US Politics

Joe Biden’s first year: Covid, climate, the economy, racial justice and democracy How has the president fared on the four big issues he outlined at his inauguration – and the one he couldn’t ignoreOne year ago on Thursday, Joe Biden took the oath of office as the 46th president at the US Capitol in an inauguration ceremony devoid of the usual crowds due to pandemic restrictions.Joe Biden backs filibuster rule change to push voting rights billRead moreBiden identified four crises facing America: the coronavirus, the climate, the economy and racial justice. He could have added a fifth: a crisis of democracy in a divided nation where, just two weeks earlier, the Capitol had been overrun by insurrectionists.How has he fared on all five counts?CoronavirusBiden took office pledging to lift the threat of the coronavirus pandemic, which he called “a raging virus” that “silently stalks the country”. And there was a period of his presidency when it appeared he had.Last summer vaccination rates soared as the virus receded and the economy rebounded. Touting the administration’s progress at an Independence Day celebration, Biden declared that the US was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus”.But then came the arrival of the Delta variant, followed by the extremely transmissible Omicron variant. Biden rushed once again to restrict travel but it did little to slow the spread. In recent weeks, Covid-19 cases have reached record levels. Deaths are rising nationally and the number of Americans hospitalized with the disease is higher now than at any previous point during the pandemic.Long lines to obtain Covid tests and low availability of at-home tests have sparked criticism of the White House’s preparedness, while shifting guidelines and muddled messaging from federal public health officials left a disease-weary public confused and frustrated. Public confidence in Biden’s handling of the pandemic has dropped significantly, weighing down his overall approval ratings.Biden responded by ordering 1bn at-home coronavirus tests and is requiring private insurance companies to cover the cost of up to eight of these tests a month. Biden also announced plans to make “high-quality” masks available to Americans free of charge and deployed military medical units to help hospitals overwhelmed by a shortage of staff and beds. Leveraging the Defense Production Act, the administration is working with pharmaceutical companies to increase the supply of antiviral pills.More than 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated, with nearly 77 million receiving a booster shot. Efforts to improve vaccination rates continue to be undermined by partisanship and misinformation. And a ruling by the supreme court this week blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-test mandate for large businesses, though it allowed a vaccine mandate for most healthcare workers to take effect.In response to the latest wave, the Biden administration has shifted its rhetoric – and its expectations. Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, said the Omicron variant would “find just about everybody”, warning that the unvaccinated risk far worse outcomes.ClimateIn his inaugural address, Biden promised to heed the planet’s “cry for survival” by marshalling an unprecedented response to the climate crisis. But his ambitious plans have since collided with the reality of an evenly divided Senate, where a coal-state senator’s opposition has thwarted major pieces of the president’s climate agenda, with potentially dire consequences for the planet.At the international talks in Glasgow last year, Biden pledged the US would slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with 2005 levels by the end of this decade. But failure to enact the president’s Build Back Better legislation would make it nearly impossible for the US to meet that target.The roughly $2tn proposal would amount to the nation’s largest ever investment in combatting climate change and contains a suite of tax incentives, grants and other policies that would grow the green energy sector and invest in sustainable vehicles and public transport services. Without it, the Biden administration would be forced to rely on a raft of environmental regulations and rules that could be overturned by future presidents.Throughout the first year of his presidency, Biden has made climate change a priority, elevating climate advocates to key posts, creating a White House office of domestic policy, and appointing John Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate, which he made a cabinet-level position. In April, he convened a summit to pressure world leaders to make stronger commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reassert US leadership on the global stage.Biden used his executive authority to quickly reverse many of former president Donald Trump’s energy and environmental policies, starting with his first day in office when he moved to rejoin the Paris climate accords.In November, Biden signed into law a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill that provides billions of dollars to make communities more resilient to climate-fueled disasters, but did little to reduce planet-warming emissions.At the international talks last year, the US played a major role in negotiations over global efforts to fight climate change, though the final agreement disappointed activists and some world leaders. “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, an existential threat to human existence as we know it and every day we delay the cost of inaction increases,” Biden said in Glasgow.Yet the coming weeks and months will be critical for Biden’s climate goals, and his legacy. The president’s Build Back Better legislation is doomed without Senator Joe Manchin’s support and it remains unclear if negotiations can be revived. Next month the supreme court will hear a case brought by Republican-led states and coal companies that could significantly restrict the administration’s power to regulate carbon emissions driving climate change.And if Republicans gain control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections, action on climate change could stall, potentially for years.EconomyIt is the best of times and the worst of times. The White House ended 2021 pointing to jobless claims at a 50-year low, a stock market smashing records and an economy among the fastest growing in the world.On the positive side, 6.4m jobs have been added under Biden, the most of any first-year president in history. When he took office the unemployment rate was 6.3%; today it is 3.9%, the lowest yet of the pandemic.Consumer demand is strong, helping the economy grow by an estimated 7% in the final quarter of 2021, although the Omicron variant, which has ravaged airlines and restaurants, is likely to cause a slowdown.Wages are also up. With a record wave of people quitting their jobs, often to seek work elsewhere, average hourly pay jumped 4.7% in December compared with a year ago.The stock market is thriving. In 2021 the Standard and Poor 500 index hit new records 70 times and finished up 29%. This beat Donald Trump’s first year as president when the S&P 500 hit new records 62 times and finished up 17%.There is, of course, a “but” coming. The economy is still about 3.6m jobs short of its pre-pandemic level. Many employers are struggling to fill positions and many people are reluctant to return to the workforce.Most dauntingly, inflation climbed to 7% in 2021, the biggest 12-month gain for 40 years, while supply chain problems left some supermarket shelves bare. This prompted a barrage of Republican criticism and fed a feeling of economic malaise, whatever the reality.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, said: “The economy is actually better than the perception. Unemployment is down to 3.9%. Many millions of jobs were created and you’re going to get inflation under those circumstances. But the message hasn’t gotten out. Everybody thinks Biden’s done a poor job.”Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and strategist, instead argues that Biden overpromised. “The entire economy is seizing up, and people do blame Biden because he was trumpeting how successful he had been,” he said. “Don’t do that.”Racial justice“President Biden met with some of the civil rights leadership and we reminded him …You said the night you won that Black America had your back and that you were going to have Black America’s back,” activist Al Sharpton told a voting rights rally in August. “Well, Mr President, they’re stabbing us in the back.”Biden is yet to fulfil his promise. But he has met some of his commitments to embed racial equity in policy. The early $1.9tn coronavirus relief package included $5bn for Black farmers, the most important legislation for this group since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Biden named a historically diverse administration that includes, in interior secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. Kamala Harris is the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president, though she has been handed intractable problems to solve and her approval rating is even lower than Biden’s.But police reform efforts have stalled. Biden abandoned a campaign promise to create a national police oversight commission in his first hundred days.Talks in Congress over the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to improve police training, curb use of excessive force and end techniques such as chokeholds, collapsed in September in what Jacari Harris, executive director of a foundation named after Floyd, described as “a devastating setback”.Most dramatically, the president’s lobbying efforts have failed to deliver on protecting voting rights for people of colour. National legislation aimed at blunting Republican-led state efforts to impose voter restrictions has stalled in the Senate, where a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans leaves no margin for error.Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have declared their opposition to reform of a procedural rule known as the filibuster, a necessary step for passing the legislation. Biden is accused by critics of doing too little too late, failing to use his bully pulpit to give the issue the same priority as his bipartisan infrastructure law.In a sign of the disappointment and exasperation, when Biden travelled to Atlanta this week to make his most aggressive case yet for filibuster reform, some campaigners boycotted the event.Charles Blow, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote: “For a year, activists have been screaming and pleading and begging and getting arrested, trying to get the White House to put the full weight of the presidency behind protecting voting rights, only to be met by silence or soft-pedaling.”He added: “When Biden fully entered the battle, the other warriors were already bloody, bruised and exhausted.”DemocracyIn his inaugural address, Biden proclaimed: “We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” Restoring the soul of the nation, he added, requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: “Unity.”Nearly a year later, back at the US Capitol, Biden struck a very different and more pugnacious tone. “I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy,” he vowed, signaling a belated realisation that instead of repairing the breach with Republicans, he must now stand in it and fight.Biden, who had run for election as an apostle of bipartisanship, and did get a win with Republican support for a $1tn infrastructure law. But the radicalised opposition party remains implacably opposed to legislation that would codify national protections for voting rights (see above).Republicans remain in the iron grip of Trump, his “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and the delusion that the January 6 insurrection was inconsequential or even a righteous cause.Trump acolytes and election deniers are now seeking office as secretaries of state and other positions that would put them in charge of running of future elections. This could given them the power to overturn results they do not like.This year Biden has begun to speak out forcefully on the voting rights issue – “Do you want to be the side of Dr King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?” he demanded in Atlanta – but less so on the more insidious, precinct-by-precinct threat to the electoral process.Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, told the Guardian last month: “At the state level we’re raising hell about it but the Democrats on the national level are talking about Build Back Better, the infrastructure bill, lots of other things.”Biden’s mission to heal divisions has crashed into polarisation that has only been accelerated by the pandemic and its battles over mask and vaccine mandates, as well as Republican-stoked culture wars over schools and critical race theory. Far from fading away, Trump is resuming campaign rallies ahead of a possible run for the White House in 2024.TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche; How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter – review How far will America’s disintegration into irreconcilable factions go? Two authors gaze into the near future of a failed state, at times enjoying their doomsday prophecies a little too muchZonked on patriotic zeal, Americans believe that their country is an exception to all historical rules. The land of the free, however, is currently hurtling towards a predetermined, apparently unavoidable crack-up. Its governmental institutions are paralysed, and a constitution devised for an agrarian society in the 18th century obstructs reform; its citizens, outnumbered by the guns they tote, have split into armed, antagonistic tribes. Given these conditions, the riot at the Capitol last January may have been the rehearsal for an imminent civil war.Looking down at this hot mess from chilly Toronto, the Canadian novelist and essayist Stephen Marche grimly predicts: “The United States is coming to an end.” Such a declaration could only be made by an outsider. To Americans, the idea of civil war remains unthinkable, the words unspeakable: at his inauguration Biden vowed to end “this uncivil war”, which implied that the only missiles being exchanged were harmlessly verbal. As Marche sees it, the impending war will be a continuation of the earlier one between Union and Confederacy, which broke off in 1865 without closing the gap between races, regions and economic prospects. To these human-made iniquities Marche adds the intemperance of nature: New York is likely to be inundated by a forthcoming hurricane, and Californian forests are already burning. In 1776 the founding fathers envisaged an egalitarian renewal of humanity. Now the decline of the US warns that the anthropocene era may be doomed. Marche, doubting that the walls erected by Fortress America can keep out refugees, the poor and the rising oceans, suspects that this is “how a species goes extinct”.The Next Civil War is fatalistic yet somehow elated as Marche vividly imagines the “incredibly intense events” that lie ahead. He has done the required historical research and conducted interviews with officials and academic experts, but he can’t resist elaborating scenarios for conflagration and collapse which he offers as examples of “the genre of future civil war fantasy”. One of these, narrated with sour amusement, concerns an explosive dispute in a western state where local protesters, riled up by a wily, cynical sheriff, do battle with federal bureaucrats who have closed down an unsafe bridge. Another, which resembles the plot of the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, follows an evacuee from flooded Brooklyn who pauses to reflect that a sunken highway looks “almost beautiful”. A third “thought experiment” tracks a nerdy loner who guns down the US president in a Jamba Juice outlet, after which a commentator solemnly describes the motive of misfits like this as a “desire for transcendence”.As Marche says, “the power of spectacle is driving American politics”, and his “cultural scripts” turn terror into lurid entertainment. He takes his cue from movies such as Independence Day or Olympus Has Fallen, which stage the apocalypse as an adventure ride; the difference is that this time no superhero flies or rides in to rescue the republic. Marche awards “iconic status” to the atrocities of 9/11 but mocks the agitators in his own fable about the bridge as “ludicrous fanatics” who seem to be dressed for Halloween or a rock festival: is he daring them to do better? There is a tempting, titillating danger to this, because sooner or later such prophecies will be fulfilled in action. Marche may be enjoying his novelistic nightmares a little too much, possibly even smirking from the safety of Canada as the US dismembers itself.The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see itRead moreA similarly excited anticipation of the end briefly disrupts Barbara Walter’s study, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. Walter teaches political science in San Diego, and she writes with dutiful academic sobriety as she compares her disintegrating country to failing states in the Balkans and the Middle East. She studies graphs, fiddles with data sets and deploys nonsensical jargon, classifying the US as an “anocracy” because it is midway between democracy and autocracy. But her droning lecture flares into life when she, like Marche, sets herself to imagine what an American civil war would look like. Projected ahead to 2028, the result resembles a hyped-up Hollywood pitch, with the synchronised detonation of dirty bombs in state legislatures, a botched presidential assassination bid, freelance militias patrolling the streets, and – worst of all! – assaults on big-box stores. Like Marche, Walter is aware that political warriors need the support of a “mythic narrative”, and she notices that some of the insurrectionists at the Capitol carried Bibles: in the absence of a sacred text, will the garbled synopsis of a disaster movie do just as well? After these dramatic flurries, Walter calms down as she suggests ways of averting conflict. Most of her proposals require constitutional change, which she must know will never happen or will come too late; she also recommends reintroducing the study of civics in American schools, as if those pious courses in communal engagement could be an antidote to civil war.Walter admits that following the last election, when Trump refused to concede defeat, she and her husband considered emigrating. They flicked through their flotilla of available passports – Swiss, German and Hungarian as well as American and Canadian – and decided on driving north to cross the border into British Columbia. Ultimately they chose to remain in California, as Walter announces after ritually reciting the national creed and thanking the US for “the gift to pursue our dreams”. Marche concludes his book with a more guarded tribute to the perhaps naive American “faith in human nature” and the constitution’s risky “openness to difference”. He then explains why he is glad to live in Toronto: Canadians, he says, “talk placidly and exchange endless nothings” rather than bragging, ranting and abusing each other like their southern neighbours, and they only have the weather’s “cold snaps” to contend with, not incendiary social convulsions. In times such as ours, to be snugly domiciled in a boring country is surely the best bet. The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may applyTopicsPolitics booksObserver book of the weekUS politicsThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attackRobert ReichKyrsten Sinema receives millions from business and opposes progressive priorities. Republicans who voted to overturn an election still bag big bucks. Whose side are CEOs on? Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.The US supreme court to Americans: tough luck if you get Covid at work | Robert ReichRead moreThat’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees (Pacs).But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.Over the last four decades, corporate Pac spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union Pacs contributed about as much as corporate Pacs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared with this 40-year record of corporate sedition.A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope | Robert ReichRead moreDespotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.My message to every CEO in America: you need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy – and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarizedIn 2016, I set out to understand why a border wall appealed to so many. I realized Americans are increasingly boxing themselves in – with vast impacts on the way we see the world “The border’s like our back door,” a concrete salesman named Chris told me in January 2017. “You leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.” It was the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration, and we were chatting on the exhibition floor of a trade show in Las Vegas, called World of Concrete. Circular saws, cement mixers, gleaming new trucks – it was an unusual place to talk about the politics of immigration.But the simple promise of a concrete wall between the US and Mexico had flung a business tycoon into the White House, and I wanted to understand what this was about.Chris was a millennial from a small town in western Ohio. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he quipped, speaking with a dose of wry humor about how far he chose to live from other people.I was struck by the mismatch between the salesman’s genial manner and his suspiciousness, his sense of anyone beyond his home or country as a potential threat. I wondered, as we talked amid a sea of construction equipment, what it would take to build genuine warmth and concern for outsiders, rather than such walls.For the last five years, I’ve crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, pursuing conversation and debate between the coasts and heartland. I set out in 2016 to grasp the appeal of the border wall, the fantasy of sealing off the country with a stark, symbolic barrier. What I learned is that such barricades appeal to many Americans because they resonate with familiar boundaries in their daily lives.What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-maskerRead moreWhile Trump’s presidency has passed, the defensive thinking that drove his ascent remains a pervasive and powerful force. I think of the Gen Xer with a bushy beard and colorful tattoos down the length of his arms, whom I saw hawking a motion sensor lighting system with these words of advice: “I know it sounds cold, but you want to keep people away as best you can.” Or this motto and promise from the home security company ADT: “a line in the sand between your family and an uncertain world.” Time and again, I’ve heard such ideas expressed by Americans I’ve met and spoken with around the country in my job as an anthropologist: businessmen and truck drivers, police officers and media personalities.The give and take of neighbors has long been a foundation for our democracy, philosopher Nancy Rosenblum writes. But cultural and economic forces have worked stark distinctions – insider v outsider, familiar v stranger, safety v threat – deep into the texture of our daily lives. These hard lines and everyday divides fuel our political troubles in ways we don’t always realize.To get to this gated community on Florida’s Treasure Coast, you have to drive through a continuous stretch of walled compounds, everything inside hidden from view by towering hedges and palms. I show my credentials at the guardhouse, and the railway gate swings open. As I drive with the security director past sprawling homes and unnervingly empty streets, Timothy tells me about a residential population – wealthy, mostly white – primed for disaster and desperate for repose.One out of every six American houses in a residential community is secured now by such community walls or fences, and I met Timothy to try to understand why.Residents who live here are mostly seeking psychological assurance, he admitted: “They like us smiling and waving at them.”Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life. The pandemic has magnified the appeal of such distance and defense, with more features like security cameras, video doorbells and HEPA air filters built into new houses than ever before.These histories have profoundly reshaped how Americans live in relation to each other, as much as where. So much of everyday life and leisure now takes place in secluded spaces. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. These changes lessen the chance for happenstance conversation with neighbors and strangers.A realtor in Fargo, North Dakota, helped me understand the significance of these shifts. A fit man in his early 60s, Paul had worked in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan real estate market for more than 20 years. He took me one morning to a compact new house in a middle-class subdivision, the smell of fresh paint lingering in the cool air inside.Standing in the living room and looking to the front, I felt enclosed in the space, almost hemmed in: the house was fronted by a three-stall garage and one narrow window on to the street and sidewalk. Turn to the back though, and you were flooded with light from every direction, the rear of the house framed with big panes of glass instead of walls.“Doesn’t it bother people that there aren’t many windows in the front?” I asked Paul. “You can hardly see what’s happening on the street.”“The inside is what they care about,” he replied. “And,” he added, pointing out the sunroom at the rear of the house and the back patio beyond, “living on the back. This is where we engage socially with our neighbors.”The small patio was lodged between other private decks and yards, a place to socialize with others by choice rather than necessity. “This is my space, I’ll engage with who I want, when I want,” the realtor explained. “It’s a bit selfish,” he acknowledged.Whether it comes to the climate emergency or systemic racism, the migrant crisis or the ongoing pandemic, so much turns on whether we can acknowledge and accept the intertwining of our separate lives. But it’s not just our homes that are styled now like defensive fortresses.Over the last decade, imposing vehicles like SUVs and trucks have come to dominate the American car market, far outpacing smaller sedans in sales. These are automobiles designed with aggressive profiles and built as defensive steel cocoons, often marketed as ways to survive an uncertain and even hostile world. As an automotive designer in Los Angeles told me, such vehicles appeal in a society that is “suffering a case of insecurity”.There is a political side to such choices: researchers have found that cities with more sedans than pickup trucks will probably vote Democratic in a presidential election, while those with more pickup trucks will probably vote Republican. But it isn’t simply a matter of signaling partisan affiliation through automotive choice. Vehicles say a lot about what people care most about.Consider an exchange I had one morning in Los Angeles with the driver of a Cadillac Escalade, a few years ago. He was an Asian American dad, like me, and we’d run into each other on the driveway of a cheery and progressive nursery school on the Westside. I’d walked my daughter there that morning; his daughter was buckled into one of the Escalade’s seats. I was struck by how tiny the child looked inside the three-ton vehicle, how challenging it would be for her to clamber down to the ground outside.The hulking white automobile was brand new, still without license plates. Why an Escalade? I asked. “It’s perceived to be safe,” he replied. “You know, more mass.”More mass. The phrase kept playing on my mind as I walked back home. Whose safety was secured by all the vehicular mass hurtling down American roads, and at whose expense?The rise of the SUV in global automotive markets is the second largest cause of increasing carbon emissions over the last decade, more significant than shipping, aviation and heavy industry. And at an everyday scale, there are serious consequences for those who encounter them in collisions.Because of their rigid and heavy frames, SUVs and trucks are far more dangerous than conventional sedans for the pedestrians, cyclists and children at play who share American streets with automobiles. Pedestrian deaths on roadways in the United States have soared by more than 50% over the last decade.Someone in an armored cockpit, someone else on their own two feet: this too is a polarized encounter. Low-income Americans and people of color are much more likely to be struck and killed while walking, which brings home another difficult truth in these developments.Indifference is a privilege. Some can afford to seal themselves off from the world beyond, while those left outside must fend for themselves as best they can.The fortress mindset thrives on suspicion, and the urge to protect oneself can make shared spaces and resources seem more dangerous than they are. Take that necessity for life itself, the water we drink. American consumers now buy an astounding 75 billion disposable bottles of water each year, each a tiny enclosure of an essential resource, a shelter made for one. The bottled water industry has capitalized on widespread unease about the quality of public water supplies in the United States. Meanwhile, as interest and investment in shared public infrastructure lags, people are left with polluted and contaminated water, forced to rely on bottled alternatives.Two years before the pandemic began, I attended a bottled water trade show in Texas. Most everyone walked around with a small disposable bottle in hand, always closed, the little caps screwed back on after every sip. “I don’t drink public water,” people would avow, wrinkling their noses in distaste at the very idea of a drinking fountain. “Someone else’s mouth is on it and over it.”Water fountains were switched off across the country in 2020 when the pandemic struck. But they’d already been disappearing for years, and how many will return remains uncertain. Bottled water is regulated so loosely that its quality is difficult to judge. Yet many Americans have come to believe again in the purity of a resource untouched by the wrong people, a dark contemporary echo of the segregated fountains of the Jim Crow era.At the bottled water trade show, I spoke with a middle-aged white man in a brown suit who worked for a water conditioning company in west Texas. I noticed his habit of crumpling up each disposable bottle into a little ball when it was empty, and I asked him about this gesture.“I like to put things away,” he told me, describing how he’d throw these crinkled balls of plastic into the back of his SUV while he was driving. I imagined them piling up in heaps, a travelling signpost for the mountain of waste that all of us are building together.There’s a curious resonance between this faith in a sealed bottle, and a culture that celebrates the invulnerable body. Americans are often encouraged to imagine their own bodies as armored enclosures, to seal off against the outside world. Think of bottled sports drinks like BodyArmor or BioSteel. “Your body, your fortress,” their taglines read.The coronavirus pandemic has supercharged such ideas, setting off a boom in personal disinfectant products and touchless technology, making it easier to deny the truth that we depend on each other for our wellbeing. The deep resistance to face masks and vaccination in the United States also relies, quite often, on a highly individualized sense of bodily autonomy.I think of a middle-aged white businessman from Michigan with whom I’ve debated the pandemic for many months. A staunch libertarian, he considers compulsory public health precautions as tantamount to slavery. They deny, he says, “my feelings, my rights, my personal body”.Regular exposure to different points of view could complicate such diehard convictions. But our fractured media have deepened the existing fissures of American society.Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these interlocking divides make it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously; harder to acknowledge the needs of strangers, to trust their motives and empathize with their struggles. In an atomized society, others become phantoms all too easily, grist for the mill of resentment and mistrust.There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes, as the political scientist Ryan Enos and others have shown. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.But this isn’t all that is happening, or could yet happen.Around the country in 2020, the pandemic spurred a return to socializing with neighbors on front yards and porches. Cities and towns have carved out new places for walking, biking and outdoor life, new ways of sharing public space with people, known and unknown. It remains to be seen whether these are temporary adjustments or more enduring experiments.Movements for mutual aid, racial justice and cultural solidarity have also brought Americans together, spurring more radical commitments to collective care-taking, redrawing the line between stranger and kin. The vitality of such movements depends on adequate space and support. Calls abound to redesign our personal and public spaces for conviviality rather than isolation. Commons, parks and open streetscapes; living quarters and resources arranged to encourage social awareness, not solipsism; communication platforms that nurture contrary lines of thought: these spaces can nurture the capacity to live and thrive alongside others unlike oneself, working against the tendency to reject and retreat.Our feelings for others are structural realities as much as personal qualities. In a society built on walls of indifference, empathy will remain an elusive hope. For “the death of the heart” is one of the most tragic consequences of segregation, as James Baldwin observed: “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall.”TopicsLife and styleTrump administrationVaccines and immunisationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
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Joe Biden’s low point: can the president revive his sinking popularity?After a week of setbacks, some analysts say time is running short to impress voters ahead of the November polls Even for a White House familiar with roadblocks and frustration, Thursday’s setbacks on vaccine mandates and voting rights came as hammer blows.Aside from the immediate derailing of two key policy tenets of Joe Biden’s administration, the vaccine ruling by the supreme court, which quickly followed Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema’s public assassination of his voting reform efforts, prompted a new round of questions over whether his presidency was doomed.Crucially, serious agonizing is now going on about what Biden’s woes might mean for the Democratic party’s fortunes in midterm elections later this year, when Republicans are tipped to seize back control of both chambers of Congress.‘Democracy on the line’: Biden under pressure to act on voting rights nowRead moreWith Biden’s public popularity sinking – in one poll this week to a new low of 33% – and with another centrist Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, having already capsized the president’s flagship $1.75tn Build Back Better domestic spending plan, some analysts say time is running short to impress voters ahead of the November polls.“The whole first year is gone. And in the end, nothing,” said Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’ Center for Politics, referring to the lengthy but fruitless discussions with Manchin over the make-up of the plan. “Manchin led him down the rosy patch then threw him into the briar patch. ‘Would you change that? You changed that, well, I don’t like this thing over here. Oh, you changed that, well, there’s these two things …’”Sabato added: “But the voting rights debacle is the worst of all because why was Biden elected other than that people wanted to get rid of Trump? It was because he was seen as experienced and competent. What’s the experience gotten us exactly? I just don’t understand how we got here.”Several of Biden’s misfortunes, Sabato said, are not directly of his own making. He has made repeated efforts to change the minds of both Manchin and Sinema, most recently in seemingly unsuccessful late-night talks at the White House on Thursday in an attempt to salvage his agenda.01:50But Sabato also believes that the president’s handling of various situations, and poor direction from advisers, particularly over the Covid-19 pandemic, runaway inflation, and last year’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, have combined to leave Biden exposed.About inflation, Sabato says: “Biden’s team simply missed it badly, they got it very, very wrong, and they’re continuing probably to get it wrong. They’re downplaying it and they’re going to tame it by mid-year. Maybe, but I’ll be surprised.”On Afghanistan, Sabato said, Biden “threw it away again”.“It could have been a big plus had it been handled correctly because just about everybody – Democrat, Republican – was more than willing to get out of Afghanistan. It was a very bad performance by his team. They couldn’t know what was gonna happen? He’s responsible for his advisers, so he can be blamed for it.”On Friday, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the president would hold a rare, formal press conference next Wednesday to mark his first year in office. As well as answering difficult questions about the administration’s failures, Biden will talk up its successes, namely the $1tn infrastructure bill he signed in November, and the $1.9tn Covid relief plan from last spring.Having appeared fatigued by Thursday’s rejections, a more buoyant Biden followed up with his own briefing on Friday afternoon, accompanied by Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor he appointed to oversee the implementation of the infrastructure act.“There’s a lot of talk about disappointments and things we haven’t gotten done. We’re going to get a lot of them done, I might add,” Biden said. “But this [infrastructure] is something we did get done, and it’s of enormous consequence to the country.”Some analysts suggest the touting of past glories displays a lack of confidence in what can still be achieved in the almost 10 months until the midterms, something Biden seemed to acknowledge on Thursday when he said: “I don’t know whether we can get this done,” after a Capitol Hill meeting with Democrats over voting rights.0The obstacles ahead of Biden are certainly substantial. They range from Democrats’ internal divisions between progressives and moderates, stonewalling by Republicans in Congress and the Donald Trump-created conservative super-majority on the supreme court that has already delivered several blows, and appears poised this summer to overturn five decades of abortion rights.Yet Biden is committed to trying to salvage what he can from what promises to be a testing few months. “Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we can come back and try it a second time,” he told reporters about voting rights efforts.Similarly, he is also likely to attempt to get through Congress individual elements of the Build Back Better plan that are acceptable to Senate moderates, including universal pre-kindergarten education, subsidized child care and a number of climate provisions.“They may try to get pieces of Build Back Better, or build back something as we now call it, but everyone’s going to describe it as crumbs from the table,” Sabato said.“If they’d started with that, people would say, ‘Wow, that’s incredible, pre-K for everybody’, or whatever piece they decided to pick, it didn’t really matter which one. But now it will appear to people as this tiny piece of what the president started out with, [and] tremendous disappointment in Democratic ranks. By the end of the story you won’t even know what passed.”In November last year, Biden, who will be 81 at the time of the 2024 presidential election, announced his intention to run for a second term.Publicly at least, he retains the support of his party, but the Washington Post reported in December rumblings of discontent in Democratic circles about his leadership. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, citing the unpopularity of both Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, even floated the idea of a comeback for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee beaten by Trump in 2016, to fill what its authors called a “leadership vacuum”.In the wake of this week’s disappointments, the possibility of an alternative Democratic ticket for 2024 emerged again, the Washington Post columnist and political analyst Perry Bacon Jr suggesting there were “plenty of strong candidates” if Biden or Harris do not run.“Biden hasn’t cracked some magic political code. Despite his white maleness and appeals to unity, Washington is gridlocked, Republican voters hate the president and his party is poised to do poorly in the midterms,” Bacon wrote on Friday. “It seems entirely possible that Biden runs in 2024 and loses to a Republican challenger. Democrats simply might be better off with someone new.”TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

Stewart Rhodes: how his arrest signals a new chapter in January 6 inquiryOath Keepers leader is one of the most high-profile arrests yet in the year-long investigation into the insurrection The arrest this week of Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers militia, marks one of the most significant moments thus far in the federal investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack.Rhodes, along with ten other associates, is charged with seditious conspiracy for plotting to violently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election – the first sedition charges prosecutors have brought related to the insurrection.Rhodes is the one of the most high-profile arrests yet in the year-long investigation into the insurrection, which has charged more than 700 people and counting with crimes related to the attack. Many of these cases have involved minor charges and the majority of suspects have received light sentences, but the sedition charges facing militia members could carry up to 20 years in prison and signal a shift towards more complex cases targeting organized extremist groups.Guns, ammo … even a boat: how Oath Keepers plotted an armed coupRead moreThe conspiracy charges against Rhodes and other Oath Keepers members, as well as separate conspiracy to obstruct Congress cases involving Oath Keepers and Proud Boys extremists, are additionally significant because they may reveal the extent of planning that went into the attack. What level of prior coordination and plotting pro-Trump groups conducted prior to January 6 remains a key question, and one that is set to become a focal point of trials in the coming months.“We’ve had such a good unfolding and narrative of what folks on the ground were doing, but we’ve not yet had a definitive narrative emerge about the people in power behind it and who was organizing it,” said Melissa Ryan, CEO of CARD Strategies, a consulting firm that researches online extremism and disinformation.“Between what we see over the next few months from the justice department and whatever comes out of the select congressional investigation, hopefully a story is going to start to emerge.”Who are Rhodes and the Oath Keepers?Rhodes has been a prominent figure in the far-right for over a decade. Easily distinguishable by his dark eyepatch – the result of dropping a loaded handgun and shooting himself in the left eye during his 20s, according to an Atlantic investigation – Rhodes positioned himself at the forefront of the anti-government militia movement amid its resurgence after the 2008 election of Barack Obama.A former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate, Rhodes announced the creation of the Oath Keepers at a 2009 rally on the site of a Revolutionary War battle. The group, which Rhodes marketed towards former and current law enforcement and military personnel, claimed to stand for defending the constitution and advocated for disobeying certain laws such as gun control legislation. Rhodes was careful to create a broad appeal for the organization, initially trying to distance it from more openly violent extremism and claiming that it wasn’t officially a militia.But the Oath Keepers soon became a leading group in the anti-government extremist militia movement, growing to thousands of members across the country. It became a visible presence at anti-government and anti-gun control rallies, while promoting far-right conspiracies about a totalitarian New World Order. Rhodes frequently told his followers that the US was entering a state of civil war and to arm themselves, a claim that became more frequent during the nationwide protests against racism and police killings in 2020. The Oath Keepers also became ardent supporters of Donald Trump and gained a foothold in the modern Republican party, including providing security for Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone one day before the Capitol attack.In September of 2021, hackers released a membership list for the Oath Keepers that revealed the extent that the group had become embedded in state institutions. Its members included dozens of law enforcement, armed forces members and elected officials – some of whom used their government emails when signing up for the militia.“The Oath Keepers have just been building more and more political power within the GOP, taking positions at the local level, running for office,” Ryan said. “You have state senators who identify proudly as Oath Keepers. I would not be surprised if they had a member of Congress in the next couple cycles.”A shift in the investigationThe charges against the Oath Keepers are some of the most serious to date in the investigation, alleging a well-armed plot to undermine the democratic elections. Investigators also lay out a series of events that contradict the dominant narrative of January 6 among rightwing media figures and many Republican politicians, who have claimed the attack was a mostly peaceful political protest and pushed conspiracy theories that leftists or government agents were behind any violence.The charging documents involving Rhodes and ten associates accused of seditious conspiracy portray a group intent on overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election and willing to use violence to achieve their goals. Prosecutors allege the Oath Keepers conducted extensive planning and coordination, with encrypted messages between the members discussing government overthrow prior to the attack and making plans to form “quick reaction force” teams to move into the Capitol area with firearms.“They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington DC, equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical gear, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms,” the court documents state.In the weeks leading up to the attack, Rhodes allegedly spent more than $20,000 on weapons and tactical equipment, including on night vision goggles, a shotgun and cases of ammunition. Court documents state that on the morning of the insurrection, Rhodes suggested to other Oath Keepers in an encrypted group chat that armed quick reaction force teams were standing by. (As part of a plea deal last year, one Oath Keeper admitted to stashing an M4 rifle at a Comfort Inn hotel just outside the Capitol.)“We will have several well equipped QRF’s outside DC,” Rhodes texted the Oath Keepers’ group chat.Federal investigators had been circling Rhodes for some time, filing court papers in March that alleged he was in direct communication with Oath Keepers involved in the Capitol attack and then several months later using a warrant to seize his cell phone. Rhodes stated last year that, against the advice of his legal counsel, he sat for a three-hour interview with federal agents to discuss the role that he and the Oath Keepers played in the attack. He continually claimed that he had done nothing wrong.“I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” Rhodes said in March of last year at a speech in Texas.None of the government’s conspiracy cases related to the Capitol attack have gone to trial yet, and researchers say sedition charges can be hard to prove. The government has charged a number of militia members with seditious conspiracy in the past only for those defendants to go free after the cases went to trial. In the late 1980s, a jury acquitted 13 white supremacists who prosecutors had charged with seditious conspiracy involving a plot to kill a federal judge and overthrow the government. More recently, nine Michigan militia members were acquitted in 2012 after authorities charged them with plotting to start an armed uprising against the government.It also remains unclear what Rhodes’ arrest and the charges facing numerous Oath Keepers means for the extremist organization as a whole. Since the insurrection, some members of the group have advocated for further engagement in local government and political activism. Meanwhile, researchers say they have benefited from a Republican whitewashing of the Capitol attack that has allowed them to continue operating with a degree of impunity.“A lot of us assumed that they would be weakened by January 6,” Ryan said. “It seems like the opposite has happened.”TopicsThe far rightUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS crimeUS justice systemfeaturesReuse this content More