US Politics

Don’t call Joe Biden a failed president yetGary GerstleProgressives today can look to the American past for examples of political movements transitioning from short-term defeat to long-term success Things are not looking good for Joe Biden. At his 20 January news conference, Joe Biden admitted that Build Back Better, the $2tn social infrastructure bill, was dead. That failure, in combination with Biden’s botched effort the week before to energize the campaign for voting rights, have inclined many progressives to join the chorus of centrist and rightwing voices pronouncing Biden a failed president.There are good reasons for disappointment in progressive ranks, especially as Donald Trump continues to thunder on about the “big lie” and as the country barrels toward a 2022 midterm that Republicans, in multiple states, are trying to rig in their favor. But progressives should refrain both from heaping excessive blame on Biden himself and from losing hope. Let’s take a step back.Led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, progressives in 2021 achieved the kind of influence in the Democratic party that they had not enjoyed since the 1930s and 1940s. But their party’s hold on Congress was weak. The Senate was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans; a vote from Vice-President Kamala Harris was required to put the Democrats into majority territory. The House, meanwhile, had a Democratic majority of only nine (222 to 213). By contrast, the transformative New Deal that Franklin D Roosevelt launched in 1933 rested on overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress (58 to 37 in the Senate and 313 to 122 in the House). Had FDR been saddled with Biden’s bare majorities, the legendary accomplishments of his 100 days – 15 separate pieces of legislation passed by Congress between March and July 1933 – never would have come to pass.The precarity of Democratic party power in Congress in 2021 caused some to counsel caution. But progressives made the opposite calculation: carpe diem – seize the day. The opportunity for transforming American society might be fleeting, they reckoned, but it was real. Biden proved surprisingly receptive to progressive appeals. He had not become a socialist like Sanders; but he had become convinced that America stood at what he liked to call “an inflection point”. The decade following the Great Recession of 2008-2009 had unleashed powerful new forces in politics, on both the right and the left. A simple reassertion of Clinton and Obama formulas for Democratic rule, Biden now believed, would no longer suffice. A new kind of politics was needed. The pandemic both demanded bold thinking and quick and decisive government action.Across the first six months of its tenure, the Biden administration more than met this challenge. The $2tn American Rescue Plan passed in early March 2021 funded massive government investments in vaccine production and distribution, stimulated economic growth and employment, and markedly reduced childhood poverty. The pandemic began to ease as the Biden administration easily blew past its goal of inoculating 100 million Americans in its first 100 days. Meanwhile, a $1tn physical infrastructure bill with bipartisan support was on its way toward passage in the balky Senate. This was the heady atmosphere in which the ambitious Build Back Better bill took shape. Congress had never considered a bill of this scope before. It would, if passed, propel the United States into a future of clean energy, sharply reduced child poverty, vastly improved services for elder care, free community college, affordable housing, expanded healthcare, and immigration reform.The second six months of the Biden administration, however, were as dispiriting as the first six months had been inspiring. The arrival of the Delta and Omicron variants – along with the refusal of large numbers of Americans to get vaccinated – allowed the pandemic to rage once again. The White House miscalculated the short-term dangers that a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan entailed. Inflation exploded as the pandemic generated both supply-chain problems and profound shifts in the structure of demand for goods and services.It is hardly surprising that Build Back Better now began to receive closer scrutiny: why so many different initiatives in one bill? Which of these programs could the government truly afford? Would passage of the bill further stoke inflation? Much commentary has focused on the villainous figure of Joe Manchin, ultimately the lone Democratic senator who refused to give his assent to the bill. But when a single senator can hold up and ultimately scuttle such an important piece of legislation, we must point a finger not just at the man himself but at the underlying vulnerability of a party with no true Senate majority embarking on an audacious project of political and social transformation.The tasks for Biden and the progressives are now somewhat different. Biden must be practical and disciplined. He needs to rescue two or three components of Build Back Better, with clean energy and early childhood care being the most important. He must get out more into the public to trumpet his achievements. His administration should also blanket the entire country with signs declaring “Biden’s $1tn infrastructure project at work for you here.” I have yet to hear from anyone who has seen such a sign.Finally, Biden ought to strengthen the resolve of the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to bring the full weight of the law down upon the January 6 insurrectionists. Two weeks ago, Garland’s Department of Justice charged multiple leaders of the Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy, a serious charge. Several Oath Keepers have agreed to cooperate, which will obligate them to tell justice department prosecutors everything they know about which individuals in the Republican party and the White House schemed with them to plan the January 6 coup.Former members of the Trump administration and their allies now have reason to fear that they, too, may be charged with seditious conspiracy. Not coincidentally, the number of Republicans willing to criticize Trump publicly is rising. Trump will hit back hard yet again, seeking to reassert his control over the Republican party. But Biden can use the incipient disarray in the party and the threat of resurgent Trumpism to his advantage. If anything can persuade independents to cast their votes for Democrats in the 2022 elections, it will be their fear that Trump, and the authoritarian movement he leads, poses the most serious threat to the future of America and its democracy.For progressives, a longer-term recalibration is in order. Despite their disappointment over the failure of Build Back Better and voting rights legislation, they have to organize for the 2022 election as energetically as they did in 2020. But they must also develop a post-2022 strategy focused on building their strength beyond metropolitan centers and corridors, given how weighted the American political system is against big cities and toward small towns and rural areas.Progressives today can look to the American past for examples of political movements transitioning from short-term defeat to long-term success. Consider the Democrats who built the New Deal order in the 1930s and the Republicans who established the neoliberal order in the 1980s. Long before they came to power, these earlier generations of left and right crusaders had coalesced into political formations that possessed an underlying ideology and a set of institutions bringing together like-minded activists, intellectuals, elected officials, donors and media influencers. Actually gaining power, however, required something more: the ability to win consistently at the polls, to amass significant majorities in Congress, and to control the presidency for long stretches. That level of political achievement took time, sustained efforts at mobilization, and a willingness to endure multiple electoral defeats.In progressive politics today, one can discern a similarity to the early phases of these two previous movements. Progressives have intellectuals, thinktanks, influential media platforms, extensive policy and personal networks, and now, thanks to Biden, a presence in numerous government agencies. These activists understand the importance of winning elections; they played an indispensable role in the electoral mobilization in 2020 that drove Trump from office and Mitch McConnell from his post as Senate majority leader.The Republican party would not be working so hard to suppress votes today if it did not discern in this 2020 performance the possible awakening of a Democratic juggernaut. But the progressive movement is still young and vulnerable; across the nation as a whole, its electoral base is geographically narrow – too coastal or too metropolitan, or both.Dislodging the Republicans from national power over sustained stretches of time means winning not just the White House and Congress but statehouses, where rules governing all elections in America – local, state and national – have long been made. Not an easy task, to be sure, especially given the Republican party’s ruthless will to power. But, then, this would not be the first time that progressives, faced with adversity, steeled themselves for the long march.
Gary Gerstle is Mellon professor of American history emeritus at Cambridge and a Guardian US columnist. His new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, will be published in April
TopicsJoe BidenOpinionUS politicscommentReuse this content More

‘The most dangerous man in Congress’: how Paul Gosar became a darling of the far rightOnce fringe, now dominant in the party, rightwing Republicans are strategizing for minoritarian rule The Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar had a simple message for the crowd when he recently addressed a packed Donald Trump rally in his home state – a gathering that had focused on promoting the baseless lie that Trump had been cheated out of a second term as president.“This is where it all began,” Gosar said in a speech before Trump came on stage. “This is where we questioned: ‘Was there fraud? Absolutely. Was it enough to overturn the election? Absolutely.’”Republican resistance to Trump rings hollow as ‘moderates’ say no on voting rightsRead moreThe far-right congressman is one of Trump’s most loyal backers in Congress, earning him one of more than 90 endorsements made so far by the former US president ahead of this year’s crucial midterm elections. Gosar is the kind of politician that Trump – who is embarking on a series of rallies to try to cement his allies’ power in the Republican party – is increasingly seeking to support.But Gosar has extensive links to white nationalists and Capitol rioters and, many observers say, represents a dangerous new breed of Republican politician, who would have once been considered fringe, but whom Trump is increasingly making central to Republican party politics.“I’m considered the most dangerous man in Congress,” Gosar told the crowd, briefly touching on popular rightwing talking points – critical race theory in schools, disrespect for the military, and “empty shelves” in stores – before focusing on the central theme of the rally: elections.In the Arizona desert the fervor among supporters huddled against the wind was a clear sign of the size of a constituency more loyal to Trump than to the party, and even as some lawmakers distance themselves from the former president amid the January 6 fallout, the far right is doubling down.In his first public appearance since the anniversary of the January 6 attack, Trump’s appearance was marked with a reaffirmation of election denial, conspiracy theories and anti-democratic ruminations. “I ran twice, and I won twice,” Trump told his supporters gathered in the windy Arizona night.At the rally the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander moved through the crowd while on stage three members of Congress, who all voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory, gave speeches affirming their support of the “big lie”.Gosar’s allegiance to Trump and his false claims extends beyond speaking the shibboleth of the big lie: on January 6 Gosar voted against certifying the election even as rioters penetrated the Capitol.“We no longer have an ability to make a clear delineation between the right and far-right in the Republican party,” said Joe Lowndes, professor of political science at the University of Oregon and co-author of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.“The Trumpist wing of the Republicans isn’t just ascending – it’s the dominant wing of the Republican party. It’s the dominant wing not just in national politics, but in state and local politics as well,” said Lowndes. “The Republican party has committed itself to a party of minoritarian rule, figuring out ways to rule in the long term without having majority support of voters.”Gosar’s involvement with the January 6 Capitol insurrection has come under scrutiny from lawmakers. A House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack has been working for six months, in meetings mostly closed to the public, interviewing more than 300 witnesses and collecting more than 35,000 pages of records, according the Washington Post.Information has surfaced that link Gosar to one prominent Capitol riot organizer.A lawsuit filed by Alexander to block the release of his phone records, subpoenaed by the House committee, reveals testimony that discloses contacts with Republican members of Congress before the Capitol riot. The lawsuit states Alexander testified that he “had a few phone conversations” with Gosar and spoke to the Arizona congressman Andy Biggs “in person”.Lawmakers are debating whether sitting members of Congress can be subpoenaed to appear before the committee.Gosar also has longstanding links to far-right and white nationalist groups.Last year Gosar was the keynote speaker at an America First Political Action Conference (Afpac) organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whom the Department of Justice in a court filing calls a “white supremacist” and who marched in the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. The January 6 committee is also seeking testimony from Fuentes, who has praised Gosar as supporting his agenda.“There is some hope, maybe, for America First in Congress, and that is thanks almost exclusively to representative Paul Gosar,” said Fuentes in a video message to his supporters last year.Gosar distanced himself from Fuentes after outcry over his appearance alongside the white nationalist in a promotion for a fundraising event. But he has also appeared to defend him. Gosar once tweeted: “Not sure why anyone is freaking out. I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First. They will not agree 100% on every issue. No group does. We will not let the left dictate our strategy, alliances and efforts. Ignore the left.”That was not the first time Gosar has incorporated white nationalist themes into his politics.Last year Gosar and the extremist Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene were linked to an “America First Caucus” that imploded in disarray after planning documents reported by Punchbowl News revealed language that included recruiting people based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions”.Gosar was also censured and stripped of his committee posts late last year after tweeting a Photoshopped video of a violent anime sequence depicting him killing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden.“I do not espouse violence towards anyone,” Gosar said during the House debate on his censure. “I voluntarily took the cartoon down, not because it was itself a threat, but because some thought it was. Out of compassion for those who genuinely felt offense, I self-censored.”But Gosar has a history posting of far-right content, including retweeting a QAnon conspiracy theory and a now-deleted tweet of a meme popular in white nationalists circles.Yet it is now in the area of election integrity that Gosar is becoming most prominent, helping to lead a charge across the US by Republicans claiming that elections in America are vulnerable to fraud and manipulation.“There’s a comfortable embrace of anti-democratic sentiment,” said Lowndes. “The Republican party hasn’t just opened the door to the far right, but it now relies on the far right.”At the Arizona rally Gosar told supporters to campaign locally on the election fraud issue. “Take it upon yourself that in your county you go to your county recorder and ask them what your ballot does. Make them walk you through it. That’ll tell them one thing: that you’re watching them. That you’re not going to let this happen, what happened in January of last year.”Gosar was among the Arizona Republican officials pushing for an audit of the election results of Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county. Before the Trump rally, the Maricopa elections department released a 93-page report rebuking each of the 76 claims about the 2020 elections made by elected Arizona Republican officials.The report found “the November 2020 General Election was administered with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable.” The report also found “despite all evidence to the contrary, false allegations continue to persist and damage voter confidence.”But there is at least one group of people close to Gosar who are not fooled – some of his own family.Three of Gosar’s siblings have publicly called for their brother to be expelled from Congress, the Arizona Republic has reported. “We know him to be an extremist and we took that very seriously,” his sister, Jennifer Gosar, told the newspaper. His brother, Dave Gosar, told NBC News: “I consider him a traitor to this country. I consider him a traitor to his family.” In the 2018 election six of Gosar’s nine siblings endorsed his opponent.TopicsThe far rightRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Here’s how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic strongholdScroll through our visual guide to see why proposed Tennessee maps amount to a masterclass in gerrymanderingRepublican lawmakers in Tennessee gave final approval on Monday to an aggressive plan to split Nashville, a Democratic bastion, in a deeply Republican state, into several congressional districts as part of an effort to tilt the state’s congressional map in their favor. The plan is now waiting for approval from Governor Bill Lee, who is likely to sign it. Nashville currently sits in the state’s fifth congressional district, represented by Jim Cooper, a Democrat who has held the seat for nearly 20 years. It’s a solid Democratic district – Joe Biden carried it by nearly 24 points in 2020 – but on Tuesday, Cooper announced he was retiring from Congress.“Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the general assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole,” he said in a statement. “I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”The new districts crack the concentration of Democratic voters in Nashville and cram them into three districts that stretch across the state and are filled with reliable Republican voters. Donald Trump would have easily carried all three of the proposed districts in 2020. 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The West Virginia senator’s name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden’s effort to curb planet-heating gasesby Oliver MilmanWithin the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US – history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases – again failing to pass major climate legislation.Joe Manchin: who gave you authority to decide the fate of the planet? | Daniel SherrellRead moreFor six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.“He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh. “If you talk to the average citizen in Dhaka, they will know who Joe Manchin is. The level of knowledge of American politics here is absolutely amazing, we know about the filibuster and the Senate and so on.“What the Americans do or don’t do on climate will impact the world and it’s incredible that this one coal lobbyist is holding things up. It will cause very bad consequences for us in Bangladesh, unfortunately.”The often tortuous negotiations between Manchin, the White House and Democratic leaders appeared doomed on 19 December when the West Virginia senator said he could not support the $1.75tn bill, citing concerns over inflation and the national debt. The latest twist caused anguish to those who see their futures being decided by a previously obscure politician located thousands of miles away.“I’ve been following the situation closely,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific nation that risks being wiped out by rising sea levels. “We have to halve emissions in this decade and can’t do it without strong, immediate action by the US.”Stege said the Marshall Islands was already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and if the US doesn’t slash its emissions “the outcomes for countries like mine are unthinkable.”Even America’s closest allies have looked on in dismay as a single lawmaker from Biden’s own party has stalled what would be the biggest – and arguably first – piece of climate legislation in the US’s plodding, and often rancorous, history of dealing with escalating global heating.“Biden has done a fair bit in very challenging circumstances [but] in Canada we look on with bewilderment because it’s such a different political context. It’s very bizarre,” said Catherine McKenna, who was environment minister in Justin Trudeau’s government that introduced carbon pricing in 2019. “Politics is hard but I don’t think anyone has given up. We just really hope they are able to get a deal.”McKenna said she was vilified by some Canadian provincial premiers who “fought to the death” against carbon pricing but that there was now broader support for climate action across the country, including within industry, than in the US. “It’s unfortunate that it’s just one person that is holding up something that’s so critically important,” she said of Manchin.“Joe Manchin is a problem, and I think he needs to be called out,” said Ed Davey, a British MP who was previously the UK’s secretary of state for energy and climate change. “It’s in the US interest, in the interest of West Virginia and elsewhere, to take advantage of green zero-carbon technology, which is the future.”Davey, who is now leader of the Liberal Democrats, warned that the US risks ceding leadership in clean energy to China if it doesn’t act. “People will end up paying higher prices, jobs will go and not be created, the security of America will be reduced, Beijing will be laughing,” he said, adding that Manchin was in effect “working on behalf of the Chinese government” by not supporting the transition away from fossil fuels.China used last year’s Cop26 climate talks in Scotland to “insidiously point out to every country that US just can’t implement”, said Rachel Kyte, an expert in international affairs at Tufts University and a climate adviser to the UN secretary general. Kyte said many governments believe Biden is well-meaning but cannot follow through on his commitments, a frustration compounded by a lack of American action on related areas, such as climate finance for poorer countries.“There’s almost a resentment that the US just can’t deliver,” she added. “There’s this sinking feeling about the politics of America. You can’t turn your back on the US because it’s still the biggest economy, but what are countries supposed to do?”Much of this angst is now being channeled towards Manchin.After more than a decade in national politics, the 74-year-old senator has suddenly garnered a level of infamy far beyond his fiefdom of West Virginia, where the centrist Democrat has served as governor and senator while reaping millions of dollars through his personal investments and campaign contributions from a coal industry that continues to loom large in his state. It’s a situation that has caused bafflement overseas.“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded. Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA”. Helsingin Sanomat, a Danish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.The negotiations with Manchin involve stakes far greater than any normal political maneuvering in Washington. The world is already being strafed by wildfires, heatwaves, floods and societal instability wrought by the climate crisis and rising temperatures are on track to breach limits set by governments in the Paris climate accords, a situation that would push some parts of the world beyond human livability.Salvaging this situation will be virtually impossible without swift action by the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter and a major oil and gas exporter. Analysts say the half a trillion dollars of support for renewable energy and electric cars in the Build Back Better bill would give the US a decent chance of cutting its emissions in half this decade, which Biden and scientists say is imperative to avoid climate breakdown.But Manchin’s opposition has already ensured the removal of a key element of the bill, a plan to force utilities to phase in clean energy over time, and the prospect of him joining Republicans to block the overall package has seen him come under intense criticism within the US.Climate activists have confronted Manchin in Washington and kayaked to his yacht to remonstrate with him. Some fellow Democrats say he has “failed the American people”. Even the Sunday Gazette, the local paper of Charleston, West Virginia, has run a headline of ‘We need this so bad’, in reference to the bill.All this has been to little effect, although Manchin did say earlier this month there could still be agreement on “the climate thing”, offering some vague hope to activists while not quite quelling their anger. “Senator Manchin is a fossil-fueled sociopath on a Maserati joyride while he lets the world burn,” said Janet Redman, climate campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “At the end of the day, Manchin cares less about his constituents than he does about the fossil fuel industry.”The current, floundering attempt to pass climate legislation is a grimly familiar episode in a lengthy record of American inadequacy. Donald Trump donned a coal miner’s helmet on the campaign trail and removed the US from the Paris climate deal. Barack Obama failed to get cap-and-trade legislation past a recalcitrant Congress. George W Bush rejected the Kyoto climate accords. In 1993, a previous Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, blocked a Bill Clinton plan to tax carbon emissions.Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”Even if American political inertia hasn’t changed, the world certainly has – the last seven years were the planet’s hottest on record, cataclysmic wildfires are now year-round events in the US west and deadly flooding swamps basements in New York, picturesque towns in Germany and subways in China. There is mounting fear that the world, including the US, does not have the time for yet another futile American effort to address the unraveling climate crisis.“Unfortunately, politicians getting fossil fuel money are standing in the way and sacrificing the rest of us once again,” said Vanessa Nakate, a climate justice activist from Uganda. Nakate pointed out that Africa was suffering from climate change even though it is responsible for just a small fraction of global emissions.“We are so reliant on the choices others make,” she said. “Our lives are literally in their hands.”TopicsClimate crisisUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Tucker Carlson viewers calling me to say US should back Russia, Democrat saysNew Jersey congressman says viewers are calling to express distress that Biden is ‘not siding with Russia’ in Ukraine crisis A congressman from New Jersey has disclosed that he is receiving calls from viewers of Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show, expressing distress at the Biden administration’s backing of Ukraine in the tense military stand-off with Russia.UK warns of ‘unprecedented sanctions’ against Russia as Biden says west is united on UkraineRead moreDemocratic representative Tom Malinowski said in a tweet his office was fielding calls from Carlson viewers “upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine”.The callers, he said, “want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions”.News of the effect of Carlson’s broadcasts doubting support for Ukraine came as the Pentagon placed 8,500 troops on high alert ready to deploy to Europe, amid fears that a Russian invasion could be imminent.Nato allies have been struggling to project unity in opposition to the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s belligerent amassing of more than 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border.Carlson, the top-rated host on Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing news channel, has been using his nightly bully pulpit to question the merits of Washington’s backing through Nato of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s expansionist threat.On Monday night, his show screened an image of the White House with the words “War Machine” stamped over it.The host accused “neocons” in the Biden administration of “betraying our country’s interests” and said a massive lobbying campaign by Ukrainian politicians and American defense contractors was behind the strategy.Ukraine was “strategically irrelevant” to the US, Carlson said.In his analysis of the crisis Carlson made no mention of Putin or his ambition to push back Nato from eastern and central Europe, nor of Ukraine’s standing as a sovereign nation which achieved independence 30 years ago.Ukraine is a country bigger in land mass than France, with a similar population to Spain, now facing an unprovoked invasion from the neighbouring power.Carlson has used his show to express contentious views on Europe before. For a week in August, he relocated Tucker Carlson Tonight to Budapest, from where he broadcast glowing reports on the authoritarian leadership of Viktor Orbán.This week he indicated that he plans to return to Hungary soon for more broadcasts praising the government’s tough stance on immigration.Speaking to the Hill, Malinowski said: “People get their opinions by watching the news, that’s nothing new. What is new is we have at least one talkshow host with a huge captive audience that is not exposed to any counter-programming elsewhere.“I find that very concerning.”TopicsRussiaUS politicsEuropeUkraineRepublicansFox NewsUS television industrynewsReuse this content More

The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faithRuth BraunsteinSome sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals. But that’s just part of the story What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? As a sociologist who has studied American religion and politics for many years, I have often struggled to make sense of these dramatic but seemingly disconnected changes. I now believe they all can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash to the religious right.Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion in public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.In a 2002 article, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”While pathbreaking, this research has been relatively narrow in its focus. This is because it has typically started with the puzzle of the rising “nones” and worked backward in search of a cause, landing on backlash against the religious right. I wondered what would happen if we flipped this question around, and started with the rise of the religious right and public concerns about its radicalism. We could then consider the varied ways that backlash against it has manifested, including but not limited to the rise of the “nones”.Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is what I call a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements, where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?Read moreSimilarly, those who associate with the religious left do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times: “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”Finally, new research finds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out. Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.
Ruth Braunstein is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide
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Sheldon Silver, top New York lawmaker sentenced for corruption, dies aged 77Democrat spent two decades as speaker of state assembly before conviction over real-estate dealings Sheldon Silver, one of the most powerful figures in New York state government for two decades before his conviction on corruption charges, has died in federal custody. He was 77.Silver, who served as the speaker of the New York state assembly, died on Monday, the federal Bureau of Prisons said, adding that the official cause of death would be determined by the medical examiner. Silver’s supporters had said he was in failing health from multiple medical conditions. The Manhattan Democrat, who told a judge he prayed he would not die in prison, was serving a more than six-year sentence for using his clout in state government to benefit real estate developers, who rewarded Silver by referring lucrative business to his law firm.Silver’s conviction ended a nearly four-decade career in the assembly. He first won a seat representing Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1976, and became assembly speaker in 1994, a powerful position that made him one of Albany’s “three men in a room” negotiating annual budgets and major legislation with the governor and state senate leader.In all, Silver served as speaker during the tenure of five New York governors, from Mario Cuomo to Andrew Cuomo.He became known as an inscrutable and stubborn negotiator, blocking proposals so often he was sometimes called “Dr No”. He helped scuttle the former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s plan to locate a football stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. And he took the brunt of the blame for the collapse in 2008 of Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan for Manhattan, which would have charged electronic tolls for driving through the borough’s most highly trafficked neighborhoods.“He was a fighter for his constituents and his work to rebuild lower Manhattan after the terrible events of 9/11 will never be forgotten,“ said the current assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, in a statement. “For years he was the lone voice in the room pushing back against many regressive policies that would have harmed so many New Yorkers, and he presided over landmark laws to improve the lives of our most vulnerable residents.”Silver was the youngest of four children of Russian immigrants. His father ran a wholesale hardware store. As an adult, he and his wife had four children and lived in a lower Manhattan apartment blocks from his first home.An Orthodox Jew, Silver was known to observe Sabbath even during the marathon negotiation sessions that preceded annual budget deadlines and the end of legislative sessions.Over time, he became a symbol of Albany’s much-maligned opaque style of governance and, ultimately, a target of federal prosecutors.Prosecutors accused Silver of trading his influence for money. In one instance, they argued that Silver persuaded a physician to refer asbestos cancer patients to his law firm so it could seek multimillion-dollar settlements from personal injury lawsuits, a secret arrangement that allowed him to collect about $3m in referral fees. In return, prosecutors said he directed hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grants to a research center run by the doctor.His original 2015 conviction was tossed out by an appeals court after a US supreme court ruling that narrowed the definition of a corrupt act. He was convicted again at a second trial in 2018 tailored slightly to conform to the high court ruling.But an appeals court ultimately threw out the conviction related to the asbestos cancer patients. Prosecutors decided not to retry him on that charge. In the part of his conviction that stuck, a court found that he had supported legislation that benefited real estate developers who were referring tax business to a law firm that employed him.Silver begged for mercy ahead of his sentencing in a letter to the judge.“I pray I will not die in prison,” Silver wrote, saying he was “broken-hearted” that he damaged the trust people have in government.The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More