US Politics

The campaign office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sits deep in the Bronx, across the street from a Chinese takeaway and 99-cent discount store, near enough to a railway bridge to hear the rumble of passing trains. The front window of the plain redbrick building is dominated by a big, smiling photo of the US congresswoman and notices that say: “We welcome all races, all sexual orientations, all gender identities, all religions, all abilities,” and “We say gay in the Bronx”. Inside, the words “¡AOC! ORGANIZING BASE” are printed in giant purple letters on a wall.Ocasio-Cortez, who at 29 became the youngest woman and youngest Latina to serve in the House of Representatives, is now 33, twice re-elected and comfortable in her political skin. She could hardly be described as an old hand but nor does she channel the shock of the new. She deploys social media with enviable authenticity; she grills congressional witnesses like a seasoned interrogator; she is an object of perverse fascination for Fox News and rightwing trolls; she has been around Washington long enough to draw charges of “co-option” and “selling out”.“AOC Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now,” ran a headline on New York magazine’s Intelligencer website in July. The article’s author, Freddie deBoer, argued that Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the Pod Save America podcast to announce her endorsement of Joe Biden for president in the 2024 election was her “last kiss-off to the radicals who had supported her, voted for her, donated to her campaign, and made her unusually famous in American politics”.The Ocasio-Cortez who sits for an interview with the Guardian is clearly aware of the leftist’s eternal dilemma – purity versus pragmatism – and determined to navigate it with care. She makes clear that Biden cannot take progressives for granted next year but urges Democrats to unite against the bigger threat of “fascism” in America. She condemns the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, but wants the US to be clear about its aims there and acknowledge “the anxieties of our history”.And after a summer of extreme heat and wild weather, she evidently worries that incrementalism will not be enough to address a climate crisis that is crying out for revolution.Ocasio-Cortez’s first legislative proposal after arriving on Capitol Hill was a Green New Deal that envisions a 10-year national mobilisation in the spirit of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal. That went nowhere, but last year Biden did sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law, touting its $369bn investment in clean energy and climate action as the biggest of any nation in history.However, the president also approved more oil and gas drilling permits in his first two years in office than his predecessor, Donald Trump, according to the Bureau of Land Management.It is, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges, a mixed picture. “What is difficult is that the climate crisis does not really care about the political complexities that we very much have to grapple with in our work,” she says, wearing a blue dress with floral shoulder pattern and sitting on a long wooden seat dotted with black and yellow cushions.“We can celebrate all of these policies that result in reductions but we also can’t erase them with increased oil and gas production. I’m very concerned about where our net math is on that because we can calculate, yes, we had an enormous amount of reductions that are represented in the Inflation Reduction Act, but this is not something that can be measured necessarily in dollars and cents.“It’s measured in carbon tonnes and in emissions and there’s a lot of funny math that happens in emissions when people talk about clean coal and how fracking somehow reduces our carbon emissions, when we know that it increases methane, which is far more powerful than CO2. While on one hand we can applaud the progress, on the other hand that in no way erases the the setbacks that we’ve had.”Ocasio-Cortez has joined Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Bernie Sanders in introducing a bill calling on the president to declare a national climate emergency to unleash every resource available. In early August, Biden claimed that he had “practically” declared such an emergency, but in reality he has not.Even so, the congresswoman says: “I believe he understands the scale of the crisis. I think what we are up against, which perhaps should be discussed more for those of us in the climate movement, is the geopolitics of this.”She goes on to describe a challenge that is bigger than one man or one nation. “The shift in energy represents a real threat to traditional power globally. As we shift away from non-renewables, we are talking about threatening power among some of the most influential institutions in the United States, in Latin America and globally. That is something that is going to have profound ramifications, all of which I don’t even believe we can fully appreciate yet.“I think that is what drives an enormous amount of blowback and resistance. When you look at, for example, the influence of the Koch brothers in US democracy, they basically have historically purchased enormous amounts of influence over the United States Senate. They are oil barons. These are fossil fuel companies that have exerted huge amounts of influence both in US democracy and in global interests.”Ocasio-Cortez also points to the power and influence of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and Middle Eastern nations such as the United Arab Emirates. “When we talk about the transition to renewable energies, wrapped inside that is a profound challenge to the current global order and that, I believe, is something that we’re going to have to contend with in our time.”For the left, the war in Ukraine is potentially more complicated. Putin’s invasion is by any measure an affront to morality. But US support for Ukraine has put critics of the military-industrial complex (the government spends about $900bn a year on defence, around 15% of the federal budget or 3.3% of the gross domestic product) in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Pentagon and endorsing a windfall for defence contractors. Longtime sceptics of US imperialism suddenly find themselves aligned with Republican hawks.Ocasio-Cortez articulates the uneasy accommodation: “It’s a legitimate conversation. I think on one hand, it is important for us to underscore what a dramatic threat to global order Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is and continues to be. We must defend democracy. We cannot allow this reversion into almost a late 19th-century imperial invasion order – it is so incredibly destabilising and dangerous. We must fight against that precedent. We must protect the democracy of Ukraine and the sovereignty of Ukraine 100%.“I think it’s also relevant to acknowledge that this is happening on the heels of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and how many of us were raised growing up saying this was going to be temporary, and it became a forever war. I believe that acknowledging the anxieties of our history of that is relevant.“Indicating to the people of this country what are we looking for, what are the levels of accountability, is not something that I think is an affront to democracy. I think the American people understandably want clarity about what our commitments are, to what extent they are. I think that is absolutely fair. We do not want a forever war and we also don’t want a return to a 19th-century imperial order either.”A self-described democratic socialist, Ocasio-Cortez has not been afraid to buck Democratic leadership, including by voting against a deal that Biden negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the debt ceiling. In 2020 she made the provocative comment that, in any other country, she and Biden would not be in the same party. Yet she has endorsed his re-election in 2024. Does that mean she has travelled towards him or he towards her?“I think it means that we have a US political system that’s not parliamentary, to my envy of many other countries,” she replies deftly. “There were so many people that were so up in arms about that comment, which I likely maintain to this day. But I find that parliamentary systems allow for a larger degree of honesty about the political coalitions that we must make. It’s not anything negative towards the president or towards anybody else.“It’s just a reality that we have very different political coalitions that constitute the Democratic party and being able to define that, I actually think grants us much power. It’s to say, listen, I am not defined by nor do I agree with all of the stances of this president, and I’m sure neither does he with mine.“But that does not mean that we are not in this together against the greater forces and questions of our time, and I think being able to demonstrate that ability to coalesce puts us in a position of far greater strength than, say, the Republican party who are at each other’s necks to the extent that they can’t even fund the government.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere has been no greater rallying point for Democrats of all stripes than Trump. As Paul Begala, a former White House adviser, has observed: “Nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars.” Ocasio-Cortez, a celebrated member of “the Squad” of House progressives, regards continued solidarity as imperative for as long as the quadruple-indicted former president menaces US democracy.She warns: “We should be candid about the fact that his chances as the nominee are still the strongest, probably out of the entire [Republican] field, and what that means. There’s very real danger here because with our electoral college, we know it doesn’t matter how many millions more votes you get. It’s about the smattering of states who just represent a few thousand votes’ difference between Trump and Biden.“We are not in 2020, and seeing what that turnout may look like is something that I’m sure keeps many of us up at night. But that being said, I know that this is why, to me, support of President Biden has been very important, because this question is larger than any policy differences. This is truly about having a strong front against fascism in the United States.”But will that be enough to motivate the progressive base in 2024? Trump has no serious primary challenger, but his approval rating remains mired in the 40s. A recent Emerson College polling survey found the Green party candidate Cornel West drawing support from 7% of independents, 8% of Black voters and 7% of Hispanics – key parts of the Biden coalition. In a hypothetical presidential election, the survey found 44% support Trump, 39% Biden, 4% West and 13% undecided.Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges that, after defeating Sanders in the 2020 primary, Biden made welcome efforts to include progressives on joint policy taskforces and in his administration. But she cautions that he must now make his case to the left all over again.“In 2020 the Biden campaign, after the nomination, did work very hard to unite the party. We’re very early still in the 2024 election cycle, but I do believe that it will be very important for President Biden’s team to once again engage in that coalition-building because it is not one and done.”Likewise, she continues, Latino voters must not be taken for granted. “Republicans have been very aggressive about building presence in Latino communities, and I believe that we as Democrats can double and triple down in our efforts to communicate in a way that’s not just translations of English material, but for us to manoeuvre ourselves almost as a separate, distinct campaign that occurs in Spanish or in many of the languages and communities that constitute the base of the Democratic party.”Ocasio-Cortez was part of an all-Latino congressional delegation that recently visited Brazil, Chile and Colombia to begin redefining US relations with Latin America after decades of interventions and distrust. The group met landless workers and homeless workers who have organised popular movements while also becoming a formidable force at the ballot box.She reflects: “I think sometimes in the US, especially on the left but even across the political spectrum, there is a struggle between more grassroots movements feeling as though engaging in electoralism is a form of selling out, or the compromises required in being part of a legislative system are somehow delegitimising to an authentic relationship to advancing the working class.“I think what we’ve seen from MST [Landless Workers Movement] and MTST [Homeless Workers Movement] is that there’s actually a way to do both, that you can preserve your integrity but also understand the importance of taking a pragmatic approach and being in the game when it comes to having electoral representation.”It takes one to know one. Ocasio-Cortez, a former restaurant server and bartender who in 2018 defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley for a seat that represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, faces the accusation from some that she has gone from outsider to insider, that she has become just a little too comfortable toeing the party line.She laughs. “I think I would be remiss to not mention that I’ve absolutely been subject to part of that. But just as we hear from some of these folks in Brazil, we are so underserved without having that presence in governance. To sacrifice all of that to a historically neoliberal order has not served us.“I think that when you see how even the Democratic party of the United States has changed in just the last five years alone, we’ve seen the fruits of being able to have a seat at the table … I believe that we would not have the legislation that we have today if it were not for that progressive representation in government.”Her commitment to the system, whatever its flaws, invites the question of whether Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most gifted communicators in politics today, will run for president herself some day. She does not say no. “For me personally, I’m very much just motivated by what the conditions of the present moment are and what we can do to help advance that cause.“I am not interested in running for anything – president or anything else including for re-election in my own seat – just running for running’s sake. It always comes down to the conditions of that moment and the possibilities of our time.”The first woman nominated for president by the Democratic party was Hillary Clinton in 2016. In Trump, she lost to a rival who gloried in shameless misogyny. But Ocasio-Cortez, whose gender, race, age and ideology make her as antithetical to Trump as can be imagined, refuses to be discouraged.“I do believe that the power of misogyny is very real and very potent in American politics,” she says. “But I’m very encouraged by what has happened since then. I believe women have emerged as a profound electoral force, especially with the overturning of Roe v Wade. Young women especially I think have been very animated and organised in this moment. I think we are in a moment of generational change.“We are absolutely contending with an extraordinary misogyny in our politics. The United States can go around and say what it says, but many, many, many other countries have elected female heads of state, whereas the United States has gone well over 200 years without one. Those barriers are very real, but I think the change of this time is also giving a lot of us a lot of hope.”Before getting back to work in an office of greens, purples, whites and yellows – and hundreds of colourful backpacks for constituents entering the new school year – she sums up: “Certainly the conditions have been such and the misogyny in our politics has been such that we’ve never been able to elect a woman president. But that doesn’t mean we never will.” More

In Wisconsin, two groups of activists are touring the state spreading seemingly opposing information about the state’s election system. One of them, led by a former Republican state senator, aims to restore trust in the administration and outcomes of elections, while the other rejects the results of the 2020 election and promotes debunked claims about widespread voter fraud in the state.Former state senator Kathy Bernier’s efforts form part of a multi-state push by the non-partisan group Keep Our Republic to educate the public about elections and democracy issues “before it is too late”, according to the organization’s website.The other coalition of activists, called North of 29 – a reference to Highway 29, which cuts a line across the state roughly between Green Bay and Minneapolis – spreads a dire message about elections: they aren’t secure, fraud is rampant, and the only way to ensure correct election results is to return to hand-counting ballots.It is difficult to ascertain the relative impacts of Bernier’s group, which debunks elections falsehoods, and North of 29, which spreads them. But confusion about the behind-the-scenes of elections and an appetite for explanations in Wisconsin, a swing state known for delivering razor-thin margins during statewide races, has created an environment for both groups to draw in voters.Groups similar to North of 29 appear to be active across the country. Efforts to spread unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud and promote a return to counting ballots by hand, driven largely by volunteers and local rightwing political groups, are aided by prominent figures such as the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell. In Shasta county, California, and more recently, Spalding county, Georgia, the spread of conspiracy theories resulted in local officials opting to hand-count ballots.Hannah Fried, the executive director of All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy group, said she is concerned about the trend. “Machine tabulation has become the gold standard,” said Fried. “What we don’t want to see is localities trying to implement hand-counting before machine tabulation, based on conspiracy theories.”The available research, including a 2018 study focusing on voting in Wisconsin, overwhelmingly shows voting machines tally votes much faster and more accurately than a human could by hand.The groups pushing to reinstate hand-counting in Wisconsin and elsewhere formed in the wake of the 2020 election. Stephanie Forrer-Harbridge, who founded North of 29 in 2020, said the idea came to her after she and her husband watched in disbelief as the election results came in on TV, with Trump losing Wisconsin. “We were like, ‘What’s going on?’” she said.After election day, she watched with interest as figures like Lindell and Douglas Frank, a chemist and former math teacher, took Trump’s unfounded allegations that the election was stolen and claimed to substantiate them using data. One of Frank’s hallmark findings suggests that similar voter registration patterns in counties across Michigan proved the existence of an “algorithm” used to steal the election. Frank applies this assertion, which PolitiFact has debunked in depth, to states across the country.Frank’s findings confirmed Forrer-Harbridge’s suspicion that something nefarious had gone on during the 2020 election, and inspired her to act. “I reached out to Dr Frank, and I’m like, ‘We need help,’” she said.Frank agreed to come to Wisconsin to speak with residents who had questions about the results of the 2020 election, and election integrity generally. “I literally cried when he said he’d come,” Forrer-Harbridge said.The results of the 2020 election in Wisconsin have been affirmed repeatedly by recounts, investigations and surveys, including a review by a conservative group that called for a revision of certain pandemic-era policies implemented by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, but found no evidence of widespread fraud. But misinformation and claims that Wisconsin’s elections are compromised and vulnerable to massive fraud have continued to circulate, largely driven by politicians and prominent media figures repeating the false claims.Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin and a misinformation researcher, attributes the persistence of elections-related falsehoods to political polarization and the willingness of bad-faith actors to endorse a lie for political gain. “If you trust someone and think they should be the leader of the free world and they tell you, ‘you were lied to and this [election] was stolen,’ it’s not surprising that some people believe that,” Wagner said.Since 2020, Frank has crisscrossed the country speaking about his theory of election fraud and his prescriptions to curb it, visiting Wisconsin regularly, where he speaks at town hall-style events in communities around the state. One event in Barron county, in the north-west of the state, drew hundreds of attendees on 28 July.Invites to the event, billed as a second amendment rally, were shared online by groups including the Barron county Republican party. Dave Graf, a resident of Barron county, noticed one flyer for the event advertised a lineup of unfamiliar speakers, including Frank. (Also featured: “new age entertainment”, “free beer”, and “hourly drawings for firearms”.)Graf was interested.After serving for 20 years in the US military as a mental health counselor, Graf has spent the first years of his retirement informally tracking the rise of extremism in his community. He had long worried that “white nationalism, xenophobic nationalism, was something that was essentially going unchecked in the military” and was dismayed to find that an ocean away, friends from his home town were beginning to embrace a similar worldview.Most people at the event, which he and other attendees estimated drew more than 500 people, seemed more interested in the gun raffle than the lineup of speakers. But one point, raised by Frank, concerned him.Frank suggests that supporters canvass the area, going door to door to see if their voter data checks out in person, Graf said. “We’re an open-carry, second amendment-loving place where this rough-looking group of people may be knocking on doors and intimidating folks.”Forrer-Harbridge confirmed that North of 29 trains canvassers to search for election fraud, but vehemently denied that the efforts constituted voter intimidation. “We don’t care who you want to vote for,” said Forrer-Harbridge. “We want to make sure it counts, and that’s what our right is as citizens.”Forrer-Harbridge said she has trained “team leads” in more than 20 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties to knock doors in search of fraud.Door-to-door canvassing in search of voter fraud is not a new concept. One group, called US Election Integrity Plan, has been sued in a federal court in Colorado for allegedly violating the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act by going “door-to-door around Colorado to intimidate voters.Frank and Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.When I asked Bernier, the Wisconsin leader of Keep Our Republic, whether she was concerned about groups like North of 29, she shrugged and said she didn’t pay them too much attention. “I try not to keep track of them because they are so irrelevant, in my mind,” she said.Instead, Bernier said she focuses on voters who have questions about the electoral process but aren’t invested in the idea that the 2020 election was rife with fraud.The goal, Bernier said, “is to educate the electorate on our electoral system and its checks and balances, to assure people that when the election results are in, they are factual and you can count on that”. Her plan involves traveling across the state over the next year, coordinating with municipal and county clerks to present the nitty-gritty, sometimes boring details of elections administration to demystify the process for voters.Before she was elected to the state assembly in 2010, Bernier served for a decade as the Chippewa county clerk – a role that includes administering elections in the county. Later, as a lawmaker, Bernier chaired numerous elections committees in the assembly and senate. Allegations of rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election rankled her, and she earned a reputation for speaking out against the Republican party on the issue.Bernier stressed the importance of demonstrating nonpartisanship to voters who may have supported Trump but aren’t sure where they land on claims of rampant voter fraud. She says her background as a conservative has helped her establish a rapport with some voters.Bernier’s not alone in her efforts. County clerks and municipal clerks – the people who make elections run – work year round to instill a sense of faith in the electoral process.Nevertheless, groups like North of 29 continue to promote misinformation and give platforms to the people actively spreading it. More

Fifty years on, the wounds left in Chilean society by the coup of 11 September 1973 are still very much open. Justice is a long way from being served, secrets remain untold, and the bodies of many of the victims are yet to be found.Last Wednesday, the government announced a new national initiative to find the remains of 1,162 Chileans who vanished under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and remain unaccounted for. In most cases, the best their families can hope for are fragments or traces of DNA.After ousting a democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, Pinochet rounded up opponents, social activists and students in Santiago’s national stadium and other makeshift detention centres, where nearly 30,000 were tortured and more than 2,200 were executed.Allende’s body was pulled out of the bombed wreckage of the presidential palace, La Moneda. He is generally thought to have killed himself rather than be captured by soldiers loyal to Pinochet, the armed forces commander he had appointed a few weeks earlier.Almost 1,500 others simply disappeared, and since the end of the junta in 1990, only 307 have been identified and their remains returned to their families. Anticipating the reckoning to come, Pinochet had ordered the bodies of the executed to be dug up and dumped at sea, or into the crater of a volcano. Investigators now hope that modern technology might help pinpoint massacre and temporary burial sites that might still yield vestiges of the dead.Ariel Dorfman had been working as a cultural and press adviser in La Moneda, and was lucky to survive. Most of Allende’s staff were executed in the first days after the coup.“This was a tragedy for Chile, for Latin America and for the world, because we were trying to open a way to a more just, radical society without violence,” Dorfman, a novelist, playwright and academic, told the Observer.Trials are under way in a last-gasp effort at accountability before the perpetrators die of old age. On Monday, seven former soldiers aged between 73 and 85 were finally jailed after the criminal chamber of the Chilean supreme court upheld their convictions for the murder of Victor Jara, a celebrated folk singer and Allende supporter who was tortured and then shot 44 times.Many of the details of the 1973 coup and the ensuing dictatorship remain unknown. Pinochet and the junta were efficient when it came to destroying evidence and the US has been grudging in declassifying its own records, which have emerged in a dribble over the years. Under pressure from Chile’s current president, Gabriel Boric – a 37-year-old former student activist – and from progressive Washington Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US has declassified two new documents: presidential intelligence briefings given to Richard Nixon on the day of the coup and three days earlier.It was hard to understand why they had been withheld for so long. They confirmed what had already been generally established: that the CIA had not directly stage-managed the 11 September coup. The presidential daily brief for 8 September contains reports of a plot by naval officers, but adds: “There is no evidence of a tri-service coup plan.”“Should hotheads in the navy act in the belief they will automatically receive support from the other services, they could find themselves isolated,” the intelligence briefer told Nixon.Even on the day of the coup itself, Nixon was told that, although some army units appeared to have joined the effort, “they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that would capitalise on the widespread civilian opposition”.Jack Devine, who was serving as a CIA clandestine officer in Chile in 1973, was eating lunch in an Italian restaurant in Santiago on 9 September when he got a message to call home. It was his wife, who told him a coup was coming.One of Devine’s sources, a businessman and former naval officer, was leaving the country and had been unable to find the CIA man, so had gone to his house and told Mrs Devine to pass on his tipoff: “The military has decided to move. It is going to happen on September 11.”Devine told the Observer: “That is the first clear sign that a coup was coming, just a couple of days ahead of time. We were caught by surprise. That’s the first evidence that something was coming. And many of the people still didn’t believe it in Washington and the CIA.”There is no question, however, that the US had helped set the stage for the military takeover. From the time of Allende’s election on 4 September 1970 at the head of the Popular Unity alliance, the White House, led by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, began plotting to get rid of him.The CIA planned a putsch the following month, before Allende could even hold his inauguration. US spies found willing officers and supplied them with guns, cash and guarantees of US support for a military government. The plot led to the murder of the commander-in-chief, René Schneider, who had stood by the incoming president, but it fell short of toppling Allende when plotters in the military pulled out.In a telephone conversation on 23 October, Kissinger told Nixon that there had been “a turn for the worse”.“The next move should have been a government takeover, but that hasn’t happened,” he said, describing the Chilean military as “a pretty incompetent bunch”.“They’re out of practice,” Nixon replied.After the failure of the 1970 coup, Devine said, “Nixon sent out specific instructions to the CIA that there be no more coup plotting.” The US administration focused instead on undermining the Allende government, which had been elected by a slender margin and was facing substantial internal opposition. Washington coordinated with its allies in Latin America to block Chile’s access to international finance, persuaded US companies to leave Chile, manipulated the global price of copper, Chile’s principal export, and helped foment strikes within the country.The Nixon administration was also quick to throw its support behind the junta. When shocked US diplomats sent reports of the slaughter that had followed the coup, Kissinger told his aides: “I think we should understand our policy – that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was.”Pinochet found another powerful friend on the world stage when Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain in 1979. She restored Chile’s export credits and dropped an arms embargo on the regime, selling it jet fighters and training its troops.A succession of Tory ministers visited Chile, admiring the high economic growth rate and the wholehearted adoption of the absolutist monetary policy extolled by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. A group of Chilean economists who had studied there, known as the Chicago Boys, took top positions in Pinochet’s government, and the country became a test case for the policies of privatisation, deregulation and tight control of the money supply. Complicating social factors, such as trade unions and popular resistance, had been taken out of the picture.“The Chilean coup was a triumph of the anti-communist movement in the United States and Latin America. You can’t get around the fact that it led to the defeat of democratic and progressive governments all over the region,” said John Dinges, who lived through the violent early years of the Pinochet era as one of the few US journalists to remain in the country after the coup.“There was a youth-oriented revolutionary movement, which was sometimes quite extreme, advocating armed struggle, and that was also physically eliminated. So the violence was successful,” Dinges, the author of two books on the Pinochet regime, said. “More than 80% of the population of Latin America was under rightwing military dictatorships by the end of 1976.”The Pinochet regime coordinated with fellow military-run governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to eliminate leftwingers and social activists in Operation Condor, a concerted slaughter across the region. It had US support, in the form of technical support, training and military aid, through the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, all in the name of fighting communism.The coup’s lasting legacy around the world has been defined mostly by the international backlash to its shocking cruelty. It galvanised the human rights movement in Europe and the US. In Washington, the US’s involvement shocked politicians such as Senator Frank Church, who oversaw the first congressional hearings on the CIA’s covert activities which ultimately led to constraints on its future operations.The martyrdom of Allende and his experiment in democratic socialism inspired a generation of leftwing political activists around the world.The record of the Allende government is complicated. The Popular Unity alliance never commanded a parliamentary majority and was deeply split. Rapid nationalisation and blanket pay rises for workers brought with them mismanagement of state enterprises and hyperinflation. But because it was violently cut short, many different myths grew up around what might have been.“It became like a Chilean mirror. People read into Chile what they wanted to see,” said Tanya Harmer, associate professor in Latin American international history at the London School of Economics.“Across the world, the diverse groups on the left learned the lessons they wanted to learn from the coup. Social democrats viewed it as constitutional democracy overthrown, so it was about the rule of law. The more radical left read it as evidence that you could never have a revolution without an armed struggle.”Dorfman argues the Allende government and its destruction changed the course of progressive politics. “There were lessons to be learned and they have endured: the need for vast coalitions to effect that structural change, and the way in which Chile’s suffering created a consciousness about human rights violations,” said Dorfman, who has written an assessment of the Allende legacy in the New York Review of Books, and a novel about Allende’s death, The Suicide Museum.Inside Chile, the coup’s legacy is still being fought over. A recent Mori poll found only 42% of Chileans thought it had destroyed democracy, compared with 36% who said it had saved the country from Marxism.Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, who has led the pressure on the US government to declassify its documents on the coup, warned that denialism about the atrocities of the Pinochet era was strengthening, along with the rise of the far right.“It is a Rosetta Stone for the discussion over the threat of authoritarianism versus the sanctity of democracy,” said Kornbluh, who is the author of a book based on the documents declassified so far, The Pinochet File. “And Chile is having that debate about its past because it’s dealing with this threat right now – and a number of other countries including the US, and countries in Europe, are facing the same issue.“The coup in Chile was really the repression of a lot of hopes and dreams around the world, and I think that dynamic still resonates and is still relevant today.” More

Robert P Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), holds a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Seminary and a doctorate in religion from Emory University. He is a son of the south, pained by the nexus between Christianity and slavery. In White Too Long, published in 2020, he wrote of church stained-glass windows that paid homage to Confederate generals, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The deadly shooting at a Dollar General in Florida last week was just one more reminder that the past is always with us.In his new book, Jones draws a straight line between religion and European migration to North America and slavery and the subjugation of Indigenous people. He identifies and repeatedly criticizes the “doctrine of discovery”, as prime culprit and enabler.Enunciated in 15th-century papal decrees, adopted in 1823 as part of US common law through the supreme court case Johnson v M’Intosh, the discovery doctrine offered theological and legal justification for conquest and its aftermath. Jones extensively quotes Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.“In essence, the doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights over the inhabitants without knowledge or consent of the indigenous peoples,” Miller wrote, in 2012.Jones adds: “Despite its near-total absence from white educational curricula … Native American scholars have been highlighting the impact of the doctrine of discovery for at least half a century.”He meticulously details events that further scar US history. It is a first-rate chronicle of horror. Jones lays out the lynchings of three Black circus workers in Minnesota, in 1920, and of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. He recounts the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the destruction of “Black Wall Street” and the deaths of 300 African Americans.He also delves in detail into the US government-sanctioned execution of 38 Dakota males in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862. It remains the single largest event of its kind in US history. Abraham Lincoln played a central role.On the page, Jones lays out his pathway to a “shared future”. He advocates “reparations” for the descendants of enslaved Black people and argues for “restitution” to Native Americans.“This is a tall order,” he acknowledges. But he remains undeterred, writing: “We cannot shrink before the difficulty of the task … the creativity of our solutions is directly proportional to, and a measure of, the strength of our convictions.”With a significant exception – support from three-quarters of African Americans – the public holds a negative view of reparations, according to a 2021 survey. Nearly 70% are opposed, including 80% of whites, 65% of Asians, 58% of Hispanics and 49% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners. That’s a lot of hearts and minds to persuade.This fall, the Democratic-dominated California legislature will consider a reparations plan. After the US supreme court rejection of race-based affirmative action, and a similar rejection by Californians in 2020, the legislature may want to tread lightly.Jones can be swept away by his convictions. In 2016, in The End of White Christian America, he wrote an “obituary” and recited a “benediction” for what he perceived as the passing of white Protestantism. To say the least, he jumped the gun.Donald Trump’s election showed that primacy lost is not the same as extinction. Even in its lessened state and amid the rise of religious “nones”, Christianity remains a force in American life. As mainstream Protestantism slides and younger evangelicals leave the fold, the landscape of Sunday morning is being reshaped.“American megachurches are thriving by poaching flocks,” an Economist headline blared. “Denominations are out. Brand identity and good vibes are in.” There is plenty to like about community and ice cream. Doctrinal orthodoxies have not fared well in the marketplace of US religion.Jones has refused to fully quit “defund the police”, the protest slogan that flourished after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in May 2020 but which Republicans predictably seized on to depict Democrats as soft on crime. Jones has also tweaked James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, for emphasizing class over race.“We can’t continue to paper over racial injustice with economic policy,” Jones wrote in 2021, in the aftermath of the Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in the Virginia governor’s race. Riffing off Carville’s famous 1992 campaign message for Bill Clinton, about the economy, Jones delivered his own: “‘It’s the culture, stupid’ – or less euphemistically, ‘It’s the white supremacy, stupid’ – must be the new mantra of political analysts today.”That’s a lousy bumper-sticker. Besides that, the data reflects that inflation, jobs, the economy and healthcare are the most pressing priorities for American voters. Only 6% place discrimination top of their list of concerns. By the numbers, it looks like Carville got it right.Jones also implicitly criticized Carville for calling the “defund the police” movement “lunacy”, writing: “I agree with Carville that ‘defund the police’ has been unhelpful. It’s neither a savvy political slogan nor an accurate depiction of what most police reform advocates actually want to do.”Not a “savvy political slogan” and “unhelpful” are understatements. Last year, after Republicans took back the US House, James Clyburn of South Carolina, a member of Democratic leadership, put it this way: “‘Defund the police’ is killing our party and we’ve got to stop it.”New York City and San Francisco have experienced major exoduses. Safe streets and thriving tax bases are necessities for vibrant urban centers. Heading for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are locked in polling dead heats. Despite his many indictments, Trump retains traction. Racial resentments helped propel him into the White House in 2016. They may do so again.
The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

Two members of the far-right Proud Boys militia group who took part in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol with the intention of keeping Donald Trump in the White House were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on Friday.Ethan Nordean, described by prosecutors as a leader of the extremist group, received an 18-year sentence for crimes that included seditious conspiracy, committed when thousands of Trump supporters overran the Capitol building.Dominic Pezzola, who attacked a police officer and was filmed using the officer’s shield to smash a window, got 10 years from the federal judge Timothy Kelly in Washington DC, following his conviction in May for assault and obstructing an official proceeding.Prosecutors had sought terms of 27 and 20 years, respectively, for Nordean and Pezzola.The pair, described by prosecutors as “foot soldiers of the right [who] aimed to keep their leader in power”, were part of a mob seeking to disrupt the certification by a joint session of Congress of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides.Kelly reportedly told Nordean that he wished there was an “alternative history” where he did something other than lead the Proud Boys, complimenting him as a smart and articulate man. Nordean – of Auburn, Washington – said: “I would like to apologize for my lack of leadership that day,” according to Jordan Fischer of the WUSA television news outlet.Sentencing Pezzola, Kelly said: “You were the one who smashed that window and let people begin to stream into that Capitol building and threaten the lives of our lawmakers. It’s not something I would have ever dreamed I would have seen in our country.”Pezzola told the court he was “a changed and humbled man”, his “sorrow and regret … unimaginable”.After Kelly left the courtroom and as US marshals led him away, Pezzola smiled, raised his hand and shouted: “Trump won,” according to a report from local news station WUSA.His sentence was among the lengthiest handed down to those convicted of offences linked to the Capitol attack, in which 140 police officers were injured.Pezzola, of Rochester, New York, posted to social media a profanity-laced video of himself inside the Capitol, smoking a cigar.On Thursday, Judge Kelly sentenced the former Proud Boys organizer Joseph Biggs, a former US army captain, to 17 years behind bars, and handed a 15-year sentence to Zachary Rehl, another leader.Like Nordean, both were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a civil war-era offense that is rarely brought. The sentences were the second- and third-longest stemming from the attack.Two other members of the group, including its former leader Enrique Tarrio, are scheduled to be sentenced next week, with prosecutors calling for a 33-year sentence.More than 1,100 people have been charged with federal crimes for their involvement in the riot and more than 600 have been convicted and sentenced. The most severe prison term yet given to a January 6 rioter, 18 years, was to the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, in May, also for seditious conspiracy.In their original filing to the court, prosecutors claimed Pezzola and Nordean were “trusted lieutenants” of Tarrio, his “boots on the ground” on the day of the attack.“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” they wrote. “The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.”Trump lost the 2020 election by more than 7m votes and conclusively in the electoral college but falsely claimed the election was stolen. Currently the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, he faces 17 federal and state criminal charges arising from his attempt to cling onto power. Trump also faces 74 criminal charges on other matters.They include allegations he incited the 6 January riot by summoning his extremist supporters to a rally at the Capitol in a tweet that read: “Be there, will be wild”.On Thursday, Rehl, a former US marine, sobbed as his sentence was handed down. He told Kelly: “For what it’s worth, I stand here today and say that I am done with all of it. I am done with politics; I am done peddling lies for other people who don’t care about me.”Norman Pattis, attorney for Rehl and Biggs, blamed Trump for the plight of his clients, whom he said were “given good reason by the highest official in the land” to question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.“What they’re guilty of is believing the president who said the election was stolen from him,” he said. More

A public feud has broken out between the US’s leading pro-Israel lobby groups over who represents the true interests of the Jewish state in Washington under the most rightwing government in its history.The hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) has called its smaller and more liberal rival, J Street, a “grave threat” to Israel’s security and accused it of endorsing the country’s “most virulent critics” in Congress.J Street has responded by portraying Aipac as a front for Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist coalition, while accusing it of failing to support unprecedented Israeli public protests against an undemocratic power grab by the government.The vitriolic dispute reflects a deepening divide among American Jews about what it is to be pro-Israel. But it also comes as Aipac’s once-unchallenged influence in Washington has been diminished by its unwavering backing for Netanyahu over the past decade or more, including siding with the Israeli leader against President Barack Obama, and by growing support for the Palestinian cause within the Democratic party as Israel further entrenches its occupation.Aipac’s standing was also damaged when, for the first time in its history, it broke with its claim to be bipartisan last year and began directly funding political campaigns against critics of Israeli government policies. It was accused of being “morally bankrupt” for endorsing Republican members of Congress who tried to block President Biden’s presidential election victory.At the heart of the dispute is Aipac’s position that support for Israel means virtually unquestioned backing for whatever government is in power. J Street argues that support for Israel requires standing for the country’s broader interests, including an end to occupation, even when that is in opposition to the policies of a particular administration in Jerusalem.As the two lobby groups prepare to face off by pouring millions of dollars into backing rival candidates in next year’s congressional elections, Aipac sent its donors a letter attacking J Street’s policies such as imposing conditions on the US’s $3.8bn a year in military aid to Israel to prevent it being used to annex Palestinian territory, expand Jewish settlements or other actions to entrench occupation. J Street endorsed the Democratic congresswoman Betty McCollum’s 2021 bill to place similar conditions on US aid.“Today, one of the gravest threats to American support for Israel’s security comes from an organization that outrageously calls itself pro-Israel,” Aipac said in the letter.“J Street’s efforts fracture the bipartisan consensus for Israel and give its radical opponents in Congress a veneer of legitimacy from an allegedly ‘pro-Israel’ group. This is a clear and present threat to American support for the Jewish state.”J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, fired back in a series of tweets.“Sadly, over time, Aipac has embraced an increasingly distorted vision of what it means to be ‘pro-Israel’ – one more aligned with the goals of the Netanyahu government and the American right than with the Jewish, democratic values of most Jewish Americans (+ Israelis themselves),” he wrote.“There’s no room for genuine concern over eroding democracy, endless settlements, racist rhetoric and the growing toll of maintaining a permanent, unjust, undemocratic occupation.”Aipac’s attack in part reflects a growing concern within the Israeli government that demands by J Street and others for the US government to take a stronger stand to end the occupation will gain wider traction in Washington.The dispute has spilled over to Israel itself.The liberal Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz two weeks ago described Aipac as “the pro-Netanyahu, anti-Israel lobby” and accused the group of flying in 24 Democratic members of Congress “so that Netanyahu could mollify them with lies”.“Effectively, the organization has become an operational wing of Netanyahu’s far-right government, one that peddles a false image of a liberal Israel in the United States and sells illusions to members of Congress,” it said.The leaders of Israel’s pro-democracy movement, which has led months of mass protests against the government’s moves to weaken the power of the judiciary, accused Aipac of blocking the visiting Democratic members of Congress from meeting the protesters.“It is about time Aipac realizes that there are no longer any buyers for the fake picture of Israel it’s trying to sell,” said the authors, who included the former deputy head of Israel’s national security council and former officials in the prime minister’s office.“Aipac is trying to offer an alternative reality and is effectively turning from a pro-Israel organization to one that promotes the anti-democratic overhaul and the de facto annexation of the West Bank, led by Netanyahu and aided by the most extreme, racist and violent elements of the Israeli far right.” More

The White House condemned the “extreme” and “hardcore fringe” of the Republican party after one high-profile, hardcore extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, said she would not vote to fund the government this month without an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden.Without a new spending measure, government funding will run out on 30 September, with federal workers furloughed and agencies shuttered.In a statement on Thursday night, the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said: “The last thing the American people deserve is for extreme House members to trigger a government shutdown that hurts our economy, undermines our disaster preparedness, and forces our troops to work without guaranteed pay.”Nodding to the May deal to raise the debt ceiling, Bates said House Republicans “already made a promise to the American public about government funding, and it would be a shame for them to break their word and fail the country because they caved to the hardcore fringe of their party”.Greene is a conspiracy theorist and controversialist who has said she is “on a list” to become running mate to Donald Trump if he is the Republican presidential nominee.Speaking in Georgia, she said she wanted funding withheld from Jack Smith, the special counsel who has brought 44 of 91 criminal charges against Trump. She also said she wanted to fire David Weiss, the special counsel appointed under the Trump administration investigating Hunter Biden, the president’s son and the nexus of unproven corruption allegations fueling the march to impeachment.“We have to rein in the FBI,” Greene told constituents. “I will not vote for money to go towards those things.“I will be happy to work with all my colleagues. I will work with the speaker of the House. I will work with everyone. But I will not fund those things.”Other hard-right Republicans have threatened to vote against government funding. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker who has only a five-seat majority, has indicated he will approve an impeachment inquiry when the House comes back this month.“If we shut down, all the government shuts down – investigation and everything else,” McCarthy told Fox News last weekend, calling impeachment a “natural step forward” from current investigations.Trump was impeached twice by House Democrats, first for seeking political dirt in Ukraine, then for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress. Senate Republicans acquitted him both times.As defined by the Brookings Institution, a government shutdown occurs when “Congress fails to enact the 12 annual appropriation bills [and] federal agencies must cease all non-essential functions until Congress acts”.Two shutdowns occurred under Trump, the first in January 2018, the second a year later, both resulting from fights over immigration. The first was brief but the second lasted 35 days, the longest in US history. The Congressional Budget Office said it cost about $5bn.Now, the White House wants a stopgap measure. On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said: “It is clear that a short-term continuing resolution will be needed next month.”The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said: “This is something that Congress can do. They can prevent a government shutdown. They need to prevent a government shutdown.”Also on Thursday, as Florida and other southern states assessed damage caused by Hurricane Idalia, the White House requested an extra $4bn to help pay for relief efforts after a number of climate-related disasters.In early August, Biden asked Congress to approve about $40bn in additional spending, including $24bn to support Ukraine in its war with Russia and other international needs and $12bn for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) disaster relief fund.On Thursday, citing wildfire disasters in Hawaii and Louisiana as well as hurricane-related damage in Florida, an OMB spokesperson said the White House now needed $16bn for disaster relief.“The president has been clear that were going to stand with communities across the nation as they recover from disasters for as long as it takes, and the administration is committed to working with Congress to ensure funding for the [disaster relief fund] is sufficient for recovery needs,” the spokesperson said.In his statement rebuking Greene, Bates, the White House spokesperson, cited the need to fund “high-stakes needs Americans care about deeply – like fighting fentanyl trafficking, protecting our national security, and funding Fema”.Reuters contributed reporting More