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      A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876

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      As Donald Trump warns inaccurately of voter fraud and polls show the unpopular president staying within touching distance of Democrat Joe Biden, the prospect of an unresolved US election draws horribly near, especially as the impact of the coronavirus is widely seen as likely to delay a result by days, if not weeks.Across the political spectrum, pundits are predicting what may happen should Trump refuse to surrender power. The speculation is tantalising but the short answer is that nobody has a clue.History does provide some sort of guide. There have been inconclusive US elections before. They were resolved, but not by any constitutional mechanism and the consequences of such brutal political contests have been severe indeed.In 2000, the supreme court decided a disputed Florida result and put a Republican, George W Bush, in the White House instead of the Democrat Al Gore. Though of course the justices could not know it, they had put America on the road to war in Iraq, economic crisis, the rise of the evangelical right and a deepening political divide.That case is well within living memory. But an election much further back produced even more damaging results.The campaign of 1876 ended with the electoral college in the balance as three states were disputed. Out of deadlock, eventually, came a political deal, giving the Republican Rutherford Hayes the presidency at the expense of Samuel Tilden, who like Gore, and indeed Hillary Clinton in 2016, won the popular vote.Tilden’s compensation was that his party, the Democrats, were allowed to put an end to Reconstruction, the process by which the victors in the civil war abolished slavery and sought to ensure the rights of black Americans, via the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments.The awful result was Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy and segregation which lasted well into the 20th century and whose legacy remains crushingly strong in a country now gripped by protests against police brutality and for systemic reform.Eric Foner, now retired from Columbia University, is America’s pre-eminent historian of the civil war, slavery and Reconstruction, a prize-winner many times over. He told the Guardian the US of 2020 is not prepared for what may be around the corner.“In 1877 there were three states, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, where two different sets of returns were sent up, one by the Democrats, one by the Republicans, each claiming to have carried the state.“There was no established mechanism and in fact, in the end, we went around the constitution, or beyond the constitution, or ignored the constitution. It was settled by an extralegal body called the Electoral Commission, which was established by Congress to decide who won.” More

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      The People, No review: elites, anti-populism and how progressive promise is squandered

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      Thomas Frank has a simple thesis: populism has been mischaracterized by its enemies, since its birth at the end of the 19th century, as a “one-word evocation of the logic of the mob”.In our own time, it has been skewered as “the secret weapon” behind the wildly unlikely selection of Donald Trump as president.The Guardian contributor and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? points out that Trump’s triumph was only made possible by an “anti-populist instrument from long ago”, the electoral college. “But that irony quickly receded into the background.”As a president whose policies have almost exclusively benefitted the top 1%, with vast tax cuts for the rich and – at the moment – not one more cent from Trump’s Senate allies for the economic victims of the pandemic, our benighted leader is actually the pure opposite of a true populist.Frank writes that populism has been continuously misidentified by elites, so much so that the liberal Center for American Progress made an extremely unusual alliance with the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to co-author a report denouncing “authoritarian populism”.True populists advanced the rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the peopleTrue populists, Frank writes, the adherents of the People’s Party who adopted the word in 1891, were those who supported “a specific list of reforms designed to take power away from ‘the plutocrats’” while advancing the “rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the people”.They were protesting “unbearable debt, monopoly and corruption … forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans who were just as worthy as bankers or railroad barons were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws.”Which of course is a perfect description of the version of American capitalism which reigns unfettered today.Frank bows to no one in his determination to highlight “racist, rightwing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them”. Opponents of the right, he writes, “should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump”. He proclaims himself “flabbergasted anew every time I see the word abused in this way. How does it help reformers … to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition?”Denunciations of populism come “from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation”, a “tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn” that has “allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly”. Anti-populism’s “most toxic ingredient”, Frank writes, is “a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans”.He has particular contempt for experts, including most of the academic establishment. “Millions of foundation dollars have been invested”, he writes, to promote the canard that populism is a “threat to liberal democracy … Your daily paper, if your town still has one, almost certainly throws he word ‘populist’ at racist demagogue and pro-labor liberals alike”.“Populism,” he adds, “was about mass enlightenment, not the empowerment of a clique of foundation favorites or Ivy League grads.”These are the people he holds responsible for failing to prosecute any bankers after the housing bubble fiasco, negotiating “disastrous trade agreements” and “prosecuting stupid wars”.The best argument Frank makes for populism lies in the record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he correctly identifies as “the most consequential president of the 20th century”, a leader who didn’t “merely talk in a populist way”, but delivered.“FDR bailed out farmers and homeowners, he protected unions, he pulled the teeth of the Wall Street wolves, he smashed oligopolies, he took America off the gold standard and … he was roundly condemned by the nation’s respectables as the most dangerous demagogue of them all, a sort of one man mob-rule.”For modern progressives, Roosevelt’s attacks against Wall Street have the greatest resonance. In 1936 he declared: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”According to Frank, “painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt’s willingness to disregard elites” that revived America after the Great Depression.Frank also offers a strong section on Martin Luther King Jr’s understanding of the populism of the 1890s and how Southern plutocrats helped to destroy it, enacting laws “that made it a crime for negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level”. The poor white man was given “a psychological bird that told him no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow.” More

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      It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline

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      Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie is a sustained attack, both jeremiad and confession, on the Republican party he served for 40 years. His is the hand at Belshazzar’s political feast: “All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market.”Stevens, a consultant, is refreshingly frank about his role and responsibility. “Blame me,” he writes, adding: “I had been lying to myself for decades.” He seeks a new leaf on a “crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility”.Unsurprisingly, he starts with race, “the original Republican sin … the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played.” Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans have had difficulty appealing to African American voters. Stevens is not surprised.“What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating non-white voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters.” How, for instance, does a black person hear an “avowed hatred of government”?The policy effects are shocking; the electoral effects only recently came into focus as demographics change. Yet the strategy “was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win”.You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try itStuart StevensThis self-deception extends to other areas, notably foreign policy, in which “the Republican party has gone from ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home”. All without much protest from those who know better.Stevens believes Donald Trump “just removes the necessity of pretending” Republicans care about social issues. Instead, it’s all about “attacking and defining Democrats”. The idea that “character counts”, so prominent in earlier decades, is forgotten.In short, stripped “of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy”. The first casualty is the truth. “Large elements of the Republican party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth” and that a cause or simple access to power is more important.Rather than saying the sky is green, the new strategy is “to build a world in which the sky is in fact green. Then everyone who says it is blue is clearly a liar.” Sadly, it has worked. Stevens notes that once “there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.”He rightly calls this fear and cowardice: “To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.” People know better – including Republican members of Congress – but will not speak. Yet Stevens recalls that the “story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul, he also doesn’t deliver on what he promised.”The remedy is simple. “You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it”.What was Trump’s role in all this? Both enabler and someone who took a shaky foundation and crushed it. Trump “brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible”. For Stevens, the GOP “rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power.”Stevens has high praise for two former clients, George W Bush and Mitt Romney, “decent men who tried to live their lives by a set of values that represented the best of our society”. Yet neither could win today. He quotes George HW Bush’s impassioned resignation letter from the National Rifle Association after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and realizes few would do so now.Stevens is deeply concerned about the future of American democracy, comparing some tests in the study How Democracies Die with actions under the Trump administration.With one party having failed its “circuit-breaker” role, he cites the “urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy” as Democrats drift left. Though moderate Republican governors remain popular, he is distinctly pessimistic today’s Republicans can be that party, as they have “legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a political party in a country with a unique role in the world”.Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”The former may happen. The latter is less predictable. More

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      Ex-FBI agent who played key role in Russia inquiry to release book

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      The former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the Russia investigation but whose text messages about Donald Trump made him a target of the president’s wrath, is releasing a book.Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J Trump is due out on 8 September, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media said.The book promises an insider’s view on some of the most sensational and politically freighted investigations in modern US history, including into whether the 2016 Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to sway the presidential election.Due out two months before the November election, the book adds to the list of first-person accounts from other senior FBI and justice department officials.The former FBI director James Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe have each released books that describe aspects of the Trump investigation. Andrew Weissmann, a former justice department prosecutor who served on Mueller’s team, is due out with a book in September.Other books about Trump and his administration, most recently by the former national security adviser John Bolton and the president’s niece, Mary Trump, have become instant bestsellers. HR McMaster, Bolton’s predecessor, also has a book due out in September, as does Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer.“Russia has long regarded the US as its ‘Main Enemy’ and I spent decades trying to protect our country from their efforts to weaken and undermine us,“ Strzok said in a statement.“In this book, I use that background to explain how the elevation by President Trump and his collaborators of Trump’s own personal interests over the interests of the country allowed Putin to succeed beyond Stalin’s wildest dreams, and how the national security implications of Putin’s triumph will persist through our next election and beyond.”Strzok helped lead the investigation into whether the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on the private email server she relied on as secretary of state. The FBI ultimately recommended against criminal charges.Strzok also played a pivotal role in the Russia investigation, including interviewing the former national security adviser Michael Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.Strzok briefly served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team but was removed after the justice department inspector general flagged derogatory text messages about Trump Strzok sent and received in 2016.Strzok became a regular target of the president’s attacks, Trump alleging that Strzok and others plotted against his campaign and even committed treason – an accusation Strzok’s lawyer rejected as “beyond reckless”.The texts were exchanged with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, and Trump routinely refers to the two of them as “the lovers”.At a congressional hearing in July 2018, Strzok insisted he never allowed personal viewpoints to influence his work, though he did acknowledge being dismayed by Trump’s behavior.The justice department inspector general said it did not find evidence that Strzok and other FBI officials were motivated by political bias.Strzok was fired in August 2018 and has sued in return. In a statement announcing the book, the publishing company said “the Trump administration used his private expression of political opinions to force him out”.“But by that time,” the statement added, “Strzok had seen more than enough to convince him that the commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin.”Though Mueller did not allege a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign, the publisher said Strzok “grapples with a question that should concern every US citizen: when a president appears to favor personal and Russian interests over those of our nation, has he become a national security threat?” More