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      in World Politics

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

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      In a Fair Observer column this week analyzing the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, Steve Westly echoes the tendentious conclusions of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Not only do they seek to place the blame for the ambiguous outcome of the election on the rhetoric of the left, they clearly want that wing of the party simply to shut up.

      Westly finds himself in the company not just of subtle political thinkers like Representative and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, but also of apostate Republicans such as John Kasich and Meg Whitman. These are people who have discovered — thanks to the four-year run of Donald Trump’s White House reality-TV show — that the Democratic Party feels a lot like the Republican Party of old.

      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

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      Westly makes the following bold claim: “Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Center-right country:

      A nation that in its majority seeks to believe in and fulfill the ideals of democracy and equality but whose power brokers have the clout to convince the media that it prefers the stability of oligarchic control

      Contextual Note

      The Democrats seized on the idea of Russian meddling in 2016 to explain their defeat in the presidential election. This time, the scapegoat is the group of Democrats who pledge allegiance to “democratic socialism” and shout “defund the police.” Those words and ideas must now be stricken from the vocabulary of the party. All language must be formulated to soothe the fears of “moderates.” 

      This exercise in pre-digested, reductionist analysis leading to the simplification of discourse and debate seeks to brand an entire swath of the population as un-American. The US is increasingly divided and visibly fragmented. The Democrats apparently want to use President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral success to dictate to the American people who they are as a group and how they should think of themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      There may be a statistical sense that justifies calling the country “center-right.” But this has no meaning when a wide range of cultural values are at play. When people are pushed toward the edges, no statistical mean accurately identifies a center. Westly is right to mention the existence of a highly motivated evangelical base. But even that fact requires further analysis. The Republicans have to a large extent created the fiction that it exists as a coherent voting bloc.

      There are two reasons not to think of the US as a center-right country. The first is that it has never been more diversified and divided. That two extremes may exist does not mean that the mid-point between them defines the nature of a people.

      Furthermore, polls taken during the election campaign have consistently shown that issues identified with the left and branded by Republicans and Democrats alike with the deliberately toxic term “socialism” are in fact endorsed by a large majority of the population. The most obvious is Medicare for All, consistently denigrated by centrists and the right as “socialist medicine” and rejected by Biden, but massively approved by Americans (70%) and even by a near majority of Republicans.

      Even Andrew Yang’s theme of the universal basic income (UBI) — a “socialist” measure of redistribution if ever there was one — also has majority support. If we consider single-payer health care and UBI centrist policies because a majority approves them, then we need to redefine who is a centrist on the political spectrum. Certainly not Joe Biden.

      The second reason concerns the nature of the two extremes. They are radically different. In the US, the extreme right is indeed a powerful force, as the tea party movement demonstrated. It expresses its extremism by eschewing all forms of rationality, insisting that personal beliefs, opinions and prejudices trump any form of reasoning. Evangelical faith is one example of this, but not the only one. Blind nationalism is another, but to a large extent that is also a feature even of the Democratic center, which embraces the slogan of American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism itself is anti-rational, an implicit rejection of the democratic principle of equality, if not of the rule of law itself.

      The extreme left contrasts radically with the extreme right. First, just in terms of comparative size, the extreme left is marginal. This imbalance may contribute to the mistaken impression that the nation can be defined as center-right. More significantly, the left as a whole, with its many variants, clings to the value of rationality. It is fundamentally an intellectual movement promoting reasoned rather than emotional approaches to addressing social problems. 

      In Shakespearean terms, the left is Hamlet, the thinker, as opposed to Polonius, the busybody focusing on executing the will of King Claudius, the wielder of power. Hamlet rebelled intellectually, but Claudius ruled Denmark until he was replaced in the final act by the Norwegian Fortinbras (literally “strong-in-arm”).

      Like most establishment Democrats, Westly singles out “democratic socialism,” treating it as a kind of virus that has infected the Democratic Party. It encourages the idea that the incoming Biden administration’s essential task will be the production of a vaccine to eliminate it or at least contain any further contamination.

      That theme of ostracizing the left seems to be the flavor of the month. Just now, Al Jazeera informs us that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared that the US will label the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — a movement focused on contesting the politics of the Israeli government — as “anti-Semitic.” It is a theme the Labour Party in the UK has just used effectively to purge the left. The left everywhere is accused of toppling statues. The center, both right and left, topples people.

      That kind of purge may not be what Westly has in mind, but it’s becoming more and more likely that that’s what the Democrats will be seeking to do.

      Historical Note

      The history of 21st-century elections tells a tale that contradicts the characterization of the US as a center-right country. The center-right epithet implies the public’s preference for stability and adherence to the status quo. But recent elections have revealed a profound and growing unease with the status quo.

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      The presidential election of 2000 should have resulted in the election of a center-left candidate, Al Gore. Instead, the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote and even failed to win the Electoral College. Bush managed to get that close to winning by defining himself as a “compassionate conservative.” That was his way of claiming to be dead center: conservative to please the Republicans, compassionate to please the Democrats.

      President Bush very quickly abandoned the compassionate side and sought to impose an aggressive neocon, neoliberal agenda that Americans had not voted for. It began with the notorious Bush tax cuts at a time when polls showed Americans were ready to accept tax hikes if the goal was to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Bush doggedly pursued his agenda rather than the people’s.

      Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 promising hope and change. His first challenge was to resolve the financial crisis Bush left in his lap. This may have sobered his impulse to effectuate change. President Obama spent the next eight years consolidating the status quo. Then, in 2016, the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to an irresponsible clown promising an irrational, undefined program of radical change.

      These recent elections show that voters regularly come out to vote against the status quo. It defines a nation that consistently expresses its impatience with the center-right but is repeatedly given little choice. The centrist Republicans invented the idea of “anyone but Trump.” The voters have shown an attitude closer to “anything but the center.” The Democrats fared poorly in 2020 because “anyone but Trump” trumped “anything but the center.”

      The massive go-out-and-vote campaign in the wake of the George Floyd killing helped the uninspired and uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, to attain nearly 80 million votes as opposed to Clinton’s 65.85 million. Without the mobilization of those protesting the status quo, Biden’s numbers would have been closer to Clinton’s. He most likely would have lost massively in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 74 million.

      As a new Democratic administration prepares to take office in January 2021, it would be wise to take the time to assess the deeper meaning of the vote.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Here's what interviewing voters taught me about the slogan 'defund the police' | Danny Barefoot

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      Joe Biden won the electoral college, leads the popular vote by millions, and will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Taking down an incumbent president is no easy feat and Biden deserves credit for his disciplined and effective campaign.
      But there is no question Biden underperformed vis-à-vis the consensus of pollsters and pundits. In Congress the underperformance was even more stark. Democrats expected to make gains in the House of Representatives. Instead, they are poised to return to Washington with an unexpectedly pared-down majority. In the Senate, Democrats were considered favorites to retake the chamber and deliver their party unified control of the federal government. Instead, they made only modest gains. This isn’t where the party wanted to be.
      I run a Democratic political consulting firm and wanted to immediately get to work to understand why this underperformance happened. While there are certainly multiple answers to that question and various dynamics at play, we decided to start our inquiry with voters who leaned towards voting for Joe Biden in the last weeks of the election, but ultimately voted to re-elect Donald Trump. We put together a focus group to discuss the election with these voters and explore what changed their minds.
      It will be easy for some to dismiss these participants as Trump voters (and they are!) but 70% of them told us they have a negative view of Donald Trump and at some point they supported Joe Biden before ultimately casting their vote for Trump. These aren’t Maga hat-wearing folks.
      One of the major takeaways from my discussion with these voters was their distaste for the slogan “defund the police”. While 80% agreed racism exists in the criminal justice system and 60% had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter, only one participant agreed we should “defund the police”. Another participant was exasperated, “That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said.”
      We tried to explain the actual policies behind the slogan “defund the police”. We noted that many activists who use this phrase simply want to reduce police funding and reallocate some of it to social services. One woman interrupted us to say “that is not what defund the police means, I’m sorry. It means they want to defund the police.” “I didn’t like being lied to about this over and over again,” added another woman. “Don’t try and tell me words don’t mean what they say,” she continued. The rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement.
      Ultimately 50% of people in our focus group said they thought Biden was privately sympathetic to defunding the police. While Biden and many Democrats rejected this framing, it is clear the calls from some on the left were louder than those denials.
      We followed up by asking if participants supported reducing police funding and reallocating it to social services and other agencies to reduce police presence in community conflict. Seventy per cent said they would support that proposal.
      It is almost beyond parody that progressive activists would build popular consensus on police reform only to slap on a slogan that is deeply unpopular with voters and doesn’t accurately communicate our policy goals. We don’t want to abolish the police. We don’t want to zero out funding for law enforcement. So we should forcefully reject slogans that imply we do. We should instead run on the broadly popular policies behind the slogan. It’s policy that changes lives. Unpopular framing that makes reform harder does favors to no one but those who want to protect the status quo.
      Representative James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an activist in the civil rights movement, was blunt regarding his opinion of “defund the police” saying he believes it cost Democrats seats. “Stop sloganeering. Sloganeering kills people. Sloganeering destroys movements,” said Clyburn.
      My party won this election. We’ve now won the most votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections. But we live in a political system that would allow Republicans to block all reform and rule through the courts if we merely repeat this year’s performance in perpetuity. Some people’s response to that is to argue we need to abolish the electoral college or some other version of structural reform. I agree. But we need unified power to even begin that discussion.
      So the conversations happening about the direction of the Democratic party aren’t about “how do we win a majority every election” (we have mostly figured that out!) they have to be “how do we win by enough to make real change in a system that is rigged against us”.
      Some have noted that Republicans would never have this debate after they won an election. That’s probably correct. But Republicans can govern through minority rule. A majority is icing on the cake for them. They don’t need to have this debate to get what they want. Democrats do.
      The first thing we should do is forcefully reject slogans, branding and messaging that is deeply unpopular with voters.
      Danny Barefoot is the managing partner at Anvil Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm and advertising agency. Danny has a juris doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center More

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      in Elections

      'Dollars don't vote': Ocasio-Cortez and the 'Squad' rally for action on climate crisis – video

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      The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among members of the ‘Squad’, a group of progressive Democrats, who spoke at a Sunrise Movement rally in Washington to push Joe Biden on tackling the climate emergency.
      AOC said they would urge Biden to ‘keep his promises’ to working families, women, minorities and climate activists as he fills his cabinet.
      In July, Biden outlined an ambitious climate plan that would spend $2tn over four years investing in clean-energy infrastructure while vowing to cut carbon emissions from electrical power to zero in 15 years
      Climate activists ramp up pressure on Biden with protest outside Democratic headquarters
      Why Biden calls Trump a ‘climate arsonist’ – video explainer More

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      in US Politics

      Fight to Vote: A revolt against Trump's election denialism

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      [embedded content]
      Good morning Fight to Vote readers,
      As the Covid-19 pandemic rages across the country, so too are officials and citizens sick of Donald Trump and his Republican allies undermining the election.
      In three key states that flipped for Democrats, the fight over election results has continued amid lawsuits and disinformation. As Republicans attempt to finagle any last votes – despite the fact that they lost overwhelmingly – it’s clear that some have lost patience.
      ‘The Trump stain’
      In Wayne county, Michigan, local Republican officials initially refused to confirm the election results in Detroit, a majority-Black city that largely favored Joe Biden. The backlash directed at those officials was fierce.
      “The Trump stain, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have covered yourself in, is going to follow you throughout history,” said Ned Staebler, a business owner in the county.
      In Georgia, where the state performed a manual recount because of the close race, the normally staid secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, said other Republicans such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and the Georgia Senate candidate Doug Collins were pressuring him to throw out legal ballots.
      “I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”
      Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is pouring $3m into a partial recount of the votes in two Wisconsin counties. The president claims his observers were not stationed close enough to the ballot count to spot mistakes. Local officials disagreed.
      “No, no, that’s not why they were chosen,” the Milwaukee mayor, Tom Barrett, said of the counties chosen for recounts. “They were chosen because they are the two counties that have a very high percentage of Democratic voters. That’s 100% why they were chosen.”
      Meanwhile, Trump has continued firing anybody who stands up to him.
      Say goodbye to Chris Krebs
      On Tuesday night, the president fired Chris Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity chief in charge of securing the election. On Monday, Krebs had said that the election was not compromised by voter fraud, as Trump has charged.

      Chris Krebs #Protect2020
      (@CISAKrebs)
      ICYMI: On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, “in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” #Protect2020 https://t.co/Oj6NciYruD

      November 17, 2020

      Another DHS cybersecurity official, Bryan Ware, is also resigning from the department.
      But there is reason to give thanks
      With Thanksgiving around the corner, it’s crucial to think about the power of Native voters – one of the last groups in the US to gain the right to vote. This year, they played a key role in Biden’s win in states such as Arizona and Wisconsin. For example, the margin in Arizona between Biden and Trump was 10,377 as of Monday. There were 67,000 eligible voters on the Navajo Nation, which heavily supported Biden.
      Turnout was also high despite the extensive hurdles many Native Americans face when it comes to casting a ballot on rural reservation land.
      I’ll leave you with this gem: the whole video of Ned Staebler’s comment to Wayne county officials.

      Rex Chapman🏇🏼
      (@RexChapman)
      Hey guys, Please Watch @NedStaebler — a Wayne County Board Member of Canvassers stuff in a locker @HartmannDude and @monicaspalmer — the two members that refused to certify the ballots for the county…pic.twitter.com/iGl3LSf3Sw

      November 18, 2020 More

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      in US Politics

      How will Joe Biden reset US relations with the world? – podcast

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      Joe Biden will enter the White House in 2021 facing numerous domestic crises. But as Patrick Wintour explains, he cannot ignore the rest of the world

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      When Donald Trump took office four years ago it was with the mantra ‘America first’. International agreements were torn up, the US withdrew from commitments like the Paris climate agreement and cut its funding for the World Health Organization. Allies in Europe were scorned in favour of creating new relationships with ‘strongmen’ leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Now, as Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House he is promising to repair damaged relations and rejoin global institutions. But as the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, tells Anushka Asthana, the next four years will not be simply spent turning the clock back on global affairs: instead Biden will forge his own foreign policy based on promoting democracy and standing up to authoritarianism. It’s a change in tone that will have ramifications too in Britain, where a Brexit deal and an orderly exit from the EU (now without the prospect of a Trump-blessed US trade deal) is becoming ever more important. More

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      in US Politics

      'Pathetic' Trump denounced over Krebs firing as campaign presses for recounts

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      Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.The president’s election campaign team continued to press for recounts and investigations in battleground states where Biden has already been declared the winner, including a new request in Wisconsin for a partial recount.And there was uproar over his decision late on Tuesday, announced by tweet, to fire a federal official in charge of election security who dismissed his claims of widespread voter fraud.The firing of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) director, Christopher Krebs, was “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”, senior House Democrat Adam Schiff said.Officials have declared 3 November’s contest between Trump and Biden the most secure US election ever.On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania supreme court dealt a blow to Trump’s efforts in a state Biden won by nearly 73,000 votes, saying officials did not improperly block the Trump campaign from observing the counting of mail-in ballots, as the president has claimed.In another lawsuit, led in federal court in the state by the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has not argued a case in federal court since the early 1990s when he was a prosecutor, the campaign accused Democrats of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election. No such evidence has emerged in the two weeks since the polls closed.Lawyers for the Democratic Pennsylvania secretary of state, the city of Philadelphia and several counties said the Trump campaign’s arguments lacked any constitutional basis or were rendered irrelevant by the state supreme court decision.They asked US district judge Matthew Brann to throw out the case, calling the allegations “at best, garden-variety irregularities” that would not warrant invalidating Pennsylvania results.The next day, the Trump campaign requested a partial recount in Wisconsin, which Biden won by around 20,000 votes, while in Georgia, which the Democrat won by around 15,000, a hand recount continued towards a midnight deadline.CNN, for one, has declared Biden the winner in Georgia.Neither state was thought likely to flip – and even if they did, their 26 electoral votes combined would not be enough to keep Trump in the White House, requiring a further reverse in Pennsylvania, a big prize with 20 votes, and equally unlikely to be achieved.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a victory he insisted on calling a landslide. Candidates require 270 electoral college votes to win. Trump is also fighting on in Nevada.By continuing to refuse to concede, Trump is holding up transition processes including funding for Biden to build his administration, even as the US flounders amid a coronavirus surge.In a statement announcing the request for recounts in Wisconsin, Trump campaign counsel Jim Troupis said: “The people of Wisconsin deserve to know whether their election processes worked in a legal and transparent way. Regrettably, the integrity of the election results cannot be trusted without a recount in these two counties and uniform enforcement of Wisconsin absentee ballot requirements.”The Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received $3m from the Trump campaign for the partial recount.A full recount would reportedly have cost nearly $8m. Trump continues to seek donations for recount efforts, though it has been widely reported that much such money is being used to pay off campaign debt and to stoke a political action committee formed to tighten Trump’s grip on the Republican party after he is obliged to leave the White House in January.Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud have been rubbished by officials from both parties and mainstream observers, as all moves to stall Biden’s march to victory have failed.In Michigan, Republican officials backed down amid cries of outrageous racism after threatening to block certification of results in Wayne county, the large, majority African American county that incorporates Detroit. Trump praised their blocking attempt on Twitter.After an election race is called for a projected winner in a state, such as by the Associated Press, results still have to be officially certified by state officials.Biden won Michigan by around 346,000 votes.Dave Wasserman, US House editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, said: “It’s time to start calling baseless conspiracies what they are: libellous attacks on the 500,000-plus heroic poll workers and election administrators in every corner of the US who pulled off a successful election amid record-shattering turnout and a global pandemic.”Reverberations also continued from the president’s decision to fire Krebs, one of his own federal appointees.In a statement last week, Cisa, Krebs’s agency, said: “The 3 November election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”In his tweet firing Krebs, Trump claimed the statement was “highly inaccurate”.Schiff, the Democratic House intelligence committee chair, called the firing “pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.Angus King, an independent Maine senator, said: “By firing [Krebs] for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”Krebs said: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020” More

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      in US Politics

      Biden's cabinet could do a lot – if he resists the urge to fill it with 'consensus' picks | Max Moran and Miranda Litwak

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      If this election was the beginning of the end of “the Trump Show,” the writers didn’t pick a very satisfying conclusion. True, despite a deadly pandemic and organized Republican voter suppression, more people turned out than ever before to vote for Joe Biden. But, unless Democrats are successful in Georgia, the Senate will likely still be controlled by Mitch McConnell – a man whose life’s work has been to stifle government action – come 2021. McConnell’s continued power seems to temper any hopes of the bold action we need in this moment.At least, that’s the narrative being pushed by the one group delighted by this outcome: big corporations and Wall Street, who were hoping for a divided government from day one of the 2020 campaign. Bankers celebrated the electoral outcome, telling Vanity Fair: “Wall Street will love it. Are you kidding me? A growth agenda without overburdensome regulation or tax reform? C’mon. Are you kidding me? [T]hey live for fucking gridlock.”For corporate America, divided government is a blessing. A dysfunctional legislature will struggle to pass laws raising corporate taxes or cracking down on corporate malfeasance. But just as importantly, by pushing the narrative that no progressives could ever get anything through a Republican-controlled Senate, corporate executives can position themselves as bipartisan “consensus” picks for powerful cabinet posts and regulatory jobs. In fact, they’re already jockeying for them. Before election results were clear, former Lehman Brothers executive and failed Republican presidential candidate John Kasich immediately chastised the left, claiming progressives nearly cost Biden the election. Kasich, who himself hasn’t won an election in six years and utterly failed to deliver Ohio to Biden, has been angling for a cabinet post for weeks.In reality, corporate executives and lobbyists are only “consensus” cabinet picks among their fellow CEOs and corporate lawyers: by a staggering 2 to 1 margin, voters of all stripes – including Republicans – say that Biden should not hire big business executives to run his government. If democracy means anything in this country – and the 2020 election’s jaw-dropping turnout means the people still believe in democracy – Biden cannot pick a corporate cabinet. It’s perhaps the one issue on which Americans are united.And so long as Biden resists the pressure to sell his executive branch out to the highest bidder, there’s still plenty he can do to improve average people’s lives without trying to appease McConnell.Biden’s Plan B for filling out a cabinet involves the Vacancies Act, which lets the president temporarily make a senior staffer at a given agency the secretary, or bring a different Senate-confirmed individual (like the many Democratic commissioners at independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission) into the cabinet job temporarily. He can also make appointments while the Senate is in recess, as presidents of both parties do all the time. Biden could even force the Senate into recess by playing a bit of constitutional hardball – the kind of hardball McConnell plays constantly.Likewise, corporate America might want you to think that a Republican Senate means that any hope of tackling big business’s abuses – and thus improving working conditions, cleaning air and drinking water, and granting Americans a life of economic dignity – is now gone. These fatalists ask how exactly Biden is supposed to get these policies past McConnell, failing to mention that Biden doesn’t need to.Biden’s treasury department can implement financial regulations to impede investments in the fossil fuel industry and reallocate funds to tackle Covid-19 and provide support to the most harmed Americans. Biden’s justice department can prosecute Big Oil companies or seek breakups of corporate monopolies. Biden’s labor department can enforce OSHA rules and crack down on wage theft like never before, making sure people’s hard-earned wages actually make it into their pockets. His IRS can focus on ensuring the rich pay their fair share, instead of auditing poor Americans making mistakes on their taxes. He can even, with one directive to his acting education secretary, cancel 95% of student loan debt. There are at least 277 actions broadly popular within both wings of the Democratic party which Biden could take on day one of his administration. And he needn’t even walk near a McConnell-controlled Senate to do them.Yet all of these actions depend on Biden appointing committed soldiers for the public good – not corporate allies. A treasury secretary Gina Raimondo would prioritize slashing aid to struggling cities in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as she has in her home state. If ex-Googlers like Roger Ferguson or Eric Schmidt pepper the executive branch, it will undercut the authority of the most important antitrust suit in a generation. Appointing Seth Harris to labor secretary will give the intellectual architect of California’s Prop 22 an insider’s angle to spread pain for gig-economy workers.Stopping these people must be a priority for the Democratic base. Activists can and should make clear to Biden that their repayment for hard work should be a highly-motivated and public interest-minded executive branch.Executive actions represent the best hope for aggressively tackling our many interlinked crises – not to mention the best hope for Biden’s party to stand any chance in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Democrats must have something to show for the trust the American people has placed in them. Failure in the coming years could mean a second Trump term, or worse: a new far-right nationalist who is better organized and more serious than Trump.Biden and the Democrats can only defeat such a threat by showing the American people that, yes, their government is still capable of improving their lives in tangible, substantive ways. Executive authority provides Biden with no shortage of ways to do that – but only if he resists the false “bipartisanship” that corporate lobbyists are furiously pushing across Washington. Such individuals cannot populate a Biden cabinet. More

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      in US Politics

      End the odes to political 'civility'. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate? | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.Biden, committed to re-establishing “normalcy”, will probably rejoice at the prospect of returning to the good old days of chummy bipartisanship. Dianne Feinstein already gave a preview, when she thanked Lindsey Graham for his “leadership” in the plainly illegitimate Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process and literally embraced one of Trump’s worst lackeys. In the coming two to four years, political moderation might be a particularly alluring siren call to a weak Democratic president who may not control the Senate or have a strong majority in the House of Representatives.Here’s the problem, however: “working across the aisle” is not an ideal in itself. If we expect politics to look like an impartial pursuit of the common good or think that there will be consensus if we all follow the rules, as the neoconservative writer Anne Applebaum has suggested, then we are bound to be disappointed over and over. Rather, we must learn to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic forms of political conflict – and properly sanction those engaged in the latter.Polarization is not a given. Culture does not automatically determine politics; we are not fated to debate all issues in terms of cliched contrasts between “flyover country” and “liberal coasts”. Some social scientists like to reduce politics to psychology; they claim that humans are hardwired for “tribalism” or, put less politely, for groups hating each other. That isn’t true. In fact, such accounts are curiously apolitical, as well as ahistorical. They cannot explain why, if tribalism is our universal fate, some democracies miraculously appear to escape it, and why some get by without endless culture wars, even if their internal differences are no smaller than in the US.Polarization isn’t an objectively given reality; it’s a rightwing political project and, not least, it’s big business – just look at the talk radio millionaires. Rightwing populists deepen divisions and reduce all policy questions to questions of cultural belonging. What makes them distinctive is not their criticism of elites, but the invidious suggestion that not every citizen is part of what such politicians often call “the real people”. Trump told four congresswomen to go home to their shitholish countries; his sycophant Jim Jordan tweeted that “Americans love America. They don’t want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco.”This strategy has worked well enough for a Republican party whose economic policies are utterly out of line with what large majorities of Americans actually want. For a counter-majoritarian party of plutocratic populism, riling people up with apocalyptic visions of “real America” being destroyed by black and brown people is not an add-on, but the core mechanism of an electoral outrage-and-grievances machine oiled with resources from the 0.01%. The noise of that machine effectively keeps people distracted from the plutocratic policies most Americans find unappealing.Fierce partisanship is not in itself a symptom of politics gone wrong. On the contrary: we would not need democracy if we did not have deep disagreements and divisions – which are inevitable, as long as we live in a free society. The problem arises when disagreement translates into disrespect. Disrespect doesn’t mean just being impolite; it means denying the standing of particular citizens – and, as a logical next step, actively trying to disenfranchise people. Republicans have been working towards a situation in which a combination of voter suppression and what the philosopher Kate Manne has called “trickle-down aggression” – acts of private political intimidation tacitly endorsed by Trump – shrinks the political power and relevance of many Americans in a way favorable to the interests of the Republican party.None of this is to say that culture is off-limits for democratic conflict. Of course, it’s not always clear how abortion, for instance, is really about “culture”. But even deep moral disagreements can be accommodated in a democracy – provided that both winners and losers have another chance to fight the fight. Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s gloating, losers don’t just “go home”, but get to hold winners accountable and develop systematic policy alternatives. Democracy always allows for second thoughts; it’s only when the stakes become absolutely existential, or religious, that society gets locked in a scorched-earth, zero-sum battle.What if rough play in politics – not pretty, but not illegitimate – becomes truly unfair play? Some theorists think the losing side should sacrifice for the sake of keeping the greater democratic whole together. But democracy cannot mean dividing politics between suckers and scoundrels, as the political scientist Andreas Schedler puts it. Game theorists tell us that we can re-establish proper rule-following by answering every tat with a tit. But responding to unfairness with unfairness might lead to a downward spiral of norms violations; fighting fire with fire could burn down the house as a whole.It is crucial to realize that not all norm violations in political conflict are the same. Not every invention of an insulting nickname on Twitter must be answered with the same childishness (of which even Trumpists must be tired by now). The best answer to suppression of our voters is not somehow keeping out partisans of the other side. Mechanical tit-for-tat retaliation – even if sometimes emotionally satisfying – should be resisted in favor of could be called democracy-preserving or even democracy-enhancing reciprocity: measures the other side won’t like, but which can be justified with genuine democratic principles: such as giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, or abolishing the electoral college.Of course, McConnell sees these proposals as merely a power grab; yet a party that tries to construct new majorities, as opposed to just capturing counter-majoritarian institutions like the supreme court and relying on the votes of what Lindsey Graham once called “angry white guys”, would welcome the contest for new voters. Fair partisan fights can restore democracy, not kitschy appeals to unity and bipartisanship. More