US Politics

A jail in Washington DC has become the latest focal point of the US culture wars after a congressional delegation led by the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene visited defendants charged in 2021’s deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and championed them as “political prisoners”.Greene high-fived the detainees and shook their hands, according to the Associated Press. As the tour group was leaving, the defendants chanted “Let’s go Brandon!”, an offensive phrase denigrating Democratic president Joe Biden.Greene was joined by fellow far-right Republican members of the House oversight committee during a two-hour tour of the DC jail on Friday. The group included extremist Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who embraced Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead by police as she participated in the Capitol riot, NBC News reported.This is at least the second visit that Greene has made in a campaign to reframe the incarcerated January 6 rioters from alleged violent insurrectionists into martyrs of the far-right cause. This time, however, her stunt was joined by Democratic members of the oversight committee who attended the tour so that they could hold their Republican peers to account, they said.“We won’t let Marjorie Taylor Greene and these … extremists tell lies about the insurrectionists and their attack on our democracy,” one of the Democratic visitors, Robert Garcia of California, said before the tour began.In a later interview with MSNBC, Garcia said he had seen Greene and Boebert and other Republican delegates treat the January 6 defendants “like celebrities, they were interacting with them, they were patting them on the back. It was completely shameful to see – these were people who tried to overthrow our government and they were being treated like rock stars and heroes.”A second Democratic representative, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, drew on her previous experience as a public defender to assess the relative merits of the conditions in which the prisoners were being held. She said that what she saw was far preferable to routine conditions in state lockups in Texas or Arkansas.“Listen, this is so much different and so much better. I don’t think the January 6ers would want to go the other way,” she was reported to say by the New York Times.The idea that the January 6 defendants being held in DC are patriotic political prisoners appears to have first emerged as a marketing message to raise money for the inmates’ legal fees. Within weeks of their detention, online crowdfunding sites had been set up for the prisoners and their families.One of the sites, American Gulag, was created by the founder of the conspiracy theory outlet Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft. It describes the rioters as “good Americans whose only crime was being invited into a political building”. It has so far raised almost $180,000.The celebration of the rioters as political prisoners then appears to have moved into the Republican mainstream. Donald Trump has called the prosecution of those who participated in the insurrection – which was inspired by his own lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – “persecution of political prisoners”.At the first official rally of his 2024 White House campaign, the former president played a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner sung by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which consists of men convicted for their participation in the Capitol attack. It reached the top of the iTunes chart.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn investigation by Just Security has found that there are 20 Capitol attack inmates still being held in the DC jail, out of a total of about 1,000 who have been arrested over the insurrection. Of those, 17 have been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers during the attack.Of the remaining three, two are members of the extremist militias the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and one has already been convicted.The 20 who have been lionized by Greene as political prisoners include Thomas Ballard, who has been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers with a baton, and Christopher Quaglin, a member of the Proud Boys who is accused of pepper-spraying officers.Garcia, speaking for the Democratic members of the jail delegation, observed that the prisoners were being housed in a newer part of the institution where conditions were among the best in an institution whose standards have drawn criticism. “They were outside, they each had tablets where they can communicate, watch movies, text their families, talk to their attorneys,” he said.Greene has rebutted the description, claiming that the inmates had been made to clean and repaint the prison before the congressional visit to make it look good. She ridiculed the Democrats, saying: “Either they like jails … or are easily fooled by fresh paint.” More

John Fetterman is expected to return to office soon after spending the last five-plus weeks in a hospital receiving treatment for mental depression, a spokesperson has said, though the staffer stopped short of offering an exact timeline.“John will be out soon. Over a week but soon,” Joe Calvello, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania senator, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in an article published on Friday. Saying that the team caring for Fetterman at Washington DC’s Walter Reed hospital was “amazing”, Calvello added: “Recovery is going really well.”The Inquirer’s report noted that a hospital stay of more than five weeks is a relatively long time to be receiving inpatient care for depression. But, the Inquirer report added, a Fetterman aide said the lengthy stay was “about John getting the care he needs and not rushing this”.“Six weeks is a grain of sand in [the] six-year term” to which Fetterman was elected, the aide said, according to the Inquirer. “He’s doing what he needs to do.”A CNN journalist had reported being told earlier in March by a source close to Fetterman that the longer hospital stay resulted from doctors taking extra care to get the senator’s “medication balance exactly right”.A rising star among Democrats, Fetterman checked into Reed to be treated for clinical depression on 15 February 2023. That stay started a week after he was hospitalized for feeling light-headed. He had also suffered a stroke while campaigning last year.The 53-year-old former mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and ex-state lieutenant governor in November flipped a Republican-held Senate seat by defeating celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Fetterman’s victory over his opponent, who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump, gave the Democrats control of the Senate, 51 seats to 49.Republicans had sought to use Fetterman’s series of health battles as evidence that he was not fit to take office. But others hailed Fetterman’s choice to disclose that he had sought treatment for depression, saying it could encourage people who need help but have been reluctant to get it.Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, published a note on Twitter on 10 March which thanked “everyone who’s shared their own struggles with us in the past few weeks”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGisele Barreto Fetterman’s tweet also contained a picture of her, her husband and their children visiting in the hospital.“We can do hard things when we do them together,” the tweet said. Saying she was proud of her husband and their children, her tweet concluded: “It gets better.” More

Donald Trump’s lawyer has admitted that the former president based his incendiary and unfounded remarks about his imminent arrest last week on mere speculation prompted by “rumours”.Trump ignited a week of political, media and law enforcement frenzy when he announced on his social media platform Truth Social that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday in the New York criminal investigation relating to hush money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. Security was stepped up at the Manhattan courthouse and around the district attorney leading the case, Alvin Bragg, amid fears of renewed protests by Trump supporters, some of whom staged the deadly attack at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Now Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, has admitted that his client ignited the firestorm based on nothing more than conjecture. Speaking on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, he denied that Trump had invented the claim that he was facing imminent arrest only to reveal the flimsy basis of the remarks.“He didn’t make it up, he was reacting to a lot of leaks coming out of the district attorney’s office,” Tacopina said. “And then there was of course a lot of rumours regarding the arraignment being the next day. So I think he just assumed, based on those leaks, that was what was going to happen.”The Daniels hush money case appears to be the most advanced of the multiple legal threats currently bearing down on Trump. While no charges were brought last week, the grand jury could reconvene Monday with an arraignment possible as early as the end of the day.Trump has placed the Manhattan case at the front and centre of his 2024 presidential bid. He has been furiously fundraising on the back of what he has called the “witch-hunt” against him, bombarding his supporters with a blitzkrieg of begging emails.On Saturday night he devoted much of the first big rally of his 2024 campaign to raging against “prosecutorial misconduct by radical left maniacs”. The event was located – some say strategically – in Waco, Texas, scene of the 1993 siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians cult in which 76 people died.In his Meet the Press interview, Tacopina declined either to defend or condemn Trump’s rhetoric, insisting he was a lawyer – not a “social media consultant”. The lawyer denounced the Manhattan prosecution as being politically motivated and said that his client was being unfairly hounded for having made a personal payment to protect his family from Daniels’ false claims of an affair.“This was a personal civil settlement that’s done every day in New York City,” Tacopina said. “This had nothing to do with campaign finance.”The $130,000 payment to Daniels came in the dying days of the 2016 presidential election as the adult film star was about to go public with allegations of a sexual encounter with Trump which he has denied. Michael Cohen, Trump’s then fixer who made the initial payment, pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws involving the hush money as well as other tax fraud charges, and served time in prison.Cohen said he had made the payment at Trump’s direction.Trump has stoked fears of renewed violence by deriding Bragg on social media in virulent and racist terms, calling the Black prosecutor a “Soros-backed animal” – a reference to the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros – and accusing him of doing the work of “anarchists and the devil”.Trump has also predicted “potential death and destruction” were he to be charged. That inflammatory statement prompted Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, to warn that “if he keeps it up it’s going to get someone killed”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate intelligence committee, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that he had been briefed by the FBI that the agency was prepared for any protests. He called Trump’s rhetoric “outrageous”, accusing the former president of having “very little moral compass”.The senator added: “If he spurs on additional violence, it would be one further stain on his already checkered reputation.”Senior Democrats have expressed some jitters that the Manhattan investigation is perhaps the hardest legal case to bring against Trump given the challenges of successfully prosecuting alleged campaign finance breaches. Warner added his voice to those concerns, saying: “Whichever of these prosecutions move forward, I hope whoever moves forward has a rock solid case.”Leading Republicans have rallied around Trump, echoing his claim that the Manhattan case is an example of a politicized and “weaponized” prosecutorial system. Last week, three top House Republicans sent a letter to Bragg demanding that he provide information about his own criminal investigation of Trump – a move that the prosecutor denounced as unlawful interference in a state legal proceeding.One of the signatories of the letter, James Comer, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that Bragg had opened “a can of worms”, warning it could spark retaliation by Republican prosecutors around the country. “You are going to have county attorneys in red areas, in parts of rural Kentucky where I am, who are going to try to overreach into federal election crime,” he said.As Manhattan remains on tenterhooks, the former president is facing more legal peril on other fronts. Last week, a federal appeals court ordered Trump’s main lawyer Evan Corcoran to appear before the grand jury that is hearing evidence about the unauthorized retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida home, intensifying the risk of Trump facing obstruction of justice charges.In a separate ruling last week, another federal judge denied executive privilege to several former Trump officials, including the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. As a result the former aides, who had a ringside seat to Trump’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in the buildup to the January 6 attack, must testify before the grand jury investigating the Capitol insurrection.
This article was amended on 26 March 2023 to clarify the relationship between Donald Trump and Joseph Tacopina. More

Donald Trump repeatedly insisted on Saturday night he was not upset by expected criminal charges that might arise from the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into his role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels as he returned from a campaign rally in Waco, Texas.But the manner of Trump’s responses to questions suggested worries about potential damage to his image, and he came across as someone angry that his good vibrations with his “Make American great again” base in Texas could be interrupted by the reality of a possible indictment as soon as this week.Travelling back from his first rally as a 2024 presidential candidate, Trump claimed during a recorded interview with four reporters aboard his Trump Force One plane that he was unafraid about the investigation even as he attacked the case and attacked media reporting about the case.“I’m not frustrated by it. It’s a fake investigation. We did nothing wrong – I told you that,” the former president said before proceeding to lash out at the NBC News reporter on the plane who asked if he was frustrated. “This is fake news, and NBC is one of the worst. Don’t ask me any more questions.”Trump also acknowledged during the interview that he had no actual insight into the investigation. He said “I have no idea what’s going to happen” – before deciding that he supposedly knew what would happen anyway and claiming, “They’ve already dropped the case, from what I understand.”Trump then settled on attacking the investigation, insisting the case is over while making various assertions not supported by concrete evidence and mainly based on speculation that has circulated among his allies and the campaign.“If anything ever happened with the case, it’s a fake case. This is a fake case. They have absolutely nothing. They have it in reverse. They should indict Michael Cohen for all the lies that he told,” Trump said, referring to the attorney who made the hush money payment to Daniels. “They may not do that, but that’s what should be happening.”The case centers on $130,000 that Trump paid to Daniels through Cohen in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks using his personal funds, which were recorded as legal expenses. Cohen later pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal crimes.It remains unclear what charges the district attorney Alvin Bragg might seek against Trump, though some members of his legal team believe the most likely scenario involves a base charge of falsifying business records coupled with potential tax fraud because Trump would not have paid taxes on the payments.The remarks from Trump on the flight came during an interview with four reporters. The Guardian obtained the recording after this reporter, confirmed to travel with the former president, was bumped off the manifest the day before the trip over recent reporting that the campaign disliked.The former president also said during the interview that the previous week had buoyed him, at least from a 2024 campaign perspective, correctly noting how he has surged in recent polls amid news of an expected indictment and the Republican base’s clamoring to his defense.“We’ve had the best polls we’ve ever had,” Trump said. Using a derisive nickname for Florida governor and expected 2024 candidate Ron DeSantis, Trump added: “Ron DeSanctimonious is crashing. They’re already looking for somebody to take his place.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You know where he would be right now [if he wasn’t the governor]? Probably working either at a cigar store or a law firm.”Trump’s rhetoric about the hush money investigation has turned increasingly bitter in recent days as he has gone from lashing out at the prospect of criminal charges, to insisting he wanted to be handcuffed and arrested, back to once again attacking the matter with vehemence.The former president’s attacks on Bragg took a turn on Friday when he predicted in an overnight post on his Truth Social website that “death and destruction” could come should the grand jury in New York return an indictment against him.Returning from the Texas rally on Saturday, where he used his speech to repeatedly air grievances about the investigation, Trump sought to distance himself from his darkest comments that had come as Bragg’s office discovered a threatening letter and white powder in its mailroom.“No – I don’t like violence and I’m not for violence,” Trump said.Then, repeating his lie that electoral fraudsters stole victory from him over Joe Biden in 2020, he said: “But a lot of people are upset and you know they rigged the election, they stole an election, they spied on my campaign. They did many bad things.” More

One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.“I think the White House is very in favor of this bill,” said Warner, chairperson of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence. Without saying whether Biden’s administration would push for these steps to be taken against TikTok, Warner added: “We [would] give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale.”TikTok has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users on the popular video sharing platform could be available to the government of China, the US’s rival global superpower. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, and Warner said laws in China require the owner company to make user data accessible to the country’s ruling Communist party.Some lawmakers have advocated for a blanket ban of TikTok, which is headquartered in San Jose. But one of the other responses from Capitol Hill has been for Warner and the Republican South Dakota senator John Thune to draft and rally support for what is known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Act.Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the Oval Office – through the commerce department – to review technologies which arrive from abroad. The commerce department could then move to ban those technologies or seek to force their sale, depending on any review’s findings.As with all such bills, the proposal would need approval from both congressional chambers as well as the president’s signature to become law. Democrats and the independents who caucus with them have a 51-49 advantage in the Senate where the Restrict Act has drawn support from both sides of the political aisle. Republicans hold a slight numerical edge in the House of Representatives.Warner’s remarks on Sunday came three days after TikTok’s chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, spent five hours publicly answering questions from members of the US House. As he testified, Chew defended TikTok’s relationship with China, saying the country’s rulers had never asked for user information and that the platform wouldn’t comply with such a request.“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said during the occasionally testy session, at which he also tried to assuage concerns about how the platform affects the mental health of its youngest users.Warner on Sunday said he was not impressed with Chew’s performance in front of lawmakers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While I appreciated Mr Chew’s testimony, he just couldn’t answer the basic questions,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, … and by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data.”Appearing separately on CNN’s State of the Union, Washington congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers – who is chairperson of the House’s energy and commerce committee – argued that TikTok could not be trusted despite Chew’s testimony. The Republican congresswoman called TikTok an “immediate threat” and said it deserved to get banned in the US.Though not directly related to TikTok, US fears about Chinese government surveillance reached a fever pitch after American fighter jets shot down a China-owned spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. The US was later reportedly investigating whether strong winds had blown the balloon off course after it took off from China’s Hainan Island and ultimately entered US airspace. More

The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and other major banks has raised fears about a potential 2008-style banking crisis. While this seems unlikely, like so many events these days, SVB’s failure has also been caught in the sticky rhetorical web of the culture war.

Right-wing media outlets and pundits have blamed SVB’s collapse on its so-called woke practices.

In other news, Vivek Ramaswamy, author of the anti-woke book Woke, Inc., recently became the latest entrant in the U.S. Republican Party’s presidential primary. The entry of Vivek Ramaswamy and other potential candidates indicates that battles over wokeness will likely spill over into the next U.S. presidential election.

Old term meets new movements

The term woke is not new, and its history is lengthy and tragic.

The idea was first popularized by legendary folk singer Lead Belly in his 1938 song Scottsboro Boys. It alludes to nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In relation to the song, Lead Belly warned, “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

‘Scottsboro Boys’ by American musician Lead Belly.

Linguist Tony Thorne suggests that Black Americans started using the term in the 1940s to “mean becoming woken up or sensitized to issues of justice.”

From this, wokeness initially focused on raising awareness among Black Americans of important issues impacting their community. But over time, its use expanded to encompass other social justice concerns, often in new and sometimes highly inconsistent ways.

In the wake of 2013’s Black Lives Matter movement, woke’s meaning quickly expanded. Part of this has to do with its social media origins. The movement subsequently became diffuse due to its unique organizational structure and social media use.

A term that was once focused on the challenges facing Black Americans within a complex political landscape expanded rapidly. Now it is used as a shorthand for a host of progressive ideas.

As a result, woke quickly became a broad rallying cry for social justice.

However, the swift spread of the term among advocates and allies was not universally welcomed. Instead, woke continued to wildly transition in opposition to the rapid expansion of social justice movements.

‘Woke’ has become a rallying cry for many progressive causes. But it has also triggered anti-woke reactionism.
zijunnyc/flickr

Waking the anti-woke

Right-wing politicians routinely rail against perceptions of wokeness. For example, Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has characterized himself as “anti-woke.”

In 2022, former U.S. president Donald Trump criticized banks, believing they had “gone woke” and should be penalized. As such, SVB and Signature Bank are not the first banks to be caught up in the widespread hysteria over wokeness.

Congressman Matt Gaetz said that the U.S. military is too focused on wokeism. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly made headlines over his government’s ban on teaching certain subjects deemed woke and his rejection of corporate social advocacy.

Business executives like Ramaswamy have criticized woke capitalism and Elon Musk has recently criticized ChatGPT which he believes has gone woke.

Comedian Bill Maher frequently complains about woke’s impact.

Personalities like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson believe it silences speech and cancels speakers.

Read more:
Can we cancel ‘cancel culture?’

The label woke is now frequently deployed in opposition to a variety of social movements, including fights for gender equality, climate change and LGBTQ+ rights, among others.

Like pebbles dropped into a pond, the waves of conflict over wokeness ripple ever outward. But how can we maximize woke’s liberating potential while minimizing divisiveness?

Open-ended terms like ‘woke’ can evolve over time to symbolize more than their creators could have ever imagined.
dinosossi/flickr, CC BY-NC

Post-woke future

For some, the idea of being woke means to “be awake to social oppression.” But for others, wokeness limits speech and threatens the prevailing order.

The result? Vicious public quarrels. We are trapped in a digital Tower of Babel built for the social media age seemingly without escape.

Open-ended terms like woke can evolve over time to symbolize more than their creators could have ever imagined. Words used ambiguously and in excess can eventually become meaningless. They can even experience semantic bleaching. This is when words lose their meaning through repeated and varied usage.

The state of play is so topsy-turvy you could argue that even anti-woke politicians can be woke. Think Poilievre advocating for drinking water for Indigenous communities. Or Trump’s criminal justice reforms.

When one term is interpreted antithetically, even adopted by its avowed adversaries, it increasingly becomes meaningless.

We should resist easy labels like wokeness that simplify or disregard complex and legitimate issues. Unclear terms confuse instead of clarify, alienating those we wish to include in conversation. Society suffers and divisions harden. And marginalized individuals often suffer the most severe consequences through no fault of their own. More

When Dianne Feinstein arrived in Washington in 1992, her home state of California was solidly purple and Republican Pete Wilson occupied the governor’s office.More than 30 years later, as the oldest member of Congress and California’s longest serving senator prepares to retire, her state is arguably the most reliably blue in the US.Feinstein’s protracted career as a senator also charts the rise of California as a political power player on Capitol Hill, whose 55 electoral votes – the largest block by far, with Texas and Florida as distant seconds – have helped guarantee a Democrat in the White House for six out of the last eight terms.Yet despite Feinstein’s early history as a transformative feminist from San Francisco, her perch in the top rungs of Senate leadership has outlasted its welcome among her increasingly liberal base. Grumblings about her willingness to work with Republicans, as well as concerns about her physical and mental competence, has left many clamouring for a changing of the guard, meaning the race to replace her in November 2024 is destined to become among the most hotly contested and consequential races in Democratic party politics.So far, three candidates have surfaced. Two of them, Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee, are veteran liberal legislators, having been in office since 2001 and 1998, respectively, while Katie Porter, a progressive congresswoman from traditionally conservative Orange county, is a rising star who first took office in 2019. Apparently not one for following party protocols, Porter stunned some observers by announcing her candidacy a full month before Feinstein made her retirement official early this February.Of the three, Schiff, who helped steer two successive impeachments against Donald Trump, has the most experience and name recognition. He also has the backing of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, whereas Porter counts Elizabeth Warren among her supporters. Both have more cash on hand than Lee, who also polls lower, despite impeccable liberal credentials that include being the only member of Congress to vote against giving President Bush unlimited war powers after 9/11.One thing that’s clear: that whoever voters choose, it will be someone to the left of Feinstein. Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, describes the changing of the guard as a completion of California’s political arc.In the early 1970s, more than half of Californians voted to reelect Richard Nixon and even San Francisco had a Republican mayor. Fast forward to now, and Democratic state lawmakers in Sacramento outnumber Republicans by a ridiculous margin: 62 Democrats versus 18 Republicans in the assembly, and a senate composed of 32 Democrats and only eight Republicans. California hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2007, when Arnold Schwarzenegger left the governor’s mansion, and its voters are increasingly the most liberal and diverse in the nation.“Dianne Feinstein leaving office marks the end of an era where California politics were more moderate,” said Arellano, who credits the California Republican party’s racially divisive position on immigration with laying the groundwork for the Democrats’ seemingly permanent lock on state politics. “California has always been a bellweather in so many things,” he said.“The fact that the two leading candidates to replace Feinstein are progressive Democrats is a victory for the left. But it’s also a warning for Republicans: this will be your fate if you don’t get your act together.”A ‘miserable’ beginningFeinstein’s journey from San Francisco’s city hall to Washington began in 1969 when she first joined the city’s board of supervisors. It was a tumultuous era marked by anti-Vietnam war protests and, particularly in San Francisco, rising demands for equality by women and gay people. For Feinstein, the late ’60s and early ’70s provided ample opportunity to challenge sexist stereotypes in American politics.It’s difficult to overstate Feinstein’s role as a political pioneer, said Jerry Roberts, a former managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote a 1994 biography of Feinstein that focused on her role in city politics. “She was a trailblazer who knocked down doors for women,” he continued. “Her legacy is Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Kamala Harris, and all the women who came after her.”Feinstein lost two successive races for San Francisco mayor in the 1970s. “It was largely because voters and women in particular still didn’t feel comfortable with women in office,” Roberts said. Feinstein eventually assumed the role by dint of tragedy, when George Moscone, the city’s Democratic mayor, was assassinated by a disgruntled city official in 1978. The same shooter also murdered Harvey Milk, a city supervisor and the first openly gay man to hold public office in the nation.“She got into office the most miserable way,” said Roberts.Feinstein quickly developed a bipartisan reputation as a hard-nosed workaholic who early on recognized the danger of Aids, crusading against gay bathhouses while defending the dignity of the disease’s victims. She was legendary for responding to the concerns of her constituents, and to the amusement of local journalists would often respond to building blazes dressed in a yellow coat to show solidarity for the city’s firefighters.“She was very hands on, so people hated working for her, which they still do, but the voters liked that,” explained Roberts. “When she left office nine years later, she had a 70% approval rating. It was pretty remarkable.”After losing a gubernatorial race to Pete Wilson in 1990, Feinstein positioned herself to statewide voters as a moderate centrist. Two years later, she won a special election to his vacant senate seat. Her senate victory joined those of fellow Californian Barbara Boxer and Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski to make 1992 the “Year of the Woman”.Feinstein was re-elected two years later and authored the nation’s first federal assault weapons ban. Her hard work on Capitol Hill helped make her the first female chairperson of both the Senate rules and intelligence committees. But as her influence in Washington grew, she also cemented a reputation as a policy hawk who typically voted with Republicans on defense appropriations.After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Feinstein became a key supporter of the US invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. She later changed her position on Iraq, saying she was misled by George Bush, and became an outspoken critic of the CIA’s use of torture in the war on terror. Her investigation into which infamously led the agency to allegedly illegally spy on her office.Outlasting her welcomeHer achievements as senator notwithstanding, the tide began to turn against her in recent years, and as the specter of her retirement loomed, so did questions of who should represent the next chapter of California politics.When Feinstein last ran for her seat in 2018, the California Democratic party, in a display of long-simmering dissatisfaction with her moderate politics, backed her more liberal opponent from the state senate, Kevin De Leon. It’s a shift that makes sense to Mark Baldassare, a survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California and a longtime political observer. “The state’s electorate is more racially and ethnically diverse now, especially among Democrats, a quarter of whom are Latino.”After nearly six full terms in office, Feinstein seemed unfocused and out of touch to both staffers and colleagues. In October 2020, following the confirmation of Donald Trump’s supreme court pick Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein drew ire if not outright bewilderment among Democrats for hugging Republican Lindsey Graham, who was instrumental in securing the conservative domination of the court, and praising the volatile proceedings as “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in”.The Coney Barrett fiasco led to calls for Feinstein’s ouster from Senate leadership appointments as well as concerns about her mental state. In retrospect, it marked the beginning of the end of her career in Washington. More recent headlines have focused on her physical frailty, particularly after a dose of shingles last month sent her to the hospital.“Progressives have always despised Feinstein going back to her days in San Francisco,” remarked the Times’ Arellano. “Even now, everybody is giving respect to her for retiring but nobody is shedding any tears.”A typical perspective among progressives is that of Marc Cooper, a former Nation magazine writer and journalism professor at the University of Southern California who now publishes an online political newsletter. To him, Feinstein’s legacy in California is the Democratic leadership’s abandonment of grassroots, anti-war politics in favor of large donor-dominated neoliberal elitism.“You can pick apart Feinstein and say there are times she’s acted like a Republican, but it’s a waste of time,” Cooper said. “We have never had a point in my lifetime when the political world is more distant from most people’s lives than it is now. The Democratic party in California used to be quite vibrant and that’s all been replaced by money.”Not everyone is quite so harsh, with others describing Feinstein a venerable figure who simply outlasted her welcome. “Feinstein is a great woman,” argued noted California journalist and author Anne Louise Bardach. “She’s been tremendous, but she overstayed her time.” Bardach believes the longtime illness and eventual death last year of Feinstein’s second husband, Richard Blum, took an immense emotional toll.” I think it was probably a huge burden for her,” Bardach said. “If he had been alive, she would have likely stepped down much earlier.”The Guardian reached out to Feinstein for an interview, but did not hear back.California’s next political chapterCalifornia voters will get their first chance to weigh in on Feinstein’s successor in the March 2024 Democratic primary race. That’s a good eight months before the general election, meaning that the public can expect a long ride of campaigning and political jockeying, including expensive television ads, and the possibility of public debates and even personal attacks.All of that, however, assumes that Feinstein does not retire early or leave office for medical reasons. If that happens, California’s governor Gavin Newsom has the responsibility to choose her immediate replacement, and has already pledged that person will be a Black woman.Jodi Balma, a political science professor at Fullerton College in southern California, believes that Newsom is unlikely to appoint Lee, however, as that would unfairly tip the race in her favor. “I’m sure he’s hoping not to have to make that decision,” Balma said of Newsom. One name that came up among those close to Newsom is Willie Brown, the longtime Democratic kingmaker and retired San Francisco mayor, according to Balma. “To be a caretaker senator would be the crowning achievement of his political career.”Assuming that scenario doesn’t play out, polling has so far suggested that the deep-pocketed Schiff has the lead, with Porter closely behind and Lee a distant third. Making the race more complicated is the fact that California’s primary laws allow the top two candidates from each political party’s March primary race to run for the general election in November.According to Balma, the consensus in Sacramento is that the last thing the party wants is two Democrats splitting a November vote, thus allowing room for a Republican challenger to win. “The Democrats don’t want two candidates fighting between March and November with negative attacks and commercials telling the voters how bad they are.”Regardless, the nation will be watching closely.“It’s a long way to the primary, but this race is attracting national attention because it’s indicative of the new leadership in California and what it means nationally for the future of the Democratic party,” said Baldassare. “There’s no question that there are some big shoes to fill.” More

Charles Dunst’s “aspirational” book about how democracies can do a better job of competing with autocracies is bursting with statistics and lots of common sense.The statistics are there to convince us that many autocracies spend much more sensibly than the world’s richest democracies do. A few examples:
China has increased spending on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product by 75% since 1975.
In 2018, 15-year-old Chinese students had the highest average scores in the world on tests for math, science and reading, followed by Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong – “none of which is a democracy”.
Citizens of Singapore have an average life expectancy of around 84 and an infant mortality rate of two per 1,000 – “better than almost every democracy”.
Singapore achieves that good health by spending just 4% of its GDP on healthcare – versus 17% of GDP spent in the US, which gets much less impressive results.
Dunst’s commonsense observations include ideas like these: weak safety nets damage citizens’ confidence in their governments (and therefore should be strengthened); bad healthcare systems cost more money in the long run than good ones; and investments in infrastructure repay themselves many times over.Dunst is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Looking at his own country, he is heartened that Joe Biden managed to push through a $1tn infrastructure bill, but then points out that’s only 1.25% of GDP, compared with the 8.5% of GDP China spent on infrastructure every year from 1992 to 2011.“China today spends more on infrastructure than the United States and Europe do combined,” Dunst writes.By spending more on things that actually matter, countries that oppress their citizens in other ways can engender remarkable levels of confidence in government.“In 2019,” Dunst writes, “nearly 90% of Chinese reported trust in their government … as did almost 70% of Singaporeans.”Practically the only good news for democracies in this story is the fact that almost every major economy faces similar declining birth rates. Most dramatically, China has gone from 2.25 children per woman in 1990 to just 1.3 today. No major economy is producing enough children to maintain its current population.At the same time, since 2017, China’s net migration rate – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants – “has worsened every year”.China lost about 335,000 people in 2022 alone.Democracies like the US, Germany and the UK all posted positive net migration rates of at least 2.7%. These numbers support one of Dunst’s more optimistic notions. While “China and others may promise economic stability”, democracies remain attractive because they offer “more freedom, equality and opportunities to pursue happiness”.Dunst argues that one of the biggest challenges for democracies is to convince their populations of the benefits of immigration, instead of listening to politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France, who have been so successful in reviving ancient xenophobia.Dunst also thinks education systems in places like the US and Britain need to become much more democratic. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for the children of alumni is 30%, versus 6% for the general population. In 2021, “nearly a third of legacy freshmen hailed from households making more than half a million dollars”.When non-connected parents “see the underperforming children of top financiers and politicians vaunted into top schools and jobs because of connections, these parents will rebel against the system that allowed this to happen … They will vote for the would-be dictator.”Dunst thinks we must offer more scholarships “for people studying science and technology … more funding for vocational schools” and “constant skill training” for the workforce.He wisely suggests that a “key reform would be to make non-regular [American] workers eligible for high-quality health insurance that travels with them from job to job”. But he is also bizarrely opposed to universal healthcare – the kind that is the norm all over Europe. Suddenly, he sounds like a flack for a greedy pharmaceutical company, writing that such a system “could undermine the competitive attitude that makes the United States one of the world’s leaders in medical innovation”.America’s continuing failure to provide decent health insurance to its most needy citizens is hardly a spur to innovation. And the fact we are the only major democracy with a healthcare system dominated by the profit motive isn’t mentioned here at all.Dunst is almost entirely silent about the explosion of fake facts on the internet, which makes it so much more difficult to sell the commonsense ideas he pushes for. Another problem is his failure to acknowledge that America now has only one major political party that is genuinely interested in solving any of these fundamental problems, while the other prefers to cater to its base with attacks on wokeness or any prosecutor who thinks it makes sense to prosecute a former president for any of his dozens of alleged crimes.This is the fundamental problem facing American democracy now. As long as the Republicans control the House of Representatives or any other part of the government, the chances of enacting any of the proposals Dunst thinks necessary to help defeat the dictators – serious educational reform, immigration reform and additional infrastructure projects – are exactly zero. More