US Politics

The Wall Street Journal has come under a torrent of denunciation for publishing a “sexist” opinion article that calls Jill Biden, the first lady-in-waiting, “kiddo”, and questions her right to use “Dr” in front of her name.Biden’s director of communications Elizabeth Alexander denounced the piece as “sexist and shameful”. Michael LaRosa, Biden’s spokesperson in the transition team, went further and demanded an apology, saying the newspaper should be embarrassed by the “sexist attack”.The article, written by a former adjunct professor at Northwestern University, purports to offer Biden “a bit of advice”. Opening on the provocative note of calling her “Madame (sic) First Lady – Mrs Biden – Jill – kiddo”, the author goes on to recommend that she drop the honorific of “Dr” before her name.“‘Dr Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic,” Epstein writes. He justifies his condescension towards her title on grounds that it referred to an “Ed D – a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware”.Over the weekend, a groundswell of criticism built into a tidal wave over the haughtiness of the piece and its sexism and racism, such as where the author suggests as a simile for rarity the phrase: “Rarer than a contemporary university honorary-degree list not containing an African-American woman”.Hillary Clinton put her reaction most pithily: “Her name is Dr Jill Biden. Get used to it.”Other prominent public figures also waded in. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, tweeted at Biden saying: “My father was a non-medical doctor. And his work benefited humanity greatly. Yours does, too.”Doug Emhoff, who is destined to become “second gentleman” as the spouse of the vice president-elect Kamala Harris, said that Biden had earned her degrees through “hard work and pure grit… This story would never have been written about a man.”Perhaps the harshest criticism came from Epstein’s old employer, Northwestern University, which tartly noted that he hasn’t taught there in almost 20 years. In a statement, the English department said it rejected his opinion on Biden “as well as the diminishment of anyone’s duly-earned degrees in any field, from any university”.Epstein’s profile on the Northwestern website, where he had been listed as an “emeritus lecturer”, was apparently later taken down, the journalist David Gura reported on Twitter. More

Donald Trump on Monday could suffer a withering blow to his increasingly hopeless effort to overturn the results of the US presidential election when 538 members of the electoral college will cast their ballots and formally send Joe Biden to the White House.Under the arcane formula which America has followed since the first election in 1789, Monday’s electoral college vote will mark the official moment when Biden becomes the 46th president-in-waiting. Electors, including political celebrities such as both Bill and Hillary Clinton, will gather in state capitols across the country to cement the outcome of this momentous race.Normally, the process is figurative and barely noted. This year, given Trump’s volatile display of tilting at windmills in an attempt to negate the will of the American people, it will carry real political significance.Trump continued those quixotic efforts over the weekend, sparking political unrest in several cities including the nation’s capital. On Sunday morning he tweeted in all caps that this was the “most corrupt election in US history!”.In an interview with Fox & Friends that aired on Sunday, he insisted that his anti-democratic mission was not over. “We keep going and we’re going to continue to go forward,” he said, before repeating a slew of lies about the election having been rigged.Trump’s barefaced untruths about having won key states including Pennsylvania and Georgia went entirely unchallenged by the Fox News interviewer, Brian Kilmeade.Any faltering hopes Trump might still harbor of hanging on to power were shattered on Friday when the US supreme court unanimously and bluntly dismissed a lawsuit led by Texas to block Biden’s victory in four other states. In a different case, a Wisconsin supreme court judge decried Trump’s lawsuit aiming to nullify the votes of 200,000 Americans, saying it “smacked of racism”.Despite the categoric rebuff that Trump has suffered in dozens of cases, including before the nation’s highest court, his unprecedented ploy to tear up democratic norms continues to inflict untold damage on the country with potential long-term consequences. The Texas-led push to overturn the election result was backed by 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – almost two-thirds of the party’s conference – as well as Republican state attorneys general from 18 states.Among the wider electorate, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 77% of Republicans believe – mistakenly – that there was widespread voter fraud in the 3 November election.Another manifestation of the harm that is being done was the violence that erupted on Saturday night across several cities. In Washington DC, four people were stabbed and required hospital treatment, and 23 were arrested, when far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters following a so-called “Stop the Steal” march enthusiastically endorsed by Trump.Far-right militia groups mingled among the Trump supporters and engaged in the violence, including the white nationalist Proud Boys who call themselves “western chauvinists”. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, addressed a crowd, exclaiming: “We decide the election. We’re waging a battle across America.”Violence also broke out in Olympia, the state capital of Washington state. One person was shot in clashes between heavily armed factions, with Trump supporters and Proud Boys facing off against counter-protesters, and three people were arrested.Video footage appeared to show that the shot was fired by a member of the Proud Boy and that the victim was a counter-protester, although details remained sketchy.In Georgia, a separate militia group, Georgia Security Force III%, were in attendance at a far-right rally at the statehouse on Saturday. The armed group has helped to organise recent caravans that have intimidated local election officials at their homes claiming falsely that Biden’s victory in Georgia was fraudulent.Biden’s transition team has watched with growing alarm the spate of violent incidents that has cropped up around Trump’s spurious claims of a rigged election. Cedric Richmond, a Democratic representative from Louisiana who Biden has tapped as the incoming director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, said they were anxious about what lay ahead in the holiday season.“We are concerned about violence,” he told Face the Nation on CBS News. “Where there’s violence it is not protest, that is breaking the law, so we are worried about it.”Asked about the majority of House Republicans who backed Trump’s frivolous lawsuit to block election results being certified, Richmond implied their resistance was more theatrical than real. “They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. This is just a small proportion of the Republican conference that is appeasing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter” feed.The outlier nature of Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede was underlined on Sunday by Al Gore in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union. Exactly 20 years ago to the day, he conceded the bitterly-fought 2000 presidential race to George W Bush, saying: “This is America, we put country before party – we will stand together behind our new president.”Gore told CNN that he hoped Monday’s electoral college vote would be the beginning of healing. He called the lawsuit dismissed by the supreme court “ridiculous and unintelligible”, and castigated those Republicans who continued to stick with Trump in his “lost cause”.“With the electoral college votes tomorrow in all 50 states, I hope that will be the point at which some of those who have hung on will give up the ghost,” Gore said. “There are things more important than bowing to the fear of a demagogue.” More

Hackers backed by a foreign government have been monitoring internal email traffic at the US treasury department and an agency that decides internet and telecommunications policy, according to people familiar with the matter.“The United States government is aware of these reports and we are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation,” said national security council spokesman John Ullyot.There is concern within the US intelligence community that the hackers who targeted the treasury department and the commerce department’s national telecommunications and information administration used a similar tool to break into other government agencies, according to three people briefed on the matter. The people did not say which other agencies.The hack is so serious it led to a national security council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter.The hack involves the NTIA’s office software, Microsoft’s Office 365. Staff emails at the agency were monitored by the hackers for months, sources said.A Microsoft spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The hackers are “highly sophisticated” and have been able to trick the Microsoft platform’s authentication controls, according to a person familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the press.“This is a nation state,” said a different person briefed on the matter. “We just don’t know which one yet.“The full scope of the hack is unclear. The investigation is still in its early stages and involves a range of federal agencies, including the FBI, according to the three people familiar with the matter.The FBI, homeland security department’s cybersecurity division, known as CISA, and US national security agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

The Trump administration is facing mounting calls to abandon threats to sanction Houthi rebels in northern Yemen to avoid an imminent danger of extreme famine in the country, where almost two-thirds of the population are in need of food aid.US state department officials are considering designating the Houthis as a terrorist group before the 20 January inauguration of Joe Biden, a move that would complicate the delivery of essential aid in large parts of the country, senior UN officials and NGOs have said.The widely predicted move would be alongside a raft of flagged sanctions against Iran and its interests over the final five weeks of Trump’s rule, in which squeezing Tehran and its allies looms as a central plank of Washington’s foreign policy.The Labour party in the UK added its voice to the concerns on Sunday, saying the expected move against the Houthis, whom Iran supports in Yemen, would result in aid being unable to reach much of the country’s north. The shadow minister for international development, Anna McMorrin, said this would deprive millions of people who had no choice but to remain under Houthi control of much-needed assistance.In a letter to the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, imploring the UK not to follow the US’s lead, McMorrin wrote: “We are concerned that a blanket definition for the Houthis would create a near insurmountable hurdle to the delivery of essential humanitarian relief, with those providing material relief or economic support to agencies and multilateral programmes at risk of legal or financial sanctions.“Humanitarian organisations would also be denied practical contact with much of the Houthis’ administrative infrastructure and would be barred from using local civilian contractors to deliver programmes.”Human Rights Watch has also warned of the consequences of US designation. “Many Yemenis are already on the brink of starvation, and US actions that would interfere with the work of aid organisations could have catastrophic consequences,” said the organisation’s Yemen researcher, Afrah Nasser, in a report released on Friday. “Any designation of the Houthis should at a minimum provide clear and immediate exemptions for humanitarian aid, but millions of lives should not have to depend on that.”Yemen, one of the region’s most impoverished states, has been in turmoil over most of the past decade. Instability worsened when the Houthis overthrew the Yemeni government in early 2015. That was followed by a military intervention led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which has further destabilised the country and led to soaring humanitarian needs. Despite temporary lulls in fighting, calls for a permanent ceasefire have not been met.The United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres, said last month: “Yemen is now in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades. In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost.”Calls to support humanitarian efforts have repeatedly met funding difficulties. Humanitarian needs have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has ravaged much of the country. However, a dysfunctional bureaucracy has made understanding the scale of the spread of disease almost impossible.Iran has provided support to Houthi rebels throughout the conflict with Saudi Arabia, which has led to mass displacement and disease and at least 12,000 civilian casualties. Riyadh insists Tehran’s level of backing is far higher than it acknowledges and amounts to a strategic threat against its eastern border. Ballistic missiles fired from Yemen have sporadically hit Saudi cities throughout the war, which has also been marked by repeated Saudi airstrikes inside the country.McMorrin and Human Rights Watch both say attempts to secure a negotiated ceasefire would be much more complicated if the US moves ahead with a designation of the Houthis.The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has told regional allies that he is determined to tighten pressure on Iran’s allies elsewhere in the region in the waning days of the administration, with proxies in Iraq and the powerful Lebanese militia and political bloc also in Washington’s crosshairs.A senior regional source said designating the Houthis and escalating pressure on Tehran over the next five weeks had been agreed between Washington and Riyadh during Pompeo’s most recent visit to the Middle East. More

Speculation about the post-White House career of Ivanka Trump is now centered on Florida, where the soon to be ex-first daughter and senior aide to her president father has reportedly bought an expensive plot of land for a house and may be considering a run for Senate.Ivanka Trump is frequently mentioned as desiring a political career of her own and during her time working for Donald Trump has sought to position herself as a more media-friendly version of her father.Now US media reports are focusing on Florida – where Donald Trump owns the Mar-A-Lago resort – as a potential base for his daughter to launch a political career of her own.“Ivanka definitely has political ambitions, no question about it,” a source told CNN. “She wants to run for something, but that still needs to be figured out.”Florida might offer one potential avenue in a Senate race in 2022 when current Republican incumbent Marco Rubio’s seat is up for re-election. Rubio was a harsh critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican nomination race but later morphed into a loyal supporter of Trump once he had the won election.“I think she’d be the immediate frontrunner if she ran for US Senate against Rubio, given her father’s popularity in the Sunshine State,” Adam C Smith, former Tampa Bay Times political editor and now consultant with Mercury Public Affairs, told CNN.Supporting the speculation are news reports that Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner – who has also been a prominent and influential member of the White House team for the last four years – are spending millions of dollars on a property in Florida that will serve as their future home base.The New York Post reported that the pair are spending more than $30m on a land lot on Miami’s exclusive Indian Creek Island, which has been dubbed the “Billionaire’s Bunker”. The island reportedly boasts its own private police force for its handful of ultra-wealthy residences.Ivanka Trump is not the only member of her family potentially eyeing up a political future post-Trump. Donald Trump Jr – who is popular with his father’s conservative base – is often seen as likely to make a serious bid to enter politics in his own right. Meanwhile, daughter-in-law Lara Trump has been mentioned as a potential candidate for the Senate in North Carolina. More

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or talk up a storm about the minimum wage, healthcare and the existential struggle for democracy.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest Instagram live stream found the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress standing at a chopping board with two lemons and a plastic jug as she expounded her political philosophy.“Both Democrats and Republicans,” she said, scooping up a lemon with her right hand, “when they indulge in these narratives of commonsense policies being radical,” – setting the lemon down on the board again – “what they’re trying to do is really shorten the window of what’s possible.”A twee icing contest on The Great British Bake Off this is not. And as far as we know, Gordon Ramsay, Ina Garten and Nigella Lawson have never been heard to exclaim, “Shoutout to my fellow radicals!” as Ocasio-Cortez did last Thursday night.But for anyone worried that politics might become a little too boring under Joe Biden’s presidency, “AOC”, as she is universally known, is bringing comfort food. The 31-year-old New York Democrat has gained a vast social media following with her intimate videos of cooking, fashion tips, furniture assembly and behind the scenes in Congress.Rep. AOC: “All these Republicans and all these folks who were anti-shutdown are the same people who weren’t wearing masks who forced us to shut down in the first place.” pic.twitter.com/85bW0lNefU— The Hill (@thehill) December 11, 2020
This may say something about a public craving for authenticity in politicians: Biden, Donald Trump and AOC’s mentor Bernie Sanders have it, as far as their supporters are concerned. Similarly Ocasio-Cortez, from a working-class family in the Bronx, comes over more like your relatable drinking buddy than a Washington stiff but combines it with a millennial’s instinct for social media and a timeless star quality.But it is also proof that entertainment and politics have become mutually indistinguishable. The trend arguably began 60 years ago with the televised Kennedy v Nixon debates, received a boost from Bill Clinton playing saxophone on a late-night talkshow and reached its apotheosis with Trump, who went from reality TV host to reality TV president.So Ocasio-Cortez offers a glimpse of where we’re heading. Her Instagram live streams typically begin with the type of bit that might feature on daytime TV before pivoting to policy. It is a technique that serves journalists, novelists and other storytellers well: first hook your audience with something engaging, then move on to the substantial idea you really want to talk about.A cooking video last year began with Ocasio-Cortez in an unglamorous kitchen, rinsing rice in the sink. What are you making? asked viewers. The answer: chicken tikka masala. “I am missing ginger, which is a really big bummer,” she said, before fielding questions on everything from Medicare for All to presidential impeachments.In last Thursday’s edition, lemons were a suitably sour match for Ocasio-Cortez’s mood in a country where 3,000 people a day are dying from coronavirus, Congress has stalled for months over providing economic relief – and Biden appears in no hurry to put her progressive allies in his cabinet.Wearing a “tax the rich” sweater, the congresswoman was visibly more angry and frustrated than usual. “If people think that the present day is like radical far left, they just haven’t even opened a book,” she said with expressive hand gestures. “Like, we had much more radicalism in the United States as recently as the 60s.“We talk about how labour unions started in this country. That was radical. People died, people died in this country, it was almost like a war for the 40-hour work week and your weekends. And a lot of people died for these very basic economic rights. We can’t go back to that time.”She added: “Doubling the minimum wage should be normal. Guaranteed healthcare should be normal. Trying to save our planet should be centrist politics.”She became even more irate as she talked about Covid-19. Hands resting on a plastic jug, she said animatedly: “Here’s the thing that’s also a huge irony to me, is that all these Republicans and all these folks who were anti-shutdown are the same people who weren’t wearing masks who forced us to shut down in the first place.”The final 12 words of that sentence came in a rapid staccato, accompanied by Ocasio-Cortez’s left hand clapping or chopping her right for emphasis. “I wanna see my family,” she said. “I haven’t seen my family in a year, like many of you all. I wanna be able to visit my friends without being scared and I wanna be able to hang out with my friends when it’s cold outside and not have to be outside.”If anyone was depending on AOC for their dinner that night, they were in for a long wait. Ilhan Omar, a fellow member of “the Squad” in Congress, teased her on Twitter: “@AOC you forgot to tell us what you were making tonight sis.”Ocasio-Cortez confessed: “I tried to make salmon spinach pasta but got carried away about how jacked up our Covid response is and how badly we need stimulus checks and healthcare that all I did was zest a lemon I’ll post my meal when it’s done.”And she eventually did post a photo for “accountability purposes”. (Her pet dog looked intrigued.)The style has been honed over time. Last year there was the live stream of Ocasio-Cortez in her unfurnished apartment where she had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Again, relatable. “I’ve been living like a completely depraved lifestyle,” she said, chewing on popcorn (top tip: add ground pepper) and assembling a table. “There’s something very satisfying about putting together Ikea furniture.”But she also delivered meat in the sandwich. “Your grandchildren will not be able to hide the fact that you fought against acknowledging and taking bold actions on climate change,” Ocasio-Cortez warned opponents. “We have 12 years left to cut emissions by at least 50%, if not more, and for everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh but your grandkids will not.”Another classic of the genre came in August this year when Ocasio-Cortez shot a video for Vogue about her skincare and lipstick routine. On one level, it was glamorous and fun. On another, it was a golden opportunity to riff on patriarchy, the gender pay gap and what it is to live in systems largely built for the convenience of men – in a medium that was infinitely more digestible than a dry university seminar.“The reason why I think it’s so important to share these things is that, first of all, femininity has power, and in politics there is so much criticism and nitpicking about how women and femme people present ourselves,” she said. “Just being a woman is quite politicised here in Washington.“…… There’s this really false idea that if you care about makeup or if your interests are in beauty and fashion, that that’s somehow frivolous. But I actually think these are some of the most substantive decisions that we make – and we make them every morning.”One of the keys to understanding the phenomenon of Ocasio-Cortez, and the backlash against her, is her years of working as a bartender and waitress. Critics seek to portray this as a weakness, with Twitter jibes such as “Shut up and sit down, bartender”. On the contrary, it is a strength, a schooling in the art of conversation and listening.Ocasio-Cortez shot back last year: “I find it revealing when people mock where I came from, and say they’re going to ‘send me back to waitressing’, as if that is bad or shameful. It’s as though they think being a member of Congress makes you intrinsically ‘better’ than a waitress. But our job is to serve, not rule.”The US constitution stipules that the president must be at least 35 years old. Ocasio-Cortez turns 35 less than a month before the next election. She is already campaigning from her kitchen without knowing it. More

As the sun dipped on a crisp autumnal evening in southern Georgia, Lauren Voyle stood in line for a front-row seat on the makeshift risers at the Valdosta regional airport. Donald Trump was due to arrive on the tarmac in a few hours’ time.It was the first time the president would hold a rally since losing the election in November and Voyle, who wore a blue Trump 2020 cap with the slogan “Keep Liberals Crying” on the rim, had driven four and a half hours from Cuming, a small city in the northern part of the state, to witness what she described as a historic moment.The president had ostensibly travelled to Georgia to canvass for the two Republican senate candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, before a critical runoff election in January. But he spent the vast majority of an incoherent, 90-minute monologue spreading baseless disinformation about a rigged election, continuing to claim victory after losing by more than 7 million votes. Georgia election officials, meanwhile, have done three separate counts of the presidential vote, each time confirming Biden’s victory in the state.Some national Republicans fear that Trump’s continued denial of the results could have major consequences for the party in January, when this Senate election will determine control of the upper chamber. With over 70% of Republicans, according to recent polling, now believing that November’s presidential election was not “free and fair”, there are concerns that a collapse in trust in electoral processes could cost conservatives dearly at the ballot box.With the Senate election likely to be decided by a thin margin – both Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are slightly ahead, according to recent polls – even a small drop in turnout on either side could have significant consequences. In many ways, Voyle was the embodiment of their worst nightmare: a staunch Republican who would not turn up to vote again.“We really believe this election was crooked,” said the 57-year-old, who voted in the November election. “I won’t [vote] next time unless they give us a clean election with paper ballots, IDs and fingerprints. I’m not doing Dominion machines.”Although Trump urged supporters during his speech to turn out for Loeffler and Perdue, he also regurgitated many of the conspiracy theories about Dominion voting software and identification issues that Voyle described.Of the dozen people interviewed by the Guardian at Trump’s rally, all said they had mostly stopped watching Fox News, which faced the fury of Trump after accurately calling the election for Joe Biden, shifting their attention to Newsmax and the One America News Network, two fringe channels propagating baseless election fraud claims recently championed by the president.Even among some of those who did plan to vote, there remained a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the two Republican Senate candidates without Trump on the top of the ticket.“I’m not feeling it for either of them, but I’ll vote,” said Tammy Bailey, who had driven three hours south to attend in person. She added: “I feel like they’re both part of the deep state,” suggesting neither candidate had shown enough support for Trump’s efforts to subvert the election results.Loeffler and Perdue have walked a rhetorical tightrope during their second election season, on the one hand declining to articulate the full-throated, baseless claims of widespread fraud that Trump has propagated while on the otherdeclining to recognize Biden as the president-elect and offering their backing for desperate legal bids to overturn the result.On Sunday, during a televised debate, Loeffler, a multimillionaire businesswoman, declined three times to acknowledge the result, instead arguing that Trump had “every right to every legal recourse”.Democrats in the state are quietly confident that this confusing messaging will play into their hands. “While they’re scrambling to make clear sense to their base, our message is clear and unified,” said one source close to the Ossoff campaign.In his effort to undermine Georgia’s election results, Trump has also attacked two of the top Republicans in the state, Governor Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state. Despite Trump’s howling, both men have refused to acquiesce to his request and Raffensperger has loudly dismissed allegations the election was rigged against Trump. Raffensperger has said that Trump’s own criticism of voting by mail cost him the election in Georgia.Asked whether the president’s attacks were hurting Republicans’ chances of winning the runoff, Raffensperger told the Guardian it would be “helpful” to separate the general election and the coming vote.“The most helpful thing for the senators is obviously to have everyone focused on them getting re-elected in the runoff election,” Raffensperger said. “It’s very tough, I understand, to really bifurcate the issue of the presidential race from the senatorial runoffs, but the better that the state party and the candidates do that, the better it really is.”“I would never tell anyone not to turn out to vote. I don’t know why someone would do that. All the true blue, or I guess true red Republicans, we’ll be all out there, making sure that we vote for our senators,” he added.Raffensperger, who certified Georgia’s election results for Biden last month, has received threats against him and his family for doing so, and urged leaders from both sides “to condemn violence and threats of violence”.The attacks have also made it harder for local election officials to prepare for the runoff. Janine Eveler, the director of elections and registration in Cobb county, which encompasses the Atlanta suburbs, said she had been getting about 50 calls and emails a day from people concerned about the election.“It has taken away time that we could be working on the election to field all of their questions,” she said, adding that it was extremely difficult to convince the callers there had not been fraud. “They are unwilling to listen to any rebuttal of that. It’s fruitless. You can’t really explain anything to anybody because they’re not willing to listen.”Eveler said the attacks had taken a toll on election workers. She said her office had lost about 15 workers for the runoffs, which she attributed to a combination of concerns about Covid, burnout, and the attacks.“The public scrutiny over things, the accusations of wrongdoing that we’ve endured is very discouraging to people,” she said. “They don’t make a lot of money. And they’re working really hard. And to be accused of fraudulent activity, it’s hard for people. Their pictures are in the newspaper all the time, counting ballots.”The lack of staffing has also meant Cobb county has had to cut by half the number of early voting sites for the runoff, a move that drew strong objections from civil rights groups who said the few sites that were available were not adequately accessible for minority voters. Cobb county is one of the largest in Georgia, home to more than 537,000 registered voters, and flipped to Biden in November – the first time the county had chosen a Democratic candidate in 40 years.Eveler acknowledged the accessibility was a problem and said the county was moving one site and working on a plan to ramp up staffing and open two additional locations during the final week of early voting.Republicans in the Georgia state legislature have already signaled they intend to use the uncertainty Trump created around the election to implement new restrictions on voting by mail. State Republicans said this month they planned to move legislation that would require photo ID with a mail-in ballot, eliminate ballot drop boxes and require an excuse to vote by mail – a rule that exists in just a handful of states.“I can’t understand why all of a sudden now we have to have these barriers to vote by mail,” said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that helps expand access to the polls. “When the other side used it – and I’m just gonna be honest, more white people used vote by mail than people of color, because they didn’t trust the process – now that we’ve got them trusting the process, now they want to go in and change the rules.”National Democrats, too, see Trump’s efforts to undermine the process as a long-term danger to democracy across the country, which could extend well beyond the election in Georgia.At an Ossoff campaign rally in the city of Lilburn, just outside Atlanta, Julián Castro, the former presidential candidate and US housing secretary, paused in the cold to reflect on the post-election circus.“The attacks that Donald Trump is launching against the basic foundations of our democracy are dangerous. They are the types of things that can weaken the common agreement we all have of participating in democracy, believing in it, supporting it and abiding by it,” he told the Guardian.“All because this man acts like a child and can’t put the needs of the country above his own selfish needs.” More

Joe Biden’s big idea – a US-led global alliance of liberal democracies ranged against authoritarian regimes and “strongman” leaders – sits at the heart of his American restoration project. His proposed “united front” of the great and the good is primarily intended to counter China and Russia. Yet it could also antagonise valued western allies such as India, Turkey and Poland. For this and other reasons, it seems destined to fail.Biden pledged during this year’s election campaign to hold a “summit for democracy” in 2021 “to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the free world”. It would aim “to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda”, he said. It was needed because, partly due to Donald Trump, “the international system that the US so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams”.It’s a laudable aspiration. Recent years have seen a marked growth in oppressive, mostly rightwing regimes that ignore international law and abuse UN-defined universal rights, including democratic rights. But how will Biden decide who qualifies for his alliance? Totalitarian North Korea and Syria’s criminal regime are plainly unwelcome. Yet illiberal Thailand, Venezuela and Iran all maintain supposedly democratic systems. Will they get a summit invite?Diplomats are already predicting Biden’s grand coalition will end up as a rehash of the G7 group of leading western economies – the US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Japan. One wheeze is to add India, Australia and South Korea – a notional “D-10”. But that simply creates another elite club from which many actual or aspiring democracies are excluded.Part of the difficulty is Biden himself. Terms such as the “free world”, recalling his formative years during the cold war, sound outdated. His blithe assertion of American moral superiority jars with recent experience. “We have to prove … that the US is prepared to lead again, not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example,” he says. It’s an old refrain. Yet the songsheet has changed, and so have the singers.China does not threaten global security in the existential way the Soviet Union once did. The fundamental challenge it poses is subtler, amoral and multi-dimensional – technological, ideological, commercial, anti-democratic. The idea that a cowed world is counting on the US to ride to the rescue is old-think. The age of solo superpower is over; the unipolar moment was squandered. Power balances were already shifting before Trump destroyed trust.Weak, divided Europe may prove to be the exception in welcoming Biden’s initiative. “We need to step up our action to defend democracy,” says Josep Borrell, EU foreign affairs chief, amid alarm over recent trends highlighted in the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2020. It asserts that for the first time since 2001, autocracy is the world’s leading form of governance – in 92 countries in total, home to 54% of the global population.Britain’s international position is now so enfeebled that it will back almost anything Biden suggests. Germany will support his initiative too, as long as he does not endanger its lucrative China exports. Hungary and Poland are problematic. The Polish government’s disregard for judicial independence and abortion rights sits badly with a campaign promoting liberal values. According to V-Dem, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is no longer a democracy at all but an “electoral authoritarian regime”.Looking further afield, Biden’s democracy drive could be like trying to herd cats, with much clawing and spitting. India is a case in point. It calls itself the world’s biggest democracy. Yet under prime minister Narendra Modi, it has become one of the biggest rights abusers, oppressing political opponents, independent media, NGOs such as Amnesty International, and millions of Muslims. Modi has nothing to say about democracy, except how to subvert it.Strictly speaking, Biden should add Taiwan, a model east-Asian democracy, to his guest list. To do so would utterly enrage China, so perhaps he won’t. Including Sudan and Afghanistan, both striving for democracy, might constitute wishful thinking. Conversely, snubbing Turkey, Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and a host of other flawed or pretend democracies would greatly offend otherwise friendly governments.The point here is that Biden, like all his predecessors, will in the end be obliged to deal with the world as it is, not as he would like it to be. As Barack Obama demonstrated in 2009, making a fine speech in Cairo about new beginnings in the Arab world feels good but ultimately signifies little. When the Arab spring faltered, the US backed the bad guys – in Egypt’s case, the dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – because it suited its selfish geopolitical interests.China and Russia, and other undemocratic outcasts such as Saudi Arabia, will count on rediscovered realism to temper Biden’s plan in practice, even if he persists with old-school American rhetoric about values and rights. Only if he and his allies attempt something meaningful, such as actively defending Hong Kong’s shattered freedoms, will Beijing feel the need to push back.Unlike Eritrea or, say, Belarus, there is much China can do if Washington’s pro-democracy tub-thumping grows unbearable. On issues such as the pandemic and the climate crisis, Beijing’s involvement is indispensable, and Biden knows it. All manner of economic, diplomatic and political leverage could be used to deflect US pressure. Most provocative is the suggestion, recently recycled by Vladimir Putin, that Russia and China may forge an anti-western military alliance, potentially drawing in lesser powers such as North Korea.This probably won’t happen. But it’s just possible that Biden’s well-meant but polarising “alliance of democracies” will deepen divisions and unintentionally spawn a new “axis of evil”. Unlike the much-hyped original, this one would be truly formidable. More