Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden under pressure to act as landmark voting rights bill faces Senate defeat

      by

      Joe Biden was facing a huge setback on Tuesday as one of his top priorities, a set of reforms to protect voting rights and shore up American democracy, barrelled towards defeat in Congress.Progressives accused Biden of failing to use his bully pulpit to champion the sweeping legislation, which aims to safeguard elections against attacks by former president Donald Trump and his allies.“OK I have reached my WTF moment with Biden on this,” tweeted Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the grassroots movement Indivisible. “Is saving democracy a priority for this administration or not?”The Senate was due to hold a procedural vote on whether to start debate on the For the People Act, a significant near-900-page overhaul of voting and election law that the White House has described as a “cause” for Biden.But in chamber split 50-50, the bill was poised to fall at the first hurdle. Sixty votes are required to overcome a procedural rule known as the filibuster and there was no prospect of 10 Republicans crossing the floor to join Democrats in advancing the legislation.The For the People Act is seen as a crucial counterweight to hundreds of voting bills introduced by Republican-controlled states, many of which include measures that would make it harder for Black people, young people and poor people to vote. Fourteen states had enacted 22 of these laws by mid-May, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Biden has spoken passionately about the need to defend democracy but despite his penchant for bipartisanship he has been unable to move the needle. Levin, a former congressional aide, drew a contrast with Barack Obama, who organised a debate with Republicans about his signature healthcare law, and Bill Clinton, who gave 18 speeches to promote a North American free trade agreement.Because of one man’s lie, Republicans are now doing the dastardly act of taking away voting from millions of AmericansHe added: “Democracy is under threat. Fascism is rising. Time is running out. It’s time for the president to get off the sidelines and into the game, or we’re all going to lose.”Obama has also sounded the alarm. Speaking on a call with grassroots supporters, he said: “We can’t wait until the next election because if we have the same kinds of shenanigans that brought about [the insurrection on] 6 January, if we have that for a couple more election cycles, we’re going to have real problems in terms of our democracy long-term.”Democrats’ goals include expanding early voting in elections for president and Congress, making it easier to vote by mail – a tool used by record numbers during the coronavirus pandemic – and improving the transparency of certain campaign contributions. They are also aiming to remove party bias from the once-a-decade drawing of congressional districts.Democrats also accuse Republicans of seeking to reduce polling hours and locations and drop boxes, and tightening voter ID laws, as a direct response to Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud.In remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, likened Trump to “a petulant child”.“Because of one man’s lie, Republicans are now doing the dastardly act of taking away voting from millions of Americans … making it much harder for them to vote, and many, many, many will not,” Schumer said.“From Georgia to Montana, from Florida to Iowa, Republican state legislatures are conducting the most coordinated voter suppression effort in 80 years.”These state houses are making it easier to own a gun than to vote, Schumer said.“Republican legislatures are making it harder to vote early, harder to vote by mail, harder to vote after work. They’re making it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in long lines. They’re trying to make it harder for Black churchgoers to vote on Sunday.“And they’re actually making it easier for unelected judges and partisan election boards to overturn the results of an election, opening the door for some demagogue, a Trumpian-type demagogue, maybe he himself, to try and subvert our elections in the very same way that Trump tried to do in 2020.”Republicans argue the For the People Act would infringe on states’ rights and that state measures are needed to stop fraud, even though there is no evidence of widespread such problems. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, dismissed the bill as a “partisan power grab” in his own speech on the Senate floor.Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote was a foregone conclusion, there is still suspense around two subplots with wider implications.The bill was co-sponsored by 49 Democratic and independent senators. The sole holdout was Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia who has expressed opposition to the legislation and declined to say if he would support the procedural motion to debate it.If, as expected, Manchin did fall into line, it would intensify pressure for Democrats to abolish the filibuster so legislation can be debated and passed by a simple 51-vote majority – with Vice-President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote. But Manchin and some colleagues have deep reservations about doing so.Kyrsten Sinema, a Democratic senator from Arizona, wrote in the Washington Post: “The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings.”She said she welcomed a full debate, “so senators and our constituents can hear and fully consider the concerns and consequences”.Biden held talks with Manchin and Sinema at the White House on Monday, aware the congressional stalemate threatens to stall his agenda. Manchin told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday: “We had a very good conversation, very respectful … We’ve just got to keep working.”Both sides are looking for political advantage ahead of next year’s midterm elections, where Republicans hope to win back the House and Senate. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      New York City’s tumultuous mayor’s race closes as voters struggle to choose

      by

      New York City will effectively choose its next mayor in the coming days, drawing to a close a tumultuous election race marred by allegations of sexual misconduct, by the staff of one campaign launching a protest against their own candidate, and by accusations that at least one of the mayoral hopefuls doesn’t actually live in the city.The winner in Tuesday’s Democratic primary will, given the leftward political leanings of the city, almost certainly win the election proper in November, and immediately be tasked with leading New York through its darkest period in several decades.America’s largest city is still recovering from the death of more than 30,000 people from coronavirus, many of them during a harrowing two-month spell in early 2020. It is also engaged in a passionate debate about to rebuild from the pandemic in a way that tackles longstanding issues of inequality.A lack of affordable housing crisis, laid bare during Covid-19, looms over the city, while an election season that began with calls for partially defunding the New York’s police department has pivoted in recent weeks, as a spike in shootings swung the debate in the opposite direction and propelled a Black former police officer, Eric Adams, to the top of the polls.After eight years of Bill de Blasio, who was elected as a progressive mayor but whose time in charge has frequently disappointed both the left and right wings of the Democratic party, the signs are that New Yorkers are ready to swing to the center.But Adams, who would be the second Black man to be mayor of New York City, and his fellow centrist frontrunners Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang, have also been helped by the spectacular implosion of two of the most hotly-tipped left-leaning candidates over the past two months.Many supporters abandoned Scott Stringer, New York’s comptroller, after two women accused him of sexual misconduct, while followers of Dianne Morales, a former non-profit executive, were aghast when most of her campaign staff led an angry demonstration outside her office in May, accusing their candidate of union busting and inaction over allegations of racism.The lack of a serious Republican candidate has added to the certainty that it will be the winner of the Democratic primary who move into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, come January.Despite that added importance of the looming ballot, early voting has so far been very low in a city, and country, that may be suffering from election burnout.Just 32,032 people voted on the first two days they were eligible to do so, which New York magazine pointed out is less than 1% of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats and 566,000 registered Republicans.This is the first mayoral election in the city that has featured early voting, however, and the candidates are hoping most voters turn out to the city’s 1,107 polling sites on the day.The polls so far suggest those voters, who are able to rank up to five candidates for the first time in a New York mayoral election, are struggling to make up their minds. Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran a whimsical bid for president in 2020, led the polls for weeks before being caught by Adams and Garcia, a former New York sanitation commissioner who has been endorsed by the New York Times.Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who is running as a progressive, has hoovered up the progressive endorsements lost by Stringer and Morales, however, and surged to second place in a survey last week, while another poll showed Yang, in particular, losing support.Wiley, like Garcia, would be New York’s first female mayor in history, a moment that struck home when she voted – for herself – on Monday.“To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe,” Wiley said on Twitter. “It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them.”To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe. It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them. pic.twitter.com/shm7YHeM8y— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) June 14, 2021
      For Adams, becoming the frontrunner has not been without its problems. In early June Politico reported there was “conflicting information” on whether Adams, the current Brooklyn borough president, actually lives in the neighboring state of New Jersey, where he co-owns a home with his partner.This led to the bizarre scene of Adams giving a tour of what he said was his garden-level Brooklyn apartment.As Adams showed reporters his “small modest bedroom” and “small modest bathroom”, however, internet sleuths noticed that a line of sneakers in what Adams said was his bedroom matched shoes his adult son was seen wearing in Instagram photos, while others noted that the fridge in the Brooklyn apartment was different to fridges Adams had previously shown off in photos on Twitter.Adams later released receipts from his EZpass – an electronic tag which automatically bills any tolls incurred on bridges and tunnels – which he said proved that while he did visit New Jersey, it was never for more than a few hours at a time.Yang, who himself was criticized earlier this year after it emerged he had moved his family out of the city as Covid-19 struck, has had no qualms about pouncing on the issue.“I want to reflect on the oddness and the bizarreness of where we are in this race right now, where Eric is literally trying to convince New Yorkers where he lives and that he lives in this basement,” Yang said at a debate last week.A more unsavory backdrop to the campaigns of both men, and a reality check for those who see New York City as a progressive spark, is the millions of dollars that groups supporting Adams and Yang have received from big money donors who normally save their money for Republican candidates.A brighter spot for many has been the introduction of ranked choice voting for the first time in New York City, although the roll out has not been without its problems. Some Black political leaders have criticized the system, suggesting voters of color were less likely to receive adequate information about how ranked choice works, and less likely to engage in ranking candidates.In a recent poll, 74% of white voters said they planned to pick more than one candidate, but only half of Black and Hispanic voters said they would do the same, an especially disappointing statistic in a race where four of the leading eight candidates are people of color.Climate change, meanwhile, has been largely absent from the televised Democratic debates, a glaring oversight for a coastal city that has an average elevation of 33ft – some areas are much lower – and was decimated by the tidal surge from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.Instead, in the final weeks crime has become a key issue. According to the New York police department’s public database there were 490 shootings in the city between 1 January and 16 May of this year, the highest number since 2002, while there have been 146 murders, a steep climb from 2019 and 2020 and a rise matched by some other large cities in the US.That figure is a long way from the dark days of the 1980s and 90s, when some years saw more than 2,000 people killed, but it has been enough to dominate the discussion.Last summer, as tens of thousands of people attended Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests in New York, many of the candidates appeared to embrace cutting the NYPD’s $6bn budget, but over the past months some have run the other way, with Yang recently calling for a “recruitment drive” to hire more police officers.Unless Wiley, who has stuck by her plan to cleave $1bn from the police budget, can pull off a win, an election that began with a lot of hope for progressives will likely end up in disappointment.But with New York City facing problems of a scale not seen in a generation, a job once dubbed the “second toughest job in America” is likely to live up to its name – whoever takes charge. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Squad goals: Ocasio-Cortez warns Biden patience is wearing thin

      by

      They were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in ‘the Squad’ of progressive politicians is not infinite.“Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand New York congresswoman and best known member of the squad. “Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? Are we passing a deal that brings down the most climate emissions? Are we passing a deal that raises wages and actually improves our infrastructure for the next generation?”Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the influential TV program Morning Joe last week came with the US president weeks into negotiations with Republicans over a massive infrastructure spending package – and apparently little to show for it.The squad and others on the left of the party have remained broadly supportive of Biden as he seeks to restore an era of bipartisan cooperation. But with his agenda stalling on Capitol Hill, frustrations are mounting and threatening to crack the facade of Democratic unity.It was Ocasio-Cortez, a social media star with a global profile, who hailed Biden’s first hundred days in office as having “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”. After all, the president’s staggering $1.9tn coronavirus relief package had been swiftly passed by Congress and signed into law, albeit without a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage that liberals have long sought.Now cold reality is intruding, however. Legislation on voting rights, gun safety, immigration and police brutality is faltering in a House of Representatives where Democrats hold a slender 220-211 majority and a Senate split 50-50 with Republicans (vice president Kamala Harris gives the party the tie-breaking vote).Biden’s next big ticket item, the American Jobs Plan, which initially proposed more than $2trn for infrastructure, is facing a rockier road. He conceded ground in negotiations with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito that ultimately collapsed. Then a bipartisan group of senators came up with a $1.2trn proposal but, progressives say, it fails to address the climate crisis, healthcare and childcare.Democratic leaders are now discussing a two-step process in which they pass a smaller bill with bipartisan support but then follow up with a second measure passed through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would require near total party unanimity.The underlying challenge for Biden is how to keep together an unwieldy Democratic coalition that encompasses conservative senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia – which is Donald Trump country – and senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist from Vermont, who this week drafted a $6trn infrastructure package.Then there is the squad, the left-leaning group of House members that now consists of seven people of color. The more that Manchin digs in his heels against ambitious legislation, the more restive the squad is likely to become, raising difficult questions over whether Biden is applying sufficient pressure to bring the doubters on board.Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive organization Democracy for America, said: “Right now people are really getting frustrated because it’s been six months and we don’t see Joe Biden engaging in the way that he should to push for more support. In fact, he’s negotiating against us and what Democrats want.“So I think there’s a growing sense of frustration among progressives and it’s understandable. We’re feeling like the clock is running out and we’re wasting valuable time and that’s where you’re going to start to see the squad and other members of the progressive movement push back and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got a limited window of time here. We need to put up or shut up’.”With more than two in three Americans supporting the infrastructure bill, according to a Monmouth University poll, Simpson argues that the squad is on the right side of history. “Their relentlessness, their fearlessness and their persistence on this should be rewarded; they should not be punished because they are fighting for what we should be doing anyway.“There’s going to be some blowback if the squad is fighting for things that we actually should get done and the rest of the party is saying, oh no, Republicans aren’t on board, oh no, let one person decide that he’s going to hold up an entire agenda for the entire nation, that the entire nation wants overwhelmingly.”Although the Biden administration has actively engaged with progressives in its early months, there have been some flash points. Ocasio-Cortez and others were quick to speak out when it emerged that Biden intended to retain Trump’s cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US; the administration blinked first and backed down.Squad members including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib sharply criticized Israel for its recent bombing of Gaza and challenged the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the country. And when Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” to the US, Ocasio-Cortez called the comment “disappointing” and noted that it is legal to seek asylum. Ocasio-Cortez has also been pushing Biden to face up to the fact that bipartisanship with a radicalized Republican party is a doomed enterprise. She tweeted: “Pres. Biden & Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake w GOP Senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.”Jamaal Bowman, one of the squad’s newest members, said bluntly that Manchin “has become the new Mitch McConnell”, referring to the Republican senate minority leader infamous for obstruction, after the West Virginia senator declared support for the legislative filibuster while opposing an expansive voting rights bill.The interventions carry weight in part because of the squad’s outsized influence in both mainstream and social media. Ocasio-Cortez has 12.7m followers on Twitter. Activists praise them for speaking with moral clarity about Washington’s failings in a way that strikes a chord with the public.Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said: “I don’t think they are outside mainstream thinking around the frustrations that people have with the Senate as an institution or the limitations that present themselves with such a narrow margin and with Joe Manchin continuing to buck his own caucus. They’re playing a very useful role.”Their willingness to dissent is a sign of party strength, not weakness, Mitchell argues. “When Joe Biden moves the struggle forward, they will give him credit for it. There are examples where the Biden administration has been outside of what we would consider progressive values and they’ve course corrected and it was, I think, because the squad were not afraid to call it.“It led to the Biden administration actually getting better on those issues. That’s an example not of disunity, but co-equal branches operating as they should.”But when it comes to the current legislative gridlock, some commentators argue that the squad would be wrong to take out their frustrations on the president, given the balance of power in the Senate.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I don’t know how you criticise Biden for Manchin. Biden is putting up the legislation they’d like. The problem is Congress and the sheer numbers. It’s an arithmetic problem more than an ideology problem.”Democrats’ narrow majority in the House should, in theory, give the squad more leverage over party leadership than ever. They threatened to torpedo a $1.9bn spending bill to upgrade US Capitol security in the wake of 6 January insurrection over concerns about more money going to police; eventually three voted no, three voted present and one voted yes; the bill passed by a single vote.Dave Handy, a New York-based political activist and consultant who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, said: “We have a very slim majority in Congress. The squad now wield more power than they’re giving themselves credit for. I don’t know why they’re ignorant of their bargaining position and the hand that they’re holding.”“Everybody else at the table seems to be aware of this. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate are very aware of the cards that they’re holding. The squad is completely aloof. I’m not even sure they know that they’re playing poker. They might think they’re playing checkers.”Handy argues that the squad should pressure Biden and other Democratic leaders much harder. “I don’t think that they’re wielding as much influence as they could be. The squad was elected to be rabble rousers. They are there to agitate. Theirs is the role of a reformer in Congress and, in my estimation, in this current Congress, they have not been doing that.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

      by

      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

      by

      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Manchin and the filibuster: Politics Weekly Extra

      by

      Jonathan Freedland and Prof Sarah Binder discuss why two Democratic senators are proving a thorn in Joe Biden’s side

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      President Biden is facing some barriers in passing his rather ambitious agenda, namely senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are refusing to toe the party line on abolishing the filibuster and on issues such as voting rights. So, which side is most likely to win out? Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University, brings us up to speed on what is happening. Watch some of the campaign adverts by Joe Manchin mentioned by Prof Binder Listen to the first episode of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More