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      Republicans are quietly rigging election maps to ensure permanent rule | David Pepper

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      Republicans are quietly rigging election maps to ensure permanent ruleDavid PepperThe past decade in Ohio shows how bad it can get – and how quickly. Despite the state’s voters often swinging Democratic, 75% of its congressional delegates are Republican The long-term health of American democracy is in peril, to a degree far worse than people imagine. But not where most people are looking.This is what gerrymandering looks like | The fight to voteRead moreWhile many eyes go to Washington DC or Mar-a-Lago, the attack on democracy is actually most concentrated and coordinated in state capitals. Whether it’s gerrymandering or voter suppression or attacks on offices that provide needed checks and balances – the states have become widely undemocratic. As I outline in my book Laboratories of Autocracy, the consequences of this anti-democratic movement are only getting worse.The past decade in Ohio, where I served in recent years as chair of the state Democratic party, shows how bad it can get – and how quickly.When Fox News called Ohio for Barack Obama in 2012, it meant he’d be president for another term. Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown also won handily that night. But how did these victories in America’s bellwether state translate at the congressional level?Not at all.Even though it was Democratic in 2012, a state that only four years ago had sent 10 Democrats to the US House of Representatives and eight Republicans, now sent 12 Republicans to the House and only four Democrats. 2014 was a big year for Republicans. They won decisively for statewide offices. The congressional delegation? 12-4. 2016? Another Republican year: 12-4. But in 2018, Sherrod Brown won again, this time by almost seven points. And many of his voters also voted for a Democrat running for the House. In all, 47% of Ohioans cast a vote for the Democratic candidate for the House, while 52% voted for the Republican.What was the outcome of that 52-47 split for Ohio’s congressional delegation? 12-4 again – 75% Republican.2020? 12-4 again.So for an entire decade, whether Ohio voters tilted to Democratic or to Republican or a toss-up, when it came to Congress, nothing changed. The makeup was the exact same 12-4 split no matter how the voters voted. In the world’s oldest democracy, the voters basically didn’t matter.Why is that?Because in Ohio in 2011, in a secret hotel room they called “the bunker”, a small group of partisan insiders designed House district maps to guarantee the outcome of all 90 US House elections that were to follow in the coming decade. And they proved to be so good at their work, they got all 90 elections right.It’s a success rate in rigging election outcomes – amid the appearance of a democratic process – that Vladimir Putin would admire. Sadly, Ohio isn’t alone. Numerous other American states experienced the same decade of guaranteed outcomes for both their US House delegations and their state-level legislatures.In some cases, even when a majority of voters voted for one party to be in charge, the rigged districts meant that the losing party remained in charge. In Michigan, in 2018, voters chose Democrats over Republicans for their statehouse by 52%-47%. Nevertheless, this led to a Republican majority in that statehouse of 58-52. In Wisconsin, losing the popular vote for the statehouse across the state by a 54-45 gave Republicans a 63-36 supermajority in that statehouse. Now that would truly impress a foreign autocrat – a system locking a minority into power despite a clear mandate by the voters that they wanted the opposite.The prime culprits behind all this election rigging are the statehouses themselves – mostly anonymous elected officials who few voters know but who wield far more power than most Americans appreciate. And that includes the power to draw the district lines of both federal and state representatives (ie their own districts), as well as establishing most of the other rules of how elections are run, including how presidential electors are divvied up.But it all gets worse. Fast-forward to now. Outraged by a decade of rigged elections, citizens in Ohio and other states took action to change the process of how lines are drawn. Some opted for independent districting commissions. In Ohio, more than 70% of the voters amended the Ohio constitution (twice!) to add clear guidelines to curb the type of extreme partisan districting that led to a decade without democracy.And how have those in charge responded? Knowing that fair districts and robust democracy threaten their grip on power, the legislative leaders are simply ignoring the new rules. Defying them. In fact, the first map they have proposed here in Ohio would guarantee an astonishing 13-2 map, knowing full well that Ohio’s partisan breakdown would best be reflected by an 8-7 map. Despite the new rules, key urban counties are now being split three ways rather than two to achieve that outrageous result.So not only are these unknown politicians willing to rig elections, they are willing to defy their own state constitution – and the voted will of more than 70% of their own population – to get it done.As bad as this example is, it’s only one of the many fronts in a nationwide attack on democracy. Locked into power in these statehouses are a generation of politicians who themselves largely got there absent any true democracy – because they also benefited from rigged maps – who are now doing all they can to maintain that power. And one thing they know for sure: the greatest threat to their hold on power is robust democracy.Since they write the rules, they have the ability to hold that risk at bay, through gerrymandering, voter suppression, cracking down on protests, attacking independent courts and officials that get in the way, and other measures – and they are taking all these actions and more across the country right now.The truth is, if another country were taking all these steps, we’d call it out for what it is – an attack on democracy itself. A descent toward autocracy. But because it’s happening in our own state capitols, we too often treat it with less urgency. That needs to end.It’s time to go on offense for democracy, at the state level, every year. Beginning now.
      David Pepper is the author of Laboratories of Autocracy and former chair of the Ohio Democratic party
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      ‘The goal was to silence people’: historian Joanne Freeman on congressional violence

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      Interview‘The goal was to silence people’: historian Joanne Freeman on congressional violenceJoan E Greve in Washington Paul Gosar was censured for a video depicting a colleague’s murder but physical assaults were a feature of the pre-civil war eraAs the House debated whether the Republican congressman Paul Gosar should be censured for depicting the murder of his colleague, one Democratic leader took a moment to reflect on the chamber’s long history of violence.Speaking on the House floor last week, the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, argued that Gosar had grossly violated the chamber’s rules of conduct by sharing an altered anime video showing him killing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden.“When those rules were written, they did not anticipate that a member would threaten violence directly against another member,” Hoyer said. “Not because it’s never happened – a congressman from South Carolina nearly beat to death a senator from Massachusetts, Senator Sumner, because he wanted to abolish slavery.”The 1856 caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks is probably the most infamous example of violence between members of Congress, but it is far from the only one. In her book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, the Yale history professor Joanne Freeman details the many threats and attacks between lawmakers during the antebellum era.The Guardian spoke to Dr Freeman about the history of congressional violence and what it can tell us about the current state of US politics and the significance of Gosar’s censure. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Besides the caning of Sumner, what were some of the other examples of congressional violence in the pre-civil war era?The research that I did revealed there were at least 70 violent incidents in the House and in the Senate. Some of them were canings. Some of them were fist fights. Some of them were actual brawls with groups of congressmen. In the well of the House where we saw [Gosar’s] censure take place, that was actually a location for several fights in those decades before the civil war.And there was a lot of deployment of threats and intimidation. Most of these were offered by southerners and usually were deployed against people who had anything to say against slavery. Obviously the goal of that was to silence people or intimidate people so they wouldn’t even stand up to say anything that was not going to be to the liking of southerners.What effect did those threats have on public debate over slavery in Congress?There’s a diary entry from a very prominent, very aggressive anti-slavery advocate, named Joshua Giddings from Ohio. And when he first gets to Congress, he reports something like, “Our northern friends are afraid.” They’re afraid to stand up against the southerners. So there’s clearly evidence that people were afraid to stand up.And not only does it shape the direction of debate, the people who do that kind of threatening very often are wildly supported by the folks back home. I suppose that’s what we’re going to see now; the person who does that kind of bullying and that kind of threatening gets a good degree of support for it.Although Gosar was censured and stripped of his committee assignments, he was also somewhat rewarded for his behavior. Donald Trump immediately offered Gosar his endorsement, and the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, suggested that he might get “better committee assignments” when Republicans regain control of the House. Is there a history of lawmakers being rewarded for violence?Unfortunately, yes. Most notoriously, look at Preston Brooks, who caned Charles Sumner, and Laurence Keitt, who held people off from intervening in the caning. There was discussion of expelling Brooks. He does not get expelled, but he resigns in protest when the debate is attacking him for what he did. He resigns in protest and is immediately re-elected. And Laurence Keitt, who actually is censured, is immediately re-elected. So sometimes these violent acts are done partly for the base, for constituents, for “the cause”. And sometimes that is indeed rewarded.So historically, have censures been effective in changing lawmakers’ behavior? Or do they sometimes encourage more of that same behavior?On the one hand, you could say people are proving that they’re willing to stand up for something, and for some populations, that gets applause. But the thing is, if people are really being offensive in some way or another, and they’re not called on it … that’s basically an endorsement. And it’s also a sign that the rules of Congress almost don’t exist. They’re just not in play.For reasons of just upholding that there are lines that can be crossed, I think it’s important for that to happen. The message of that kind of censuring is that this person did this thing and is accountable for that. And if you don’t hold people accountable for their actions, that too is a passive stab at democracy.How did the violence in Congress before the civil war both reflect and intensify the divisions in the country itself?The violence in Congress reflects and affects the violence and politics throughout the nation at large in a few ways. By the time you get into the 1850s and you have the telegraph, which is spreading that kind of information very quickly around the nation more broadly than ever before, Americans can see that happening. So that sets a tone for politics all by itself.Some of it is playing to an audience. Depending on how it’s acted out and the language that’s used and the posturing that’s taken by the members of Congress, it’s deliberately intended to rile up Americans, which it does. That kind of violence can encourage violence, intensify political rhetoric [and] seemingly justify extremism and violence. It has an impact on the public.If the public gets riled up, they’re going to demand more things from their representatives – more violence, more extremism.Given everything you know about the congressional violence that happened leading up the civil war, what do you think the censure of Gosar says about the direction of our country now?It certainly reflects the tone and tenor of our politics right now, and that almost goes without saying. It gestures towards what’s coming next because he’s going to be rewarded for it in some ways, and because of that, there will be others that follow in that model.It also shows a certain lack of respect for the institution of Congress. The censure doesn’t matter clearly to this person. It’s a moment that shows how far party is above government and above institutions of government and above institutional stability. That’s not a very comforting thing to consider either.We’re in very unpredictable times. We never know from one moment to the next what direction things are going to lean towards. It’s tempting to see an incident like [the Gosar censure] and assume from it we’re doomed. We’re in a moment of extreme contingency, and indeed things might become much worse.But during that kind of moment of extreme contingency where anything can happen, those are also moments where it’s possible to make positive change. It’s possible in a moment of instability to really push for some kind of a change that isn’t necessarily in the direction of force and violence, but is rather in a direction of inclusion and rights. I think we as Americans need to be thinking about that right about now.TopicsUS politicsUS CongressRepublicansDemocratsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump stoked Covid in red states – but there are blue anti-vaxxers too | Robert Reich

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      Trump stoked Covid in red states – but there are blue anti-vaxxers tooRobert ReichAmong my neighbors in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America, many don’t trust big pharma or the government – or simply choose to put themselves first Is there a relationship between Covid and politics? Sure seems so.Michigan leads US in Covid case count, accounting for one in 10 new casesRead moreBy the end of October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of counties Donald Trump won by wide margins had died from Covid. That was more than three times higher than the Covid death rate in heavily Biden counties, of 7.8 per 100,000.Counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote had an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60%.Presumably, this is because Trump counties also have the highest unvaccinated rates in the US. Almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.There are some obvious reasons why Trump voters have been hesitant to get vaccinated. Trump politicized the issue – making the jab a hallmark of his peculiar form of rightwing populism. He and Fox News spread false rumors and conspiracy theories about the vaccine. By the time Trump finally called on people to get vaccinated, the damage was already done.In other words, it’s the same trifecta of rightwing media, inadequate education and rejection of science that gave us Trump in the first place.But this isn’t the whole story, because the US as a whole trails every other advanced country in the rate of vaccinations. Why?In recent weeks I’ve discovered that several anti-vaxxers live around me – in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America. I’ve known several for years. They are well-informed and well-educated. But they’re as opposed to getting a shot as any Trump anti-vaxxer.Some are ex-hippies, now in their late 60s and early 70s, who regard their bodies as “sacred” and don’t want anything or anyone to “invade” it.One, who grows her own food and lives by herself in a cabin not far from here, told me she didn’t want anything going into her body that she didn’t control. When I asked whether she had been vaccinated against smallpox, measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, she told me she assumed so but had been too small to have had knowledge or control.Others – also in their late 60s and early 70s – don’t trust big pharma. They see Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson as greedy global corporations in search of people to exploit and tax havens to park their exorbitant profits.“Why in hell would I trust a fucking thing Pfizer says or does?” one of them asked me.None of these people trusts the government. Their generation (which is also mine) came to political consciousness during the Vietnam war – a time when the American flag became an emblem of fascism, particularly in lefty coastal enclaves. They now believe the government has been so corrupted by big money that they don’t trust agencies charged with protecting the public.I’m sympathetic to their distrust of both big pharma and big government. But this doesn’t mean the science is wrong.One of them referred me to a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that about a third of the drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2001 and 2010 had safety problems after reaching the market.I checked and he’s correct. But he left out a critical fact: as soon as the FDA discovered the problems it forced manufacturers to pull the drugs or issue warnings.Deep down, I think these blue anti-vaxxers are motivated by something different from mere distrust. When I pointed out that they could well be endangering others (including me), they remained unmoved.When I suggested that their concerns, however valid, had to be weighed against the public’s overall interest in conquering this epidemic, they said they didn’t care.My conclusion: They’re infected not by Covid but by a narcissism that refuses even to consider the risks and costs they’re imposing on others.Has living through Covid made me a hypochondriac? I asked some experts | Maeve HigginsRead moreI can’t say for sure that Trump anti-vaxxers share this narcissism, although the leader of their cult surely does. And, of course, my sample size was so small I can’t even generalize to all blue anti-vaxxers.If we blame Trump and the culture that produced him for the relatively low rate of vaccinations in the US, we’re missing a character trait that may offer a fuller explanation.This trait is found among Democrats and independents in blue America as well as Republicans in Trumpland. In fact, I think it’s been near the core of the American personality since before the founding of the nation – a stubborn, selfish, me-first individualism.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Ilhan Omar: Lauren Boebert’s ‘Jihad Squad’ bigotry is ‘no laughing matter’

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      Ilhan Omar: Lauren Boebert’s ‘Jihad Squad’ bigotry is ‘no laughing matter’
      Colorado Republican apologises for remarks in home district
      Minnesota Democrat demands action from party leaders
      How the threat of political violence is growing across US
      Islamophobic remarks by Lauren Boebert are “no laughing matter”, Ilhan Omar said, demanding action from congressional leaders – after the Colorado Republican said sorry. Why Republicans are embracing Kyle Rittenhouse as their mascotRead more“Saying I am a suicide bomber is no laughing matter,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. “[House Republican leader] Kevin McCarthy and [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi need to take appropriate action, normalising this bigotry not only endangers my life but the lives of all Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in Congress.”Boebert made the remarks in her home district. To laughs and whoops, she joked about encountering Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, in an elevator on Capitol Hill.“I see a Capitol police officer running to the elevator,” she said. “I see fret all over his face, and he’s reaching, and the door’s shutting, like I can’t open it, like what’s happening. I look to my left, and there she is. Ilhan Omar.“And I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.’ We only had one floor to go. I said, ‘Oh look, the Jihad Squad decided show up for work today.’”That was a reference to the “Squad”, a group of prominent House progressives of which Omar is a member. Boebert, a far-right Trump ally and controversialist, has also used the term on the floor of the House.In response, Omar said: “Fact. This buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.“Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny and shouldn’t be normalised. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”In the face of widespread condemnation, Boebert apologised “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Representative Omar”.She also said she had “reached out to [Omar’s] office to speak with her directly. There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction”.Democratic House leaders including Pelosi indicated that was not enough.“Racism and bigotry of any form, including Islamophobia, must always be called out, confronted and condemned in any place it is found,” they said in a joint statement.“Congresswoman Boebert’s repeated, ongoing and targeted Islamophobic comments and actions against … Ilhan Omar are both deeply offensive and concerning … we call upon Congresswoman Boebert to fully retract these comments and refrain from making similar ones going forward.”The statement also condemned as “outrageous” McCarthy “and the entire House Republican leadership’s repeated failure to condemn inflammatory and bigoted rhetoric from members of their conference”.Can the Republican party escape Trump? Politics Weekly Extra – podcastRead moreAnother far-right Republican, Paul Gosar of Arizona, was recently formally censured for tweeting a video in which he was depicting killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another leading progressive, and threatening Joe Biden.Only two Republicans voted for censure: Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who both broke with the pro-Trump wing over the Capitol attack.On Friday, Kinzinger called Boebert “trash” and said: “I take sides between decency and disgusting.”Perhaps alluding to McCarthy’s silence on controversies involving pro-Trump figures, he wrote: “Ask some of the normal members when they last talked to Kevin? Been a while for most.”On Friday evening another pro-Trump extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, tweeted that she “just got off a good call” with McCarthy.“We spent time talking about solving problems not only in the conference, but for our country,” she said. “I like what he has planned ahead.” TopicsIlhan OmarDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesIslamophobiaRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats need to admit that inflation is real – or voters will turn on them | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Democrats need to admit that inflation is real – or voters will turn on themAndrew GawthorpeInflation is an issue of real concern to many Americans. It’s also a chance for Democrats to name and shame price-gougers Inflation is rapidly becoming a problem for the Democratic party and President Joe Biden. They need to get a grip on it before it imperils their wider agenda and sinks their chances of keeping control of Congress in the midterm elections next year. As they think about how to address it, one thing is certain: what they’ve been doing so far isn’t working. A recent poll found that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Biden is handling inflation, and the same number consider the issue “very important” in their evaluations of his presidency. Among those Americans concerned about the state of the economy, nearly nine in 10 ranked inflation as a reason why. Clearly something has to change.But inflation, a complicated product of economics and mass psychology, is also devilishly difficult to understand, and even more difficult to control. Presidents have few tools to tame it, and the ones they do have can backfire. The inflation of the 1970s crippled Gerald Ford’s presidency and was doing the same to Jimmy Carter until he opted for an extreme cure – installing a chair of the Federal Reserve who dramatically raised interest rates, stopping inflation but also plunging the economy into a deep recession which handed the White House to Ronald Reagan. These experiences left inflation with a reputation as a presidency-killer, with either the disease itself or the medicine taken to combat it ultimately killing the patient.Despite this, Democratic party elites have been slow to take the latest round of inflation as seriously as they should. American policymakers have not had to deal with levels of inflation as high as this for 30 years, and it shows. Many latched on to the message that inflation was “transitory”, a temporary consequence of the economy revving back into high gear as the country emerged from the coronavirus pandemic. Some liberals have even lashed out at those warning about rising prices, characterizing their concerns as an attempt to undermine support for Democrats’ plans to spend more to advance social welfare and combat climate change.Whatever the economic merits of the argument – and many economists still expect inflation to start falling soon – this response has been politically toxic. Democrats risk appearing out of touch on an issue of profound concern to many Americans. In order to change tack, they need to communicate to voters that they feel their pain and that they’re fighting to make things better.There are already signs that Democrats from the president on down are starting to get it. Biden recently gave a speech on the topic and announced the release of 50m barrels of oil from the US strategic petroleum reserve, an attempt to bring down gas prices at the pump. He also pointed the finger at oil companies for charging consumers high prices even as the wholesale price of oil has dropped over the past few weeks.But Democrats should also be doing more to point the finger at the businesses who are helping to foment the problem. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies in many different sectors are using this inflationary spike as a cover to raise prices faster than their costs, essentially betting that consumers won’t object when they already see prices rising all around them. According to the report, nearly two out of three big, publicly traded US companies have seen larger profit margins this year than in the same period in 2019. Inflation might be hurting consumers, but it’s a boom year for corporate America.Democrats ought to use all the tools of government to highlight and combat these abuses. As Biden has been finding out, public anger over inflation tends to be directed towards the incumbent president – and the only way to survive might be to redirect it at a more appropriate target. The presidential bully pulpit can be used to highlight corporate abuses and regulatory investigations, such as the one already announced by the FTC into the oil and gas sector, can hold industries to account and combat potentially illegal practices. Nor should Democrats stop there. They control both houses of Congress and should consider holding congressional hearings to name and shame particularly egregious price-gougers.Whether any of these measures will actually serve to lower prices is an open question. But the only responsible thing to do is try. Corporate price rises risk kicking off an inflationary spiral in which the initial reasons for rising prices become secondary to a general feeding frenzy, and anything that can be done to discourage it is healthy. Administration actions might also serve to dampen consumers’ expectations of future inflation, which will reduce the risk of a spiral. Because the media narrative is driven by inflation that has already happened, reassurance remains important even after prices have begun to stabilize.But even if we shouldn’t hold our breath for these actions to actually slow the rate of price increases, it’s important to show leadership on this issue for the simple reason that it’s what worried voters want and deserve. To be seen to be acting and pointing a finger at those to blame is smart politics, especially if this bout of inflation does indeed prove to be transitory and prices begin to fall next year.Meanwhile, corporate America has to decide if it really wants to undermine the Democrats and risk handing stewardship of the economy back to the party of Donald Trump. With the modern Republican party increasingly the party of incompetence and ignorance, self-restraint might be the better option. As Democrats should seek to remind the price-gougers, profiting less now will help everyone mightily down the road.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University, and host of the podcast America Explained
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      Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for making democracy work’

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      Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for making democracy work’The Democratic ex-senator preaches a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise in a country paralysed by civil war A friend once joked to Joe Lieberman, former senator and vice-presidential nominee, that the Democratic party was like his appendix: it was there but not doing much for him.“It’s a funny line,” he says by phone from his law office in New York, “but the truth is that it’s more than that because I feel good physically when the Democrats do well – in my terms – and I do get pain when they go off and do things that I don’t agree with.”Lieberman may be in for a world of pain now. The other Joe – also 79, also a Democratic ex-senator – was expected to share his centrist convictions as US president. Instead Joe Biden as president has surprised friends and foes alike with the scale, scope and audacity of his multi-trillion-dollar agenda.The Democratic party itself has moved left over the past decade, making it an increasingly awkward fit for Lieberman, who voted for George W Bush’s Iraq war, endorsed Republican John McCain over Barack Obama for president and is still close friends with South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the quintessential Republican apologist for Donald Trump.So it was that in a recent appearance on C-Span to promote his new book, The Centrist Solution, Lieberman was assailed by a caller from Oregon over his “archaic” views and policies that “have done nothing for the poor and the working class”. Another, from Connecticut, upbraided him for the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street and a crime bill that “put so many Black and Brown people in this country in jail”.Yet he remains unbowed and undeterred by political currents. Lieberman, co-chair of No Labels, a group focused on bipartisanship, continues to preach a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise working across the aisle in a country that seems paralysed by a cold civil war.When he joined the Senate in 1989, he recalls, a typical vote would see around 40 conservatives on one side, 40 liberal on the other, and 20 that were an unpredictable mix. By the time he left in 2013, there was no Democrat with a more conservative voting record than any Republican, and no Republican with a more liberal voting record than any Democrat.He attributes the polarisation to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, which makes incumbents risk averse, the increasing influence of money in politics – “they expect you to do ideologically what they want you to do” – and the partisanship of both cable news and social media, which encourages politicians to play to their echo chambers.Lieberman recounts from his Senate experience: “We would want to be able to go home at election time and say, ‘My friends, here’s what I got done for us’. But now people tend to want to go home and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I tried to do except for those bastards in the other party’. That’s a really vicious cycle that takes the country nowhere. The public, certainly the broad middle, is sick of all this.”This disaffection, Lieberman believes, helps explain why, in 2016, millions of Americans decided to blow it all up by electing an outsider, celebrity businessman Trump. Evidently it did not work as Washington became more poisonous and polarised than ever.Does the “centre ground” mean anything any more when one party, the Republicans, has veered into far right extremism, for example by embracing Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election and failing to condemn the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol?Lieberman’s answer will strike some as out of touch and trafficking in false equivalence: “The divisive forces in both of our two major parties have moved further away from the centre. But I believe those more extreme segments of both parties are in the minority in both parties.”“The majority, I’d say, in the Republican party is centre right and in the Democratic party is centre left, and it’s quite possible for them to make their way to the centre and negotiate and come up with centrist solutions. In the book, I’ve tried very hard to distinguish centrism from moderation. Centrism is not an ideology. It’s a strategy for making democracy work.”He continues: “It takes leaders who are willing to work together across party lines to get something done and, if that doesn’t work, it takes voters who I think are in the majority, certainly the plurality, to demand at election time that the candidates they vote for will work across party lines.”To many bruised by years of Washington gridlock, this will sound naive.Lieberman’s support for the 60-vote filibuster, a Senate procedural rule, as one of the last remaining incentives to bipartisanship is out of touch with a new generation of progressives who regard filibuster reform as essential to protecting voting rights and democracy itself.But he does allow the possibility that the two-system party might no longer be fit for purpose – and that the long awaited, much derided case for a viable third party might become irresistible.“If one could imagine the Republicans nominating Donald Trump again the president and the Democrats – assuming for a moment that Joe Biden doesn’t run again – nominate somebody further to the left, which is possible as a result of Democratic primaries, wow, there’s going to be a big space in the middle open and somebody will take it,” he says.“The conditions now are unprecedented in American history. The degree of partisanship and the degree of effective control of the political system by minorities to the right and left in both parties really may open the door to a successful third party campaign for president, perhaps as early as 2024.”Lieberman has reason to be a student of third party candidacies. In 2000 Ralph Nader’s Green Party polled at less than 3% but was widely blamed for depriving Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore and running mate Lieberman of critical votes in their narrow defeat by Bush and Dick Cheney.The losing vice-presidential candidate himself, however, is philosophical: “I never blamed Nader because he had the legal right to do what he did and there was some interesting post-election polling that surprisingly indicated that the Nader vote would have divided between Bush and Gore.”He describes the supreme court’s ruling in favor of Bush in the disputed election as a “miscarriage of justice”, however. A Gore-Lieberman administration is now one of the great historical what-ifs, an alternate timeline that could have shaped the 21st century very differently.For example, Lieberman points out, Bush oversaw a big and unnecessary tax cut that put America back in deficit territory after three surpluses in a row under Bill Clinton. “I’m confident that President Gore would have felt a responsibility to go into Afghanistan, from which we were attacked [on 11 September 2001], but would he have gone into Iraq? I doubt it. That would have changed history a lot.”“The other major change would have been obviously that Al Gore was the leading American champion for doing something about climate change. We would have pushed through some reactions to climate change which would have put us in a better, safer situation now.”Criticized for his resistance to withdrawing from Iraq, Lieberman lost a Democratic primary election for his seat in Connecticut in 2006 only to win election as an independent. Two years later, he again marched to the beat of his own drum by endorsing his old friend McCain, a Republican senator for Arizona, rather than Democratic senator Obama, the first African American nominee of a major party.He insists: “Surprisingly, neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom I really knew well, ever asked me for my support. McCain did and I thought, what the hell? He’s my friend, totally capable of being president, and so I don’t regret at all supporting him.”“We had great areas of agreement on foreign and defense policy but we disagreed a lot. I consider myself a centre left Democrat. He’s a conservative Republican but a maverick so he broke on climate change, he broke for a while on campaign finance reform.”It later emerged that McCain had wanted Lieberman as his running mate, believing the country ready for a bipartisan ticket, only to be persuaded by his staff to go for the inexperienced, rabble rousing Sarah Palin instead. Another crossroads of history. McCain later admitted it had been a mistake.Lieberman, the nearly man for a second time, comments: “If McCain had been able to have me as his running mate, I have confidence that we would have done better than he did with Governor Palin. But it’s hard to say that we would have won. Obama was just walking on the mountaintop at that point and Bush 43 was unpopular and the economy was in bad shape, so people really wanted a change.“And not only was Obama a change in party but he was African American. It was a breakthrough moment for America. I think a lot of people voting for him felt not only that he was the change and capable but that we were going to prove again what we are as a country. So it was an extraordinary moment.”The close friendship between Lieberman, McCain, who died in 2018, and another senator, Graham of South Carolina, saw them dubbed “the three Amigos”. But where McCain evidently loathed Trump, Graham has defended the former president’s indefensible actions while enjoying his hospitality on the golf course. Does Lieberman ever call him and say, snap out of it?“Well, we talk a lot. Lindsey will always try, by his nature, to be where he feels he can be effective and so you’ve watched him sometimes be quite close to Trump and at other times be critical. We remain friends. I have nothing negative to say about him because he is my friend but I do think that his great skill ultimately – and I watched it while I was in the Senate – is to be a bridge builder, a bipartisan centrist problem solver.“At the right moment he will be, I hope, part of the sort of restoration of the Republican party in which he grew up and where his really dear friend – and mine, of course – John McCain was ultimately the nominee. That’s the Republican party Lindsey most naturally fits into.”It is a party that can still be saved, Lieberman insists. “I don’t think Trump is going to win in 2024 and Republicans who are not tied to him will see that increasingly and people will challenge him, including some who will go back to the regular conservative Republican party, not the party that was so extreme and nasty and willing to ignore the law of the United States.“I don’t know who it will be. A lot of people are looking at taking him on. It will take some guts. There’s something brewing out there. So, am I optimistic that the more mainstream centrist elements in the Republican party will take over again? I am.”For their part, Republicans have condemned Biden for campaigning as a centrist but governing as what they perceive as a radical who pushed a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, $1.2tn infrastructure deal and $1.75tn social and climate spending package.Lieberman, who worked with him in the Senate for 24 years, says: “The squad, the further left in the Democratic party, seems to be having influence that is taking him, at least in public perception, further to the left than I certainly thought he was and I’m confident he is now.“It may be understandable because we’ve just come through an unprecedented crisis because of the pandemic and he wanted to do everything he could to get us back on track. So the bills he supported were bigger than any I ever voted for or that he voted for in the 24 years. But I think we we saw him at his natural best on the bipartisan infrastructure reform bill that just passed and he signed.”Ever hopeful, Lieberman notes that the president defied progressives by nominating Jerome Powell for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve. He adds: “Biden is solid. He sees the world realistically and he knows he can’t be Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson now in part because he doesn’t have the great Democratic majorities that they had.“And the country, thank God, is not where it was in the Depression, as bad as the pandemic was. The old Joe, which is the real Joe, will be dominant in the next three years of his presidency.”TopicsUS newsThe US politics sketchUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS SenateanalysisReuse this content More