who can’t pay the balance above $100,000 to go to medical school will not be able to go to medical school. Poor people, first-generation wealth, and blue-collar people cannot afford to send their children to medical school, even if those children have 4.0 [grade-point averages] and the potential to become excellent physicians. I’m worried about limiting poor and working-class people’s ability to go to medical school, not only because it will adversely affect those students, but also entire communities. There is already a physician shortage in this country, and there are already disparities for those in the medical field willing to take care of the disenfranchised. Now, we’re going to make it worse.

DM: To continue the metaphor, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is the third battlefield of the war. Of course, “DEI” can mean anything with the current crew. Same question: How does the attack on DEI threaten America?

RM: If you were to ask any Fortune 500 CEO, they would tell you that diversity of experience, thought, and background is good for the bottom line. It makes economic sense to have a diverse workforce. Even if there is no moral impulse for diversity, the argument that it makes better financial sense should resonate.

We know that in health care, you have better outcomes in communities when those communities have a shared background, which leads to trust with physicians. That is why it is important for the National Medical Association to stand up and say that diversity, equity, and inclusion are paramount. The requirements of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for diversity in recruitment and retention were important not only for medical students and residents, but also for the outcomes of patients positively affected by a diverse workforce. With those requirements no longer being enforced, we risk patients being unable to get quality health care. We have providers and medical students who don’t have the same cultural experience with their diverse colleagues. Everyone becomes better after having proximity to those who are different. At its core, medicine is an empathetic art. Empathy is a huge component of health care—medical practice, nursing, and physical therapy. You name it.

If you don’t have that proximity but later have to provide care for those who are different, where will you get your emotional quotient? That EQ has to be built in.

Degrading DEI standards will increase disease and injury in communities that differ from the majority.

DM: What are some ways the NMA works to counter this, and what do you hope to achieve with your leadership?

RM: We’re ensuring that our residents are supported. Many times, we have found that Black residents have been targeted and removed from residency without justice. We’re working with the Young Doctors Project, which takes young men from urban settings during the eighth grade and mentors them through high school, college, and medical school. We’ve partnered with Elevate MeD, which helps medical students get into residencies. We have another partner, Nth Dimensions, which allows medical students to move into orthopedic programs, where there is a paucity of diversity. We work closely with the Student National Medical Association. We have a strong post-graduate section within the National Medical Association.

We support ourselves as we become entrepreneurs within medicine or move into academia.

We also focus on health justice, violence prevention, environmental justice—and climate change, because drinking clean water and breathing clean air are essential to good health outcomes.

We are also an advocacy organization. The NMA was at the table 60 years ago when Medicaid was written into law, and other medical associations did not favor it. We advocate for equity in health care delivery, no matter where you are from, the money you have, or whether you are rural or urban.

This year’s theme is “Mobilizing Health Justice for a New America.” The days of standing around and talking are gone. We need to start fighting and moving.

DM: Given the high stakes, are you advocating for health care professionals, especially your members, to raise their voices and contribute more to the ongoing debate?

RM: One hundred percent. I’m traveling the country and willing to visit any city, bringing the members of the National Medical Association to the debate, to discuss what needs to happen locally and nationally. I was just in Cincinnati. I was just in Tunica, Mississippi. The NMA just had our annual convention in Chicago.

My grandfather was one of the first Black physicians in Atlantic City. He graduated from med school in 1932, started his practice in 1935, and used to take pies and cakes for payment from those who couldn’t afford care. So, I ask our members to determine how much free health care they can give in their practice. Then, let’s create a national clinical collaborative that provides free health care to communities. Then, let’s use that to pressure the corporate world to pay for medical equipment, the nursing staff, and the technicians. We need to do that if the government doesn’t step up. Health care is a human right.

The post Fighting to Protect Public Health in the Trump Era appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Gore Vidal took a British television interviewer by surprise in 2012 when he remarked, “When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative,’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not. They’re fascists.”

That might have seemed like hyperbole during the year Mitt Romney became the Republican presidential nominee. But it rings truer as we pass the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s second term in office. Now, the American media is running into the limits of its vocabulary. Despite the inadequacies of the term, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and all the many outlets that follow their lead continue to describe the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans as “conservative,” a word that seems wholly inadequate to a moment when the president in a single week demands a private business, the Washington Commanders football team, change its name back to the Redskins or face some unnamed punishment, when the president’s FCC uses its regulatory power to coerce conformity from a publicly traded corporation, and when Trump uses unilateral tariff powers to promote his planned resort in communist Vietnam.

The failures of “conservative” to accurately convey the ideology and actions of today’s Republican Party are many. First, there is the lexical use, that is, by default, complimentary when it means restraint. One might praise a neighbor for his “conservative lifestyle” or advise a couple that they would benefit from a “conservative household budget.” Given that most Americans are largely apolitical, “conservative” hits the average ear in such a way that bolsters false Republican bromides about “getting our fiscal house in order” and “encouraging personal responsibility.”

Second, it is painfully apparent that Republicans have become anything but conservative in the traditional sense of the word. In his tome, The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will, who left the Republican Party, struggles to define “conservative,” but he identifies two strains of the political philosophy: American and European. He argues that the latter “emphasizes the traditional and dutiful, with duties defined by obligations to a settled collectivity, the community.” American conservatism, by contrast, “seeks […] to conserve or establish institutions and practices conducive to a social dynamism that dissolves impediments to social mobility and fluidity.”

Setting aside that Will’s description of American conservatism might be elastic enough to imply support for universal health care, childcare programs, and tuition-free (or, at least, low tuition) universities, it is a valuable tool for measuring the Grand Canyon-sized gap between the Trump personality cult and what has, traditionally, passed for “conservative.” Republicans and their so-called “thought leaders” aim to overturn and subvert institutions and norms, rather than “conserve” them in the European sense. They are also consolidating executive power rather than maintaining distrust of too much power vested in any branch of government, let alone one man. The view of human nature as deeply fallible and immune to romantic Jacobin or Marxist visions of a new man is at the heart of conservatism. But MAGA is built on a different premise, that one ruler should be given broad authority and not held back by the Lilliputians of the Deep State. No wonder we find ourselves living in an increasingly autocratic form of government that commits vandalism against the concept that Will most closely associates with conservatism—“individual autonomy.” To his credit, Will recently denounced Trump as the “most statist president in US history” whose repressive policies and erratic actions constitute a “Putinesque” form of governance.

Will, like MSNBC host and former communications director for George W. Bush, Nicole Wallace, the editorial crew at the Bulwark, and Liz Cheney, would insist that the Republican Party is violating “true conservatism.” They often conceal their roles in pulling American politics to the far right with assessments that sound suspiciously like self-pity. “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me,” they will say.

Stuart Stevens, a former political campaign manager in the Republican Party, adopts a more honest approach in his aptly titled memoir, It Was All a Lie. The virtuous and philosophical precepts of Republican politics, from “personal responsibility” to “limited government,” were nothing more than a cover for a power grab that would eventually lead to the ongoing violation of democracy, the rule of law, and the social compact.

A more charitable view would consider that, perhaps, there were always two versions of “conservatism” duking it out within the GOP and its attendant media culture. There was the moderate, pro-business wing, represented by Stevens’s former client, Mitt Romney, and the anti-democratic militancy of Joseph McCarthy, Jesse Helms, and now, Donald Trump. To quote an old rock and roll song, for the sane side, “it’s all over but the crying.”

Mike Lofgren, a former Republican staffer and budget analyst in the US Senate, who often writes for the Washington Monthly, argues that the “dark turn of American conservatism” isn’t much of a turn. When I spoke to Lofgren over the phone about the political history and applicability of the term “conservative,” he said, “Ever since the French Revolution, there’s always been a revolutionary, reactionary countermovement aspect to conservatism that’s very radical.”

Lofgren, the author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, the Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, then proposed that “there needs to be some label that can encompass” that element of conservatism to communicate the threat to societal stability that, ironically enough, something most people call “conservative” now presents. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former “chief counselor,” calls himself a “Leninist.” Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned political philosopher who is a prominent influence on JD Vance, identifies as a “neo-monarchist.” These appellations are self-damaging, but unlikely to resonate with most Americans. Gore Vidal wasn’t the only person to see the contemporary American right as “fascist.” Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has applied that term to the current president. The problem with “fascist” as a descriptor is that it is too loaded. Personally, I think the term is accurate in describing much of what the Trump administration is doing. Still, when many people hear the word, they immediately think of Hitler, or something vaguely nefarious that has no precise political meaning.

During our conversation, Lofgren and I agreed that “radical” is accurate and politically potent. Typically associated with the left, “radical” is synonymous with “extreme.” It signals an agenda threatening societal stability, sabotaging American life, and invading people’s lives. Trump and the Republican Party that he controls are radical–undermining the democratic process, undercutting democratic institutions, and undergirding an autocracy. They’ve attempted to overturn an election, established a Supreme Court that has wildly expanded executive power, while granting the president legal immunity for any action he takes in or even after office, and stretched their repressive influence into commerce, academia, and media.

“Radical is never seen by the public as good,” Lofgren said before adding, “It’s familiar and has a pejorative context.” The word also has the added benefit of tacitly noting who is subverting what generations of Americans have taken for granted, relating to personal freedom, separation of powers, and the rule of law. Here’s a hint: It isn’t Black Lives Matter activists who haven’t held a rally in years, librarians stocking novels with gay protagonists, or college professors with grey ponytails. It is the political party that celebrates the president deporting immigrants without due process, detaining people without criminal records in facilities guarded by alligators, and usurping congressional authority to allocate taxpayer dollars.

The mainstream media should adopt radical because it communicates an extreme break from sociopolitical norms, and the Democrats should not shy away from the pejorative context that Lofgren describes. “Extreme” is not a good substitute because it seems to imply that Trump is a stronger variant of traditional conservatism, 150 proof versus 80, when in fact he’s an entirely different breed. True, Newt Gingrich advised congressional Republicans in the 1990s to use words like “anti-American” and “traitor” to ridicule Democrats. President Trump has referred to his political opposition as “perverts,” “the enemy within,” and the Nazi-borrowed, “vermin.” By those standards, “radical” is pretty tame.

The bizarre, unforced error that Democrats must stop making is to refrain from using the word “Republican.” In recent years, they tend to adopt too-clever-by-half nicknames for Republicans, like “MAGA extremists,” zero in, with laser-like precision, on an individual, like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, allowing the word “Republican” to remain untarnished.

The alliterative, “Radical Republican Party,” should become a stain that its leaders cannot scrub clean. Middle Americans who pay closer attention to the manufactured drama of reality television than to the endangerment of their society should come to understand that the Republican governor or senator smiling down at them from a billboard next election season is not a “conservative” church usher or VFW captain, but a radical planning to disrupt their quiet lives.

The post Conservatism or Radicalism: Unpacking Today’s GOP appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On May 30, Travis Decker, a combat veteran, allegedly murdered his three daughters, ages five, eight, and nine, in Washington State. Suffering from severe PTSD and unable to obtain adequate mental health services, Decker, in the words of his ex-wife’s attorney, transformed from a “loving man” into a “monster.” “The courts didn’t fail these girls,” the attorney said, “It was our system. If somebody had provided Travis with the help he needed, those girls would be alive.”

The “system” is in desperate need of an overhaul. Just like the sexual assault epidemic in the U.S. military, acts of domestic violence and child abuse have become all too common among active-duty military personnel and veterans with combat experience. When the tour of duty ends, many bring the war home, injecting familial life with violence that can culminate in suicide and, as the catastrophic accusations against Decker make all too clear, homicide.

Nobody knows more about the problem than Stacy Bannerman. When her husband, who had changed into “a familiar stranger,” to use her words, returned from the Iraq war, he was no longer a loving companion but an abusive drug addict. His behavior grew violent, including an attempted strangulation and threatening Bannerman’s life with an assault rifle. Bannerman left her husband, but she did not quit the fight to protect military families through an expansion of mental health services for veterans and the construction of a more peaceful society.

Bannerman has devoted over a decade to calling attention to the crisis of military service-connected domestic violence—an often thankless task. Despite the headwinds, the author of Homefront 911: How Families of Veterans are Wounded by Wars has testified before Congress and is helping lead the newly formed Yellow Ribbon Casualty Campaign. It is painful for Bannerman to revisit her trauma regularly, but when we recently spoke by phone, she said, “It is the work that my soul has agreed to do.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

DM: What is the Yellow Ribbon Casualty Campaign, and why is it necessary?

SB: The Yellow Ribbon Casualty Campaign is a group of survivors—folks who have experienced injury, damage, or loss as a direct result of post-9/11 service-connected domestic violence. The campaign is to get accountability from the United States government, specifically the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. These government agencies need to be held accountable. Frankly, the accountability is long overdue. We are doing it because we have to. The government has conducted studies since before Vietnam. So, that’s well over half a century. The government knows very well that combat exposure significantly increases the risk and likelihood of post-combat domestic violence. Also, domestic violence tends to be severe in a post-combat situation. We’re talking about shooting, stabbing, and strangulation. We’re not talking about a push or shove. It’s much more likely to be lethal than civilian domestic violence. The government has known this for decades, and they’ve done nothing about it. We’re trying to expose the truth.

DM: What kinds of numbers are we talking about in this crisis? How many victims?

SB: So, while there have been all kinds of education, funding, and training around veteran suicide, there has been a cultural and legal failure to have anything near a commensurate amount of education, funding, and training around service-connected domestic violence. The government isn’t tracking it. So, what are the exact numbers? We don’t know. The VA has a legal, internal policy of mandatory reporting. They have to comply with the VA directives on this matter. I ran a FOIA request submitted on March 19, 2019, the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Years later, the VA asked if I was still interested. I assured them I was. Finally, when they responded, they could not produce a single document demonstrating their compliance with either their internal policy regarding domestic violence or child abuse or compliance with the mandatory reporting laws in the various states. So, the VA is either out of compliance with its policies or not in compliance with FOIA requirements. When I use the phrase “cover-up,” this is Exhibit A.

DM: This is quite similar to the sexual assault epidemic within the military.

SB: Yes.

DM: What is it about the nature of military service that leads to high rates of violence, particularly against women?

SB: Women and children. It is the combat exposure, particularly the PTSD resulting from it. What we are seeing is that if the service member has intermittent explosive disorder, he has a three to five times greater frequency of violence within the home. I was recently in Washington, D.C., to launch the Yellow Ribbon Casualty Campaign with families from across the U.S. We had all sustained injury, damage, or loss as a result of post-9/11 wars and military service. There were mothers, wives, and children. One of the women couldn’t be there because she was at the wake of her husband, who had just committed suicide. People need to understand that there is a close link between suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation, particularly in veterans. There is a reason that psychological screenings always ask, “Are you in danger of causing harm to yourself or others?”

So, why do the “or others” not matter in our governmental institutions? If you want to talk about numbers, think about how if there is a single veteran suicide, on average, there are five or six immediate family members affected. If there is a veteran committing violence at home, we’ve got a spouse, and we’ve got kids. A lot of the murders have happened in front of the children. Then, in turn, those children will be treated and often hospitalized for suicidal ideation. One of those children, who was hospitalized at eight years old, joined us in Washington, D.C.

DM: I will turn the question around even if you asked it rhetorically. You said, “Why don’t the ‘or others’ matter?” Why don’t the political structure and mass media consider this issue important?

SB: First and foremost, it is because the family member is not a military investment. We are not government issue. There’s a reason that the VA counselors create what they call “collateral damage files.” That’s all we are—collateral damage. The government hasn’t invested millions of dollars in us. And it would like to do whatever it can not to invest millions of dollars in the families. What we know for a fact is that Army Strong directly correlates with family strong. Soldier retention is directly correlated with family satisfaction. Force readiness is tied to family readiness. All the family readiness and support groups are volunteers. The VA has veteran caregivers, most of whom do it for free. We are in a patriarchal, sexist society, and there are fewer institutions where that is more reflected than the United States military. Women are valued only as free labor.

The nation, after Vietnam, did understand that, regardless of how bad the foreign policy is, don’t take it out on the soldier. Well, now there’s been a pendulum swing in the other direction. It’s “Thank you for your service,” and the soldier can do no wrong. It’s “every soldier is a hero.” Well, not every soldier is a hero, and the soldiers themselves acknowledge that. But, in civilian America, because of the military-civilian divide, the only way they can assuage the guilt and shame over contributing nothing to the post-9/11 wars, one of which—Iraq—was based on lies, is never to disparage the veteran. It’s such a horrifically uncomfortable conversation. We don’t want to have this conversation.

DM: What does that say about war and the federal government, where the lead discretionary budget item is the military?

SB: Some bells cannot be unrung. The collateral damage of war cannot be contained. We aren’t the first generation of military families going through this, but the Yellow Ribbon Casualty Campaign wants to ensure that we are the last generation to go through this. I don’t want to go to one more funeral of one more spouse, child, or caregiver.

DM: How exactly is the Campaign organizing and fighting back?

SM: It’s a multi-pronged approach. We’re going to look at reintroducing the Kristy Huddleston Act, which I wrote. It is named after a woman who was shot to death by her Iraq War veteran husband. It funds caregivers and makes medical care and mental health services more readily available to military families. We are trying to set up Congressional hearings. We are filing claims for compensation for damage, injury, or death. There is a two-year window in which you can file claims if a government employee is responsible for the damage, injury, or death. The VA has a legal duty to inform about any potential known workplace hazards that could detrimentally impact its employees and their families. We’re also looking into a class action suit for family members who have suffered losses. And we need to fight for the establishment of services for military families because there are none.

We are also trying to expand the Superfund laws. Right now, the Department of Defense can be held liable for a toxic chemical spill. People directly impacted can sue the DOD. Why don’t we have a similar law that allows people who are harmed or suffer property loss as a result of toxic violence to hold the government accountable for cleanup, recovery services, and repair?

A big part of it, though, is public education. People don’t want to talk about it, but when it comes to military service-connected domestic violence, silence is deadly.

DM: How does all of this affect the women in the military?

SB: I suggest asking women veterans. I don’t feel comfortable speaking for them other than saying that most know they are entering a male-dominated institution when they sign up.

I’ll also add that there are many beautiful and positive things about masculinity. I want to be clear about that. But what we are seeing, particularly with this current administration, are the consequences of a dysfunctional masculinity.

DM: And because you’ve lived with those consequences, what do you think of this resurgence of sexism? It was always there, but…

SB: Yes, it’s been weaponized again. It is celebrated again. I’d like to think it is the death rattle, but I don’t know. There was a referendum on consciousness in our country with the last election; frankly, we lost. Something broke with us in the nation. I don’t know how long we will look at what isn’t working and hold it up as the best we can be. At some point, we have to decide that enough is enough.

The post “When it Comes to Military Service-Connected Domestic Violence, Silence is Deadly” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Since assuming power in January, President Donald Trump has ordered the destruction of the so-called administrative state (social services, regulatory agencies), revoked and threatened to revoke funding from universities that don’t bend to his political will, and attempted to eliminate anything resembling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from government, public education, and public health. His administration has also targeted law firms that are even tangentially connected to the prosecution of Citizen Trump. Recently, he issued a memorandum directing the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, a fundraising arm of the Democratic Party, on unsubstantiated right-wing conspiracy claims of accepting foreign contributions. In his effort to defund the left, he’s made America McCarthyite again.

This war on the left and crusade to defund it is not new, although conservatives have never waged it on this scale. This assault has a familiar Republican pedigree, even if the 47^th president has taken it to unrecognizable extremes and used a chainsaw rather than a scalpel, as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s presidencies did to defund the left. Democrats, for their part, have no equivalent.

The transparent tactic of political warfare is already resulting in widespread unemployment of civil servants, the dangerous weakening of the nation’s public health apparatus, and the dismantlement of scientific research ranging from tuberculosis treatment at Harvard to breast cancer detection methods at Michigan State University.

Masha Gessen, a journalist who draws on her formative years in Putin’s Russia to write about autocracy, observes that Trump is attempting to construct a “mafia state,” defining it as an “absolutely centralized system in which one person…the don, distributes money and power.” Gessen makes comparisons to Russia under Putin, and Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Combining the leadership methods of Chairman Mao and Michael Corleone is a shocking methodology for an American president, but it is not entirely without precedent.

If you go back to the 1980s, the Reagan administration was quite open about trying to defund what it saw as federally supported left-wing projects, such as the Great Society program Volunteers in Service to America, better known as VISTA. Almost from its beginning in 1964, Republicans saw the program as a hotbed of radicalism, even though it was the domestic analog to the Peace Corps, President John F. Kennedy’s signature effort to promote American goodwill during the “long twilight struggle” against communism.

Sam Brown, who served as the ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) under President Bill Clinton, was the director of ACTION, a federal domestic volunteer agency, under President Jimmy Carter. (ACTION oversaw VISTA and other volunteer programs such as Foster Grandparents and the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and it was, in the 1990s, folded into the Corporation for National Service, the umbrella agency for AmeriCorps.) Brown has personal experience with Republican “defund the left” zealotry. When I asked him, over email, to recall his undermined tenure at ACTION, he wrote,

There was a full-on Congressional attack, led by [the late Republican Representative] John Ashbrook [of Ohio], to eliminate funding to organizations funded by ACTION, which I led at the time. They targeted specifically ACORN, Illinois Public Action, and Mass Fair Share, all organizations organizing voter drives and local anti-poverty efforts. They called hearings in the House and used a series of exhausting document requests, meetings, detailed follow-up questions requiring very substantial staff time to respond, and press releases to try to exhaust administrative staff and discredit these organizations and, collaterally, ACTION as the funding agency.

The investigation found nothing of substance but, in the words of Brown, “sucked the life out of many staff and made it more likely that future grants would go to less […] effective organizations.”

Brown offers a succinct assessment of why Republicans moved to discredit ACTION and are now implementing a similar strategy fueled by a cocktail of growth hormones: “Republicans want to defund those they perceive as not only wrongheaded but as their enemies. This is particularly true of any organization organizing for change since that is a longer-term threat to them.”

Reagan accelerated the defunding-the-left tempo. Acting on the counsel of the Heritage Foundation, whose policy agenda, Mandate for Leadership, explicitly called for the elimination of subsidies and tax breaks for “public interest groups,” the Reagan administration attempted to eliminate tax exemptions and grants (sound familiar?) for any organization that practiced “political advocacy.” Due to widespread opposition from religious organizations, charitable groups, and even trade associations, upset that new rules would have restricted their lobbying, Michael Horowitz, then the Office of Management and Budget Counsel and a prominent conservative attorney in the decades since, ended up promulgating a less restrictive set of rules. It is worth noting that the Heritage Foundation is also responsible for the authorship of Project 2025, the playbook of the current Trump administration.

The failure of their war on the non-profit sector did not prevent the Reagan White House and OMB from executing a broader, defund-the-left initiative. Reagan led a relentless assault on the Legal Services Corporation, a federally funded non-profit established by Congress to provide legal aid to the poor. Reagan’s combative posture was not due to “fiscal responsibility” but ideology. Believing that attorneys who work in legal aid are a progressive monolith, Republicans called for the dismantlement of the LSC. Reagan cut their funds by hundreds of millions when those efforts failed.

Meanwhile, Reagan also initiated the policy of staffing government agencies with far-right extremists who harbor hatred for those very agencies. During his two terms, he oversaw the appointment of hundreds of bureaucrats who took Reagan’s rhetoric to heart, such as the infamous declaration, “Government is not the solution to any problem. Government is the problem.” Two of the young bureaucrats were current Fox News host Laura Ingraham and conspiracy theorist provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, who in 2014 pleaded guilty to one felony count of violating voter laws.

Conservative parties exist in every democracy, but there is no tangible equivalent to Republican anti-statism and anti-government militancy. The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom and the Conservative Party in Canada do not run candidates who pledge to destroy the institutions they are vying to lead.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich coalesced conservative advocacy groups to, in the words of CLEAR, an environmental watchdog, “Defund the left” by targeting “federal funding of non-profit advocacy organizations.” When George W. Bush became president in 2001, his resident Machiavelli, Karl Rove, pushed for tort reform as a weapon against a class of Democratic donors and agents of legal reform: trial lawyers. In the words of Paul Burka, the former senior executive editor of the Texas Monthly, Rove aimed to “create a permanent Republican majority.”

Rove was also instrumental in accusing ACORN, the now-defunct consortium of community organizations, of “voter registration fraud.” Due to a manipulatively edited video from right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp and asked an ACORN staffer for tips on evading the law, the wrecking ball hit its target. Republicans in Congress, with the aid of mute and frightened Democrats, stripped ACORN of funding.

Over its multi-decade history, ACORN had scandals and failures, including embezzlement by high-ranking staff. There was, though, never evidence of voter fraud—quite the contrary. The principal reason that Republicans defenestrated ACORN is that it was effective at legal voter registration, ushering racial minorities from low-income areas into the electorate.

Peter Dreier, a professor of political science at Occidental College, wrote that the assassination of ACORN “reminds us that America’s current polarization wasn’t inevitable. It was manufactured, a product of the web of big business, conservative media entrepreneurs, and right-wing politicians that led to Trump and his efforts to challenge science, the press, civil liberties, and public policy based on evidence.”

Rove and the W. Bush administration also encouraged tort reform efforts to limit plaintiffs’ ability to launch effective lawsuits and to limit damages. The effort had its policy arguments about supposedly helping businesses thrive in a litigious world. Still, its aim was also to limit the political effectiveness of American trial lawyers who were emerging, along with Hollywood, as a significant source of funding for Democratic candidates at the local, state, and national levels.

Although the efforts of pre-Trump Republicans to defund the left were odious, they, at least, had some basis in reality. They were also narrowly targeted.

Trump, in contrast, has launched a culture war against scientific research, America’s elite colleges, the Cold War icon Voice of America, and, indeed, entire swaths of society that he and his aides have called leftist rather than aiming at modest government agencies or one part of the American bar.

His targets for liquidation are those that William F. Buckley railed against in the 1950s and that Rush Limbaugh labeled as the “four corners of deceit” in the 1990s – government, academia, science, and media. It is a truism to say that “ideas have consequences.” Well, the consequences of the right wing’s anti-intellectualism, suspicion of multiculturalism, desire to impose Christianity on secular life, and growing contempt for science are now creating financial and, in all likelihood, physical carnage.

In this sense, Trump’s purge is more Maoist than Buckleyite. Republicans, from Barry Goldwater to George H.W. Bush, may have complained about elite universities, but they made no effort to crush them. (Bush 41 of Andover and Yale said during the 1988 campaign that Michael Dukakis’s views were born in a “Harvard Yard boutique,” but the university’s president, Derek Bok, had no reason to fear the Skull & Bones man.) Trump, like the warriors of the Chinese Communist Party, is engaged in wholesale destruction. In 1966, the People’s Daily of China published its call for the Cultural Revolution. “Sweep away all the cow demons and snake spirits,” the editorial demanded, calling on the proletariat to “completely eradicate all the old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits that have poisoned the people of China for thousands of years.” The campaign against the “Four Olds” was critical to Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, setting off massacres, book-burning efforts, the erasure of history and renaming of public sites and territories, and the purging of “class enemies” from institutions, political and social, large and small.

The Trump administration has restrained itself from mass murder. Still, it has initiated a Mao-like financial and reputational purging of entire sectors of the country, public and private, that it deems “woke” (rather than bourgeois). In simple terms, the president and his goon squad are waging war against their political opponents, even punishing those whose only “crime,” according to Republican justice, is guilt by association.

The Chronicle for Philanthropy reports that, due to the Trump regime’s war on the non-profit world, non-profit organizations have laid off 10,000 workers in 70 days, but that figure has undoubtedly grown. It’s hard to track various federal judges issuing restraining orders against Trump’s henchmen.

Nature begins a report on the grim crisis facing higher education with a brief list of illustrative examples: “A test for lead contamination in water, a project to measure the oldest light in the Universe, and a study of heat and drought’s effect on the brain are all on ice after President Donald Trump’s administration halted research grants to several elite US universities.” The same story describes “labs on the brink” and public health projects meeting an abrupt end.

An everyone-does-it cynicism defines Trumpism. The fantasy-minded Republicans may accuse Democrats of trying to defund the right, but there is no real-world equivalent. “Defund the Police” was a chant after George Floyd’s murder, but the Democratic Party never embraced it. The defense budget has gone up under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. There’s no Democratic effort to defund agriculture or the oil industry to savage red-state voters. As a general proposition, Democrats seek office to use government as an effective tool to promote the general welfare. Republicans, acting per the motto of Ronald Reagan, see “government as the problem.”

It all operates under what is essentially an illusion. Republican apparatchiks and reactionary bloviators claim that they are merely guarding themselves against a vast left-wing conspiracy. Still, the reality is that there is hardly anything resembling an organized political left in the United States.

Tina Nguyen, a once-rising right-wing media star, details her years with Breitbart and the Daily Caller in her exposé, The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing (And How I Got Out). The most fascinating passages are those about her time trying to track down a story on how the Democratic Party “builds a bench” and advances itself through American culture and institutions. Instead of finding a progressive octopus with tentacles reaching into every corner, she saw hundreds of poorly funded grassroots organizations reacting cycle-to-cycle with no real capacity to execute a long-term plan.

While it is undoubtedly true that the campus culture of elite universities leans left, and as recent investigations of antisemitism have demonstrated, the upper ranks of academia have significant problems, the belief that the entire industry operates in concert as a political indoctrination center is tantamount to an acid flashback. Most institutions of higher education, from community colleges to regional state schools, are apolitical in official comportment and student activity.

Furthermore, there is simply no Democratic equivalent to the current Trump sledgehammer exercise against universities and non-profit organizations. When I asked journalist and former Dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann (a Washington Monthly contributing editor), about the infliction of severe pain on universities, he said, “It would be like if because people on the left grumble about oil companies, the next Democratic President just declared, ‘Ok, there will be no more oil companies,’ and started doing things to make them go bankrupt.”

Lemann referred to the “blitzkrieg” against higher education as “far, far beyond McCarthyism at its worst.”

McCarthyism ruined lives, weakened American institutions, and demonstrated the dark heart of right-wing ideology that opposes and endangers nothing less than representative democracy. In only a few months, and in the name of their own “cultural revolution,” the Trump administration has placed America on the edge of a much greater catastrophe.

The post Defund the Left: Trump’s Cultural Warfare Explained appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions; doctors who offer reproductive health services to women could go to prison; Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters; rogue police could break down citizens’ doors and bust into college dormitories in midnight raids; schoolchildren could not be taught evolution, Black history, or gay rights; writers, artists, and journalists would be censored at the whim of government; and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights.

With the addition of a few phrases and substituting the name “Donald Trump” for “Robert Bork,” the above paragraph is a transcript of the speech that Senator Ted Kennedy gave on the floor of Congress as an opening salvo against Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.

As the Massachusetts Democrat made clear in his thunderous denunciation of the federal appeals court judge, Bork, a vocal opponent of Roe v. Wade, argued that the First Amendment applied only to political speech, not artistic expression. As acting Solicitor General, Bork played a pivotal role in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” during the Watergate era when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the special prosecutor investigating the scandal, Archibald Cox. Richardson refused, and so did his deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Bork, then solicitor general, was the felonious president’s willing executioner and sent Cox packing. A federal court later ruled that the termination was illegal.

Bork also declared that Southern states had a right to levy poll taxes and refused to concede that the federal government had the power to enforce fair voting standards. Adding insult to injury, Bork claimed that the alleged misuse of the commerce clause demonstrated “a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” Black Americans who lived under the terror of enforced segregation and exclusion, police brutality, lynching, and disenfranchisement might have argued that the ugliness of Jim Crow surpassed legalistic debates regarding mild interference with property rights.

Kennedy, with good reason, saw Bork as a threat to the Constitution as well as an opponent of racial and gender equality. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, representing hundreds of civil rights organizations, joined Kennedy in opposing Bork’s nomination.

Many observers, even those sympathetic to Kennedy’s position, accused the senator of hyperbole. They insisted that Bork did not favor racial segregation but maintained that the use of the commerce clause in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was beyond the Constitution’s reach. He also, as many Republicans now claim, believed that the states should regulate abortion and that not only was there no Constitutional right to an abortion but also no Constitutional right to privacy—the cornerstone principle of constitutional cases relating to police searches and sales of contraceptives. The Washington Monthly has long taken issue with Bork’s influential 1978 work undermining decades of antitrust law, The Antitrust Paradox, which led to the widespread adoption of a legal standard that made it easier for corporate mergers to pass judicial muster.

Even if Kennedy’s depiction of Bork as Bull Connor in a judicial robe was, arguably, over the top, the consequences of the late scholar’s legal philosophy were indisputable. Had his vision prevailed in the 1960s, the Jim Crow regime of oppression and exclusion against Black Americans would have continued for who knows how long. In some ways, he was to the right of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who, for instance, voted to strike down a statute against flag burning. Bork said he would have upheld the law.

On abortion, stories of women with failing pregnancies dying from lack of medical intervention since the revocation of Roe v. Wade in 2022 illustrate that “back to the states” might make for a palatable political slogan. In practice, it enables the horrors that Kennedy highlighted.

The United States is currently living through a horror show of even larger proportions. Trump has already marred the world’s oldest representative democracy with the actions of a dictator. He’s ignored court orders, with the acquiescence of Republican leadership, circumvented congressional power, and violated the human rights and due process of countless people under the dubious claim that his administration is merely deporting violent criminals. Trump’s immigration goon squad is shipping human beings to El Salvador, where they live under torturous conditions. Making matters worse, the White House has shown no interest in rectifying their error when they exiled innocent men to the Central American gulag. (We’ll see what the administration does now that the Supreme Court has upheld a lower court order to return anyone mistakenly hustled off to El Salvador’s prison.) Agents of Trump have also infiltrated college dormitories, grabbing students for the “crime” of participating in anti-Israel protests, and even placed tourists and guest workers, including a Canadian actress who has appeared in MTV music videos, in detention centers.

Thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court appointments, each of whom sunk Roe, the State of Texas attempted to prosecute and fine a New York doctor $100,000 for prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident. A New York county clerk refused to file the motion against the doctor.

Even in the Trump era, it is unlikely that restaurants will place “White Only” signs in the window and defy the Civil Rights Act. But the administration recently revoked a Lyndon Johnson-era executive order prohibiting businesses that contract with the federal government from practicing racial segregation, and the zeal with which it’s pulled books by Maya Angelou from military service academy libraries and censored Harriet Tubman’s role in the underground railroad at National Park Service exhibits does not inspire confidence.

Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University, told NPR, “These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government’s efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that they are now excluding those provisions from the requirements for federal contractors, I think, speaks volumes.”

An unprecedented attack on civil rights law pairs well with the Trump White House’s totalitarian assault on history. In the first two months of his second term in office, Trump has presided over the erasure from federal websites information regarding Jackie Robinson, the Native American code talkers, and other figures and stories related to Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous history. The demolition of knowledge goes even further. He has declared war on higher education, unilaterally threatening to strip billions of dollars of grant money from universities if college administrators do not placate the narrow, reactionary anti-diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-transgender agenda of the Republican Party.

Moving along to Kennedy’s catalog of Bork’s offenses against democracy and equality, the Trump administration is attempting to intimidate journalists into silence and complicity. Because they won’t cooperate with his absurd renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” the Trump White House has banned the Associated Press and other outlets from briefings, although it’s been ordered to grant them admission. President Trump has filed lawsuits against journalists for using colorful invective when describing him and has publicly floated the idea of stripping broadcast licenses from CNN and MSNBC.

Finally, in the advancement of their violent campaign against immigrants, the Trump administration has ended legal defense services for unaccompanied children appearing before immigration courts. Human rights and legal experts have warned that depriving children of legal representation places them at higher risk of trafficking and abuse.

The America that Ted Kennedy envisioned as “Robert Bork’s America” is Donald Trump’s America. Only this time, it isn’t an educated prediction. It is real, with offenses against civil rights compounding daily. The question is what Democrat will speak with the clarity and aggression of Kennedy, whose floor speech galvanized opposition to Bork. It is true that Democrats controlled the Senate at the time. Still, unlike current political culture, it was common for the Supreme Court nominees to receive 80 votes or more for confirmation. For example, Scalia, nominated by Reagan and the first Italian-American justice, was approved unanimously in 1982. Democrats tried hard to derail Justice William Rehnquist’s elevation to Chief Justice that same year but could only raise 32 votes to oppose him. Derailing a president’s pick for the Court, especially a president as popular as Reagan, was no mean feat. Kennedy did much to pull this off, and especially relevant to the current counterpunch against the Republican authoritarian assault, his speech motivated and emboldened Democratic senators to do what they already believed was right. Bork garnered 42 votes on the floor, picking up just two Democrats and losing six Republicans.

Senator Cory Booker injected Kennedyesque energy into his colleagues and constituents by showing admirable indignation and panache with his filibuster in protest of Trump’s lawless attack on healthcare services and Republican-proposed cuts to Medicaid. His pledge to speak as long as he is “physically capable” signaled necessary defiance against Trump’s autocratic ambitions and antisocial cruelties.

Undoubtedly, other Democrats object to Trump with similar urgency and conviction. Senator Chris Murphy and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse are relentless, and progressive members of Congress, Summer Lee and Jasmine Crockett, are passionate. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has shown the courage and commitment to Democratic principles that should inspire voters.

The question remains: who will galvanize the electorate as Kennedy did when declaring war against Bork?

Some problems make the replication of the Kennedy moment much more challenging. Unlike in the 1980s, no mono-media culture can amplify a stirring and dramatic speech like Kennedy’s to national heights. The millions of outlets—many of them hopelessly partisan and hallucinogenic in favor of the far right—scramble the attention span of the American people, allowing for siloed habits of those who do consume news. News consumption is hardly a universal household American experience. Many Americans are tuned out of politics, with nearly half unable even to name the party that controls Congress and only the rarest citizen aware of the Congressional Record.

Finally, Kennedy was controversial, bringing a few of those controversies on himself, but he had stature. When he spoke, people listened, even those who did not like him. Friends and foes recognized him as a leader. His opening shot against Bork was effective. Most historians partially credit Kennedy’s efforts with the Senate rejection of the Bork nomination. (The jurist did himself in with his lengthy defense of his positions, which, to be fair, is far more welcome than the prevaricating, obfuscating testimonies of most of the Supreme Court nominees who followed, not wanting to suffer his fate or losing on the Senate floor.)

The power of Kennedy’s speech is often forgotten. Left and right pundits have coined the term “Borked” to designate a vicious personal attack. Kennedy did not attack Bork personally but focused on his legal philosophy and history. Furthermore, before Kennedy took the floor, he and his staff completed assiduous research, including securing the support of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. It wasn’t the equivalent of a podcast rant. It was dramatic and effective leadership that met the moment’s urgency.

It is hard to find Kennedy’s equivalent in today’s political culture.

The old inquiry is whether leaders make the times or the times make the leaders. As the Trump administration mocks every standard Americans have claimed to hold dear, someone must, like Booker, at least attempt to capture the times in Kennedy fashion, using strong, clear language that demands attention.

Democrats crave confrontation. They want to see their elected officials fight through our current political emergency. One Democratic tendency that must end is the self-flagellation over the supposed “toxicity” of the “Democratic brand.” Kamala Harris only lost the swing states by margins under two percent (under one percent in Wisconsin). It is worth noting Kennedy’s declaration of war against Bork’s nomination came after Reagan won in a genuine historic landslide, defeating Walter Mondale in every state but Minnesota. At no point did Kennedy appear on television to whine about the falling fortunes of the “Democratic brand.”

The millions of Americans who filled the streets of large cities and small towns across America for the anti-Trump “Hands Off” protests on April 5 are not demanding poll-tested, consultant-approved “messaging.” They seek courageous opposition to the dismantlement of civil society, social liberalism, and democratic institutions.

Robert Bork’s America sounded like a dark place. Donald Trump’s America is a dark place. Despite the challenges, someone must look into the camera and try to light the spark.

The post What Liberals Can Learn From Ted Kennedy’s “Robert Bork’s America” Speech appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Jay Farrar, one of the best American songwriters, describes the exurban life in his rock band, Son Volt’s aptly named song, “Exurbia”: 

Exurbia, someone’s nightmare dream… 

No people walking  

No people conversing  

Just work, car, interstate then house. 

The nightmare dream has invaded national politics, transforming conventional notions of the American dream—not to mention Martin Luther King’s egalitarian dream—into a cruel taunt. Exurbia is one of American geography’s most important but least studied precincts. Consisting of the fringe towns outside the inner ring of metro areas, their distance and density separate them from the more familiar suburbs. Exurban villages are not only further from the nearest city; they have fewer people. Defying categories, the exurbs aren’t precisely rural. The former home of trailer parks and farmhouses, they are planned communities, disconnected from the urban center but bearing a resemblance to suburbs. Exurbia is the land of the corporate chain strip mall, subdivision, and megachurch. Good examples of the latter are Floodgate in Brighton, Michigan, which the Atlantic profiled as a theological “stop the steal” central headquarters, and Dream City church in Arizona, where Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA regularly hosts “Freedom Night.”  

Cheap land made exurbia attractive to prosperity gospel ministers whose idea for a house of prayer resembles a basketball arena. Still, studies show that the megachurch, whether of the “cash is king” or fire-and-brimstone conspiracy theory variety, acts as a magnet, attracting like-minded worshipers to the small towns beyond the suburbs. The megachurch, often functioning as a citadel of hate against LGBTQ people and feminists, is not only often the largest building in town. It is often the main source of recreation. Exurbs have low property taxes, little public green space or communal activity, quiet local governments, and often fewer places for human interaction than traditional suburbs, let alone cities. Adding to the “nightmare dream” is developers’ tendency to exclude sidewalks from the neighborhood. Sidewalks encourage walking and conversing while also sending a signal of hospitality. Exurbia is all about isolation.  

It not only creates and breeds physical isolation. It also engineers epistemic isolation. The only thing more challenging to find in exurbia than public transportation is local media. Provincial newspapers, radio stations, or community access television broadcasts rarely, if ever, exist. The empty media landscape allows for the surreal scenario of Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, or Alex Jones acting as the equivalent of the local news anchor–informing the audience of how, beyond their peaceful streets of seclusion, undocumented immigrants, transgender softball players, and single women with college degrees are plotting an anarchist revolution.  

I wrote my book, Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy, after learning that Donald Trump’s highest levels of support are in the exurbs. His most obsequious and dangerous supporters in Congress—public nuisances like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert—represent heavily exurban districts. Putting the lie to Republican and mainstream media folklore that Trump’s authoritarian populism is merely misguided protest from low-wage, blue-collar workers, The Wall Street Journal reports that the median income in exurbia is significantly higher than the overall median for the United States.  

None of the findings surprised me because I live near the exurbs of Northwest Indiana and regularly spend time in these distinctly American towns. Moving into the 2024 election, they began to resemble photographs from distant dictatorships. Instead of gigantic murals of Chairman Mao or Saddam Hussein decorating every corner, there were oversized flags, posters, and signs showcasing the mug of Donald Trump. Many banners featured the “fight” pose that Trump struck after surviving an assassination attempt. Needless to say, Indiana was not aberrant.  

Many people are moving to exurbia because they are priced out of the cities and the closest suburbs. As the development of suburbia itself demonstrated, there is also an understandable desire for young people to move to quieter surroundings when they begin to have families. It isn’t as if the region is monolithic or cannot change. In my book, I even interview admirable activists in exurbs fighting for causes ranging from conversation and sustainable energy to racial justice. All recent indicators, unfortunately, show that exurbia remains a right-wing stronghold.  

By some black magic miracle, Trump improved his electoral standing in almost all of America. More predictably, he ran up his score in the exurbs of battleground states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. 

Understanding the voters of exurbia is crucial to getting a grasp on Trump’s political success and his Elon Musk-led wrecking crew agenda of government sabotage and DEI demolition.  

Exurbia was borne of white flight. As the suburbs became more diverse, inhospitable, or outright hostile, residents moved further from urban centers, creating a demand for new housing developments and expansion of the corporate chain economy. Property taxes were low because new infrastructure is cheaper to maintain than rusty pipes and battered bridges. Multiple studies show that the leading indicator for MAGA enlistment, whether on the extreme level of participating in the January 6 insurrection or merely voting for a congressperson like Greene or Boebert, is residency in a county with increasing diversity, especially one where the Black-white income gap is shrinking. Combined with megachurch Christian Nationalism, fear and hostility toward multiculturalism operate as the engine of the Trump movement.  

Trump made surprising gains with Latino and young voters, mainly with the men in each category. But his base remains the middle to upper-middle class of white tradesmen and small business owners who look at what America has become since the triumphs of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements with suspicion or contempt. Exurbia will eventually diversify, but for now, it offers the promise of escape—escape from racial minorities, escape from secular values, and escape from the mechanisms of democracy that allowed for the entrance of racial minorities and secular values into the cultural mainstream.  

It is a political version of the “flight or fight” instinct, and it is now boosted by an increasingly rabid Trump in power. In his 2000 classic Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam states that social isolation often fuels political extremism. Many exurbanites believe the federal government is an irredeemably corrupt payout scheme and a slush fund for Blacks on the dole, reckless single mothers, and schools that want to turn their kids gay or transgender.  

As a consequence, they cheer as Trump and Musk try to dismantle critical governmental agencies, eliminate programs aiming to achieve racial equality and do their best to erase transgender people from public existence.  

The exurban dream is one where the entire country resembles the exurban town. Because such a transformation is impossible by organic means, the Trump voters of exurbia delight in a political program that operates according to paranoia and self-imposed isolation. It isn’t novel in American history, but rather an update of the mentality that historian Richard Hofstadter explained in his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The exurban reactionary’s antecedents are the Know-Nothing Nativists, the John Birch Society, and Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children.”  

The current iteration is much more dangerous because those who represent and advocate for the exurban mindset have unprecedented media influence and political power.  

Farrar also refers to exurbia as “someone’s psychedelic scream.” It’s time to cover our ears.

The post The Exurban Dream vs. The American Dream appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Two nights before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, my wife, parents, and uncle celebrated my grandmother’s birthday at an Italian restaurant near Chicago. At some point between my first and second vodka tonic, my MAGA-adherent uncle leaned close to my ear to ask, “If in two years, inflation is down, the economy is strong, and crime is down, will you admit you were wrong about Trump?” 

My initial response was to explain that inflation, for most items, is way down, crime rates have declined for three years, and by all indicators, the economy is strong. Ignoring my cursory review of the factual record, my uncle plowed ahead, “Yeah, but if all that happens, and the border is secure, would you admit that he is a good president?” 

“No,” I said, “Because our definitions of ‘good’ are radically different.” 

We got off the topic without any invective. My grandmother’s birthday dinner remained pleasant. But the conversation with my uncle, like most familial debates over politics these days, was unproductive. It felt pedantic to note that economic and crime rates do not necessarily reflect presidential performance. It also felt like a waste of breath because my uncle and I spoke different political and philosophical languages. Like two monolingual men attempting a simultaneous conversation in Mandarin and Spanish (a MAGA horror film), we could not have a meaningful exchange. My uncle tried to pin me on specific numerical metrics of presidential success. He was apparently unwilling to consider that my contempt for Trump has little to do with the efficacy of his policy agenda. There is nothing the man could do, other than abdicate, that would lead me to respect him.  

Giving my uncle the benefit of the doubt that he supports Trump only because he believes that populist nationalism is beneficial to American institutions and people still leaves us at a state of static broadcasting. I think Trump’s leadership will fail, as it did during his first term. Even if it triumphs, according to my uncle’s metrics, the Trump presidency demands a thorough undressing, shorn of policy debates over birthright citizenship or Pete Hegseth. What remains when the orange-skinned emperor is naked? It is a question of values.  

To applaud Trump and MAGA, one must reject, or at least ignore, values that have regulated American politics and dictated ethical behavior. They are the values of democracy, especially the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, acknowledgment of ideological adversaries as legitimate, fidelity to the truth, and the unwavering disapproval of violence as a tool of politics.  

Some principles supersede executive orders and policy directives. If we reduce leadership to clinical criteria of economic performance or border expansion, we have to conclude that Vladimir Putin is a great president of Russia. He delivered on his promise to enlarge the Russian middle class and expand Russian borders and influence. Of course, we would then have all of our work in political science, cultural studies, and ethical inquiry ahead of us. 

Any exploration of ethics must include virtue. Even the mechanistic consequentialism of John Stuart Mill—a most beneficial to most people’s calculus—forbids conflating two or three metrics with presidential success. Trump’s assault on democratic institutions, public health, and environmental safeguards will include the suffering, and in some cases, deaths, of many people.  

Immanuel Kant, operating out of a different school of thought than Mill, said, “Live your life as though your every act were to become universal law.” The Bible asks, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” Ernest Hemingway said, “Tell the truth and to hell with everyone.”   

Hemingway advised F. Scott Fitzgerald against “making silly compromises.” There are compromises that I consider not only silly but dangerous. Even if the price of the precious eggs drops to 1 cent per carton, and Trump throws them into audiences like he hurled paper towels at Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico, I will hold steadfast to higher principles. 

As John Adams famously wrote, “We are a nation of laws, not men.” The reverent admirers of Trump treat him as a king with special legal and moral exceptions. Congressman Andy Ogles has proposed a Constitutional amendment to allow Trump, but not Obama, to run for a third term. A Monmouth University poll shows that most Trump supporters wouldn’t object if Trump violated the Constitution to persecute his political enemies. Trump himself has said he favors “suspending” the country’s foundational legal document. After only a week in office, he signed an executive order attempting to nullify the 14^th Amendment, which grants birthright citizenship. A judge has ruled it a violation of the Constitution, as will others. Trump has also pledged to ignore the TikTok ban he once favored despite it receiving congressional passage and Supreme Court approval.  

The United States, in its best moments, has offered haven and hospitality to those escaping poverty and persecution. No matter how one feels about border security or the ideal number of immigrants, their humanity is not subject to debate. They have rights mandated by international and U.S. law. Separating families, rounding up immigrants, and placing them in camps and detention centers, while comparing them to snakes and monsters and alleging that they are murderers and rapists who eat family pets, degrades our country, and pollutes the humanity of anyone who would support it.  

Similarly, transgender men and women are human beings worthy of the legal protections, economic opportunities, and social acceptance that cisgender people take for granted.  

Transgender Americans are routinely the target of hate crimes. Trump, by pardoning the January 6^th insurrectionists, even those who beat and maimed police officers, has encouraged political violence. This dangerous act coincides with his removal of security details from former aides turned political foes, such as Anthony Fauci and John Bolton. It is his promotion of political violence after many previous iterations, from dismissing the plot to murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as “maybe not a problem” to instructing the Proud Boys, a thuggish hate group known to assault liberal protestors, to “stand by” that adds serious weight to the charge of fascism.  

Regardless of the cost of the items in my shopping cart, I can’t accept the endangerment of immigrants, transgendered men and women, and anyone else Trump chooses, because they are political adversaries or the latest targets of reactionary media, to put in harm’s way. I also cannot approve of the abandonment of Ukraine and the weakening of international alliances that have helped the world avoid global conflict for 80 years. Appointing an unqualified television host with a history of alcohol abuse and credible accusations of sexual harassment to run the Department of Defense only makes matters worse.  

Another disqualifying appointment is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to Health and Human Services. Gasoline can run out of the local pumps with the ease and cost of water, and I’ll remain outraged that an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, who appears to use steroids and claims that a worm ate part of his brain, will dictate public health protocol for the next four years. Kennedy has also faced accusations of sexual assault. The Trump administration’s indifference toward the mistreatment of women, coupled with the Republican Party’s eradication of women’s reproductive rights, signals a brutality that moral citizens should reject.  

Trump’s violations of basic decency combine to form an attack on the United States. In nine years, Donald Trump has managed to coarsen our culture, making cruelty and belittlement of everyone, from women to people with disabilities, a perverse form of entertainment for his followers. He has also marketed deranged conspiracy theories, helping to undermine faith and trust in public service and institutions, all while placing liberal democracy in the crosshairs. Some of the moguls who surround him—Elon Musk, Marc Andreeson, and Peter Thiel—have expressed support for a techno-monarchy, arguing that democracy is too messy and inefficient for the modern world. 

Liberal democracy not only enabled the U.S. and the West to enjoy unprecedented success and stability for 80 years. It allowed our society to rally around freedom, equality, and peaceful conflict resolution. It even enabled oppressed and neglected groups of people to organize to correct its most vicious failures. The Civil Rights movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement are among the most inspiring examples of how liberal democracy succeeds while bolstering values essential to establishing and maintaining a healthy and happy civilization.  

In 2020, Biden narrowly prevailed over Trump by building a message around an appeal for the “soul of the nation.” Due to inflation and due to the biases that many voters hold against a woman of color, the same message from Kamala Harris did not resonate with equal force. However, the outcome of a close election doesn’t repeal values or rewrite the truth. 

There is a concerted effort to dismantle any discussion of values in American life. “Virtue signaling” and “woke” are two juvenile insults that reactionaries levy against anyone who attempts to articulate a principle of empathy, compassion, or anything beyond coldhearted self-interest and might makes right calculations.  

The day after Trump’s inauguration last week, Bishop Marian Edgar Budde put the larger question of values in perspective during her sermon at the Washington National Cathedral. With the president and vice president in the front row, she asked that they show mercy for gay and transgender children, and immigrants and their sons and daughters. Trump and Vance showed signs of disgust, while their supporters denounced Budde, predictably as, “woke.” Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia said Budde should be “added to the deportation list.”  

If a commander in chief is too fragile, too much of a snowflake to absorb an uncomfortable moment in a public forum, and if a minister requesting kindness to children is cause for discomfort, even contempt, then what we have is a values crisis that transcends policy. The ensuing fight will go far beyond the price of eggs.  

Now, I’d like another vodka tonic. 

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