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      in World Politics

      Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

      by

      Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He not only lost, he lost bigly, at least in terms of the popular vote, despite record numbers of voters turning out for him, wishing for four more years. Trump’s response has been entirely predictable. Like the proverbial spoilt child in the sandbox, he has been ranting and raving, shaking his fist at the injustice of it all, plotting his revenge on detractors and former allies alike and, particularly, on the ungrateful American people who so bitterly snubbed him, forgetting all the wonderful things he has done for them during his presidential stint.

      America Is No Longer One Nation

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      This brings me to another self-declared genius and self-appointed savior of his nation, Adolf Hitler. In an earlier article, I have maintained that associating Trumpism with fascism is pure nonsense. Equating Trump with Hitler is indeed utter nonsense, except for one not-so-minor detail.

      Treason

      Some 40 years ago, the German-British journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner wrote a remarkable book on Hitler with a rather unpretentious title, “Anmerkungen zu Hitler” (“Notes on Hitler”). In less than 200 pages, Haffner discusses the most significant aspects of the Hitler phenomenon, his “achievements” and “successes,” his errors, mistakes and crimes. None of these aspects is relevant for the point of this piece, even if they would make an excellent blueprint for any future notes on Trump. What is relevant here is Haffner’s final note: “treason.” Once Hitler realized, Haffner argues, that all was lost, he turned on his own people. Since he had failed to destroy the enemies of the Third Reich, and here above all the Soviets, he could at least destroy his own people.

      As Golo Mann, one of Germany’s most eminent postwar historians, noted in his review of Hassner’s book in Der Spiegel, in Hitler’s eyes, the potential demise of the German people was, “in and itself no loss” — as long as it guaranteed that the trains continued to roll toward Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematoria to run smoothly.

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      Hitler’s betrayal of the German people was the quasi-logical consequence of his personality and self-projection. On a mission from the almighty (proof: Hitler survived the July 1944 attempt on his life largely unharmed), he promoted himself as the “chosen one” selected to do “the work of the Lord.” And Hitler was hardly alone in considering himself chosen. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, a Catholic paper stated that Austria’s “return to the Reich” was a clear sign that “the Almighty God has blessed the work of the Führer.”

      After the attack on Poland in 1939, the official organ of the Protestant Church of the Free City of Danzig wrote that God had sent Hitler to liberate Germany from the shackles of Versailles and redeemed the German people from the danger of Polish violence. Successes such as these affirmed Hitler’s belief that he was special, infallible, even almighty — a belief daily reaffirmed by his entourage of mediocre sycophants and yes-men scared to death of his choleric tantrums, perfectly portrayed by Bruno Ganz in “Downfall.”

      At this point, in films, you usually get a disclaimer that “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I don’t know whether this also applies to opinion pieces. In any case, the disclaimer does not apply here. Any associations evoked in the reader’s mind are fully intended. This does not mean to suggest that Trump and Hitler are in the same league. Quite the contrary.

      Petty Impersonator

      Hitler was evil personified, a mass murderer who drew great satisfaction from human suffering. Compared to Hitler, Trump is a petty impersonator, a “man without qualities” and substance, full of himself. And yet. As Aninda Dey has recently put it in The Times of India, Trump’s behavior following his defeat in the presidential election is reminiscent of Hitler’s last days in his bunker in Berlin. “Ensconced in the White House ‘bubble bunker,’” Trump “uncorked a similar deluge of rants, delusions, a fake narrative, alternate reality and invincibility as witnessed by Hitler’s Generals and staff in his end days.”

      Add to that the clownish public appearances of the likes of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has finally managed to live up to his own Borat-type caricature, and the picture is complete. Like Hitler in 1945, Trump in November 2020 lives in an alternate reality. This is a reality where he has won bigly, where the American people cannot wait to see all the wonderful things he has in store for them, like a big, beautiful wall, really beautiful new industrial parks and coal-fired power plants — where he will finally have the opportunity to make America great again.

      Delusion, even self-delusion, however, goes only that far. Reality hits when even Trump’s faithful toadies like Tucker Carlson, over at Fox News, take their distance — if cautiously, like treading on eggshells — and strong-arm methods no longer prove effective. It is in this situation that delusion turns into bitterness, and bitterness into a strong urge for revenge. This might be the point where we are now, the point where Trump turns on his own people, dishing out punishment for having failed him. Unfortunately enough, this is a real possibility, given he is going to be in office for another two months. And as the pandemic has taught us, two months are quite a long time.

      The signs are there, for all to see, starting with COVID-19. Over the past several weeks, the situation has reached catastrophic proportions, particularly in the predominantly rural states such as the Dakotas. The statistics are public knowledge, daily displayed on the front page of The New York Times. By now, even some of the most reluctant Republican governors, such as North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, have caved in and mandated wearing masks in their state after being overwhelmed by the pandemic. In the meantime, Trump completely checked out, despite a skyrocketing rate of new infections. In line with his earlier shrug of shoulders, “It is what it is,” the administration has largely gone AWOL.

      As Time magazine recently noted, in a situation where the United States and its people are confronted with a health crisis of terrifying proportions, Trump has “pulled a ‘disappearing act.’” But then, why should he care. He cared little before, when he was still the president. Now, he soon won’t be. It is what it is. Let them fend for themselves. Serves them right if they die from the “China virus.”

      Reversing Democracy

      In the meantime, Trump has done what he has done best — corrode America’s political institutions and weaken, sabotage and subvert the democratic system. The United States used to be a liberal democracy, all its serious faults and shortcomings notwithstanding. To be sure, the Founding Fathers of the republic were not entirely sure whether democracy was such a great idea. James Madison in particular had serious reservations, and it was he who drafted the US Constitution.

      This explains the Electoral College, an archaic and arcane institution, which Trump has been trying to manipulate to his advantage. This explains why it took until 1913 that senators were elected by the people rather than being appointed by state legislatures. Madison had little trust in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. In view of the current situation, he might have been right. Be it as it may, the United States developed into a liberal democracy. Donald Trump has done whatever he could to reverse this development.

      Embed from Getty Images

      His persistent insistence that the result of the election has somehow been rigged, his ludicrous tweets charging that he was cheated of what is rightfully his, together with his so-called legal team headed by Baghdad Bob impersonator, Rudy Giuliani, and the chorus of his sycophants in Congress and the right-wing media who have been toeing the line have done indelible damage to the democratic system. A few days ago, a representative survey found that more than half of Republicans believe that Trump “rightfully won” the election; more than two-thirds believe that the election was rigged. Before the election, more than 50% of Republicans expressed confidence about the electoral process; after the election, a bit more than 20%. In fact, a substantial majority of Republicans said they were “not at all confident” that the election had been fair and that the results were accurate.

      What is at heart here goes far beyond the belief in various conspiracies involving ballot tampering and other forms of fraud, but a fundamental belief that the whole system is rigged. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have recently put it in Foreign Policy, elections, “Trump’s most fervid supporters feel, are rigged by open borders and low hurdles to the naturalization of people who have entered the country illegally and by making it easier for African-Americans to register and vote, policies introduced by Democrats who are thereby seeking to lock in their future preeminence by reshaping the electorate to their advantage.” As a result, they fear that for them, “there may never be another election.”

      The whole thing would make for a jolly good Monty Pythonesque farce if it were not so pathetic and, unfortunately, bloody serious. As Tho Bishop from the Mises Institute has recently noted, “regardless of the legal outcome, America is about to find itself with a president that will be viewed as illegitimate by a large portion of the population — and perhaps even the majority of some states. There is no institution left that has the credibility to push back against the gut feeling of millions of people who have spent the last few months organizing car parades and Trumptillas that their democracy has been hijacked by a political party that despises them.” They should know, given that they voted for a president and a political party that for four years showed nothing but contempt for large swaths of the American public.

      Betrayal of the American People

      The American president is supposed to be the president of all Americans. With Trump, this has never been the case. He has foremost been, in descending order, the president of himself, the president of the rich, of the Fox News MAGA crowd, and the white portion of the US population of European descent. His presidency has been largely consumed by the mission to safeguard and protect the privileged position of these groups. Take, for instance, the census whose data form the basis for the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. In July, Trump made it known that he intended “to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.”

      What all this amounts to is a large-scale, multi-pronged operation designed to add fuel to existing resentments, exacerbate the already high disaffection with politics, further undermine trust in political institutions and the democratic processes and, ultimately, pit Americans against Americans. In ancient times, they called this strategy divide et impera — divide and conquer. It is a core point in the playbook of every serious authoritarian and wannabe dictator, from Putin to Erdogan, from Orban to Maduro. In the United States, it is nothing short of a fundamental betrayal of the ideals that once upon a time, far, far away in history, informed the American republic, its founding documents and constitution. It has further eroded America’s standing as the defender and promoter of democracy across the globe, leaving its image further sullied.

      What this operation amounts to, in turn, is a fundamental betrayal of the American people. The architects of American democracy, above all James Madison, firmly believed that elected political leaders, “who held their office as a public trust, were not merely to act as a mouthpiece of the citizenry but to see farther than ordinary citizens: ‘to refine and enlarge the public views,’ to have the wisdom to ‘discern the true interest of their country,’ and to do so against ‘temporary or partial considerations.’” It fell onto the country’s political institutions and civic associations — political parties, the media, churches and schools — to cultivate the citizens’ minds and shape “a democratic people.”

      Over the past few years, the opposite has happened. As Larry Bartels, one of America’s most respected political scientists, has recently put it, under Trump, the Republican Party’s commitment to democracy has been eroded by “ethnic antagonism.” He cites the results of a recent survey that found that, among Republican identifiers and independents leaning toward the GOP, more than half agreed with the statement, “The traditional way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Four out of 10 agreed that “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Under the circumstances, recent alarm over the specter of a coup staged by Trump in connivance with Republican officials in Congress and the states might not be all that crazy. In fact, they reflect to what degree four years of Trump have debased the spirit of American democracy, and to what extent the United States under Trump have progressed on the way to becoming a banana republic.

      It is fitting that by now, there are serious concerns that Trump’s attempts to create as much havoc as possible might even extend to the economy. As Claudia Sahm recently asked in the pages of The New York Times, “Is Trump Trying to Take the Economy Down With Him?” Trump already caused significant damage to the US economy with his protectionist policies aimed at China and the European Union — damage acknowledged even by Trump’s economic advisers. In the twilight of his presidency, nothing is more tempting than leaving his successor with an economic train wreck, particularly if it causes maximum damage to cities, such as Detroit and Atlanta, and states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, that killed his chances of reelection.

      US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s recent decision to defund several Federal Reserve COVID-19 lending programs, sharply criticized by both the Federal Reserve and the Biden transition team, is a preview of things to come. As Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, put it, Mnuchin’s move was a clear sign “that the Trump administration and their congressional toadies are actively trying to tank the U.S economy.”

      It is to be hoped, for the sake of the American people, first, and for the whole international community, second, that the worst is not going to come to pass. Trump’s continued non-response to the catastrophic trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, his protracted insistence that the outcome of the election was not only unfair but illegitimate, and his administration’s recent decisions directly impacting America’s economy suggest that a worst-case scenario is not out of the realm of the possible. On the contrary, it is quite likely.

      If it should come to that, it would represent an act of treason against the American people, which should be treated as such — and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion. Adolf Hitler betrayed the German people, starting in 1944. He was never held accountable for his betrayal, taking the easy way out by committing suicide. The German people, however, learned a lesson that for a long time immunized them to the siren songs of a politics based on the appeal to the baser sides of human nature. It is to be hoped that coming to terms with the extent to which four years of Trump have inflicted damage on American democracy will immunize the American people against a repeat of 2016. I, for myself, would not count on it.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      by

      During his presidency, Donald Trump found a new way to keep the American public and its media alert. It was a kind of educational game called “Spot the Lie.” If the media had understood how the game worked, the nation and the world would have benefited. Instead, it tended to degenerate into a shouting match in which each side would shriek with increasing volume to express its indignation.

      What was special about his prevarication? It was systematic and provocative, attention-getting. Traditionally, US presidents lied quietly, covering their reprehensible acts in expressions of virtuous intentions. Even the most obvious lie of the 21st century — George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding a massive store of weapons of mass destruction — was presented as a concern for ensuring peace by preventing an imminent act of war by a mad Iraqi dictator. It turned out that both the madness and the capacity for war were on the American side. But nobody noticed because, well, the American military is by definition “a force for good.”

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      With the incoming Biden administration, there will be fewer obvious lies. Given President-elect Joe Biden’s limited rhetorical skills, there may even be moments when Americans have access to the true intentions of a government that ordinarily seeks to hide them.

      After the signature by 15 Asian nations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) last week, Biden explained what would be behind US strategy after he becomes president on January 20, 2021. “We make up 25% of the world’s trading capacity, of the economy of the world,” he said. “We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25% or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Rules of the road:

      The prescription of behavior for a group of supposed equals that clearly favors the interests of one member of the group whose dominant status allows it to impose its values and preferred behaviors on other members of a group without having to consult an external authority or waste too much time negotiating among equals

      Contextual Note

      Leaders of hegemons rarely explicitly lay out their hegemonic agenda. No one could doubt the bold claim Biden has made about the “rules of the road.” The United States always seeks to set the rules rather than play by them. But his statement deviates from the truth when he compares the US attitude with China’s. When it’s about the US defining the rules, Biden uses the verb “set.” But when it’s China, he uses the verb “dictate.” After all, China is a communist dictatorship, so logically anything it does can be called dictating.

      That’s how clever diplomatic language works, at least in the hands of Democrats. They prefer to select the effective verb to instill the idea of good versus evil. Republicans prefer to use the language of moral judgment or downright insult. President Trump likes to call them purveyors of evil, “illegitimate” or even “shitholes.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the major difference between the rhetoric of the two parties is that the Republicans shy away from admitting the hard reality that results from the muscular use of power relationships. They prefer to present it as the logic of history, divine will or predestination that have put the US in the role of unique decision-maker for the rest of the world. The shining city on the hill spreads its light across the globe by virtue of being the shining city, not through its complex interplay with other nations. It has an existential quality that can no one can ever doubt.

      That is what Trump means by “America First.” He presented the slogan as if it turned around the idea that the US should decide to tend only to its own needs and not worry about what happens elsewhere in the world. But it also contained the idea that because America was “first” by virtue of its might, it produced the light that illuminated the rest of the world. It didn’t actually have to be good and fair to stand as a model for everything that was good and fair.

      The primary difference between these two interpretations of American exceptionalism lies in the respective rhetorical strategies rather than policy. That is why Biden’s foreign policy may not be very different from Trump’s in its overall effect on the rest of the world. It will be a variation on hegemonic rhetoric, but the military and financial base will be nearly identical. 

      Democrats believe that American exceptionalism, the success story of the nation, endows it with the authority to write the rules of the road for the rest of humanity. The Republicans see it as the result of writing the rules for themselves which they expect the rest of the world will naturally follow.

      Historical Note

      When, alluding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the RCEP, Joe Biden compared the attitude of the US quite naturally seeking to “set the rules of the road” and the Chinese who “dictate outcomes.” The case can be made that he inverted the truth concerning the history of these two trade arrangements.

      When the TPP was still awaiting signature at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the BBC noted that the deal designed to put the US in the position to set the rules of the road was contested inside the US. The BBC reports: “US opponents have characterised the TPP as a secretive deal that favoured big business and other countries at the expense of American jobs and national sovereignty.” That highlights the problem Biden will be facing in many of his future decisions: how to define the US and its interests. In other words, who defines the rules? Is it big business or the American people?

      Commenting on the historical background of the “secretive deal,” Vox reported: “Negotiations over the TPP’s terms were conducted in secret, with well-connected interest groups having access to more information — and more opportunities to influence the process — than members of the general public.” Even Congress was refused full access to the terms of the draft.

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      In other words, when Biden refers to setting the rules of the road, it is anything but an openly negotiated procedure. In contrast, the RCEP was drafted conjointly and largely democratically by all the interested parties, which include some of the strongest allies of the US: Australia, Japan and South Korea. It is a lie of Trumpian proportions to suggest that the RCEP was dictated by the Chinese.

      Statements of that kind by the president-elect do not bode well for the future foreign policy we can expect from the Biden administration. Biden’s future secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, sounds refreshing when he more realistically characterizes the state of the world at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July: “Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.” 

      Blinken’s approach to foreign policy is likely to be similar to Obama’s, which does indeed appear refreshing in comparison to Donald Trump’s. But it is likely to be a return to a certain form of wishing to write the rules alone, if not handling the problems alone. In an interview in July, Blinken regretted that, under Trump, the US had lost the ability to dictate the rules. “If we’re not doing a lot of that organizing in terms of shaping the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another,” he said, “then one of two things, either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things.”

      The problem Biden will face is that the world has changed. Unlike a few decades ago, few now believe the US has a divine right to “shape the rules” or the ability to stave off chaos.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

      by

      In a Fair Observer column this week analyzing the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, Steve Westly echoes the tendentious conclusions of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Not only do they seek to place the blame for the ambiguous outcome of the election on the rhetoric of the left, they clearly want that wing of the party simply to shut up.

      Westly finds himself in the company not just of subtle political thinkers like Representative and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, but also of apostate Republicans such as John Kasich and Meg Whitman. These are people who have discovered — thanks to the four-year run of Donald Trump’s White House reality-TV show — that the Democratic Party feels a lot like the Republican Party of old.

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      Westly makes the following bold claim: “Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Center-right country:

      A nation that in its majority seeks to believe in and fulfill the ideals of democracy and equality but whose power brokers have the clout to convince the media that it prefers the stability of oligarchic control

      Contextual Note

      The Democrats seized on the idea of Russian meddling in 2016 to explain their defeat in the presidential election. This time, the scapegoat is the group of Democrats who pledge allegiance to “democratic socialism” and shout “defund the police.” Those words and ideas must now be stricken from the vocabulary of the party. All language must be formulated to soothe the fears of “moderates.” 

      This exercise in pre-digested, reductionist analysis leading to the simplification of discourse and debate seeks to brand an entire swath of the population as un-American. The US is increasingly divided and visibly fragmented. The Democrats apparently want to use President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral success to dictate to the American people who they are as a group and how they should think of themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      There may be a statistical sense that justifies calling the country “center-right.” But this has no meaning when a wide range of cultural values are at play. When people are pushed toward the edges, no statistical mean accurately identifies a center. Westly is right to mention the existence of a highly motivated evangelical base. But even that fact requires further analysis. The Republicans have to a large extent created the fiction that it exists as a coherent voting bloc.

      There are two reasons not to think of the US as a center-right country. The first is that it has never been more diversified and divided. That two extremes may exist does not mean that the mid-point between them defines the nature of a people.

      Furthermore, polls taken during the election campaign have consistently shown that issues identified with the left and branded by Republicans and Democrats alike with the deliberately toxic term “socialism” are in fact endorsed by a large majority of the population. The most obvious is Medicare for All, consistently denigrated by centrists and the right as “socialist medicine” and rejected by Biden, but massively approved by Americans (70%) and even by a near majority of Republicans.

      Even Andrew Yang’s theme of the universal basic income (UBI) — a “socialist” measure of redistribution if ever there was one — also has majority support. If we consider single-payer health care and UBI centrist policies because a majority approves them, then we need to redefine who is a centrist on the political spectrum. Certainly not Joe Biden.

      The second reason concerns the nature of the two extremes. They are radically different. In the US, the extreme right is indeed a powerful force, as the tea party movement demonstrated. It expresses its extremism by eschewing all forms of rationality, insisting that personal beliefs, opinions and prejudices trump any form of reasoning. Evangelical faith is one example of this, but not the only one. Blind nationalism is another, but to a large extent that is also a feature even of the Democratic center, which embraces the slogan of American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism itself is anti-rational, an implicit rejection of the democratic principle of equality, if not of the rule of law itself.

      The extreme left contrasts radically with the extreme right. First, just in terms of comparative size, the extreme left is marginal. This imbalance may contribute to the mistaken impression that the nation can be defined as center-right. More significantly, the left as a whole, with its many variants, clings to the value of rationality. It is fundamentally an intellectual movement promoting reasoned rather than emotional approaches to addressing social problems. 

      In Shakespearean terms, the left is Hamlet, the thinker, as opposed to Polonius, the busybody focusing on executing the will of King Claudius, the wielder of power. Hamlet rebelled intellectually, but Claudius ruled Denmark until he was replaced in the final act by the Norwegian Fortinbras (literally “strong-in-arm”).

      Like most establishment Democrats, Westly singles out “democratic socialism,” treating it as a kind of virus that has infected the Democratic Party. It encourages the idea that the incoming Biden administration’s essential task will be the production of a vaccine to eliminate it or at least contain any further contamination.

      That theme of ostracizing the left seems to be the flavor of the month. Just now, Al Jazeera informs us that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared that the US will label the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — a movement focused on contesting the politics of the Israeli government — as “anti-Semitic.” It is a theme the Labour Party in the UK has just used effectively to purge the left. The left everywhere is accused of toppling statues. The center, both right and left, topples people.

      That kind of purge may not be what Westly has in mind, but it’s becoming more and more likely that that’s what the Democrats will be seeking to do.

      Historical Note

      The history of 21st-century elections tells a tale that contradicts the characterization of the US as a center-right country. The center-right epithet implies the public’s preference for stability and adherence to the status quo. But recent elections have revealed a profound and growing unease with the status quo.

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      The presidential election of 2000 should have resulted in the election of a center-left candidate, Al Gore. Instead, the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote and even failed to win the Electoral College. Bush managed to get that close to winning by defining himself as a “compassionate conservative.” That was his way of claiming to be dead center: conservative to please the Republicans, compassionate to please the Democrats.

      President Bush very quickly abandoned the compassionate side and sought to impose an aggressive neocon, neoliberal agenda that Americans had not voted for. It began with the notorious Bush tax cuts at a time when polls showed Americans were ready to accept tax hikes if the goal was to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Bush doggedly pursued his agenda rather than the people’s.

      Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 promising hope and change. His first challenge was to resolve the financial crisis Bush left in his lap. This may have sobered his impulse to effectuate change. President Obama spent the next eight years consolidating the status quo. Then, in 2016, the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to an irresponsible clown promising an irrational, undefined program of radical change.

      These recent elections show that voters regularly come out to vote against the status quo. It defines a nation that consistently expresses its impatience with the center-right but is repeatedly given little choice. The centrist Republicans invented the idea of “anyone but Trump.” The voters have shown an attitude closer to “anything but the center.” The Democrats fared poorly in 2020 because “anyone but Trump” trumped “anything but the center.”

      The massive go-out-and-vote campaign in the wake of the George Floyd killing helped the uninspired and uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, to attain nearly 80 million votes as opposed to Clinton’s 65.85 million. Without the mobilization of those protesting the status quo, Biden’s numbers would have been closer to Clinton’s. He most likely would have lost massively in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 74 million.

      As a new Democratic administration prepares to take office in January 2021, it would be wise to take the time to assess the deeper meaning of the vote.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

      by

      Two fundamentally ambiguous events concerning the Jeffrey Epstein affair have left many people wondering how far the web of influence around the convicted sex offender extended. The first was the trial that ended with a sweetheart deal allowing Epstein, an American financier, to be virtually free while serving prison time. The second event was his apparent suicide in prison as he was awaiting trial on separate charges. 

      The conditions surrounding his suicide are so spectacularly equivocal that any rational person can only be dumbfounded by the uncritical acceptance by the media of New York City’s medical examiner’s declaration of suicide as definitive. CNN, for example, reporting on the most recent news concerning the 2005 trial and the sweetheart deal writes drily: “Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in August 2019.”

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      In the article, CNN cites a review by the Department of Justice finding “that Alex Acosta, President Donald Trump’s former Labor secretary, exercised poor judgment when, as a US attorney in Florida, he gave sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a non-prosecution agreement.” It adds that “the review did not find that Acosta or other prosecutors engaged in professional misconduct.”

      The article mentions that Acosta was guilty of a second count of poor judgment “when he failed to notify the girls and young women who alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein about the decision to not prosecute the multi-millionaire on federal charges.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Poor judgment:

      The commonly attributed failing that explains why a crime committed by any member of the elite (defined as those empowered to judge the acts of others and exempt from being judged by others than their own) cannot be considered a crime since the mistake of showing poor judgment eclipses in gravity the crime itself

      Contextual Note

      As a federal prosecutor and then President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta belongs to the middle ranks of the judicial and political elite just as Epstein belonged to the middle ranks of the financial and social elite. Epstein appears also to have been associated with the international intelligence elite. That offered him supplementary security because intelligence can never be accused of crimes since its duty is to be engaged in serious criminal activity. By virtue of their belonging to the elite, both Epstein and Acosta knew they were at least theoretically protected from ever being convicted of serious crimes. But so were people like Harvey Weinstein, who belonged to the entertainment elite, or Bernie Madoff, who worked his way into the financial elite.

      Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff demonstrate that it’s possible to go too far in exercising poor judgment. All three had, at some point, probably lost any notion of there being such a thing as “too far.” They thus learned they weren’t quite as elite as they imagined themselves to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Epstein case helps us to understand one important principle: that in the circles of the elite, there are always two levels of logic that protect them. The first is the phenomenon of the first offense, or the first occasion in which the subject crosses a line that could expose the nature of the game. The less timid or cautious actually push their luck to discover where that line may be before pulling back to their safety zone.

      The second is the security deriving from the self-interested solidarity of the elite. They will never betray the secrets of their peers, whom they learn to protect passively. Passive protection translates as the rhetorical skill of denying even awareness of actions deemed compromising. It is important to avoid recourse to active protection, such as rising to the defense of a peer. This is frowned upon because it may raise suspicions of complicity. Individual sins can be brushed away. Collective sins require more effort.

      Sexual crimes (Epstein, Weinstein) — typically individual sins, but not crimes — if found out and verified, are paradoxically the least forgivable, especially today, after the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. Judicial crimes and crimes of political influence, such as Acosta is accused of, are easily dismissed because they are generally viewed as part of the job of balancing interests out among the elite.

      Then there are serious political crimes, including war crimes. In some sense, they are the easiest to gloss over because they are motivated by “noble” (i.e., nationalistic) intentions. But because they concern public policies, they become highly visible and can draw the attention of political opponents. Protecting them becomes more complicated, requires working closely with the media and takes time.

      Take the example of Elliot Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy, first for Venezuela and then for Iran. He was convicted of lying to Congress in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. He even admitted in an interview to being seriously involved in the micro-management of the Contra death squads in El Salvador. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992, who continued to provide his services to George W. Bush and now Trump.

      All this is public knowledge, which means mildly embarrassing but not compromising. It explains why a prominent member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, Kelly Magsamen, can even today justify her active collaboration with Abrams in a now-deleted 2019 tweet visible here. Defending her work with Abrams on the Trump administration’s shambolic effort to provoke regime change in Venezuela, Magsamen explains: “I worked for Elliot Abrams as a civil servant. He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We have a lot of work to do in Venezuela. We share goals.”

      Goals justify everything. But mistakes happen, leading to accusations of “poor judgment.” Convictions also happen, sometimes followed by presidential pardons. That is what is called “being held accountable.” Most significantly, bygones become bygones.

      The elite has a job to do and solidarity is an essential part of that job.

      Historical note

      The capacity of elite networks to protect their members, especially when it involves national security (i.e., the intelligence community), has always been impressive. Not only can they accomplish enormous tasks that may or may not involve serious criminal activity — from massacres of civilian populations to assassinations of political leaders and even scientists — they are particularly skillful at covering them up, delaying and distorting the perception of truth and influencing the commercial media to disseminate their version of the “truth” while characterizing all other accounts as conspiracy theories.

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      Alex Acosta’s public explanations of his sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein was anything but convincing, as any spectator should be able to notice. In response to the question raised by his own explanation that Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” he responded: “There’s been reporting to that effect, and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects … and I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.” He then added: “I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines but I can tell you a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.”

      The strategy is impeccable. Call the issue “reporting,” meaning it could just be hearsay. Then mention that other hearsay exists, suggesting that it is all equally incredible. Then invoke “guidelines” that no one understands but everyone accepts as being crucial to our common security. The final touch consists of asking for questions from another reporter to avoid follow-up questions to one’s evasive answers.

      History provides us with many examples of how the work of the elite to cover up its most public crimes produces effects that last decades and disqualify the truth, even when it finally emerges to the light of day.   

      Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago. The evidence that the bullet that killed the senator was fired by a second gunman is overwhelming. A lengthy interview half a century later with one of the forensic pathologists consulted for the autopsy (but not for the trial) not only presents that evidence but reveals how and why it was covered up at the time.

      This is just one startling example of how the media continue to create enough doubt about decades-old affairs to protect the elite of the past. It appears to be part of their job protecting today’s elite. Acosta has nothing to worry about.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What the Democrats Need to Understand About America

      by

      The most-watched election in the world is over, and the United States will have a new president. Democrats succeeded in removing Donald Trump from office — the first one-term president in nearly 30 years and the fourth in the last century — but the Republican Party won this election. Joe Biden will begin his presidency …
      Continue Reading “What the Democrats Need to Understand About America”
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      Welcome to Joe Biden’s Socialist States of America

      by

      One of the sillier notions advanced during this US presidential election campaign was that if Joe Biden were to win, he and his party would transform the United States into the promised land of socialism. I guess not even the Republican strategists who promoted this canard seriously believed it to be true. Unfortunately, the message …
      Continue Reading “Welcome to Joe Biden’s Socialist States of America”
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      Cautiously Optimistic: The Biden Administration’s Options in Yemen

      by

      As Joe Biden is declared US president-elect, expectations vary from pessimism on the left and among experts in the Middle East to optimism over lessons learned. In the US, the left has already sent the first warnings on expectations, focused on foreign policy and singling out Washington’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen. The coalition that brought victory for the Democratic Party included major progressive members of Congress, a segment that opposes US support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, among other priorities.

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      Yemeni-Americans have also raised expectations for the Biden administration, as part of the coalition that won the crucial state of Michigan. Mounting pressure at home will undoubtedly drive a number of opportunities to advance efforts to de-escalate the conflict and restart peace talks in Yemen soon after Inauguration Day in January next year.   

      Unique Approach

      The current administration’s policy in the Middle East has exonerated Arab regimes both at home and in the region. As reality sinks in on a Biden presidency, concern grows among both President Donald Trump’s supporters and American progressives over the potential for a Biden pivot toward more intrusive Obama-era policies and limited access to weapons purchases. Biden would shift from the Trump administration’s policy to a reciprocal relationship maintained with Gulf monarchies based on access to weapons in exchange for mutually beneficial public gestures of cooperation while balancing tensions within the Gulf Cooperation Council. Observes highlight the pressure from some in Biden’s own camp demanding significant departure from Trump’s approach to relationships with the Arab regimes, in particular.

      Critics of the current administration underline the manner in which Trump’s hands-off approach and business interests served to prolong the war in Yemen and turned a blind eye to possible international humanitarian law violations. Focus remains on the personal relationship between Trump family members and Arab officials, marginalizing the work by US diplomats and defense officials. This approach will definitely not continue under a Biden administration, raising concern among Arab leaders over access to the president and control over their own institutions. While observers acknowledge these concerns, they highlight the persistent reliance on US cooperation amid growing economic and security vulnerabilities in the region. Iran remains a top priority for both sides following an end of UN sanctions.     

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      While Biden’s potentially unique approach — a more pragmatic agenda than that employed during President Barack Obama’s second term — will rattle relations with the Gulf monarchies, his pivot could lead to substantial progress on Yemen’s peace process. There are three main reasons a Biden presidency encourages such positive expectations.

      One, progressive members of Congress such as senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy, Representative Ro Khanna and even the Republican Senator Mike Lee are expected to pressure the Biden administration on weapons sales and on criticism of Saudi Arabia. This group will undoubtedly be joined by the so-called Squad — Democratic House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilham Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — all staunch critics of Gulf regimes.

      Second, Biden will most likely prioritize a return to talks with Iran to rescue the nuclear deal abandoned by President Trump. Saudi Arabia and Israel will again aim to influence the Biden administration to limit concessions made to Tehran. Third, a Biden administration would prioritize reengagement with the European Union and the NATO alliance, addressing, among many other issues, relations with Turkey and the situation in Iraq and Syria at a highly volatile time and amid a growing threat from Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks in Western Europe. These issues cannot ignore the role of Iran in the region as the one-year anniversary of the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani approaches.       

      Under Pressure at Home

      Joe Biden’s victory signaled an astounding rejection of President Donald Trump, delivered by a wide-ranging coalition of Democrats, progressives and moderate Republicans. Among these are the likes of Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all holding significant leverage over the incoming administration. This pressure is not confined to domestic issues, with foreign policy also featuring high on priorities for Sanders and Warren during their own presidential bids.

      Relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, embroiled in the conflict with Qatar and the war in Yemen, will definitely face mounting challenges. Biden is not just seen as a repudiation of the Trump approach to the region, but also as an extension of the Obama legacy. When Biden served as President Obama’s vice president, he witnessed the change of the guard in Saudi Arabia from the late King Abdullah to King Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, and will find a much different Saudi Arabia, now nearly five years now under the de facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

      The crown prince now holds the defense portfolio, with his brother Khaled as his deputy, and in charge of the Yemen file. Both Mohammed bin Salman and Prince Khaled have visited the White House and maintained direct communications with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The personal relationships that granted Saudi Arabia reprieve following the murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two years ago and the mounting accusations of war crimes in Yemen will not exist in a Biden administration.

      It is important to keep in mind that the Powers Act is among the issues carrying over from the Trump era. The most recent fight in Congress aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to go to war with Iran, but we must recall that Senator Sanders was among a number of members of Congress who criticized President Obama and Vice President Biden for supporting Saudi Arabia and the UAE at the start of the Yemen conflict in March 2015. President Biden would have two options in the emerging political environment: either negotiate a deal with progressives in the Democratic Party, pledging to not go soft on Saudi Arabia and halt weapons sales or face an embarrassing scenario where members of his own party, joined by Republicans looking to obstruct his administration as much as possible, move to limit his powers and publicly undermine his foreign policy options.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As opposed to Trump’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which emboldened their roles in Libya and Yemen, a Biden presidency under pressure from the Democratic left would undercut leverage of Gulf monarchies vis-à-vis actors on the ground in Yemen, for example. In response to increasing unpredictability in recent months, Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognized government of Yemen resisted pressure to announce a new cabinet following the agreement in August between President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the pro-secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC) until after the US presidential election. Saudi Arabia and President Hadi hedged their bets on a second Trump term, which would grant both leverage over the STC and advance a more favorable composition of the cabinet. It is still likely that a new cabinet is formed before the end of 2020, as the STC knows its relationship with the UAE could also change under a US administration that is more engaged and looking to de-escalate the conflict upon taking office.

      Iran has not sat idly on the sidelines either and has perhaps positioned itself far better than its regional rivals. The arrival of a new ambassador to Sanaa in mid-October signaled a major escalation in diplomatic relations. Hassan Eyrlou, reportedly “an IRGC member tied to Lebanese Hizballah,” was smuggled into Sanaa from Oman during the latest prisoner exchange between Houthis and the government of Yemen that included two US nationals. This move aggravated relations between Saudi Arabia and the office of the UN special envoy to Yemen as local officials accused the current UN envoy, Martin Griffiths, of complicity in the violation of the embargo. Iran has grown bolder in publicly acknowledging its relations with Houthis since the signing of a defense cooperation agreement in December 2019 in Tehran.

      No Straight Path

      Iran has positioned itself within the Arabian Peninsula in a manner in which it can exploit substantial leverage on a Biden pivot away from the current US approach in the region. The regime in Tehran, more so than Houthis in Sanaa, has managed to prove to the international community that it can operate around Saudi and Emirati defense posture and expand its political and military spheres to advance its interests. Whether it is a military confrontation under Trump or a diplomatic test under Biden, Iran has secured enough leverage to negotiate under favorable terms.

      Yemeni observers agree that Ambassador Eyrlou was not the only one smuggled from Muscat. The tactic used is fairly well known, as a number of Iranian officials and Houthi elements travel to and from Sanaa by air, bypassing the long road from Sanaa to Mareb, Sayyun and the Mahra-Oman border. While no one is yet suggesting flights serve to smuggle weapons, drones or missiles, observers don’t doubt smaller components such as batteries, computer chips or radar components are transported to Sanaa. The trend in both smuggling operations and attacks by Houthis on Saudi territory has involved the use of smaller drones, along with deployment of short-range ballistic missiles and weaponized over-the-counter drones on positions held by the Yemeni army and coalition troops along various battle fronts.

      This complicates the circumstances for the Biden administration as well as the position held by progressives in Congress aiming to halt weapon sales to Gulf allies. The military threat posed by Iran, and now by the Houthis, has long been used by Israel and Saudi Arabia to justify their role in the war in Yemen and in the procurement of weapons systems, both defensive and offensive. In order to rally support from Gulf allies for reengagement with the Iran nuclear deal, Joe Biden will have to reassure allies of pressure on Iran to de-escalate and rein in the Houthis in Sanaa. Both demands will come at a very high price.

      Tehran will insist on the UN expanding the table and include the Iranian regime as a power broker in peace negotiations under Griffiths. The aim is not just to act as a counterweight in negotiations but to ensure a role in organizing a final solution to the conflict in Yemen that advances its interests and maintains Houthis within its sphere of influence. This is problematic for Mohammed bin Salman, who aims to recreate Saudi influence in Yemen as his uncles did since the end of the revolution in North Yemen in 1967.

      It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia provided monthly stipends to Yemeni officials, including members of the Al Houthi family, for decades until the start of the Youth Uprising in 2011. For instance, Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s parliament, helped the Saleh regime fight secessionists in 1994 and was involved in the settlement of the Saudi-Yemeni border agreement of 2000, all while receiving financial assistance from Saudi Arabia.

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      On the other hand, while Houthis greatly benefit from the international recognition granted by Iran, they don’t necessarily see eye to eye on Iran’s role beyond providing military assistance. Houthis continue to insist on their sovereignty and reject claims by Saudi Arabia and other rivals that they are Tehran’s puppets, while a number of Iranian officials have publicly announced that “Sana’a is the fourth Arab capital in [their] hands.” In order for the Houthis to accept any deal on a ceasefire, they will insist on direct talks with Saudi Arabia prior to the start of any comprehensive peace talks with President Hadi and the STC. This is not only a problem for Iran but mainly a non-starter for President Hadi and his government. Both Iran and Hadi fear a secret deal between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis will undermine their long-term interests in Yemen, and Hadi particularly fears being removed as president as part of the agreement.

      It would be difficult to convince Iran to abandon Sanaa as part of the process to reengage with the nuclear deal, but it is not impossible. In partnership with European allies who hold deep economic interests in advancing relations with Iran, the Biden administration could ideally negotiate an Iranian exit from Sanaa, knowing the regime will maintain a low-level presence. Unilateral sanctions against Iranian entities remain an option for the US, and, under a more pragmatic Biden administration, European allies would be less reluctant to join in order to exert further pressure on Iran to comply. Joe Biden would hold on to Trump-era sanctions as a carrot, which would also serve to assure both Israel and Saudi Arabia that he is not willing to let Iran off the hook easily.

      Other Options

      The war in Yemen is now near its seventh year, and the Houthis continue to hold the upper hand on the ground. Yet even with gains against the coalition and Yemen’s National Army, Houthis also recognize there is no final solution through military victory. Houthis are suffering economically and know the limited support they receive can always be bargained away for greater interests. The economics of the war have also had a great impact on the UAE, forcing it to withdraw its troops from southern Yemen and the west coast in 2019 primarily as result of budget constraints, which have also affected relations with the STC and its affiliated security forces. Saudi Arabia has also felt the pinch from the financial support for President Hadi’s government, financing the war against the Houthis and weapons purchases from the US to strengthen its defense throughout the kingdom, all at a time of economic uncertainty.

      There is no doubt the Biden administration will be pressured to end support for the war on Yemen on day one. Its options are limited and come at high political risk at home and in the region. European allies, who have proven limited in their influence since the signing of the Stockholm plan in December 2018, also want to see progress in the peace process. Ultimately, there is no doubt that if any of these efforts are to succeed, Yemenis must bear the bulk of the responsibility to secure progress and deter potential spoilers along the way. There is no way Joe Biden can secure progress through diplomacy alone if the parties on the ground do more to protect their individual interests than advancing peace and relief to millions of impoverished Yemenis facing famine and outbreaks of infectious disease throughout the country.

      While a number of Yemeni actors have reached out to Russia, it is unlikely that President Vladimir Putin is willing to play a major role in the conflict. Russia is expected to continue playing a role at the UN Security Council, where the UK is the penholder on Yemen, primarily blocking the expansion of mandates or a new round of sanctions on individuals. On the UN track, Martin Griffiths is the third UN envoy to Yemen and is on his third year in the post, and he’s come under increasing criticism by all parties, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

      Under such conditions, a Biden administration could see an opportunity to reintroduce a plan drafted by former Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016 that could marginalize the UN in the process. Griffiths is close to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and both would fight to maintain the UN as the host of any peace talks, but it is unlikely the US would expend much political capital to hand over the process to the UN. It is difficult to predict if the UN can maintain its high-profile role in Yemen, or if it is time to introduce a new neutral broker who can better balance relations between actors to restart comprehensive dialogue toward a peace agreement.

      *[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Diwan.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Why Does God Allow Miscarriage?

      by

      The Senate hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court did not sit well with American feminists. An ultra-conservative judge belonging to an ultra-conservative Catholic faith group vehemently opposed to abortion and anything gay was hardly a candidate one would expect feminists to endorse. Interestingly enough, feminists zeroed in on one particular aspect defining the candidate, the fact that she is a mother — and a working one at that — to a relatively large family: five of her own, two adopted. This fact provoked a prominent feminist to tweet, “It’s a very weird thing to watch these old creeps congratulate a handmaid on her clown car vagina.”

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      For those unfamiliar with the terms, the Urban Dictionary defines “clown car sex” as “the act of trying to place as many penises as possible into a single vagina like many clowns try to fit into one car somehow.” The term “handmaid” as used in the tweet presumably comes from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” where women of all statuses living under a totalitarian theocratic state (in the US Northeast and parts of the upper Midwest) “are stripped of their rights, forcing them to live out lives of servitude in a patriarchal society” ” and made “(through servitude and rape) to carry children for the powerful.”

      The link to Barrett is her presumed membership in a Catholic faith group that, according to ex-members, dominates the lives of its members and preaches the subjugation of women.

      Fertility Shaming

      The term, of course, is hardly new. As early as 2012, the conservative Trump convert, Mollie Hemingway, wrote a piece entitled “Fertility Shaming: ‘It’s A Vagina, Not A Clown Car.’” In it, the author noted that she lived in two fundamentally different worlds. Here, a culture where “large families are considered awesome. You’re not looked down on for being childless or having a smaller family — indeed, my folks only had three children — but large families are considered cool.” There (Washington, DC), a different environment where “large families are mocked or derided. You only have 11 children if you’re retarded.” The latter she referred to as “fertility shaming.”

      Hemingway points out the hypocrisy of those who promoted reproductive rights and, one might add, a woman’s right to choose, but only as long as it means “avoiding our fertility, and doing whatever it takes to not have kids (or more than one or two of them).” Ironically enough, her reference in the text is to Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas mother of “19 Kids and Counting,” who supposedly said “It’s a vagina, not a clown car.”

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      Duggar, unlike Barrett, is not a Catholic. But both women obviously believe artificial (as opposed to natural) birth control methods are fundamentally frowned upon by God. I am not sure where they got that from the Bible, but then I’m not a theologian versed in the intricacies of Bible exegesis. In fact, I started my academic career at a Catholic university where I had a colleague with 11 children, in addition to a number of them who never made it. Initially, even the Duggars were not against birth control — until they saw the light and “vowed to leave how many kids they’d have in God’s hands.” Apparently, the Duggars’ conversion moment was triggered by a miscarriage following the birth of their first son. Duggar blamed herself for the miscarriage thinking that her use of the pill had caused the problem. It somehow never occurred to her that miscarriages are quite common, as are stillbirths. Her miscarriage was not an act of divine punishment but an act of nature, random and unpredictable.

      US statistics suggest that between 10% and 15% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage during the early months of gestation, while one in 160 birth are stillbirths. Research shows that “Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy with 1 in 4 women experiencing at least 1 miscarriage during their reproductive lifetime.” A Swiss website claims that half of all fertilized egg cells end in a spontaneous abortion. Most “natural” abortions occur during the first three months of pregnancy. In a number of cases, women report several miscarriages. And as the age when a woman can become pregnant increases, the prevalence of miscarriage increases too. In fact, after the age of 40, the likelihood that pregnancy ends in miscarriage increases by 50% compared to a woman in her early 20s.

      A recent article in The New York Times recounts the story of a woman desperately trying to have a baby. In the process, she experiences three miscarriages within a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, studies show that the likelihood of a miscarriage after three previous miscarriages increases by 50%.

      What these stories imply is that miscarriages are a fact of life, a “natural” occurrence. They are one of these things that just happen, for no apparent reason. It’s the bad luck of the draw, similar to the fact that some people (such as Germany’s ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) smoke all of their lives and live prosperously well into their late 80s, while others never touch a cigarette and yet die young of lung cancer. For those who believe that life has no particular meaning, that you get what you get, this is perfectly understandable, perhaps even acceptable.

      It Is What It Is

      For those, however, such as Europe’s dwindling number of true Catholics, and particularly American self-proclaimed Christians, it poses a fundamental problem. America’s “true believers” hold that life starts at conception. They also believe that its termination represents a crime, equivalent to murder in some circles. Unlike abortion, however, miscarriages cannot be blamed on human agency — unlike, for instance, global warming.

      This leaves only one alternative. The termination of human life via miscarriage must be the result of God’s will, similar to the way American Christians explain to themselves the rapid warming of the planet, the eradication of much of the planet’s ecosystem and the potential destruction of humanity. It is all part of God’s plan for humanity. It is, as one of the great sages of our time has observed, what it is.

      To be sure, this is a terrible simplification. And clearly not every American Christian subscribes to this logic. Far from it. At the same time, however, surveys suggest that many do; they certainly act as if they did. The reality is, there is nothing that would suggest that there is any necessity for this planet to survive as a home for intelligent beings. By now we know that over millions of years, this planet was populated by scores of creatures, ferocious and majestic, only to be wiped out by cataclysmic events. Their remnants can be found in museums all over the world, reminders of the fragility of life on Earth.

      The fact that more than 10% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage poses a fundamental challenge to the notion, so dear to Christians, that the termination of a pregnancy represents an abomination in the eyes of God, that life starts at conception and that there is a fundamental “right to life.” God obviously disagrees, otherwise he would not allow for the “natural” termination of the life of millions of fetuses every year. For believers in a merciful God, be they Christians or Muslims, this must be nothing short of frightening. It suggests that God might not be as merciful as they believe or, worse, that God could care less about the fate of humanity.

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      For non-believers, it is one more piece of confirmation that the existence of God is a myth, that human life is the result of a chain of processes based on trial and error, and that humanity might be nothing but the accidental, and highly destructive, byproduct of natural selection and evolution. We don’t know. For believers, it is all part of God’s plan, like earthquakes, pandemics and the extermination of whole nations.

      Fatally enough, this kind of thinking has failed to imbue us with humility and prudence. Today’s ruling class, from Trump to Johnson, from Bolsonaro to Putin, acts as if the destruction of the natural environment, the extinction of much of the planet’s species and rising average temperatures are of no consequence. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is credited with having noted that one day, the living might envy the dead. Khrushchev is said to have made the remark with regard to the threat of nuclear war.

      Today, other threats are much more urgent than nuclear war. Pandemics, global warming, the extinction of a large part of this planet’s flora and fauna are realities that suggest that human life in the decades to come will be confronted with the quite real prospect of extinction, be it because of intolerable climate conditions, the exhaustion of the planet’s freshwater resources or because of pandemics, similar to the plague in the Middle Ages, that wipe out large parts of humanity. Under the circumstances, the living might very well wish they had been among that 10% to 15% whose potential existence ended in miscarriage.

      Bigger Than Nuclear War

      For the likes of Barrett, Hemingway, Duggar and Simcha Fisher, a Catholic freelance writer and blogger with 10 children, these ideas are most likely heretical, detestable and pernicious to the max, given they prevent women from fulfilling their divinely-mandated destiny of motherhood. They tend to ignore the fact that their pursuit of a grand family is only possible because the vast majority of Americans don’t indulge in it. If everybody did it, the consequences would be disastrous.

      Take the case of a small country like Switzerland, which has a population of just over 8.6 million people. A large proportion of the country’s territory is covered by high mountains and several large lakes, areas that are largely uninhabitable. In 2016, there were roughly 3.8 million private households in the country. If each one of them had produced 10 children, within a few years, Switzerland’s population would increase by more than 30 million — roughly half that of France. Even the most pro-natalist representatives of the Swiss far right would consider this a nightmare scenario. And this despite the fact that Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world, with excellent health and social services.

      The consequences of unbridled fertility can daily be seen in the news: the treks of desperate refugees from largely Catholic Central American countries such as Honduras and El Salvador, seeking to make their way on foot to the southern border of the United States. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of Honduras more than quadrupled, reaching more than 8.5 million. And this in a country with rudimentary health care and no social services to speak of. The same is largely true for El Salvador.

      To be sure, over the past two decades, population growth in the two countries has dramatically declined, now approaching European levels. At the same time, the influence of the Catholic Church has considerably waned in the region, compensated by a dramatic upsurge in the number of evangelicals, which might to a certain extent explain the collapse in fertility rates. But by now, the damage is done, reflected, in part, by the steady stream of refugees from the region.

      President Donald Trump’s response was to freeze aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, thus further aggravating the situation in these countries. Earlier on, his administration, as Summer Brennan writes in Sierra, had already “stopped contributing to the United Nations Population Fund, the largest global supplier of contraceptives and reproductive services.”

      At the same time, the US named Valerie Huber to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “Huber,” Brennan points out, is “a longtime advocate of abstinence until marriage, is a proponent of “natural” family planning — in other words, the rhythm method.” Now, if they could only stop God from allowing miscarriages and stillbirths, and prevent Catholic priests from sexually assaulting young boys, Donald Trump could find his place in the history books as the president who restored religion to its rightful place in the center of American life.  

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More