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      The Republican party is abandoning democracy. There can be no ‘politics as usual’ | Thomas Zimmer

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      The Republican party is abandoning democracy. There can be no ‘politics as usual’Thomas ZimmerRepublicans could not be clearer about their cynicism, yet some establishment Democrats act as if politics as usual is still an option Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized his friendship with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. At the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, for instance, he praised McConnell as “a man of your word. And you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.”Biden’s publicly professed affinity is weirdly at odds with the political situation. Going back to the Obama era, McConnell has led the Republican Party in a strategy of near-total obstruction which he has pursued with ruthless cynicism. It is true that he has, at times, signaled distance to Donald Trump and condemned the January 6 insurrection. But McConnell is also sabotaging any effort to counter the Republican party’s ongoing authoritarian assault on the political system.The distinct asymmetry in the way the two sides treat each other extends well beyond Biden and McConnell. Republicans immediately derided Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court – while Democratic leaders are hoping for bipartisan support; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists the nation needs a strong Republican party – meanwhile radicals like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who fantasize about committing acts of violence against Democrats, are embraced by fellow Republicans, proving they are not just a extremist fringe that has “hijacked” the Party, as Pelosi suggested. And when Texas senator Ted Cruz recently intimated that Republicans would impeach Biden if they were to retake the House “whether it’s justified or not,” the White House responded by calling on Cruz to “work with us on getting something done.” Republicans could not be clearer about the fact that they consider Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, yet some establishment Democrats act as if politics as usual is still an option and a return to “normalcy” imminent.There is certainly an element of political strategy in all of this. Democrats are eager to present themselves as a force of moderation and unity. But Biden’s longing for understanding across party lines seems sincere. He has been reluctant to make the fight against the Republican party’s assault on democracy the center piece of his agenda; Democratic leadership has proved mostly unwilling to focus the public’s attention on the Republican party’s authoritarian turn.One important explanatory factor is that many Democratic leaders are old. They came up in a very different political environment, when there was indeed a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. There is no reason to be nostalgic about this – the politics of bipartisan consensus more often than not stifled racial and social progress. But there was certainly an established norm of intra-party cooperation until quite recently. When California senator Dianne Feinstein hugged South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham at the end of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in 2020, it was a bizarre throwback to those days of amity across party lines in the midst of a naked Republican power grab.Beyond institutional tradition and personal familiarity, this inability to grapple in earnest with the post-Obama reality in which Democratic politicians are almost universally considered members of an “Un-American” faction by most Republicans has deeper ideological roots. The way some establishment Democrats have acted suggests they feel a kinship with their Republican opponents grounded in a worldview of white elite centrism. Their perspective on the prospect of a white reactionary regime is influenced by the fact that, consciously or not, they understand that their elite status wouldn’t necessarily be affected all that much. The Republican dogma – that the world works best if it’s run by prosperous white folks – has a certain appeal to wealthy white elites, regardless of party.From that vantage point, it is rational to believe that the bigger immediate threat is coming from the “Left”: an agenda seeking to transform America from a restricted, white men’s democracy that largely preserved existing hierarchies to a functioning multiracial, pluralistic, social democracy is indeed a losing proposition for people who have traditionally been at the top. When Biden insists that “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist”, and instead emphasizes his friendship with Mitch McConnell, he offers more than strategic rhetoric. Many establishment Democrats seem to believe that it is high time to push back against the “radical” forces of leftism and “wokeism.”The constant attempts to normalize a radicalizing Republican Party also have a lot to do with two foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary: the myth of American exceptionalism and the myth of white innocence. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the postwar era, but much of the country’s Democratic elite still subscribes to an exceptionalist understanding that America is fundamentally good and the US inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be. This often goes hand in hand with a mythical tale of America’s past, describing democracy as being exceptionally stable. Never mind that genuine multiracial democracy has actually existed for less than 60 years in this country. What could possibly threaten America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? Acknowledging what the Republican party has become goes against the pillars of that worldview.Finally, the American political discourse is still significantly shaped by the paradigm of white innocence. Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean – whatever animates white people’s extremism, it must not be racism, and they cannot be blamed for their actions. The dogma of white innocence leads to elite opinion instinctively sanitizing the reasons behind the rise of rightwing demagogues, a common tendency in the commentary surrounding the success of George Wallace in the late 1960s, David Duke in early 1990s, or Donald Trump in 2016. The idea of white innocence also clouds Democratic elites’ perspective on Republican elites: Since they cannot possibly be animated by reactionary white nationalism, they must be motivated by more benign forces, fear of the Trumpian base perhaps, or maybe they are being seduced by the dangerous demagogue.“I actually like Mitch McConnell,” Biden said during a press conference a few weeks ago, providing a window into what he sees in Republicans: No matter what they do, underneath they’re good guys, they’ll snap out of it. Promise. It’s the manifestation of a specific worldview that makes it nearly impossible to acknowledge the depths of Republican radicalization – a perspective that severely hampers the fight for the survival of American democracy.
      Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer
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      Joke’s on them: how Democrats gave up on rural America

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      Joke’s on them: how Democrats gave up on rural America It is a diverse and complicated place poorly served by stereotypes and simplistic solutions
      This essay originally appeared in the DriftOne evening a few summers ago, I walked from my house to the county fairgrounds. It was a long July day, and the sun still hung above the hills that surround the small western Colorado town where I live. People packed the bleachers of an outdoor arena to watch a rodeo.Shortly before the bullriding began, a rodeo clown strolled to the center of the dirt field and began his night with a joke. It went something like this:There was a man who died after a good life on earth, and St Peter met him at the pearly gates and welcomed him to Heaven. When he got inside, the man noticed that there were clocks all over the place, each set to a different time.“What’s with all the clocks?” he asked.“Those are liars’ clocks,” St Peter answered. “They keep track of the lies that people tell on earth.”“Whose is that?” the man asked, pointing at a clock set to two.“That’s Noah’s clock,” St. Peter said, “he lived 800 years and only lied twice.”“How about that one?” the man asked, looking at a clock that showed noon.“That’s Mary’s clock,” St. Peter said. “The Mother of God didn’t tell a lie her whole life.”The man thought for a minute. “How about Hillary Clinton’s clock?” he asked.“Oh, that’s in Jesus’s office. He uses it as a ceiling fan.”This is not a new bit. The same story was told in similar settings about Barack Obama, and a friend who grew up in the area noted that his father’s 1990s version had Bill Clinton as the punchline. At the rodeo, there was an assumption shared by clown and crowd: a Democrat, take your pick, would be the butt of the joke.If the Democrats don’t shape up, Biden’s presidency will lead to a Trumpian sequel | Astra TaylorRead moreWhen it comes to rural America, the Democrats are not doing well. They have lost Arkansas, which had two Democratic senators as recently as 2010. They’ve lost Minnesota’s farm country and its Iron Range in the north – once strongholds of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. As of 2020, they’re on the verge of losing south Texas. And they’ve lost Colorado’s Western Slope. In 2010, the region was held by a Democrat, but it’s now represented in Congress by Lauren Boebert, best known for tweeting about the locations of lawmakers during the January 6 riot, pledging to carry her handgun into Congress, and going on a racist tirade against Representative Ilhan Omar.Unlike some of her fellow far-right House members, Boebert does not represent a deep-red seat. In 2020, she won with only 51.4% of the vote. Colorado’s third district is large and varied, covering the state’s entire western half. Federal public lands comprise much of the area, which also includes ski towns high in the Rockies, large chunks of farmland, and a couple of midsize cities. The areas near the New Mexico border have substantial Latino populations.This has not inspired Boebert to moderate her positions or reach out to those who didn’t vote for her in 2020. On the contrary, she continues to dial up a persona that seems designed to inflame the culture wars and offend many of her own constituents. Add to her political theatrics the fact that she hid a $1m connection between her husband and an oil and gas firm, and it’s hard to think of a better opportunity for Democrats to shake their losing streak and regain a rural seat.The party seemed to agree, and it adopted a well-worn approach. A frontrunner for the Democratic nomination emerged early on in Kerry Donovan, a popular state senator widely viewed as a rising star in Colorado. Her entry into the race received attention from Politico and the Associated Press, and she was boosted by national Democratic fundraising groups, bringing in nearly $2m by the end of September 2021. Her first campaign ad depicted her on horseback, sporting a cowboy hat. A few seconds later, she lugged hay bales in slow motion, as if to secure her credentials as a “rancher”, a label also affixed to her campaign Twitter account.Donovan does indeed own a ranch, but there’s more to the picture. She also lives in the swank ski town of Vail, which was never part of the third district. On the ranch, which sits some miles west of the town and was included in the third district’s old boundaries, her family raises fuzzy Scottish highland cows. As a local Democratic official told me when Donovan entered the race: “That’s not ranching in western Colorado. That’s a hobby.” In November, Donovan suspended her bid after Colorado’s redistricting commission just barely sliced the ranch out of Boebert’s district. (Seven other Democrats remain in the primary.)In recent election cycles, a number of Democratic candidates have adopted tropes of rural authenticity in similar fashion. They appear in campaign ads with rustic farm imagery, a well-placed truck to lean an elbow on, and, of course, cowboy hats. There are often guns involved.The former Indiana senator Joe Donnelly chopped wood in one campaign ad – he “split” from the national party, you see. In 2017, there was Rob Quist, a “singing cowboy” with no prior political experience whom Montana Democrats picked to run for an open House seat. Quist never appeared in public without a hat, and it was a great hat, but he still lost. Last fall, the longtime New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announced that he was running for governor of Oregon. His Twitter account describes him as an “Oregon farmer”. (In January, state election officials determined that Kristof is ineligible to run for governor, because he does not meet Oregon’s residency requirements.)These put-on personas – cowboy, rancher, farmer – are meant to signal not just authenticity, but also an independence and toughness tied to the mythos of the frontier.Of course, Republicans use these tactics as well, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan transformed his Hollywood cowboy roles into a political persona. He was often photographed in a broad-brimmed hat or on a horse on his California estate. Both Bushes, especially the younger one, cultivated Texan identities with boots, buckles, and pearl snap shirts, symbolism that became essential to selling their wars overseas.More recent examples become almost too numerous to count. Consider Donald Trump Jr’s habit of dressing in camouflage and blaze orange. On Tucker Carlson’s new interview-based show, the anchor appears to broadcast from a log cabin, having traded in his signature preppy, bow-tied look for a flannel shirt.Some politicians seem not to understand the costumes they wear: Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first interior secretary, once wore his cowboy hat backwards in a photo op with Mike Pence. He also rigged his fly-rod the wrong way around while fishing with a reporter from Outside Magazine. Today, Zinke is favored to win Montana’s new House seat, though according to a deeply reported Politico story, he appears to spend most of his time in Santa Barbara, California.Americans of all kinds, urban and rural alike, rightfully feel excluded from the centers of political decision-making and ignored by a giant, faceless bureaucratic state.For a politician, exuding a sense of familiarity, of shared concern and experience with the citizens you hope to represent, can be a valuable thing – if you can pull it off.Some can – take Senator Jon Tester, Montana’s sole Democrat holding statewide office. Tester still works the dryland wheat farm in the rural Montana county where he was raised. When he was nine years old, he was feeding raw beef into a meat grinder in his family’s butcher shop when his left hand slipped into the machine. He lost three fingers. A 2017 Washington Post profile notes that he still uses the same meat grinder.Tester can campaign as a farmer without fearing accusations of hypocrisy, and in a state that has gone from purple to deep red in recent elections, he wins consistently. But Tester is the exception that proves the rule. Finding seven-fingered farmers is not a political strategy, and appearing authentic, whatever that may mean, is no guarantee of smart policy or political courage.Tester, who has spent the past few years criticizing Democrats for abandoning rural voters, voted to deregulate the financial sector in 2018, claiming that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the financial crisis had hurt small community banks. (An Associated Press factcheck found that the laws were not the primary cause of consolidations and closures.)Some on the left have an explanation for this state of affairs. Laid out most famously in Thomas Frank’s influential What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and most recently invoked by Bernie Sanders backers who note his popularity in rural areas, the argument goes like this: like the rest of the country, rural communities have been and remain dominated and exploited by the economic forces that transcend local control – deregulation, unrestrained financial markets, and deindustrialization. If Democrats would simply run on bold economic populism, it goes on, rural voters would overlook the cultural issues where they align with Republicans and vote in accordance with their economic interests.Frank’s account of the trouble with Kansas has troubles of its own. His diagnosis of the Democratic party’s shortcomings is not wrong, but his remedy is simplistic. It misunderstands how political motivations work at an individual level. Yes, the economic forces that tear apart rural communities and lives are material – most things are. These forces that remade and degraded rural economies also deepened class divides, and consolidated wealth in the hands of a few. But the rural identities and cultural norms that formed in response to these forces are deeply held, not easily discarded, and, crucially, not always functionally related to economic conditions in ways that leftists would prefer. Right now, rural America’s dominant political culture is conservative. Any serious attempt to build political power here must begin by conceding this fact.This is a tangle. Republicans pander to rural voters with fabricated authenticity, with false displays of rural cred – and win. Democratic attempts at replicating this strategy predictably fall flat. A watered-down version of GOP cultural politics, taken in the context of the party’s electoral slide in rural areas, smacks of desperation. Some leftists treat rural Americans as possessed by an enchanting ideology, sure to fall into line once the spell is broken.Untying this knot requires an understanding of what’s happened to rural America and why the caricatures that both parties rely on float far from the truth, failing to acknowledge its political complexity and demographic diversity. About a quarter of rural residents are not white, an accelerating trend according to the 2020 census. That a majority of Indigenous Americans live in rural areas – and most sovereign tribal land is rural – is often ignored. Lower-income people and the poorest rural Americans tend not to vote at all. And with both parties, each in its own way, taking rural areas for granted, can you blame them?A century ago, there were more than 6 million farmers; today, fewer than 750,000 remain. Yet the US’s agricultural output has increased fourfold since then, while total acres farmed have declined only slightly.Same set of resources, more capital, fewer owners: this is an instructive way of understanding the economic stratification that has occurred in many rural communities. A class of local elites owns the valuable land that surrounds a typical small town, which is home to a post office, public schools, a grocery store, and sometimes a hospital.According to a recent Atlantic article by Patrick Wyman, the owners of physical assets – fast food franchises, apartment complexes, car dealerships – make up the rest of this scaled-down hierarchy. They sit on local non-profit boards, run the chamber of commerce, and are influential members of their churches. They often hold elected office. And they frequently vote. Wyman called this class of people the American gentry: local oligarchs, with wealth more often tied up in material assets than hedge funds.As Wyman explains, the rural gentry lack the familiar emblems of extreme wealth; these are not people with luxury penthouses, Wall Street offices, wealth accumulated in global finance, and offshore bank accounts. But on the ground at the town or regional level, they hold substantial economic power and are disproportionately responsible for the political constitution of rural areas.Excluded from the gentry are the vast majority of rural Americans. The political messaging of both major parties tends to glorify rural America as full of small farms and yeoman farmers. In reality, American agriculture is enormously reliant on government subsidies and tax breaks, while education, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail employ more rural Americans than agriculture, as of the 2015 census. As for all that farmland – hundreds of millions of acres nationwide – it is increasingly held by the wealthy and powerful.In early November, a 127-acre Iowa farm sold at auction for $18,500 per acre. As Mother Jones reported, institutional investors like Prudential, Hancock, and TIAA have purchased huge amounts of farmland in recent years. The single largest owner of American farmland, though, is Bill Gates, with holdings spread across the country. His plans for the land are not clear, but the financial incentives are obvious. With the climate crisis set to dramatically reduce the amount of arable land, Gates likely sees this oncoming scarcity as a smart investment. He’s probably right.Fear of resource consolidation in the hands of the powerful few has been a constant in rural areas since America’s founding. In the mid-1830s, the English sociologist Harriet Martineau spent several years traveling around the US and recording her observations of the new country, a popular activity among European intellectuals of the time. A characteristic of Americans, in Martineau’s view, was pride in the land, in its vast stretches and easy availability. (Though a perceptive observer of the US’s slaveholding economy and a supporter of the early abolitionist movement, Martineau failed to mention the removal of Indigenous nations, the genocide that made the land available in the first place.)In her book Society in America, Martineau described a “great danger” that Americans seemed on guard against. “They have always had in view the disadvantage of rich men purchasing tracts larger than they could cultivate,” she wrote. “They saw … that it is inconsistent with republican modes that overgrown fortunes should arise by means of an early grasping of large quantities of a cheap kind of property.”Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaRead moreThat attitude did not last. In 1862, the Homestead Act opened hundreds of millions of acres of land to settlement, most of it in the western US and taken from Indigenous nations by force. The law stipulated that the land be doled out in parcels of up to 160 acres, but thanks to loopholes, fraud, and poor enforcement, land speculators and companies were able to obtain much larger tracts on the cheap. Cattle barons acquired huge land holdings. Their herds overgrazed the range, and in the course of just a few decades, desert began to replace grassland and enabled the spread of cheatgrass and other invasive species that now fuel the wildfires that flare each summer.By the late 19th century, erratic commodity markets were afflicting midwestern grain farmers, while in the south, Black and poor white tenant farmers were trapped in extortionist credit systems, working land they did not own. Agrarian anger fed the populist movements of time, which formed, in part, as a response to emerging monopolies in the meatpacking and milk industries. Successive waves of consolidation followed in the 1920s and 1930s, caused by low crop prices and the Great Plains drought that led to the Dust Bowl.All of these issues – market consolidation, farm prices, the cost of food for an increasingly urban and unionized workforce – converged in the Roosevelt administration’s response to the Great Depression. In crafting the New Deal, the administration ultimately prioritized the interests of commercial farmers, subsidizing their incomes while implementing production caps. In the south, communist and socialist organizers had some success building coalitions between poor white and Black farmers, bonded in their resistance to the cotton and tobacco companies that dominated the land.But in the end, big business won out. Agricultural corporate empires – including some, like Tyson Foods, that persist today – formed, while federal policy bankrupted thousands of small and tenant farmers. Though today the New Deal is seen as a pinnacle of progressive policymaking, its impact on rural America is mostly ignored. In many ways it was the dawn of modern agribusiness, the historian Shane Hamilton writes, which brought with it “the acceptance of a certain degree of monopoly power within the farm and food economy”.These trends accelerated after the second world war, with the advent of industrial farming and its new pesticides, combine harvesters, fertilizers, and seed technologies. Federal agriculture policy facilitated these changes in the form of large subsidies and enormous, publicly funded water infrastructure projects, which made large-scale irrigation possible in arid regions. In 1973, as global grain prices soared, Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out”. By the 1980s, commodity prices had declined, endangering the farmers who had taken on debt in order to get big, as instructed. Drought compounded these difficulties.At the height of the farm crisis, more than 500 farm properties were selling every month at foreclosure auctions. In 1985, a larger number of agricultural banks failed than in any year since the Great Depression, and by the end of the decade, hundreds of thousands of farmers had defaulted on their loans. During at least one protest, they wore paper bags over their heads to hide their faces from creditors.Neither major party did much to halt the crisis. Perhaps the most prominent voice defending the interests of small farmers was Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and again in 1988, when he won 11 states in the Democratic primary. His success shocked the party establishment. With Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign as direct inspiration, Jackson tried to build a broad-based movement that emphasized the specific obstacles facing Black Americans, while drawing in struggling farmers under the banner of shared economic interest.At a 1985 rally in rural Missouri, Jackson gathered angry white farmers, Black supporters from Kansas City, and union locals to attempt to stop the foreclosure and sale of an 120-acre family farm. “This is a rainbow coalition for economic justice,” Jackson told the crowd. In the end, the farm sold, Jackson lost the primaries, and Ronald Reagan vetoed a relief package for farmers, though he would ultimately sign a farm bill that included aid money.In Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class, Mike Davis connects the “consolidation of local citadels of capitalist power on a state or municipal basis” in this period to Reagan’s rise. In the 1970s, voter participation plummeted abruptly, a pattern that mostly broke down along class lines. The lowest-income earners were substantially more likely to be non-voters, which holds true today, according to Pew Research Center.Meanwhile, middle and upper strata earners became, if anything, more politically involved, throwing themselves into single-issue campaigns like bussing and abortion, and financing the emergence of business Pacs. Put another way, as economic forces broke down rural communities, those left behind became less inclined to participate in a system that did not help them. Those who benefited, naturally, continued to find electoral politics worthwhile. Members of the gentry became the so-called “median voters” and frequent donors, shaping a system that enriched them while punishing their neighbors.The next major Democratic attempt to take on consolidation in rural America would not come for another two decades. It can be hard to remember now, but during his first campaign, Barack Obama combined talk of hope and change with sharp criticisms of monopoly and trade deals like Nafta. Democrats hadn’t talked like this since before the Clinton administration. He promised to “strengthen anti-monopoly laws” and fight market consolidation in agriculture industries, and the political payoff was substantial. Not only did Obama sweep the Rust Belt, but he also took Iowa and North Carolina. He lost Missouri by a mere 0.13 percentage points – a margin unthinkable for a Democrat today.It’s easy to see why Obama’s anti-monopoly message caught on. To take one example, by 2010, a few large corporations like Tyson and Perdue controlled more than 90% of the poultry industry. Nominally independent farmers were subject to the whims of the large chicken packers, who offered barebones contracts that locked in low prices, required farmers to constantly purchase new technology, and denied them the right to negotiate with other buyers. Oftentimes, farmers didn’t even own the chickens they raised. All of this remains true today.Obama’s administration tried to prevent similar consolidation in beef production. The industry was trending the wrong way, with a few large corporate meatpackers steadily expanding their hold on hundreds of thousands of small, independent cattle producers. There was a sense of hope that here, finally, was an administration that would take on the industry, according to Bill Bullard, whom I caught on the phone in between service dead zones as he drove across Montana.Bullard used to operate a cow-calf operation in South Dakota and today runs R-Calf USA, the largest advocacy group representing independent ranchers and slaughterhouses. Obama’s Department of Agriculture held public meetings across the country to hear from ranchers and farmers. Bullard recalled one event in 2011 in Fort Collins, Colorado, for which he estimated that more than 2,500 people showed up, with the crowd spilling out of the event center.Under Obama, the USDA proposed rules that would protect farmers who spoke out against unfair contracts and tried to negotiate better prices for their products, as well as stronger enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, a bill that cracked down on Gilded Age meat monopolies.This would have been the pinnacle of Obama’s agricultural reform, giving the USDA real teeth in preventing mergers and holding corporations accountable for anti-competitive behavior. But little came of the effort. Industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association ratcheted up lobbying pressure, and Congress repeatedly blocked stronger USDA corporate enforcement – often led by rural state Republicans. In the end, Bullard said, Obama “left the farmers and ranchers out to dry”.Today, the “Big Four” – Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS – control an estimated 85% of the beef industry. As R-Calf alleges in an ongoing lawsuit, the companies have illegally colluded to fix artificially low prices, driving independent producers to bankruptcy even as beef prices soared. “We took a private action,” Bullard said, “because we couldn’t rely on the Congress or the administration.”In Obama’s last year in office, Congress finally passed legislation strengthening the USDA’s antitrust powers. Then Donald Trump took office. Allies of corporate agriculture were put in charge of the USDA, which promptly threw out a rule that made it easier for small farmers to sue large meatpackers and demoted the agency’s independent antitrust office to a subdivision of the Agricultural Marketing Service. (Joe Biden is proposing to revive some of the Obama-era rules.)These issues of corporate domination and consolidation persist, affecting every facet of rural America, while both parties have stood by. Their efforts eased by weak antitrust enforcement, corporate retailers like Walmart muscled out independent businesses in small towns. Now, dollar stores proliferate in rural communities, sometimes forcing the big box stores to close. There are more dollar stores in the US than Walmarts and McDonald’s locations. In many large geographic areas with low populations, people live with reasonable access to only one hospital, or even a single healthcare provider. Lack of competition in rural areas is a crucial reason why Obamacare exchanges have failed to keep down healthcare costs, as the Intercept reported. And that was before the pandemic, which has caused a record number of rural hospitals to shut down for good.It’s no coincidence that this trend toward consolidation tracks a sustained stretch of economic stagnation in the rural United States. Forty years ago, just over 20% of new businesses came from outside metro areas. By the 2010s, that number had declined to 12%. According to one recent study, 97% of net job growth between 2001 and 2016 went to cities.And it’s a plain fact that rural areas never recovered from the Great Recession. From 2010 to 2014, counties with fewer than 100,000 people had a 0% net rate of new business creation. While many cities bounced back, jobs and businesses didn’t return to rural areas, especially those with predominantly communities of color. Unemployment levels were still trailing pre-recession levels when the Covid-19 economic fallout arrived to hammer rural areas yet again. Deindustrialized towns continue to bleed population and jobs. Broadband access lags, preventing established industries from keeping up and new ones from breaking ground, while gaps in secondary educational attainment between rural and metro areas yawn wide.At the same time, the rural gentry has only expanded its wealth. According to a central Kansas dairy farmer I called, just a few families own most of the farmland that surrounds his town, with holdings that swell to tens of thousands of acres. These families, he said, get the sweetest federal contracts, call the shots on Covid protocols in the church, and tend to rotate in and out of local positions of power in government.This isn’t limited to Kansas. Using county data from 1980-2016, a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in Population Research and Policy Review found an association between the chronic population decline in rural areas and an increase in income inequality. In other words, the economic forces that have meant immiseration and population decline for rural economies have benefited a small class of capitalists. This relationship, write the study’s authors, “suggests that income and other forms of wealth (by extension) are becoming increasingly concentrated into the hands of a select few”.After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, these compounding rural crises became something of a preoccupation for national media and mainstream liberals. Rural America suddenly seemed to them a distant shore, home to strange customs, backward people, and jokes that weren’t funny. National reporters dropped in to diners and filed dispatches from Trump rallies. Pundits wrote countless columns with titles like “Why rural America voted for Trump”, “Penthouse populist: why the rural poor love Donald Trump”, and “Explaining the urban-rural political divide”.Democratic politicians such as Tester and the former Missouri senator Claire McCaskill criticized the party for abandoning moderates and recommended that it run candidates who could relate to rural voters – there’s a throughline between these suggestions and the cowboy hats.Trump’s success in rural areas and among non-college-educated whites spawned a market for books that sought to explain non-coastal areas. The condescending infatuation with JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was the most obvious example, but more sophisticated works – including Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia – also became prominent.Four years later, though Trump didn’t win, he took an even greater share of the rural vote. In 2020, he won roughly 90% of rural counties. Whatever lessons Democratic strategists have absorbed do not seem to be working.There’s a certain sort of liberal who looks at all this and writes off rural areas as deserving of whatever policies the GOP inflicts on them. As a New York magazine headline blared after the 2016 election, “No sympathy for the hillbilly”. For a more recent example, consider this (since-deleted) tweet from Nell Scovell, a television writer who co-wrote Lean In with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, in response to the tornadoes in Kentucky that killed more than 70 people in December:
      Sorry Kentucky. Maybe if your 2 senators hadn’t spent decades blocking climate legislation to reduce climate change, you wouldn’t be suffering from climate disasters. If it’s any consolation, McConnell and Rand have f’ed over all of us, too.
      This sentiment reared its head online after the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin blocked the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act. Trading in some of the most reprehensible stereotypes about Appalachia, the actor Bette Midler wrote on Twitter:
      What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.
      Lazy thinking of this sort is what happens when you don’t make class distinctions. The existence of the rural gentry class – and increasing income inequality that coincided with economic decline in rural areas – ought to make clear that not all rural Americans are voting against their class interests when they side with Republicans.The wealthy voted for Trump, and Trump rewarded them with tax cuts. But rural political conservatism relates to rural economic conditions in other, more complicated ways. During the Great Recession, Katherine Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spent several years conducting ethnographic studies on rural, often white, Wisconsinites. She found a persistent sense that rural areas and the people who live there are mistreated, creating a recognizable “rural consciousness”. People felt not only that they had been abandoned by the government, but that cities and cultural elites hoarded power and prestige at the expense of rural areas.Some of the rural discontent is unquestionably racial. The GOP appeals to people who want to preserve the social and economic benefits that whiteness confers, or to restore the loss of privileges brought by an increasingly diverse populace. A recent analysis of 2020 voting patterns by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that among non-college educated white voters, “racial resentment” was one of the highest predictors of conservative political views.But all this applies to plenty of suburban Trump voters, too. To the extent that a rural consciousness exists, it’s entangled with a sense of having lost something while the rest of the country moves ahead. This, Cramer found, creates a persistent “us v them” view of the world. In Wisconsin, this rivalry manifests as anger at cities – where, it should be said, most of the state’s non-white population lives – but also at white-collar professionals and public employees of all kinds. These attitudes can also be found in western Colorado, with the frustration directed at the Denver and Boulder population centers. Western Slope economies depend on tourist dollars from these metro areas, yet there’s a strong sense of resentment toward the cultural and economic power concentrated on the other side of the Rockies.I encountered this sentiment in the fall of 2020, when I interviewed an unaffiliated, first-time candidate for local office named Trudy Vader. Vader’s family had been forced to sell their ranch during the farm crisis of the 1980s. Today, what’s left of the ranch holds a mobile home, a horse pen, and little else. A few wealthy families own most of the county’s private ranchland. The property’s sale was one of her formative experiences. Her sense of having once held and now lost something dear could not be separated from other, less concrete losses: her ranching town overrun with tourists during the summer, agriculture’s decline as a cultural force, a hunch that people worked harder back in the day.Vader’s default conservatism – her nostalgia for an era that might not have been as great as she remembers – makes some sense in this context. But she remains a landowner, a status that millions of Americans cannot hope to achieve. If economic change can help create distinct rural identities, those identities can also become relatively uncoupled from material realities, spiraling out in unpredictable ways that may not easily trace back to economic conditions.In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin summarizes the mindset of conservatives like Vader:
      People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess.
      The conservative mindset that Robin describes is widespread, but it is not absolute, even on an individual level. Vader’s primary issue during the race, one that she stressed throughout the campaign, was a local affordable housing crisis, which she supported radical measures to address. (Politics may be national, but major party categories are still scrambled at the local level.)There’s evidence that the political makeup of rural America is neither as simplistic, nor as homogenous, as either major party’s treatment of it would lead us to believe. The past six months have seen one of the most sustained periods of labor activity in decades. More than a dozen strikes and unionization efforts are happening around the country right now, many of them in small towns and midsize industrial cities in rural areas. Every day, reports appear of workers walking off jobs that demand too much for too little pay.For months this past fall, John Deere workers stood on picket lines in towns in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas, and came away with pay increases and a strong bargaining agreement.In late 2021, after strikes across the midwest and rust belt that lasted more than two months, Kellogg workers won an agreement that removed a two-tier benefit system and ensured no factory closures until 2026.In Topeka, Kansas, last summer, several hundred Frito-Lay workers stopped working, alleging low pay, long hours, and unsafe conditions.Since April, Alabama coal miners have been striking – in November, hundreds protested outside the New York City headquarters of the financial giant BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining corporation they work for.In early November, simultaneous strikes in hospital maintenance and steelwork meant that 3% of the entire town of Huntington, West Virginia, had walked off the job. Last year’s strike wave was preceded in 2018 by gigantic teacher strikes that began in West Virginia and spread to 10 other states.And in response, the Democratic party has done nothing, as far as I can tell. Whether it’s a strategic lapse or an indication of the special interests Democratic politicians are beholden to is unclear. Either way, there’s no increased urgency to pass the Pro Act, no organized attempt to aid workers, to tap into this energy, to show which side they are on.At a broader level, it’s more evidence that Democrats neglect the internal class structure of rural America at their own peril. The rural gentry has real stakes in the status quo.There are also, if you set aside received stereotypes and pay attention, people working to change the way things are today. The inhabitants of rural America are as complex and diverse as people anywhere, and no less important. Forget the electoral map. There is opportunity here for people who are up for doing the work of politics: meeting people where they are, finding common interests, building institutional strength, and trying to persuade others to join in, while being guided by local issues and concerns.When change occurs, this is how it happens. And as for Democrats who think that this work isn’t worth it, or that rural America is somehow unworthy of their efforts, well, the joke is still on them.TopicsUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Money unites: Republicans and Democrats find rare bipartisanship over trading stocks

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      Money unites: Republicans and Democrats find rare bipartisanship over trading stocksDespite wide public support for banning lawmakers from trading stocks, members of both parties have expressed anxiety about the idea Nancy Pelosi probably did not expect to set off such a firestorm with her use of three words: free market economy.When the House speaker was asked in December whether she supports proposals to ban members and their spouses from trading individual stocks, she said no. “We’re a free market economy,” Pelosi said. “They should be able to participate in that.”But Pelosi’s comment sparked ire among government ethics experts and editorial boards, who argued that lawmakers’ ability to glean information from classified briefings and stakeholder meetings raised the possibility of insider trading.Some critics also noted that Pelosi’s husband, Paul, recently netted a gain of more than $5m from trading stocks of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.In the face of backlash, Pelosi has changed her tune on the stock-trading issue, but her hesitation highlighted an uncomfortable truth about how Congresshas responded to the proposal.Despite wide public support for banning lawmakers from trading stocks, members of both parties have expressed anxiety about the idea: a rare moment of bipartisanship in a divided America, but one whose subject – stock-trading politicians – is unlikely to please many voters.Government watchdog groups warn that if Congress fails to act on this issue, it will only intensify many Americans’ concern over how money has tainted their country’s political institutions.The debate over banning members’ stock-trading has been reinvigorated in recent months, after a string of high-profile controversies at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In February 2020, Republican senator Richard Burr sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock before the market suffered a severe setback the next month. While he was overseeing those valuable stock trades, Burr was also publicly downplaying the threat of the virus. The justice department investigated Burr and three of his Senate colleagues – Republicans Kelly Loeffler and James Inhofe and Democrat Dianne Feinstein – for possible insider trading, but ultimately no charges were filed.In response to the outcry over those controversies, both Democrats and Republicans have proposed bills to crack down on members’ stock-trading. One bill, introduced by Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly, would require members, their spouses and their dependent children to place their stock portfolios in a blind trust controlled by an outside party. Republican senator Josh Hawley has proposed a similar bill, although his legislation does not cover dependent children and would not fine members’ salaries for violations, as the Ossoff-Kelly bill would.Over in the House, Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Chip Roy have introduced a similar bill to the Ossoff-Kelly proposal, and more than 50 members have signed on as co-sponsors to the separate Ban Conflicted Trading Act. That bill, which was first introduced by Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, would ban members and senior congressional staffers from trading individual stocks.“It has really gotten to a point where it’s getting a little bit too difficult for the rest of Congress to ignore,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a co-sponsor of Krishnamoorthi’s bill, said at a town hall on Tuesday. “The fact of the matter is, we shouldn’t be able to day-trade the companies whose regulation and whose hearings and whose industries and business is before Congress.”A majority of Americans agree with her. According to a January poll from the progressive firm Data for Progress, 67% of US voters say lawmakers should be banned from trading stocks. Another recent survey, conducted by the conservative advocacy group Convention of States Action, found that 76% of voters believe lawmakers and their spouses have an “unfair advantage” in the stock market.It is illegal for members of Congress, or any American, to engage in insider trading. However, insider trading is very difficult to prove, so in 2012, Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (Stock) Act to address concerns about lawmakers’ financial activities. The law prohibits members from using information gained through work for their own personal profit, and it requires them to disclose stock trades within 45 days.Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have pointed to the existing legislation to argue against banning members from trading stocks. Republican congressman Pete Sessions has described a ban as unnecessary, while one of his Democratic colleagues, Elaine Luria, attacked the proposal as “bullshit”.“Why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt? We already have the Stock Act that requires people to report stock trades,” Luria told Punchbowl News earlier this month. “So I’m very strongly opposed to any legislation like that.”Advocates for a stock-trading ban were quick to note that Luria and her husband own millions of dollars worth of stocks in Facebook, Netflix and Apple, among other companies.“Honestly, the stock trades by members of Congress just smell bad … Regardless of which party is doing it, it just doesn’t look good,” said RL Miller, the political director of Climate Hawks Vote. Responding to Luria’s comments specifically, Miller added: “Members of Congress expecting that they don’t prioritize companies in which they’re invested is bullshit.”Miller’s group was one of 18 progressive organizations that signed on to a letter urging Congress to hold a hearing on banning stock trades, arguing that the Stock Act and other existing laws “have not served as a sufficient deterrent to this problem”.Enforcement of the Stock Act also appears to have been spotty at best over the past 10 years. No one has ever been prosecuted under the law, and an investigation by Business Insider found that at least 55 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers were late in filing their stock trades in 2020 and 2021. A late filing is supposed to be punished with a $200 fine that increases with subsequent offenses, but Congress does not keep any public record of such fines, and it’s unclear how often they are collected.“The teeth behind the Stock Act are basically non-existent,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, government affairs manager at the Project on Government Oversight. “We’re seeing that reporting and disclosure do not actually act as any kind of a deterrent to doing things that look, at the very least, pretty sketchy.”Government watchdog groups also argue that the Stock Act is now somewhat outdated. They say the legislation does not properly account for how lawmakers can use the 24-hour news cycle and social media platforms to affect markets and specific companies’ share prices.“We have seen countless examples of how members – not just as a body but individual members – can influence the stock market with a range of tools at their disposal,” said Donald Sherman, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Now we’re at a place in history and on the Hill where an individual member of Congress can influence the stock price with a tweet.”Groups like Crew are hopeful that the momentum for passing a stock-trading ban will soon translate into congressional action. Despite her initial reluctance, Pelosi has now adopted a more open-minded tone about the proposals, and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said the upper chamber should address the issue.“I think this is sort of an easy win that will have a very positive impact on policy-making and on public-facing democracy,” Sherman said.The enactment of a stock-trading ban could have the additional benefit of boosting the public’s opinion of Congress, which has suffered in recent years. According to Gallup’s January polling, only 18% of Americans approve of how Congress is handling its job. Advocates for the proposed stock-trading ban say the policy would bolster public confidence in one of America’s most important political institutions.“Anything that can restore Americans’ trust in Congress is a good thing,” Miller said. “This would help rebut that appearance of double-dealing and go a long way toward restoring Americans’ trust in their leadership.”For those members who are hesitant to give up their stocks, Hedtler-Gaudette suggested they should reconsider their chosen career.“To become a member of Congress is an extraordinarily prestigious thing. But it is not compulsory,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “There are a number of sacrifices that you have to make to run for office … If this is a problem, then you are not required to run for Congress.”TopicsUS politicsUS CongressDemocratsRepublicansNancy PelosiStock marketsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Campaigning AOC electrifies crowds as Democrats fear brutal midterms

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      Campaigning AOC electrifies crowds as Democrats fear brutal midterms Congresswoman has been a boon to progressive candidates in Texas while party grapples with rift in WashingtonHolding a gold microphone and wearing a seafoam-green pantsuit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez energized the San Antonio crowd with her vision for flipping the state of Texas to Democratic control.“It will happen,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a rally earlier this month. “The only question is when, Texas.”As the crowd cheered, she added: “The work that you put in today, the work that you put in tomorrow, the work that you put in on Monday – when you go one more door when you’re tired, when you make one more call when you feel exhausted, you’re bringing that day one day sooner.”The progressives in the audience roared in response, hanging on to her every word.“Texas will turn blue,” @AOC says to the crowd as they cheer her on. “It’s inevitable!” pic.twitter.com/YZBJHCbx1n— Priscilla Aguirre (@CillaAguirre) February 12, 2022
      Four years after bursting on to the national political stage with a shocking primary victory over a long-serving House Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez is using her substantial political influence to promote progressive candidates and policies. Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign in 2018 was largely dismissed as a pipe dream, but the leftwing New York congresswoman is now impossible to ignore.Just this month, the New Yorker interviewed Ocasio-Cortez about the fight for voting rights and her role as a progressive icon, while the editors of New York magazine are releasing a book documenting her rapid rise in Democratic politics. As she makes headlines, Ocasio-Cortez has continued to use her massive social media following and her significant campaign war chest to advance her leftist policy agenda.AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreWith Democrats bracing for a potentially disastrous midterm season, the congresswoman’s actions on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill make it clear that she will continue to be a dominant force for the progressive movement. There seems to be no question now: AOC is here to stay.On the trailOcasio-Cortez travelled to Texas this month to campaign for two of the progressive candidates she has endorsed this election cycle, Jessica Cisneros and Greg Casar. Since her first victory in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez has used her celebrity status to help other progressives attract voters and raise money, which she has a unique talent for. During the 2020 cycle, her campaign committee raised more than $20m.“Having her there on stage with you, it just is an amazing experience,” said James Thompson, a former congressional candidate who held a 2018 rally with Ocasio-Cortez in Wichita, Kansas. “The immediate impact on my campaign was fundraising. We raised a substantial amount of money off of the rally that we had here. It really energized the people.”An endorsement from Ocasio-Cortez has the ability to immediately elevate a progressive candidate’s campaign, and the congresswoman does not limit herself to open-seat races. In the four years since she won her own primary against the then congressman Joe Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed a number of candidates who are challenging sitting lawmakers. Cisneros, for example, is attempting to defeat Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who has served in the House since 2005.“AOC endorses more primary challengers to incumbents than pretty much anyone who is a current incumbent in Congress,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign. “I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that she was the primary challenger to an incumbent, so she knows personally how difficult it is to get support for something that requires that level of courage.”But Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to openly oppose Democratic incumbents has rankled some of her House colleagues who have been on the receiving end of her criticism.“This election is taking place in the 28th congressional District of Texas – not New York City,” Cuellar’s campaign said in a statement ahead of Ocasio-Cortez’s rallies in San Antonio and Austin. “The voters will decide this election, not far-left celebrities who stand for defunding the police, open borders, eliminating oil & gas jobs, and raising taxes on hard working Texans. Members should take care of their own district before taking failed ideas to South Texas.”Ocasio-Cortez’s rallies in Texas also displayed her singular ability to enrage her Republican critics, who swiftly denounced her suggestion that the traditionally conservative state would inevitably move to the left.“If AOC thinks for a moment that Texans will fall for her whacked-out, woke, socialist idiocy, she doesn’t know Texas,” said Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor. But to Ocasio-Cortez’s many admirers, her frequent clashes with Democrats and Republicans alike have set an example for a new kind of politics.“She’s been an inspiration, I think, to a lot of people,” Thompson said. “Now, I think that scares the hell out of the Democratic party though, too, because we’re bucking the establishment and saying, ‘Look, we want you to represent the people, not just party interest.’”In the halls of CongressOcasio-Cortez’s willingness to clash with members of her party extends beyond the campaign trail to her work in Congress.Earlier this month, she pursued the bold strategy of trying to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had voiced opposition to the proposed ban, and Ocasio-Cortez’s tactics seemed aimed at forcing the hand of Democratic leadership. (Pelosi has since struck a more open-minded tone about the ban on members’ stock-trading.)Ocasio-Cortez has also been unafraid to criticize some of her centrist colleagues who have attacked progressive policy proposals. On Friday, after Axios published a report suggesting moderate Democrats blamed the party’s falling polling numbers on progressives and their support for the “defund the police” movement, Ocasio-Cortez hit back over Twitter.She argued the real reason behind Democrats’ bleak prospects in the midterm elections was the party’s failure to pass the Build Back Better Act, the $1.75tn spending package at the heart of Joe Biden’s economic agenda. Ocasio-Cortez accused her centrist colleagues of tanking the legislation by allowing the bipartisan infrastructure bill to pass on its own, leaving Democrats with nothing to campaign on.“They don’t know how to accept responsibility so are lazily blaming the same folks they always do,” Ocasio-Cortez said.Rahna Epting, the executive director of the progressive group MoveOn, similarly dismissed claims that Ocasio-Cortez and her allies are dragging down Democrats’ electoral prospects as “utter nonsense”.“Members of Congress of the progressive flank have raised expectations on Democrats broadly to deliver and prioritize people over profits. There is nothing wrong with that,” Epting said. “What Democrats need to do is to stop the infighting.”Epting, whose group was one of the only progressive organizations to endorse Ocasio-Cortez during her 2018 primary battle, praised the congresswoman for using her platform to advocate for important issues including student debt relief and the climate crisis.“AOC’s superpower is to expose and shed light on corruption and injustices that have been longstanding,” Epting said. “I think she has been one of the most electrifying members of Congress, probably in the history of the United States. And she’s a true champion for people.”But Ocasio-Cortez will be the first to admit that her hopes of enacting meaningful progressive policies have suffered setbacks in recent months. Build Back Better remains stalled in the Senate because of Democrat Joe Manchin’s opposition, and the party has failed to enact national voting rights legislation.Instead of bemoaning congressional inaction, though, Ocasio-Cortez has urged patience.“We have a culture of immediate gratification where if you do something and it doesn’t pay off right away, we think it’s pointless,” she told the New Yorker. “There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed.”Thompson has seen the long-term impact of Ocasio-Cortez’s work for himself. He lost his 2018 race, but since then, the politics of Wichita have shifted. Democrats now make up a majority of the Wichita city council, when they previously only held one of seven seats.“Even though I didn’t win, her coming really energized our local Democrats in our community,” Thompson said. “It made us realize that look, we’re not alone. And we can do something when we come together.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.In return, the New York Democrat, popularly known as AOC, said: “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”Dictionary.com defines pendejo as “a mildly vulgar insult for ‘asshole’ or ‘idiot’ in Spanish”.It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd GreenRead more“Once again,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “the existence of a wife or daughters doesn’t make a man good. And this one is basura.”Basura is Spanish for “trash”.She also accused Carlson of sexual harassment.Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”The leading provocateur in Fox News’ evening line-up was discussing a book about Ocasio-Cortez, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, written by Lisa Miller, a reporter at New York magazine.Carlson said Miller’s book was “like a box of Fig Newtons. You know it’s wrong to open it, but the temptation is strong, and so we did.”As the media watchdog Mediate put it, several of the passages Carlson read were “fawning in nature and weave mundane videos AOC has posted online – such as her assembling Ikea furniture – into a grand narrative about her life”.In one passage, Carlson said, the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.“Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call?” Carlson said.“Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’ Either way it’s a little strange. It’s definitely over-sharing and yet, according to the book, over-sharing is the key to Sandy Cortez’s success.”Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Remember when the right wing had a meltdown when I suggested they exhibit obsessive impulses around young women? Well now Tucker Carlson is wishing for … this on national TV.“You’re a creep, bro. If you’re this easy with sexual harassment on air, how are you treating your staff?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezFox NewsRaceUS politicsDemocratsNew YorkPuerto RiconewsReuse this content More

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      It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd Green

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      It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truthLloyd GreenA New York judge has ruled Trump will have to testify in his fraud investigation, leaving Trump sweating and his investors shaking their heads Donald Trump’s bad luck continues. On Thursday afternoon, Arthur Engoron, a Manhattan judge, gave the thumbs up to subpoenas issued to Trump, favorite child Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr, by Tish James, New York’s attorney general. The court’s ruling follows a decision by Trump’s accountants to walk away from the one-term president and disavow years of financial statements issued by his company.Much as the Trump trio tried, they could not shut down James’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices, which could lead to a civil suit by James. Unlike a criminal prosecution, a civil action comes with a lower burden of proof for the government. At the same time, civil lawsuits can drag on – like right into 2024. Barring a stay, Trump and his two children have been ordered to appear at deposition within 21 days.Trump and two eldest children must testify in New York case, judge rulesRead moreIf they tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, who knows what liability may result? On the other hand, if they invoke their right to remain silent, they will probably be portrayed as criminals.“You see, the mob takes the fifth,” Trump observed on the campaign trail in 2016. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the fifth amendment?”Time sure flies. And if the Trump family refuses to appear at deposition or simply stays mum when grilled, they risk being charged with contempt, a distinction presently held by Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House counselor and 2016 campaign guru.At this moment, Trump must be sweating while his lenders have to be shaking their collective heads. How much is Trump worth and how bad can things get are no longer hypothetical issues. In the absence of operative financial statements, restructurings and bank-called defaults have spilled into the realm of the real.As one Trump insider confided: “Hey, this might be serious. Could Donald Trump [and his business] be screwed? I don’t know, but I’m not as confident as I once was in saying, ‘No’.”Meanwhile, 2024 Republican presidential aspirants are likely stifling a collective smirk. Trump’s legal woes stand to broaden the Republican party’s presidential field, and for some it is downright personal.For Mike Pence, Trump’s hapless vice-president, these recent developments may well trigger a sense of schadenfreude. It wasn’t that long ago when Trump’s loyalists came with makeshift gallows for Pence as they stormed the Capitol, and Trump said nothing to deter the mob. Instead, he demanded loyalty from his No 2.As for Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, Trump’s troubles could not come at a better time. Trump has all but called DeSantis a coward for refusing to say whether he was vaccinated. Beyond that, Florida’s recent per capita Covid mortality rate is the seventh highest in the US, and DeSantis is having a hard time denouncing neo-Nazi violence.“So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that,” the Sunshine state governor declared. “We’re not playing their game.”To be sure, Trump’s Maga base would stick with him through thick-and-thin. The party’s deep-pocketed donors are a different story. Trump may have delivered them a trove of tax cuts and ambassadorships, but he’s emotionally draining.Beyond that, his antics in the run-up to the 2020 Georgia runoff elections cost the Republicans control of the Senate. There are reasons Mitch McConnell rejects Trump’s lie that the election was stolen and is seeking to bypass the 45th president.Thursday’s ruling was scathing. At one point, the court concluded that the attorney general had uncovered “copious evidence of possible financial fraud”. Elsewhere, the judge excoriated Trump & Co for their flight to fantasy and fiction, invoking Alice in Wonderland, 1984 and Kellyanne Conway all in a single sentence.“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements that it issued based on numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’); and ‘alternative facts.’”In the past, Trump managed to weather storms surrounding his finances and credibility. Trump University did not stop the ex-reality show host’s political ascent. What happens next remains to be seen.Right now, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are in the low 40s, inflation is on the loose, and Nancy Pelosi is poised to lose the speaker’s gavel. Against that tableau, Trump poses a distraction from Republican ambitions, an unwelcome detour from anticipated outcome.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionUS politicsDonald Trump JrIvanka TrumpMike PenceKellyanne ConwayNew YorkcommentReuse this content More