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      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Bite me! How Apple’s download chart became a new battleground for pop – and politics

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      Over 20 years after its launch, Apple’s online music store has found a surprising new life – as a battleground for online turf wars. Last week, at least five songs rose to the upper reaches of the Apple Music (formerly iTunes) download charts, powered by different internet factions. Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion fans waged war against each other as foot soldiers in the rappers’ feud; Britney Spears fans mass-bought the singer’s years-old songs Liar and Selfish as a way to troll her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, who released a song also called Selfish last month; and rightwing media influencer Ben Shapiro encouraged his fans to drive Facts, his new rap song with Canadian former wrestler Tom MacDonald, up the charts. Far from a measure of objective popularity, the chart reflected political biases, years-old feuds and outright pettiness.Fans mobilising to push certain albums or songs up the Apple Music download charts is nothing new – in 2018, a group of Mariah Carey fans mass-bought the singer’s 2001 flop Glitter as part of a campaign called #JusticeForGlitter. But musician and writer Jaime Brooks says that the cratering of the digital download market in recent years – around 152m digital songs were sold in the US in 2022, less than half of 2018’s 412m – has allowed campaigns that are smaller and far less coordinated than #JusticeForGlitter to disproportionately affect the charts. “I don’t think anybody’s actually using their phones and iTunes to listen to files any more, except people who have not upgraded their setup since 2012 – there are a lot of people like that in America, but not enough to sustain these huge numbers,” she says. “This [downloading] is a purely performative gesture – it only ever happens as a result of some kind of factional culture war that somebody has the money and inclination to try to represent on the charts.”Indeed, a lot of these sales campaigns have an implicit or explicit political meaning. Shapiro’s song, naturally, is part of an attempt to “own the libs”; Spears fans see their trolling of Timberlake as a kind of punishment for his perceived mistreatment of the singer when they dated, and for the unapologetic pose he has since adopted. In Megan’s song, she references Megan’s Law, a piece of legislation that requires the government to make information about sex offenders public, which many saw as a shot against Minaj, whose husband is a registered sex offender; Minaj’s song accuses Megan of falsely accusing Tory Lanez of shooting her.These relatively niche buying campaigns seem small fry in comparison with two campaigns led by the American conservative establishment last year. In July, Jason Aldean’s single Try That in a Small Town was sent to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its video was pulled from Country Music Television amid criticisms, including that it was racist, which Aldean denied. In August, the total unknown Oliver Anthony debuted at No 1 with his libertarian – and, some say, QAnon-pandering – single Rich Men North of Richmond.Kristin Robinson, a senior writer at Billboard, says the Aldean song in particular was not just driven by his fans, but by onlookers who saw the track as a cause to support. “Anchors on Fox News and other kinds of conservative talking heads led a fandom – not in the musical sense but in a political sense – to support that song,” she says. That both songs were in the country space, she says, only helped. “Country music still does quite well with sales in general, because country tends to be a bit of an older audience that has more buying power, or might not be as technologically savvy.”View image in fullscreenSales also have a disproportionate effect on the Billboard charts. A single sale counts for 150 streams, which is why astute fans tend to focus more on downloads than the kinds of “streaming parties” that some fanbases hold. Brooks says that education on the charts – the ways in which certain formats are weighted more heavily than others, and how a fairer chart might be implemented – has been led by K-pop fanbases. “They’ve developed among themselves a whole ideology about this type of thing, and they really did teach the pop fan community about how this stuff works,” she says. “That’s factoring into the current situation, where you had Megan fans organising to try to put big numbers on the board to fight back against Nicki.”Of course, few of these campaigns create their desired impact. While Megan’s Hiss debuted at No 1 – with around 100k in sales, 29.2m streams and 2.9m radio impressions – Shapiro’s song debuted at No 16, Timberlake’s at No 19 and Minaj’s at No 23. Brooks says that, either way, we’re likely to see more of this in coming years, as music consumption drops on the whole and pop music becomes more tied in with celebrity and politics. “Politics is sort of eating music – in the case of the Ben Shapiro thing, it’s enthusiasm driven by the political media industrial complex, and with Britney v Justin, it’s the celebrity industrial complex,” she says. “It’s all ultimately pointless – it’s people competing to be into the virtuous product v the non-virtuous product. But ultimately, it’s all the same shit.” More

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      ‘Being mean will only rally her fans’: Taylor Swift is winning whether she backs Biden or thumps Trump

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      The 2024 US presidential election campaign, lacking any defining story to tell and with a prevailing lack of enthusiasm in a rematch of candidates in their eighth and ninth decades, last week settled on Taylor Swift – and an endorsement she may or may not make – as its defining obsession.On one side, expectations emanating from the Biden re-election camp were that the 34-year-old superstar would cast her influence over tens of thousands of Swifties their way; on the other, furious Republicans who at first sought to denigrate and wrap her in conspiracy theories, and later thought better of the strategy.Rolling Stone reported that allies of Donald Trump were pledging a “holy war” against Swift if she sides with the Democrats in November. Some theorised that the National Football League is rigging games for Swift’s Kansas City Chiefs boyfriend, Travis Kelce, to sweeten the Democrats endorsement hopes.Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that the Shake It Off hitmaker had been converted into a psychological operations asset four years ago. The Pentagon hit back, saying: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”However, not all Republicans are on board with the attacks on Swift. “I don’t know what the obsession is,” presidential candidate Nikki Haley told CNN. “Taylor Swift is allowed to have a boyfriend. Taylor Swift is a good artist. I have taken my daughter to Taylor Swift concerts. To have a conspiracy theory of all of this is bizarre. Nobody knows who she’s going to endorse, but I can’t believe that’s overtaken our national politics.”While many are preoccupied with whether Swift can cross nine time zones to make it back from an Eras Tour concert in Tokyo to see her boyfriend play in next weekend’s Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl in Las Vegas (she can), the intensity of political questions surrounding Swift mirrors the febrile nature of the election 10 months away.View image in fullscreenDoubtless, Swift could offer politicos lessons in values-based messaging, audience understanding and building genuine connections with fans or voters. Last week, Trump argued that he is more popular than her, even if the values-based narratives he presents are often more aligned with self-victimisation than self-empowerment.A survey last year by Morning Consult found 53% of American adults are Swift fans. There are almost as many men as women, almost as many Republicans as Democrats, including baby boomers, millennials, Gen Xers and young adults from Gen Z. In other words, a constituency that could make or break a national political campaign.The recent Republican primary in New Hampshire indicated Trump’s weaknesses with women, who make up much of Swift’s fanbase. But recent polling, too, has shown that Biden’s ratings and support among young voters has dropped and he’s now closely tied in the 18-34 demographic with Trump.“They’re not crazy about Biden,” says Democratic party consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “If they turn out at all, it may be to oppose Trump and with no intensity at all. But if you’re having trouble with younger people, and you need to do something, what better way to cure the problem, or at least show that you are sensitive to it, than to get Taylor Swift out?”David Allan, professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who teaches a Swift-focused course, says the Republicans will have to navigate the singer.“Republicans need to be careful with Taylor because she’s extremely popular with all-demographic women and some men. You don’t want to appear to be mean because it will only rally her fans,” he says. Conversely, attacking Swift could bring its own counter-intuitive, culture/class war rewards.“You know she’s having some effect if Fox News is attacking her,” Allan says. “For Trump, having Taylor Swift against him gives him something to talk about.” A salient lesson comes from the Dixie Chicks – now the Chicks – who wrecked their careers before the Iraq war when singer Natalie Maines said from a London stage they were ashamed to be that President George Bush was from Texas.In Swift’s documentary,Miss Americana, her father fretted that an overt political position could put her in the same position as the Chicks. But Swift is now believed to be too big to be commercially vulnerable.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs the music industry newsletter Hits Daily Double put it: “Her domination of the marketplace from every conceivable angle is next-level. But she just seems to get bigger, and to rule every area she enters – the rerecorded albums, the massive tour, the blockbuster movie of the tour, the NFL games where her mere presence changes the center of gravity.”Whether or not Swift goes two-feet in with Biden, Allan adds: “It’s getting to that point in the 60s that if Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell didn’t speak out about the Vietnam war it would hurt them with their fans. If she doesn’t do something, even if just to help to get out the vote, it will hurt her authenticity.” In September, Vote.org reported more than 35,000 new political registrations, a 23% jump over last year, after Swift urged her 280 million Instagram followers to sign up.Swift, who was politically cautious until she endorsed Tennessee Democratic senate candidate Phil Bredesen in 2018 (he lost) and then Biden in 2020, has not shown any interest in being adopted by political factions. A 5,000-word New York Times essay that claimed her as more than just queer-friendly was criticised for making overreaching assumptions.View image in fullscreenBut US candidates often seek show business endorsements. “The tradition goes back at least 60 years when [John F] Kennedy brought out Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Judy Garland and others to go stump for them, and country music stars, who have come out mostly for Republicans,” Sheinkopf notes.Other musical endorsements include the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd for Jimmy Carter. But musicians including Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga couldn’t push Hillary Clinton over the line in 2016, and it hasn’t hurt Trump to use Village People’s gay paradise anthem YMCA as a walk-off song, which crowds greatly appreciate.Swift might not even need to formally endorse Biden, Sheinkopf adds. “Even to put it out as rumour makes Biden look less like he’s 81 years old and more like he’s listening to younger people, their subcultural desires and what they feel about things.”For Swift, he says: “She gets to become a decision-maker, and an even larger figure in American and international life. Her public persona becomes as important as her music and that means she’ll make a lot more money.” More

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      The Truce review: deep dive on Democrats’ dynamics and divisions

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      Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump. The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition frays, riven by the Israel-Gaza war, crisis at the US-Mexico border and inter-generational tensions. The party convention in Chicago in August carries the potential for a repeat of 1968. Then, pandemonium in the Windy City helped cost Hubert Humphrey the White House.But for sustained Republican efforts to gut reproductive rights, a strong issue for Democrats to run on, Biden and Kamala Harris would be in even deeper trouble. Even on the economy: strong GDP numbers and an invigorated bull market have yet to yield political profit.After three years on the job, the 46th president is widely viewed as a back-slapping north-eastern pol and Hunter Biden’s dad – not the transformational figure he sees when he looks into the mirror. Worse for him, at 81, majorities say he’s just too old.With The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen cast a sympathetic eye toward the party of Biden, Barack Obama and the Squad, prominent progressives of color in the US House. Walker is an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo who covered the White House for Yahoo News. Luppen is a lawyer with a social media presence. In the past, he has donated to Democrats including Obama and Hillary Clinton.Mindful of Democrats’ internal divisions, the authors warmly describe Biden’s shift left and the political cover conferred. Convincingly, Walker and Luppen argue that the tilt from the center united the party and helped Biden enact legislation – until the House was lost.“This rapprochement culminated in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address,” Walker and Luppen write, of a speech that “leaned hard on progressive policy priorities from promoting organized labor to getting a handle on police violence”.Unfortunately, it failed to make Biden any more palatable to much of the public. On the one hand, 71% are sympathetic to unions, the highest level since 1965. On the other, Democrats remain seen as soft on crime. In 2020, protesters’ demands to “defund the police” were a boost only to Trump.“Bernie [Sanders] may have lost the election,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey reportedly told Ilhan Omar, a Squad member from Minnesota, after the State of the Union, referring to the Democratic primary in 2020. “But he won the speech.”Sanders, from Vermont, is the only socialist in the Senate. Biden also needed the centrists, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema but they were never his. To a point they gave him cover but they never embraced his agenda. Manchin, from West Virginia, now mulls a third-party White House run. Sinema became an independent.Walker and Luppen also describe the enthusiasm shown for Biden’s State of the Union by Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman and Squad member.“Mr President, that was awesome – that was awesome!” Bowman is quoted as saying.“Did you write the speech?” he is shown asking Sanders.Bowman has attracted controversy of his own. In September, he pulled a fire alarm in a congressional office building, then denied doing so in an attempt to delay a crucial vote. He did plead guilty to a misdemeanor.More recently, Bowman praised Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify its actions against Palestinians, who has said Holocaust deniers should be allowed to teach, and who on 7 October, the day Hamas fighters raped and murdered Israelis, wrote: “It warms every fiber of my soul [to see] the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”Introducing Finkelstein at a panel session, Bowman said he was “starstruck” and had “watched him all the time on YouTube”. Under fire, Bowman said he had been “unaware of Norman Finkelstein’s completely reprehensible comments”.Encapsulating Democrats’ deepening divide over Israel, Bowman now faces a primary challenge from George Latimer, the Westchester county executive. Two months after that vote, the party will most likely face a convention fight fueled by the same issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoubt also swirls around Biden’s vice-president. Walker and Lappen distill it. “Kamala is not ready for prime time”, a “senior White House aide” is quoted as saying, adding: “She ain’t made for this.” Fifty seven percent of registered voters concur. Walker and Luppen are not done. “This person should not be president of the United States,” a “top aide” to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign says.“The problems Harris and her team experienced on her campaign persisted during her time as vice-president,” Walker and Luppen write, adding that a source offered a damning assessment: “It was, they said, Game of Thrones.”HBO also aired Veep.The Truce also shines a light on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York and perhaps the most prominent Squad member. In the process, the book dishes on Corbin Trent, a former senior aide, and Riley Roberts, the congresswoman’s fiance.“I was hooked on fucking pain pills,” Trent acknowledges. Walker and Luppen stress that Ocasio-Cortez did not know. These days, Trent is back in the news for allegedly siphoning $140,000 in Pac money and for attempting to oust Biden as the nominee.As for Roberts, Walker and Luppen remind us of how his feelings for the police and his entrepreneurial spirit came to coincide. The authors recall a now-deleted site on which Roberts pushed the “Cop-Out Collective”, boasting, “High-end hemp t-shirts with our logo will be available for sale.”According to one poll, 47% of voters see the Democrats as too liberal, a seven-point swing since 2020. In another survey, only 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners expressed satisfaction with Biden as their nominee. More than seven-in-10 Republicans and allies are content with Trump.The Democrats have ceded economic policy to Sanders, their social agenda to Ivy League professors. When pivoting left on economics, it is imperative to remain in the cultural center. Democrats, including Biden, ignore this at their peril.
      The Truce is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      Lindsey Graham ‘threw Trump under the bus’ in Georgia case, book says

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      The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, revealing that the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.Trump’s cheating at golf has been widely reported.Isikoff and Klaidman also reportedly describe a “strange encounter” between Graham and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who has pursued the election subversion case, producing 13 criminal charges against Trump and charging a host of his allies.Willis reportedly decided against charging Graham over his involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s win in the state.“After Graham was finished testifying,” Isikoff and Klaidman write, “he bumped into Fani Willis in a hallway and thanked her for the opportunity to tell his story.“‘That was so cathartic,’ he told Willis. ‘I feel so much better.’ Then, to the astonishment of one source who witnessed the scene, South Carolina’s senior senator hugged the Fulton county DA who was aggressively pursuing Trump.“Willis’s reaction: ‘She was like, “Whatever, dude,”’ according to one witness of the strange encounter.”Trump’s criminal charges in Georgia contribute to a total of 91, as do four federal charges concerning his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former president also faces 40 charges over the retention of classified information; 34 regarding hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an affair; civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”; and attempts to remove him from the ballot, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Nonetheless, he has dominated the Republican presidential primary, winning convincingly in Iowa and New Hampshire and now pressuring his last rival, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, to drop out.Graham remains, in public, a vocal Trump supporter, oblivious to charges of hypocrisy given a famous 2016 prediction that Trump would “destroy” the Republican party, and given a claim, immediately after the attack on Congress, that he was finally “out” of Trump’s camp. More

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      ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

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      When he was a Ku Klux Klansman in South Carolina, Elwin Wilson helped carry out a vicious assault that left John Lewis with bruised ribs, cuts to his face and a deep gash on the back of his head. Half a century later, Wilson sought and received Lewis’s forgiveness. Then both men appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show.Wilson looked overwhelmed, panicked by the bright lights of the studio, where nearly 180 of Lewis’s fellow civil rights activists had gathered. But then Lewis smiled, leaned over, gently held Wilson’s hand and insisted: “He’s my brother.” There was not a dry eye in the house.Raymond Arsenault, author of the first full-length biography of Lewis, the late congressman from Georgia, describes this act of compassion and reconciliation as a quintessential moment.“For him, it was all about forgiveness,” Arsenault says. “That’s the central theme of his life. He believed that you couldn’t let your enemies pull you down into the ditch with them, that you had to love your enemies as much as you loved your friends and your loved ones.”It was the secret weapon, the way to catch enemies off-guard. Bernard Lafayette, a Freedom Rider and close friend of Lewis, a key source for Arsenault, calls it moral jujitsu.Arsenault adds: “They’re expecting you to react like a normal human being. When you don’t, when you don’t hate them, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The case of Mr Wilson was classic. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, for sure.”Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, has written books about the Freedom Riders – civil rights activists who rode buses across the south in 1961 to challenge segregation in transportation – and two African American cultural giants: contralto Marian Anderson and tennis player Arthur Ashe.He first met Lewis in 2000, in Lewis’s congressional office in Washington DC, a mini museum of books, photos and civil rights memorabilia.“The first day I met him, I called him ‘Congressman Lewis’ and he said: ‘Get that out of here. I’m John. Everybody calls me John.’ It wasn’t an affectation. He meant it. He seemed to value human beings in such an equalitarian way.”Lewis asked for Arsenault’s help tracking down Freedom Riders for a 40th anniversary reunion. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Lewis’s death, at 80 from pancreatic cancer, in 2020.“From the very start I saw that he was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” Arsenault says. “I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite like him – absolutely without ego, selfless. People have called him saintly and that’s probably fairly accurate.”Arsenault was approached to write a biography by the historian David Blight, who with Henry Louis Gates Jr and Jacqueline Goldsby sits on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Black Lives series. The resulting book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, examines a rare journey from protest leader to career politician, buffeted by the winds of Black nationalism, debates over the acceptability of violence and perennial tensions between purity and pragmatism.Arsenault says Lewis “was certainly more complicated than I thought he would be when I started. He tried to keep his balance, but it was not easy because a lot of people wanted him to be what is sometimes called in the movement a ‘race man’ and he wasn’t a race man, even though he was proud of being African American and very connected to where he came from. He was always more of a human rights person than a civil rights person.“If he had to choose between racial loyalty or solidarity and his deeper values about the Beloved Community [Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a just and compassionate society], he always chose the Beloved Community and it got him in hot water. He, for example, was criticised for attacking Clarence Thomas during the [1991 supreme court nomination] hearings and of course he proved to be absolutely right on that one.“There were other cases where if there was a good white candidate running and a Black man who wasn’t so good, he’d choose the white candidate and he didn’t apologise for it. He took a lot of heat for that. Now he’s such a beloved figure sometimes people forget that he marched to his own drummer.”Lewis’s philosophy represented a confluence of Black Christianity and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Arsenault says. “He had this broader vision. There’s not a progressive cause that you can mention that he wasn’t involved with in some way or another.“He was a major environmentalist. There was a lot of homophobia in the Black community in those years but not even a hint [in Lewis]. He was also a philosemite: he associated Jews as being people of the Old Testament and he was so attracted to them as natural allies. Never even a moment of antisemitism or anything like that. He was totally ahead of his time in so many ways.”‘A man of action’Lewis was born in 1940, outside Troy in Pike county, Alabama, one of 10 children. He grew up on his family’s farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and attended segregated public schools in the era of Jim Crow. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister.Arsenault says: “I have a picture of him in the book when he was 11; they actually ran something in the newspaper about this boy preacher. He had something of a speech impediment but preached to the chickens on the farm. They were like his children or his congregation, his flock, and he loved to tell those stories.“But he was always bookish, different from his big brothers and sisters. He loved school. He loved to read. In fact his first protesting was to try to get a library card at the all-white library.”Denied a library card, Lewis became an avid reader anyway. He was a teenager when he first heard King preach, on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at the segregated Troy State University.“He was a good student and a conscientious student but he realised that he was a man of action, as he liked to say. He loved words but was always putting his body on the line. It’s a miracle he survived, frankly, more than 40 beatings, more than 40 arrests and jailings, far more than any other major figure. You could add all the others up and they wouldn’t equal the times that John was behind bars.”Lewis began organising sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its chair in 1963. That year, he was among the “Big Six” organisers of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, where at the last minute he agreed to tone down his speech. Still, Lewis made his point, with what Arsenault calls “far and away the most radical speech given that day”.In 1965, after extensive training in non-violent protest, Lewis, still only 25, and the Rev Hosea Williams led hundreds of demonstrators on a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. In Selma, police blocked their way off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers wielded truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Walking with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. Televised images of such state violence forced a reckoning with southern racial oppression.Lewis returned to and crossed the bridge every year and never tired of talking about it, Arsenault says: “He wasn’t one to talk about himself so much, but he was a good storyteller and Bloody Sunday was a huge deal for him. He said later he thought he was going to die, that this was it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He passed through an incredible rite of passage as a non-violent activist and nothing could ever be as bad again. He’d been through the fire and so it made him tougher and more resilient. It’s origins of the legend. He was well considered as a Freedom Rider, certainly, and already had a reputation but that solidified it and extended it in a way that made him a folk hero within the movement.”Lewis turned to politics. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta city council. Five years later he won a seat in Congress. He would serve 17 terms. After Democrats won the House in 2006, Lewis became senior deputy whip, widely revered as the “conscience of the Congress”. Once a young SNCC firebrand, sceptical of politics, he became a national institution and a party man – up to a point.“That tension was always there,” Arsenault reflects. “He tried to be as practical and pragmatic as he needed to be but that wasn’t his bent.“He was much more in it for the long haul in terms of an almost utopian attitude about the Beloved Community. He probably enjoyed it more when he was a protest leader, when he was kind of a rebel. Maybe it’s not right to say he didn’t feel comfortable in Washington, but his heart was back in Atlanta and in Pike county. As his chief of staff once said, wherever he went in the world, he took Pike county with him.”The fire never dimmed. Even in his 70s, Lewis led a sit-in protest in the House chamber, demanding tougher gun controls. As a congressman, he was arrested five times.“He was absolutely determined and, as he once said: ‘I’m not a showboat, I’m a tugboat.’ He loved that line. Nothing fancy. Just a person who did the hard work and was always willing to put his body on the line,” Arsenault says.‘If he hated anyone, it was probably Trump’Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but switched to Barack Obama, who became the first Black president. Obama honoured Lewis with the presidential medal of freedom and in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, they marched hand in hand in Selma. Lewis backed Clinton again in 2016 but was thwarted by Donald Trump.Arsenault says: “He was thrilled by the idea of an Obama presidency and thought the world was heading in the right direction. He worked hard for Hillary in 2016 and thought for sure she was going to win, so it was just a devastating thing, as it was for a lot of us. He tried not to hate anyone and never would vocalise it but, if he hated anyone, it was probably Trump. He had contempt for him. He thought he was an awful man.“That was something I had to deal with in writing the book, because you like to think it’s going to be an ascending arc of hopefulness and things are going to get better over time, but in John Lewis’s life, the last three years were probably the worst in many respects because he thought that American democracy itself was on the line.”When Lewis died, Washington united in mourning – with a notable exception. Trump said: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”Arsenault says: “They were almost like antithetical figures. Lewis was the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, but when he died in July 2020 he probably thought Trump was going to win re-election. Within the limits of his physical strength, which wasn’t great at that point, he did what he could, but the pancreatic cancer was so devastating from December 2019 until he died.“It was tough to deal with that part of the story but, in some ways, maybe it’s not all that surprising for someone whose whole life was beating the odds and going against the grain. He had suffered plenty of disappointments before that. It just made him more determined, tougher, and he was absolutely defiant of Trump.”Lewis enjoyed positive relationships with Republicans. “He was such a saintly person that whenever there were votes about the most admired person in Congress, it was always John Lewis. Even Republicans who didn’t agree with his politics but realised he was something special as a human being, as a man.“He had always been able to work across the aisle, probably better than most Democratic congressmen. He didn’t demonise the Republicans. It was Trumpism, this new form of politics, in some ways a throwback to the southern demagoguery of the early 20th century, this politics of persecution and thinly veiled racism. He passed without much sense that we were any closer to the Beloved Community.”Lewis did live to see the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He was inspired, a day before he went into hospital, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House.“For him it was the most incredible outpouring of non-violent spirit in the streets that he’d ever seen, that anybody had ever seen,” Arsenault says. “That was enormously gratifying for him. He thought that in some sense his message had gotten through and people were acting on these ideals of Dr King and Gandhi.“That was hugely important to him and to reinforcing his values and his beliefs and his hopes. I don’t think he was despondent at all because of that. If that had not happened, who knows? But he’d weathered the storms before and that’s what helped him to weather this storm, because it was it was so important to him.”Lewis enjoyed fishing, African American quilts, sweet potato pie, listening to music and, as deathless videos testify, dancing with joy. Above all, Arsenault hopes readers of his book will be moved by Lewis’s fidelity to the promise of non-violence.“When you think about what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East and Ukraine right now, it’s horrible violence – and more than ever we need these lessons of the power of non-violence. [Lewis] was the epitome of it. You can’t help but come away with an admiration for what he was able to do in his lifetime, how far he travelled. He had no advantages in any way.“The idea that he was able to have this life and career and the American people and the world would be exposed to a man like this – in some ways he is like Nelson Mandela. He didn’t spend nearly 30 years in prison, but I think of them as similar in many ways. I hope people will be inspired to think about making the kind of sacrifices that he made. He gave everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      ‘This person should not be president’: Kamala Harris takes hits in book on Biden

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      Considering Kamala Harris’s fitness to take over from Joe Biden should the need arise, a top aide to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign said: “This person should not be president of the United States.”The withering assessment, given after Harris was picked for vice-president in 2020, is reported in The Truce: Progressives, Centrists and the Future of the Democratic Party, by the reporters Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen. The book will be published in the US on 24 January 2024. The Guardian obtained a copy.Harris ran for president in 2020, but withdrew a month before the first vote. Her campaign, Walker and Luppen quote the unnamed aide as saying, was “rotten from the start.“A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realised that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States.”Another unnamed aide, identified as a “senior staffer”, is quoted as saying Harris’s backstory, as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who became the first woman and woman of colour to be vice-president, is “a lot of the reason people support her.“But you’ve got to back that up with: ‘What are you going to do?’”In fact, Harris made a strong start to the Democratic primary in 2019, landing memorable blows on Biden in the first debate when she brought up the veteran senator and former vice-president’s historic opposition to “busing”, a way of compelling racial integration in public schools.“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” Harris said, onstage in Miami, “and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”But Harris failed to capitalise with policy proposals or further profitable attacks and though Biden forgave her, overruling reported opposition among aides and from his wife to pick Harris as his running mate, reports of tension and Harris’s frustrations as vice-president have been a feature of their time in power.The White House has repeatedly denied such reports concerning Biden and Harris’s working relationship and alleged dysfunction in Harris’s office.Biden and Harris are set to form the Democratic ticket again this year.Polling, however, shows widespread concern that at 81, Biden is too old to properly prosecute a potentially historic campaign, with Donald Trump seemingly set to be the Republican nominee once more.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolling also shows low approval numbers for Harris. Republicans, particularly Trump’s closest challenger, Nikki Haley, have made the prospect of her taking power a central campaign theme.Walker and Luppen report speculation that Harris could line up a 2028 bid on a ticket with Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who won the Iowa caucuses in 2020.A former Buttigieg staffer is quoted as saying Harris has established “a personal relationship with Pete in a way that she doesn’t with other people”.But alleged people problems, familiar from reports about Harris’s campaign and her time as vice-president, also surface in Walker and Luppen’s book.“The problems Harris and her team had experienced on her campaign had persisted during her time as vice-president,” the authors write.“Harris saw heavy staff turnover, with aides describing a toxic climate riven with factionalism and mismanagement. One source who worked for the vice-president declined to go on record or even discuss matters anonymously, due to the heated atmosphere around the office.“They refused to characterise the experience of working for Harris, apart from offering a three-word assessment. It was, they said: ‘Game of Thrones’.” More

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      The Rebels review: AOC, Bernie, Warren and the fight against Trump

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      In 2017, mere months after Donald Trump settled into the White House, Joshua Green of Bloomberg News delivered Devil’s Bargain, a mordantly amusing but deadly serious take on the 45th president and his relationship with Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who became Trump’s chief strategist. With wit, insight and access, Green informed, entertained and horrified. More than six years later, both Trump and Bannon face criminal trials. Then again, the band may soon be back together – in the West Wing.Green is acutely aware of the economic and social cleavages that roil the US and divide Democrats ranged against the Republicans’ rightward turn. With his new book, The Rebels, he shifts his gaze to three notables of the Democratic left: two senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York. Once again, Green’s work is smart, sharp and smoothly written.Warren and Sanders failed in bids to become president. In 2020, his second such primary campaign, Sanders won early contests but saw his ambitions crash in South Carolina. That heavily African American primary electorate wasn’t all that keen on Brooklyn-bred progressivism, as Sanders offered.As for Warren, she failed to win a single contest and finished third in her home state, behind Sanders and Joe Biden. What worked for her in debates, congressional hearings and the faculty lounge did not resonate with voters. A highly contentious claim to be Native American raised damning questions too.Still, Warren’s critiques of the mortgage meltdown and resulting displacements provided intellectual heft for the populist left. Furthermore, unlike Biden she was intellectually brilliant and not beholden to Delaware and its credit card giants. Warren was a harsh critic of Wall Street too. The two billionaires in the 2020 race, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, regularly felt her sting. Ditto Tim Geithner, first treasury secretary to Barack Obama and another key character in Green’s book.Warren made an impact. Green writes: “Knowing [Trump’s] commitment to economic populism was merely rhetorical, Bannon fretted that Warren would lure away blue-collar voters with a program he described as ‘populist Democratic nationalism’.”In the House, Ocasio-Cortez, who at 34 is decades younger than Warren, Biden and Sanders, is the one member of the “Squad” of progressives who possesses the tools and dexterity to play politics nationally. She is emotionally grounded.At one 2019 hearing, the congresswoman widely known as AOC filleted Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s ties to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data-harvesting and research firm owned by Bannon and the rightwing Mercer family. She also put the wood to Exxon over its early but non-disclosed knowledge about global heating and its effects.All three of Green’s subjects convey seriousness. Humor, less so. Nonetheless, the book offers a valuable recapitulation of the crack-up of the New Deal coalition, the impact of Ronald Reagan’s victories and the continued reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008.The Democrats hold the White House and the Senate but their future is unclear. Non-college graduates, regardless of race, find less to love in the historic home of working America. Green seizes on the havoc wrought by economic liberalization, financialism and expanded trade with China – factors that have driven a wedge between the Democrats and what was once their base.Convincingly, Green argues that neo-liberalism is in retrograde and that Biden is more a transitional figure than a harbinger of what comes next. Even so, Biden tacked left – instead of pivoting toward the center – as he faced Trump in 2020.In 2021, on inauguration day, Biden issued the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. His White House intoned: “Advancing equity is not a one-year project – it is a generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with all communities.”Good luck with that. The controversial fall of Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, who came under sustained conservative fire over the Israel-Hamas war, student protest and allegations of plagiarism in her work, is just one recent illustration of how tough such terrain will remain.Green traces many Democratic dilemmas to 1980, when Reagan handily defeated an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Afterwards, Democratic mandarins concluded that the old-time religion of lunch-bucket liberalism needed to make room for market-based economics. Reagan’s embrace of tax cuts and reduced government resonated with the public. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to stand as heirs of that strategic decision. But it was about more than “it’s the economy, stupid”, as Clinton would learn on the job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton told Robert Rubin, his treasury secretary, a former head of Goldman Sachs.James Carville, the guru of Clinton’s first victory, later said that were he to be born again, he wanted to be reincarnated as the most powerful thing in the world: the bond market.Green homes in on the close relationships that existed between the Obama administration and Wall Street. In 2008, for all the then Illinois senator’s talk of hope and change, he was the financial sector’s choice for president over John McCain. Green quotes Geithner’s pitch to Obama for the treasury slot, and describes how Geithner beat out Larry Summers, Rubin’s successor, to secure the job.Green also examines how in saving the financial system despite its players’ unadulterated greed and stupidity, Geithner helped incubate resentments that haunt the US today.“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner said. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson?”In 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, voters did the latter. Ten months from now, they may do so again.
      The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics is published in the US by Penguin Random House More