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    Will Donald Trump’s Bad Deals Cost Him the Election?

    Abraham Lincoln is generally credited with a famous adage that you can fool all the people part of the time, or you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time. Until today, it is unclear whether or not Lincoln ever uttered the phrase. In the end, it is irrelevant, except for history buffs. I’m certainly not one of them. I love the saying because it expresses a deeper truth that once again has proven its power to get right to the point — much to the chagrin of Donald Trump.

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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    Throughout his tenure in office, President Donald Trump has mastered the art of hoodwinking and fooling his supporters, mesmerized by his larger-than-life ego, his sloganeering, his ability to promote himself as “one of them,” as the chosen one who would make America great again. Of course, he wasn’t, and he didn’t. And he could have cared less about all these voters who fell for him. And fall they did, and hard.

    Ultimate Populist

    Four years ago, Donald Trump presented himself as the ultimate populist, as the one candidate who listened, who understood, who felt “your pain.” The tragedy is, of course, that those who fell for him did so because they actually did feel pain. A lot of it. Their pain was real, and still is, perhaps even more so than four years ago. It is easy to dismiss Trump’s 2016 supporters as misguided hoopleheads, ignorant and unsophisticated. This is what Hillary Clinton did at the time, and she paid dearly for it.

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    There is a kernel of truth to the disparaging notion of the East Coast elites who are largely clueless with regard to the rest of the country. Otherwise how to explain the wave of journalists from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post rushing to obscure places in flyover country in a quest to find out how “these people” ticked. There is also more than a kernel of truth to the charge that the liberal elite has nothing but disdain if not outright contempt for “ordinary people” and a complete disinterest in their daily struggles to make ends meet. Unfortunately enough, today more than ever over the past few decades, the United States abounds in those who are in this predicament. According to official estimates, already in 2017, more than 50% percent of Americans did not have enough cash to cover a $500 unexpected expense. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, things have hardly improved.

    Trump won in 2016 because he managed to eke out a tiny advantage in critial swing states. Among the most prominent of these were Ohio and Pennsylvania. Once in the heartland of American industrial might, both states were devastated by deindustrialization. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore confronted the American public with the heart-wrenching story of Flint, Michigan, once a major hub of the American automotive industry.

    Flint, however, was only one of many stories of the collapse of the American Dream, the end of an era where Americans still were the most prosperous people on the planet, where anyone who managed to expertly wield a screwdriver could aspire to a middle-class life with a housewife, two children and two cars. As it turned out, Flint was paradigmatic of what had happened throughout the Midwest, from northern Indiana to Ohio to western Pennsylvania.

    American liberals are quite inconsiderate. They have come up with a number of denigrating notions, such as “flyover country” for the vast swath of land between the two coasts. For the states devastated by deindustrialization, the moniker is “Rust Belt.” Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan — all of them are part of the Rust Belt — remnants of a bygone era, mired in nostalgia for a time when work in the steel mills was “recognized as challenging, dangerous, and important.” These were the days when cities, such as Youngstown, Ohio, Flint, Michigan, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, still counted for something, unlike today.

    Failed to Deliver

    Trump may lose tomorrow’s election because he fundamentally swindled his Rust Belt voters, much as he did his coal constituency. In both cases, he promised at the time of his election in 2016 that he would revive ailing industries. He failed to deliver on both counts. Steel and car manufacturing have not come back to the upper Midwest, and coal has virtually collapsed in crucial mining states such as West Virginia.

    To be sure, this was inevitable, given international competitive pressures engendered by globalization. Only, during his 2016 campaign, Trump chose a rhetoric of resentment instead of telling it “as it is.” Among other things, he blamed deindustrialization and massive job losses on unfair competition from low-wage emerging and developing countries that “enriched” themselves “while leaving the United States littered with abandoned factories and underemployed workers.”

    Not surprisingly, Trump’s rhetoric found open ears and minds among working-class communities in the Midwest hit hard by offshoring and deindustrialization. And for good reasons: Ordinary people could care less about the dynamics of international commodity markets, the profit margins of large corporations, shareholder value or the pressures exerted by financial markets. What they care about is primarily their ability to put food on the table, their concern that their children will lead a better life, and their concrete worries about the future. What they care about is that good-paying jobs return to their communities. This is what Trump promised in 2016.  This is what he failed to deliver.

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    Trump’s working-class constituency should have taken notice as early as 2017 when the president sought “job-creation advice” from the leaders of corporations that were shedding thousands of workers as they moved production abroad to Mexico, India, China and elsewhere. In fact, as a recent Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch report revealed, during Trump’s nearly four-year tenure, more than 200,000 workers lost their jobs as a result of corporate offshoring. Altogether, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to trade during his presidency.

    To add insult to injury, about “one of every four taxpayers’ dollars spent by the federal government on procurement contracts during the Trump administration went to the pockets of companies that offshored American jobs during his administration.” In fact, half of the top 10 recipients of public contracts were companies that were offshoring jobs during Trump’s tenure.” Trump also did little to dissuade corporations from continuing to close down factories in the American “heartland.”

    Decline

    Take the case of Youngstown, Ohio, one of Trump’s campaign hotspots in 2016 and one of those industrial cities where many former Democrats switched to Donald Trump. Once a flourishing industrial city, by the turn of the new century, it was little more than a shadow of its former self. Youngstown’s decline started in the late 1970s with the collapse of the steel industry. In the years that followed, the region lost more than 50,000 jobs. It never recovered. In the first decade of the 21st century, the region saw the largest population decline of any of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. By 2018, it was among the fastest-shrinking cities in the United States.

    In late 2018, General Motors (GM) announced it would shut down its plant in the region, leaving 1,500 workers without a job. This came in addition to some 3,000 workers that had been let go since 2017. In 2016, some 40% of unionized auto workers (UAW) had voted for Trump. Yet when UAW leaders appealed to Trump to save their plant, he did not respond. When he finally met with GM’s CEO, she noted that the only thing that concerned her was “shareholder value.” Shareholders appreciated her determination. In late 2018, the industry’s leading trade magazine named her, for the second time, “Industry Leader of the Year.” So much for Trump’s heartfelt concern for the plight of ordinary American workers.

    And then there is coal. In 2017, a few days after taking office, Trump praised “beautiful clean coal” and viewed his administration was “going to put our miners back to work. Miners are going back to work. Miners are going back to work, folks. Sorry to tell you that, but they’re going back to work.” They didn’t. On the contrary, under Trump, the coal industry has virtually collapsed. By early 2020, not least as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were “more job losses and mine closures in the coal industry than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower was president 60 years ago, and despite Donald Trump’s fervent promises to revive the coal sector.”

    This has been good news for the environment, but bad news for coal miners. The reality is, coal is one of the most toxic and harmful sources of energy — nothing beautiful or clean about it. The burning of massive amounts of coal in Siberia some 250 million years ago caused the most extensive extinction of living species in our planet’s history, wiping out 96% of all marine species and around 70% of terrestrial vertebrates. Of course, coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and elsewhere could care less what happened some 250 million years ago. What concerns them is the fact that over the past four years, the source of their livelihood has virtually disappeared under their feet, Trump’s assurances notwithstanding.

    A Bad Deal

    And yet, some voters in West Virginia, the Appalachian state hit particularly hard by the collapse of coal, still maintained their loyalty to a president who had made boisterous promises and delivered little, if not nothing. Attracted by his “America First” rhetoric and his stance on abortion, they continued to support Trump as “the only one standing in the way of the entire industry closing down.” At the same time, they seemed more intent on blaming their predicament on those liberals harping on about climate change than on embracing policy options propagating a reasonable alternative to coal.  

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    One way Trump sought to make good on his promises is protectionism. By now, the story is familiar, particularly with respect to Trump’s trade war with China. Hardly surprising, the most important target of American protectionism was steel. By raising tariffs on steel — under the guise of security considerations — Trump intended to shield domestic producers against international competition and allow them to raise their prices. The policy was a great success. According to informed calculations, the tariff did raise the price of domestic steel considerably, boosting the earnings of the US steel industry and creating some 8,700 new jobs. At the same time, higher prices pushed up the costs for steel users by a whopping $5.6 billion. This meant that steel users had to “pay an extra $650,000 for each job created” in the steel industry. The art of the bad deal.

    Trump promoted himself in 2016 as a savvy businessman with vast experience in the art of the deal. As it turned out, his deal-making skills were more hot air than reality. Esquire magazine explored the huge gap between claim and reality as early as mid-2018, suggesting that “maybe the president isn’t actually that good a negotiator and/or businessman.” There was “abundant evidence,” the article charged, “that Trump, the consummate tough guy, often comes off worse in negotiations because he doesn’t actually know any details about the issues at hand and actually does not like confrontations.”

    The disastrous course of Trumpian brinkmanship in his confrontation with China was glaring proof of Trump’s ineptness — with dramatic consequences. One of the sectors affected by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports were health-related goods, comprising a quarter of all imported medical products. Trump slapped tariffs on nearly $5 billion of US medical imports from China. With the global supply of medical wares drying up at the beginning of the pandemic, the United States faced serious shortages of vital medical equipment at a time it needed it most, partially crippling the country’s ability to confront the pandemic.

    To be sure, there are many reasons Donald Trump may lose the election. His letting down of his core constituencies in the Rust Belt is only one of many. At the moment, polling shows Trump’s challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, leading in the critical Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with the two currently tied in Ohio. In-depth studies over the next few weeks and months will undoubtedly reveal whether Trump lost support among major constituencies that four years earlier had been seduced by his rhetoric and personal style. In the end, however, Lincoln’s purported phrase may once again prove its worth. After all, you can’t fool all people all of the time, not even all of your former supporters.

    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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    Working-Class America Needs Real Change, Not Slogans

    In August, Joe Biden addressed the Democratic National Convention as he accepted his party’s nomination to run for president. During his speech, Biden framed the election on November 3 as a battle for the “soul of America.” The former vice president depicted the urgency of the moment as he saw it: that the American people have a critical choice to make in an election that carries great social, political and economic implications.

    However, Biden’s use of the word “soul” is not new to American political discourse, according to historian Jon Meacham. Behind Biden’s message is an appeal to euro-centric principles or certain traditions attempting to underscore the reality that the US political and economic system is broken — dividing people culturally and socially along the way. Biden claims our beliefs, values and political norms have been dismantled, corrupted and co-opted by those who either do not understand them, take them for granted or perhaps couldn’t care less about them for the sake of their interests.

    360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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    The blame is placed on President Donald Trump and his associates at home and abroad for good reasons. Trump and his ilk have distorted or corrupted liberal traditions, republican citizenship and democratic institutions and, at the same time, they have disregarded individual rights, civic fairness and human decency.

    Trump has wrought a new divisive politics, from his self-serving slogans (“Make America Great Again” to “Keep America Great”) and rhetorical tweet storms to his elite-centered social policies. Together, this has ushered into the mainstream of American life radical right-wing ideas, extra racial and immigrant animus, and anti-media hostility. These divisions have reached unimaginable heights, with dire consequences reflected further in Trump’s and the Republicans’ lack of leadership around the coronavirus pandemic, racial and social justice, the homelessness crisis and rising unemployment, among others.  

    Both Trump and Biden are operating within a symbolic/performative political frame that supposedly addresses the real needs of the American working people. Yet the competing slogans and the performative politics we have witnessed over the past few months have done more to perpetuate the bitter partisanship keeping us “trampling on each other for our scraps of bread,” as E.L. Doctorow pointed out in 1992. So, what we instead need is a transformative (redistributive) politics that directly answers the complex quotidian concerns of the majority working-class people across race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and civic or legal status now and after the election.

    Sloganism and Performative Politics

    American author William Safire once wrote that slogans can serve as a “rallying cry” or a “catchphrase” that often “crystallizes an idea” or “defines an issue.” Most importantly, according to Safire, some slogans even “thrill, exhort and inspire” people into action. Sloganism has become an American neoliberal ideological tool and strategic marketing imperative that guides both the Republican and Democratic parties, especially during presidential elections.

    The 2020 election seems different because there is more urgency to win at any cost, even at the expense of democracy itself, from both major parties and their supporters. American voters seem to gravitate more to familiar or comfortable slogans, without critically assessing the purpose or the message behind them. Many lose themselves in the symbols and patriotic images that slogans invoke. Even Biden seems to use a “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” as both aspirational and inspirational, if not transformational.

    These slogans and the broader performative electoral context that gives rise to them obscure the political and economic structures creating and sustaining the underlying problems facing the working class. This includes wealth inequality, lack of labor and political power, declining wages, unemployment, affordable housing issues and limited access to quality health care. Taken together, all of this makes many Americans more vulnerable during public health crises, environmental disasters and economic downturns.

    What Forms Transformative Politics Take Also Matters

    We need to consider the forms of transformative politics that Trump, as the incumbent president, has engaged in that run counter to his “Keep America Great” slogan. Trump’s housing policy, for example, is not based on what the working class need, especially in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. His slogan does nothing to help those in need of affording housing, rent control and extended eviction moratoriums.

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    Trump’s proposed federal budgets and other policies on public and assisted housing reflect his real intentions. Yet his form of transformative politics was evident just a few years ago, too. “Trump’s administration has proposed legislation that would sharply raise rents for tenants in public and other federally subsidized housing,” wrote Thomas J. Waters back in 2018. Regarding the economy, this is what Trump’s transformative politics under his slogan “Keep America Great” looks like, according to Jerry White: “While tens of millions of people are confronting the worst economic and social crisis since the Great Depression, the multitrillion-dollar CARES Act bailout for Wall Street has led to booming bank profits. Goldman Sachs on [October 14] announced that its third-quarter profit nearly doubled to $3.62 billion.”

    President Trump’s actions with failing to control the spread of the coronavirus are as irresponsible as his politics, economic views and policy positions. Trump used taxpayer-funded hospital services at Walter Reed Medical Center to “heal” from the COVID-19 disease, while ordinary Americans who do not have access to such quality services — despite paying taxes — die by the hundreds of thousands. Other Republicans have been irresponsible too. This is not what Americans want at any level of government.

    Another way of looking at the impact of Trump’s form of transformative politics is his federal judge appointments, including the placement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Federal Circuit to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Her place in the nation’s highest court has the potential of negatively transforming the lives of millions of Americans. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse argued in a recent statement that the effects of replacing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg with Barrett would eliminate many people’s access to health care. Moreover, Justice Barrett would signify a major shift in the court’s ideological makeup with transformative political, social and economic consequences.

    Barrett, with her ultra-conservative credentials and originalist judicial philosophy, could play a role in overturning Roe v. Wade, a 1973 Supreme Court case to protect women’s reproductive rights, including access to abortion. Her appointment could also lead to the elimination of the Affordable Care Act, which protects over 20 million people with preexisting medical conditions. Most importantly, with another conservative justice in the court, Trump could secure an election victory by disqualifying mail-in ballots and allowing restrictive voting tactics (reducing drop-boxes, for instance) with impunity.

    On voting rights and the role Barrett may play on any potential challenge to the election outcome, Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman observes: “President Trump has explicitly said that he wants the Supreme Court to look at the ballots. So, everything about Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination is illegitimate, but it’s especially illegitimate if Trump wants to get her on there so that he can install himself in a second term.” This form of transformative politics in the name of “keeping America great” would thus undermine the constitutional rights and civil liberties of all Americans, eroding the underlying political culture that is often ingrained since childhood, and thus further deteriorating American voters’ trust in their democratic institutions.

    In terms of protecting workers and industries, Trump has failed to fulfill his promises as his 2016 slogan, “Make America Great Again,” suggested. Yet he continues to make similar arguments about bringing back manufacturing jobs and providing health care to working-class Americans. In reality, Trump’s policies have led to more offshore jobs than ever before.

    Finally, although Trump does not possess a presidential temperament that has been a requirement since at least the 1960s, he has remained popular among many within the Rust Belt states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, though that could change). This is due to his performative nature as a reality-TV celebrity and, of course, his longstanding image as a so-called successful businessman, despite recent revelations about his failure to pay income taxes (only $750 in 2017 and 2019) because he lost more money than he made in the past 15 years.

    Importance of Class Solidarity for Transformative Politics

    What are the real concerns of American voters who are in the majority working class? Although some people are convinced by catchy slogans and performative politics, most working-class Americans expect real reforms in the short and long terms. Ed Yong of The Atlantic recently pointed out, “Showiness is often mistaken for effectiveness.”

    Americans want real redistributive policies and need even more critical structural changes around issues like education reform, police brutality, affordable housing, employment opportunities, a living wage, health care, infrastructure and taxation, among others. Framing the election in either rhetorical, symbolic or moralistic terms only goes so far in the voters’ minds. According to the Pew Research Center, the economy (79%), health care (68%), Supreme Court nominations (64%), the coronavirus outbreak (62%) and violent crime (59%) are the most important issues for registered voters this year.

    Policies that impact real people are the key to creating universal and transformative changes that will benefit all, if not most Americans. As Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project suggests: “Given the demographic composition of the different economic classes, it really is the case that class-based wealth redistribution will also heavily reduce the disparities between different demographic groups.” He adds that every “$1 redistributed from the top 10 percent to the bottom 50 percent reduces the class gap between those groups by $2 while also reducing the white/black gap by 52 cents, the old/young gap by 57 cents, and the college/high-school gap by 75 cents. This kind of leveling is where our focus should be.”

    Regrettably, we have seen an increase in symbolic politics from both liberals and conservatives over the past several years that ignore or down-play voters’ demand for transformative (redistributive) politics. Both Trump and Biden have remained within the same neoliberal capitalist framework where concerns over racial, class-based inequalities are outdone by superfluous debates over removing Confederate flags and monuments of racist historical figures. Less debated are issues dealing with demilitarizing police departments and properly funding public schools.

    As Professor Toure Reed of Illinois State University recently wrote: “For the past several decades now, liberals and conservatives alike have been disposed to view racial inequality through one of two racialist frames: the ingrained, if not inborn cultural deficiencies of black and brown poor people; or the ingrained, if not inborn racism of whites. The political-economic underpinnings of inequality, however, have been of little interest to either Democrats or Republicans.”  

    Yet economic redistribution is rarely, if ever, seriously discussed in public, the media or even in academia. Why? Because that would force both Democrats and Republicans — who are often beholden to Wall Street firms, K-Street lobbyists and the broader investor class — to reveal positions, strategies and policies that produce the forms and types of racial and wealth inequalities that they ought to be addressing for the betterment of all Americans. But to do so means potentially putting themselves and their supporters out of business. Lastly, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. show that a race-only policy focus or using race as a proxy measure, especially in the medical industry, may lead to dire real-world consequences for working-class communities across race and other categories of ascriptive difference.

    Of course, if we were to focus on a broad class analysis (as measured by an individual’s relational position within a power structure that determines who produces what goods and services and when), that would put the neoliberal capitalist and political establishment in jeopardy of being closely scrutinized by those critical of the elite/investor class’ malfeasance, which is something that mega corporations, media conglomerates and the big pharmaceutical industry, among others, do not want.

    This may partly explain why Trump — and, at times, Biden — would rather engage in performative politics and empty promises than deal directly with what ails most of the poor and working-class people, who are often essential workers making the neoliberal capitalist system work. It is easier to frame things with slogans like “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” and “Keep America Great” than talk about wealth redistribution, single-payer universal health care, a Green New Deal and workers’ rights.

    There is a big difference between what Trump has accomplished — and for whom — over these past four years and what Biden stands for and promises if elected president. Despite Trump’s claims that Biden is a radical social democrat, the former vice president’s record over the past 40 years shows he is neither a radical nor a social democrat. At best, Biden is a moderate liberal with certain progressive tendencies. 

    Within this context, Biden has tried to navigate and balance competing interests within the Democratic Party. There has been tension between the progressives represented by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and “The Squad” and Biden’s own Clinton-Obama neoliberal establishment (Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer). Biden’s historic choice of Senator Kamala Harris, who is the first woman of Indian and Jamaican descent on any major party ticket, is supposed to appease the progressive wing while also satisfy the neoliberal Democratic establishment.

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    Yet Harris on the ticket would also appeal to those moderates in the Republican Party who want to return to pre-Trump norms. However, this moderate-to-liberal past has been distorted by a misguided and opportunistic Trump who continues spreading falsehoods and lies about Biden’s record, vision and plans.

    At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump said: “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” Later, he offered a different picture to counter Biden’s “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” slogan. While Biden’s version offers a hopeful message, Trump provides a dire and apocalyptic vision of an America under a Biden-Harris administration. “Joe Biden is not the savior of America’s soul — he is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness,” Trump said.

    Nevertheless, the president failed to heed his own messaging. His political short-sidedness has once again brewed controversy. Trump has called service members or those who lost their lives at war “losers” and “suckers.” Jeffrey Goldberg, while referring to John Kelly’s reaction to Trump’s off-putting questions and comments about US soldiers, wrote, “Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.” Trump’s performative politics then backfired because the commander-in-chief is expected to respect service members and their families, not insult them.

    Trump has lost the support of many military families despite his speeches otherwise during the most important election in a generation. Unfortunately, this attitude from the president is not new and reflects his well-known tendency toward self-absorption and self-imagery that places the well-being of others, including the entire country, in a secondary position.

    This attitude endangers the men and women serving in the military at home and abroad. It weakens the image of the military and the working-class citizens who volunteer to serve in that capacity for often economic reasons, which is something Trump himself avoided during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth captured Trump and his position well when she called the president the “coward in chief” during an interview with MSNBC in September.

    Transformative Politics Viewed From Likely Voters’ Perspective

    Whether Trump’s political strategy of invoking fear of a Biden-Harris administration proves effective, only time will tell. Yet, according to the latest national polls of likely voters presented by FiveThirtyEight, Biden is running ahead of Trump. The Quinnipiac University’s state-by-state polls also show Biden leading in key swing states (including Georgia), though Florida is too close to call either way, as per the latest figures.

    The regional or state-by-state approach to understand likely voters should be our focus instead of the national polls. The latter are usually conflated by Democratic likely voters in California, New York and New England states, which masks the fact that the Electoral College historically determines the presidency, not the national popular vote. This makes both Midwestern swing states — Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — as well as Pennsylvania pivotal grounds in presidential elections. 

    Several other factors must be taken into consideration in this most critically important election. The debate over absentee ballots, vote-by-mail and early voting versus in-person, same-day voting has increased over the past few weeks amidst the rising numbers of COVID-19 infections.

    Most likely Republican voters (Trump supporters, presumably) have said they will vote on Election Day (70%), while those who lean Democratic have said almost the inverse: they will vote early and by-mail/absentee ballot (74%). Still, Republican Party officials have begun to make strides toward convincing many of their supporters to reconsider the vote-by-mail or absentee ballot option over in-person voting, attempting to keep up with the Democrats while contradicting President Trump’s claims about the potential corruption and voter fraud of the mail-in ballot process. Trump’s comments have been proven false by many election experts.

    Voting in the United States is controlled and managed by local and states officials, while the federal government through the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) regulates, administers and enforces federal campaign finance laws. The Trump administration and the Republican Party have been engaged in voter suppression tactics that further erode Americans’ views and confidence in long-standing democratic practices and institutions. Yet potential voter intimidation at voting places and the elimination of drop-off boxes are two more reasons to be vigilant.

    A Transformative Paradigm Shift in the Presidential Election Cycle

    American poor and working-class people demand better from a republic that promotes freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. These standards require a political and economic system that provides stable employment, a living wage, modern infrastructure, access to a fast internet connection, quality health care for all, affordable and modern housing and more. This means real transformative elections and politics.

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    In the end, the American voter is expected to make an important choice on which party will bring about those kinds of transformative changes. Many states now provide a variety of voting options because of the pandemic. At the time of publishing, over 75 million people have voted either early in person or by mail. An increase in early voter turnout should lead to a paradigm shift in the ways we talk about voter participation and how states deal with presidential elections in the future. Although the increase in mail-in and absentee ballots is due to circumstances around the COVID-19 pandemic, the additional voting options beyond the traditional in-person method should be made permanent, especially if we want to uphold the ideals of freedom, equality, community and democracy in the US.

    Media, social commentators, scholars and political pundits alike need to talk less about Election Day that is based on anachronistic constitutional rules and norms and more about a fall election quarter where registered voters often begin casting ballots as early as September in some states. This transformative paradigm shift will, in turn, lead to less pressure in having to declare a winner on election night and, more importantly, prevent President Trump and others in the future from claiming that the election is rigged, corrupt and illegitimate or even unconstitutional.

    What will become the new normal in American political and social life? Will we be a liberal, social or racial democracy? Will we become a real democracy based on working-class solidarity across races and less on racial divisions across and between classes? These are some of the most critical questions of our time that should keep us busy in trying to hold elected officials, the media and ourselves accountable if we want to keep any semblance of our republic intact.

    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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    Macron Claims Islam Is in “Crisis.” Erdogan Disagrees

    In France, Samuel Paty was beheaded on October 16 near Paris. He was a history teacher who had shown caricatures of Prophet Muhammad to his students in a lesson on freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

    Paty’s killer, Abdullakh Anzorov, is an 18-year-old of Chechen origin. He arrived in France at the age of 6 as a refugee and was granted asylum. In an audio message in Russian, Anzorov claimed to have “avenged the prophet” whom Paty had portrayed “in an insulting way.” Before he was murdered, Paty was the victim of an online hate campaign orchestrated by the father of a student who reportedly might not even have been in the class.

    As Agnès Poirier wrote in The Guardian, since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, the French seem to be “living [their] lives between terrorist assaults.” Since then, she writes, “Islamists in France have targeted and murdered journalists, cartoonists, policemen and women, soldiers, Jews, young people at a concert, football fans, families at a Bastille Day fireworks show, an 86-year-old priest celebrating mass in his little Normandy church, tourists at a Christmas market… the list goes on.”

    Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

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    Yet Paty’s killing has touched a chord. Arguably, no country venerates its history teachers more than France. After defeat against Prince Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia in 1870, the Third Republic emerged. In the 1880s, it took away education from the Catholic Church, making it free, mandatory and secular. Poirier observes that the “peaceful infantry of teachers” has since “been the bedrock of the French republic.”

    She poignantly points out that the first generations of teachers were nicknamed “the Black Hussars of the Republic” because they had to battle the local priest for influence. Thanks to these teachers, as per Poirier, “religion was eventually relegated to the spiritual realm.” More than others, history teachers are the keepers of the revolutionary and republican flame, exposing young minds to Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot et al and emancipating their thinking.

    French President Emmanuel Macron called the brutal beheading an “Islamist terrorist attack.” At a ceremony at Sorbonne University, he conferred the Légion d’honneur on Paty. Macron awarded France’s highest honor posthumously to the late history teacher because he died for trying to explain freedom of speech.

    Macron has since defended the right of French citizens to publish anything, howsoever offensive others might find that to be. Earlier this month, he claimed, “Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country.” His comments enraged many Muslims inside and outside France.

    Paty’s killing has shaken France to the core. After more than a century, religion is back to the forefront in the country. This time, it is not Catholicism but Islam.

    A History of Blood and Gore

    At the heart of the matter is a simple question: Does Islam lead to violence and terrorism? Many Islamic scholars and political analysts argue in the negative. After all, the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno and launched the Inquisition. Jews fled Spain to find refuge in Ottoman lands. These authors take the contrarian view that Islam can only be a religion of peace after it conquers the world and establishes a supremacy of sharia.

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    Writing about Islam’s links to violence and terrorism is sensitive and controversial. There are nuances to be sure. However, most scholars know fully well that Islam has a just war theory. It rests on the assumption that justice would not be served unless the will of Allah is established all over the world. As per this theory, non-believers in Islam have three choices.

    First, they can convert to Islam and become part of the umma, the global community of Muslims who recognize there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his final messenger. Second, they can refuse to submit to Allah, but they must then flee their homes or face the sword. Third, they can surrender to Muslims and pay jizya, a poll tox for non-Muslims in a state run according to Islamic principles.

    Both Sunnis and Shias prize jihad, which denotes both personal struggle and just war. Both Sunnis and Shias believe that jihad is the duty of an Islamic state, should certain conditions arise. There is little daylight between Sunnis and Shias on their ideas of jihad against non-believers. Many Muslim jurists considered the non-acceptance of Islam by non-Muslims an act of aggression that had to be countered through jihad. Like Christianity, Islam lays claim to universality and jihad is its version of a crusade.

    Arguably, the most interesting reform of Islamic law occurred when Arabs conquered Sindh in the eighth century. For the first time, Islam encountered Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. A puritanical Abrahamic faith encountered much older spiritual traditions of the Indus and Gangetic river basins. These pagan polytheists were not covered by the Quran. Its verses recognized Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and the imprecisely defined Sabians. These religions are based on divine revelations and came to be known as Ahl al-Kitab, the People of the Book.

    The Indo-Gangetic spiritual traditions were clearly not the People of the Book. When Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, he approached the then-caliph in Damascus for how to deal with Indian polytheists. The fuqaha (Islamic jurists) and the ulema (clergy) in Damascus ruled that these new religions ultimately believed in the very same god as Muslims and the People of the Book. Therefore, through the exercise of qiyas — analogical reasoning as applied to the deduction of Islamic juridical principles — these non-Muslim Sindhis were to be treated as protected minorities if they paid the jizya.

    As waves of Muslim invaders came to the Indian subcontinent, conversion took place both through peaceful and violent means. Lower-caste Hindus turned to Islam because it offered a greater sense of community, charity for the poor and egalitarianism. Yet violence was par for the course too. Idols were smashed, temples desecrated and local communities slaughtered.

    Muslims who claim that theirs is a religion of peace could do well to remember that even the golden age of Islam is full of blood. The first three caliphs were assassinated. Ali ibn Abi Talib and Khalid ibn al-Walid were brave generals who led aggressive armies and did not hesitate to spill blood.

    The Battle of Karbala exemplifies the violence that has accompanied Islam from its early days. In 680, Umayyad Caliph Yazid I’s troops massacred the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph. For Shias, it remains an annual holy day of public mourning. This was a bloodthirsty struggle for succession and has led to a Shia-Sunni divide that runs deep to this day.

    The Umayyad Empire’s extravagance and decadence led to a successful Abbasid rebellion in 750. The victors invited over 80 Umayyad family members to a grand feast on the pretext of reconciliation. In reality, this feat was the infamous Banquet of Blood in which the Umayyads were killed in cold blood. Abd al-Rahman I was the only Umayyad who escaped, and he fled all the way to Spain to set up the kingdom of al-Andalus.

    Violence in Modern Times

    Over time, Arab rule became benign. There is a strong argument to be made that Muslim rule was more tolerant than Christian rule in many matters. Minorities who paid jizya carried on with their business and way of life. The Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals governed multi-ethnic empires even as Europe imploded into religious wars.

    Once Europe took to technological, industrial and military innovation, the rest of the world fell under its sway. Tottering Muslim empires were no exception. This defeat still rankles among many Muslims. Many have turned inward and hark back to a glory period of Islamic dominance. They dream of the days when Muslim armies swept all before them, including Jerusalem in 1187 or Constantinople in 1453.

    After World War II, European colonial rule has been replaced by American economic domination. Oil was discovered in key parts of the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, it was Western companies that took much of the profits. Till today, the price of oil is denominated in dollars. The formation and domination of Israel in the Middle East added to this Muslim angst. In 1979, a millenarian revolution succeeded in Iran. In the same year, militants seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca, and it took two weeks of pitched battles for Saudi forces to regain control. The militants might have lost, but Saudi Arabia emulated Iran in hardening sharia and giving more power to the ulema.

    In Iran, the new regime killed thousands who did not agree with it. They included liberals and leftists. Led by hardline clerics, the Iranian regime liquidated the minority Bahai sect in Iran. It set out to export its Islamic revolution. In response, the Saudis began to export their own puritanical Wahhabi Islam. Saudi money poured all the way from Indonesia and India to Bosnia and Chechnya.

    This took place at the height of the Cold War. This was a time when the West in general and Washington in particular were terrified of the Soviet Union. The fear of communism led Americans to intervene in Iran, Vietnam and elsewhere. They made a Faustian pact with militant Islam. The CIA worked with god-fearing Islamists to fight godless communists. These Islamists went on to become a trusty sword arm for the US against the communist menace of the Soviet Union. Nowhere was this best exemplified than the jihad Americans funded in Afghanistan against the Soviets. As is hilariously captured in Charlie Wilson’s War, the Saudis matched the Americans dollar for dollar.

    Eventually, the Soviet Union fell and the West won. As nationalism, socialism and pan-Arabism stood discredited, the battle-hardened jihadis stood ready to take their place. Conservative, fundamentalist, extreme and radical Islamists soon found their spot in the sun. The Molotov cocktail of violence and terrorism spread throughout Muslim societies. Disgruntled young Muslim men in the West found this cocktail particularly irresistible. In the post-9/11 world, there is a mountain of literature that chronicles all this and more.

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    American action after the attacks on September 11, 2001, have strengthened rather than weakened this culture of violence and terrorism. George W. Bush’s war on terror has proved an unmitigated disaster. In 2003, the Americans unleashed chaos in Iraq by dismantling the Baathist regime and leaving nothing in its place. A Shia-Sunni civil war followed. Iran became a touch too powerful in Iraq. Sunnis who had been dominant during the Baathist era under Saddam Hussein were left leaderless and felt marginalized. In the aftermath, the Islamic State emerged in the vacuum. Syria imploded as well and the Sykes-Picot construct collapsed. The Islamic State’s messianic message of violence and terrorism not only garnered local support, but it also drew in recruits from Europe, South Asia and elsewhere.

    Eventually, Syria, Iran and Russia allied together even as the UK and the US collaborated quietly to crush the Islamic State. They were able to destroy it militarily, but radical Islamist ideology lives on. It is the same ideology that powered the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan jihad and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Now, it is inspiring Anzorovs to behead Patys.

    A Clash of Cultures

    In the aftermath of Paty’s beheading, France and Turkey have fallen out. Macron has championed freedom of expression, which includes the liberty of publishing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. Like many of his countrymen, Macron sees freedom of expression as an essential part of France’s secular values. Laïcité, the French version of secularism, is enshrined in the very first article of the constitution. It declares, “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” Macron has pledged to “to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.”

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes objection to Macron’s position. He believes that there must be limits to freedom of expression. With millions of Muslims in France and over a billion around the world, the French should desist from insulting Prophet Muhammad. Erdogan sees Macron as having a problem with Islam and Muslims. In a speech, the Turkish leader declared, “Macron needs treatment on a mental level.” In response, France has said Erdogan’s comments are unacceptable and recalled its ambassador to Turkey.

    A new kind of Islamism has now entered the scene. Unlike clerics in Iran or royals in Saudi Arabia, Erdogan is a democratically elected leader. Ironically, he rose to power in Turkey thanks to the country’s growing democratization, which in turn was fueled by its quest to join the European Union. In Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkey, the Islamist Erdogan seized power and brought in a very different vision for the future.

    Erdogan jettisoned Ataturk’s Europeanization of Turkey. Instead, he decided to become the popular, democratic voice for Islam. He has championed causes like Palestine, Kashmir and Xinjiang that resonate with Muslims worldwide. Even as the Turkish economy stumbles, Erdogan is taking on Macron as a defender of Islam. Erdogan gains inspiration from the Ottoman Empire. Until a century ago, the Ottoman sultan was also the caliph, the spiritual leader of the Sunni world. In fact, Mahatma Gandhi’s first mass movement in 1919 demanded the restoration of the Ottoman caliphate.

    President Erdogan wants to bring back Ottoman cultural glory to Turkey. One by one, he is smashing up the symbols of secular Turkey. A few years ago, Erdogan built a 1,000-room white palace on 50 acres of Ataturk Forest Farm, breaking environmental codes and contravening court orders. On July 10, 2020, he reversed the 1934 decision to convert Hagia Sophia into a museum. Now, this architectural marvel is a mosque again.

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    France is a land of joie de vivre, which favors bikinis over burkinis. Laïcité emerged after a bitter struggle with the Catholic Church, is central to the republic and is an article of faith. In contrast, Turkey is rolling back Ataturk’s version of laïcité. Erdogan is striving to emerge as the popular Islamic leader who takes on the West, India and even China. He has thus thrown the gauntlet to Macron.

    Erdogan has geopolitical reasons to rile Macron. Turkey and France are on opposing sides in Libya’s civil war as well as the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. France has deployed jets and frigates to counter Turkish oil and gas exploration in disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, the two countries are squaring off on religion.

    The Turkish president is not alone in criticizing Macron. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has also accused Macron of “attacking Islam.” Erdogan is urging a boycott of French goods. Many others in the Muslim world are also calling for such a boycott. Some shops in Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar have already removed French products. Protests have broken out in Libya, Syria and Gaza.

    Secularism vs. Faith

    Erdogan’s actions and the support they have garnered raise uncomfortable questions. In the Westphalian system of nation-states, what right does he have to tell Macron how to run his country? More importantly, his rhetoric raises a key question about the world. Who decides what is offensive? Can a popularly elected leader of a former imperial power speak up for co-religionists to another former imperial power or anyone else? If so, are we seeing a drift toward Samuel Huntington’s famous proposition about a clash of civilizations?

    This question assumes importance in the light of the past. When Spanish conquistadores took over Latin America, they did not just rape, torture and kill. They killed the local gods and ensured the triumph of the Christian one. In “Things Fall Apart,” the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe chronicles how Christianity went hand in hand with colonization in Africa. In India, Muslim invaders sacked temples. In Iran, Safavids destroyed Sunni mosques and converted them into Shia ones. In recent years, many have seen secularism as a way out of this maze of centuries-old religious conflict.

    Intellectually, secularism is the legacy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It involves the shrinking of religion from the public to the private sphere. After all, religious wars tore apart Europe for more than a century and a half. Today, France is thankfully not ruled according to l’ancien regime’s dictum of “un roi, une foi, une loi” (one king, one faith, one law). Unlike Huguenots, Muslims have not been subjected to St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Laïcité may not be perfect, but it is much better than the alternative.

    Unfortunately, Muslim societies have failed to embrace secularism. From Indonesia and Pakistan to Iran and Turkey, there is a disturbing intolerance afoot. Of course, the West fanned the flames, but now this conflagration inspired by religion is singeing societies, states and even the international order. Earlier this year, the Islamic State group massacred Sikhs in Kabul. By September, most of the Hindus and Sikhs had left Afghanistan. It is important to note that these communities had lived in Afghanistan for centuries and even stayed on during the heydays of the Taliban.

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of American-style capitalism to provide prosperity or opportunity, people are turning again to religion. On October 22, a Polish court banned almost all abortions. In Eastern Europe and Russia, the influence of the church has been increasing. Even benign Buddhists have turned malign and are targeting minorities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Yet the scale of what is going on in the Muslim world is different. There are tectonic shifts underway from Islamabad to Istanbul that are disturbing. Minorities are fleeing Muslim countries and radical Islamists like Anzorov are taking to the sword.

    Does Macron have a point? Is Islam truly in crisis?

    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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    David Gelernter: The Making of a Trumpista

    After four years of the Trump presidency, it is still not entirely clear why a substantial number of voters in 2016 cast their ballots for a candidate who made it glaringly obvious that he lacked many of the most basic character traits needed to qualify for America’s highest political office. At the end of his tenure, fraught with some of the worst incidences of corruption, deceit and plain incompetence, it boggles the mind why anyone in their right mind would still support Donald Trump. Yet according to the most recent polls, around 40% of eligible voters still do.

    In a previous article, I have tried to explain why evangelicals and large parts of traditional Catholics have to a large degree stuck with Trump, despite his obvious moral flaws which are fundamentally at odds with the teachings of the Bible. Apparently, they don’t really care, as long as Trump pretends to take their concerns seriously. This means restoring Christianity’s traditional central role in American society, “valorizing” Christian beliefs too long subjected to ridicule and disdain, and actively promoting the one issue most important to them: the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which put American women in a position where they were free to choose what to do with their bodies.

    The Trump Tsunami: An End of American Conservatism?

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    Numerous observers have written about the second group of Trump supporters, the white supremacists — white voters obsessed with, and anxious about, the rapidly changing composition of America’s population. They could probably care less about abortion, given the fact that abortion is significantly more prevalent among African American than white women. In fact, in 2008, abortion rates among black women were five times as high as among white women; among Hispanic women, twice as high. For hardcore white supremacists, this obviously is good news, given their fears of being “out-birthed” by non-whites. Trump’s “nudge nudge, wink wink” when it came to the white supremacist Proud Boys thugs during the first debate with Joe Biden was a clear appeal to the white supremacist vote.

     American Entropy

    Little has been written about a third group, which is perhaps the most interesting of all, given their ideational stance, which eludes easy classification. One of its most paradigmatic representatives, I would suggest, is David Gelernter, a brilliant professor of computer science at Yale University, an iconoclast and intellectual maverick, whose intellectual curiosity has extended well beyond his main field of study.

    Gelernter attained renown — a modicum of fame he certainly could have done without — in 1993 as one of the victims of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. The professor lost a hand in the terror attack as well as suffering severe damage to internal organs and one of his eyes. Gelernter incurred Kaczynski’s wrath for his enthusiastic support of technological progress. Technological innovation, the Unabomber’s letter addressed to Gelernter charged, was only possible because “techno-nerds” like him made it “inevitable.” And with it a list of negative consequences, such as the invasion of privacy and environmental degradation.

    The attack confirmed what Gelernter appears to have suspected for some time — that America had become hostile to technology and pessimistic about the future. How could this happen? According to a lengthy New York Times expose from 1995, in Gelernter’s view, the United States had achieved something of a “technological and economic utopia — and the country subsequently imploded with its own success.” Evoking the second law of thermodynamics, he charged that “the entropy of American society” had “increased enormously,” and there was no way to put things back together again. What was left was a retreat to pure nostalgia, a yearning for a time when there was still a strong notion of civic virtues, when there were strong moral values and strict rules for sex and marriage and the interactions of people and authorities.

    On the flip side, what was left was a strong sense that American civilization was on the decline, provoking Gelernter’s outrage and indignation. The main reason: the incursion of “moral relativism” into the fabric of American society in the wake of ’68, which had fatally undermined what hitherto had held Americans together as Americans, their way of life — strong time-honored moral principles.

    Fast forward some 20 years. The year is 2016, and Donald Trump has emerged as the Republican frontrunner in the race for the presidency. Gelernter has chosen sides. In his view, there is only one way to protect the American nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. To be sure, Trump was nothing but “an infantile vulgarian” who “had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy.” But this was nothing compared to the likes of Clinton and Obama, that “third-rate tyrant” who has nothing but contempt for ordinary people, who “doesn’t give a damn what people think.”  

    Trump, on the other hand, is someone the “empty gin bottle [voters] have chosen to toss through the window,” reflecting voters’ recognition of “the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.”

    Contempt for Democracy

    In light of what has transpired since the beginning of this pandemic, with a president devoid of any sense of human empathy for the tens of thousands of victims of his callousness, exhibiting brazen contempt for even the people in his direct entourage, these observations sound eerily prescient, if in a fundamentally opposite sense. Unfortunately, Gelernter so far appears to have shied away from addressing Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Even iconoclasts appear to have a hard time dealing with cognitive dissonance.

    In my book, this amounts to intellectual dishonesty — the refusal to own up to one’s unwavering support for a man who would rather risk destroying the very fabric of American democracy than concede defeat. But then, subverting the constitutional order, undermining existing institutions and rigging the results of elections has been one of the hallmarks of populist regimes, from Perón to Chavez, from Morales to Maduro. Populists have little love left for democracy if it does not go their way. Ironically enough, in late 2015, in a commentary for the ultra-conservative Washington Examiner, Gelernter accused the American left for seemingly having “lost its taste for democracy.”

    Today, contempt for democracy is one of the hallmarks of Trumpism. As one of his minions in the Senate recently reiterated his party’s position, America was not a democracy, nor was democracy an objective. America was a republic, dedicated to the pursuit of material happiness, and that’s it. For neutral observers, the Republicans’ objection to characterizing their country a democracy was and continues to be, as John Haltiwanger writes for Business Insider, “tied to the fact Republicans have reason to fear a system in which a majority of Americans have more say.” And given the direction of America’s demographics, fear appears to be turning into a nightmare triggering what sociologists call a “moral panic.”

    It is this moral panic which might explain Gelernter’s lashing out on the left in a 2018 Wall Street Journal commentary titled “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” With “they” he obviously referred to “the left.” Gelernter’s central thesis was that the left hated Trump because Trump was “a typical American —except exaggerated.” Hating Trump, Gelernter asserted, meant hating “the average American — male or female, black or white.” And hating the average American meant hating America, what it is, what it stands for, meaning its “exceptional and unique destiny.”

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    This in itself was not a new thought. As early as 2005 Gelernter, in an essay on “Anti-Americanism and Its Enemies” which appeared in Commentary, had argued that America was “superior to all others — morally superior, closer to God.” Americans were God’s new chosen people, “a unique collective instrument of God in the affairs of the nations,” with a distinct “divine mission to all mankind.”

    Those who hated America, did so because they hated the American interpretation of Christianity, if not Christianity itself. At the time, Gelernter’s focus was particularly on Islamic fundamentalism, hardly surprising after 9/11. In the years that followed, Gelernter’s focus shifted increasingly to what he believed were the domestic enemies of Americanism — the liberal Left, which rejected the notion that the US was meant to be the greatest county in the world. This, of course, was a notion Trump apparently wholeheartedly embraced, exemplified by his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

    The accusation that they hate their own nation has been one of the main tropes on the populist radical right against the left, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. In both cases, the right’s charge has been that the left defends the rights of minorities to a decent life not out of concern for universal human rights but because they hate their “own” people, who in reality should always come first because they hate their own country and everything it stands for. On this reading, the left have nothing but contempt for their own country because they don’t really consider it their home. Their home is elsewhere, anywhere (in David Goodhart’s sense of the word), in the empty space between Berlin, London, New York and Paris, always on the move, nowhere at home, and certainly not in their own country.

    Sense of Nostalgia

    Gelernter’s unwavering support for Donald Trump, despite his misgivings about the president’s boorish behavior, was to a large extent grounded in that sense of nostalgia which is one of the defining facets of contemporary radical right-wing populism, whether in the United States or in Europe. Nostalgia for the “small-town America” of his youth — Gelernter grew up on Long Island — his “plea for the past” irrevocably lost, reflected in his book on the 1939 World Fair, informed his intellectual trajectory following the Unabomber attack, from techno-geek to Trump apologist.

    In the process, Gelernter expressed his misgivings about a whole range of ills and evils that in his view had befallen postmodern American society, each one attributable to the liberal left. At the same time, he adopted the major tropes central to contemporary radical right-wing populism, in Europe and the US.

    Political correctness: In 2016, Gelernter wrote an essay in the Washington Examiner where he claimed that political correctness was “the biggest issue facing America today.” Political correctness, he maintained, actually was a misnomer, disguising “the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” Its primary victims — the traditional American mainstream, “working- and middle-class white males and their families,” furious about the havoc political correctness had wreaked on American society for decades, “made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.”

    But now there was hope because with Donald Trump, there finally was a GOP candidate who dared to stand up against political correctness. He was the only candidate who found the right words to appeal to his “unprivileged, unclassy supporters” who sense “that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college” but don’t have the “time or energy to set their children straight.”

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    Feminism: In an article from 2008 that appeared in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s neocon flagship published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, Gelernter attacked American feminism for having degraded the English language. In the past, the author asserted, English had been there for everyone. Starting “in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” This was largely in line with his earlier charge that prominent American feminists “cast women in the black victim role, men as the bigoted white oppressors.” Feminists routinely attacked women who chose their family over a career. Yet, as Gelernter put it in a Commentary article from 1996, mothers should stay home. If they failed to do so, it was not primarily the result of economic necessity or social pressures to keep up with “the Joneses” next door, but because feminists had convinced them that for a woman to “be worthy of respect is to do what men do” (a line from Goethe’s “Egmont”). Once again, there is a strong whiff of nostalgia informing the analysis, a yearning for the times before “Motherhood Revolution,” perfectly reflected in the black and white TV series “Leave It to Beaver.”

    Not Just a Theory

    Evolution: It is well known that one of the core constituency of Donald Trump are evangelicals. Evangelicals voted for Trump not because they believed that Trump was a dedicated Christian. Quite the opposite: They voted for him because they believed that he would restore Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life and, equally important, that he would do whatever possible to reverse Roe v. Wade by appointing anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. One of the most important dogmas among American fundamentalist Christians is the belief that God created the world and human beings over a period of six days (on the seventh He took a break and rested), some 10,000 years ago.

    It stands to reason that for evangelicals, Darwinism is the bête noire par excellence. To be sure, over the past decades, the Darwinist paradigm has come under close scrutiny. A number of its propositions, in light of new empirical findings, have been challenged and revised.

    However, Darwinism is not only a theory, subject to scientific falsification, but also a creed. And on the American radical populist right, it has been treated as such. This might explain why Gelernter’s widely noted take on the subject, “Giving Up Darwinism,” appeared in 2019 in the Claremont Review of Books. A rather obscure magazine, the Claremont Review gained notoriety with the publication of “The Flight 93 Election,” a pro-Trump polemic that appeared in September 2016 on its website. “Published under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the essay compared the American republic to a hijacked airliner, with a vote for Donald J. Trump as the risky, but existentially necessary, course.”

    In the years that followed, the Claremont Review turned into “the academic home of Trumpism.” Under the circumstances, Gelernter’s essay on Darwinism takes on a “meta-political” meaning, an affirmation of being part of the tribe. It logically follows from a sentence in his essay on political correctness, his observation that “Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant.”

    Human responsibility for global warming: In June of this year, about two-thirds of Americans thought the federal government should do more with respect to climate change. More than three-quarters thought the US should prioritize renewable sources of energy. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on a platform that promised he would save coal while promoting other fossil fuels. The plea secured him crucial support in coal-dependent states in the Appalachian region, such as West Virginia and Kentucky.

    Coal is known as a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. This is, of course, if you believe, like most scientists do, that humans bear responsibility for global warming and climate change. Trump, as is well known, doesn’t. In radical right-wing populist doctrine, climate change is but a “hoax,” as Trump claimed during the campaign, and the concern about climate change is nothing but alarmism provoked by the liberal left as a new ploy to undermine the capitalist system and prevent Americans from living as if there were no tomorrow.

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    Enter David Gelernter. In early 2007, Gelernter was among the forerunner for the position of science advisor for the Trump administration. At the time, he was under scrutiny, among other things on the question of global warming. When pressed he admitted he did not believe humans were responsible for climate change, even if he noted that he was not in a position to make an informed judgment. As he put it in an interview with The Scientist, “The evidence I’ve seen has not convinced me that the cause of this global warming or an appreciable contribution [to it] is human activity.” In the end, it did not matter. Despite his embrace of climate skepticism, he was not nominated. Perhaps, despite his own distaste for intellectuals, he was too much of an intellectual for a president who has shown nothing but contempt for them. Given David Gelernter’s status as a leading American scientist and intellectual with wide-ranging interests far beyond his immediate field — thus hardly the “typical” Trump supporter — his trajectory from techno-nerd to a convinced Trumpista is more than fascinating. It allows us to understand to what degree the combination of a deep sense of nostalgia and an equally profound disenchantment with the postmodern “left” prepares the ground for a mindset and psychological disposition that elevates a boorish loudmouth without substance and moral decency to an icon of redemption and revival.

    For some reason, Gelernter has been remarkably silent over the past year or so. Nothing on the president’s remarkable track record with regard to COVID-19, nothing on the eruption of racism-inspired violence during Trump’s tenure and the Black Lives Matter movement. It would also be interesting to read his views on Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court of a mother who certainly has not taken his advice to stay at home.

    I have contacted Gelernter via email to find out what he thought about Trump’s blatant disregard for the suffering of the victims of COVID-19 (“It is what it is”), a reflection of his obvious contempt for the average American. He never responded. And yet, for some reason, I suspect that in November, Gelernter is not going to fall for Trump once again.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    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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    The Rise and Fall of US Democracy

    A functioning democracy requires an educated, informed population that understands its role in the processes that define how the democratic nation is governed. Ordinary citizens have two opportunities for actively participating in those processes. They can run for office or help those who are running for office get elected. And they can vote. Most people settle for voting. Actually, in the best of years, only slightly more than the majority of eligible voters actually vote. American democracy has never fired on all its cylinders.

    The failure of half of Americans to participate is surprising because America has sedulously made the effort to educate its future voters. From day one, every schoolchild in the United States learns not only that the form of government they live under is a democracy but also that it is a regime defined by its commitment to freedom. Teachers, seconded by the media and the politicians who appear in the media, relentlessly drill into them the idea that the US is uniquely free, in ways that no other nation can claim. Americans possess unbridled freedom to speak out and to act, even in socially eccentric ways. For some, it even includes the freedom to shoot.

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    Although democracy and freedom are not synonymous, every schoolchild is taught to believe that they are. This has created a curious phenomenon in US culture: the idea that what they have is less the freedom to speak out, act and influence their community than the freedom from interference by other people — and especially by the government. In other words, many Americans understand that the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to be left alone. Instead of defining the individual’s field of possible action and participation, in their minds, democracy defines the right to avoid all action and participation.

    The Art of Democratic Identity

    Children who enter first grade and learn for the first time that they live in a free country may be left wondering what an unfree country is. A literal-minded 6-year-old — such as this writer who entered first grade during the Cold War — may naively wonder why, in a country that our teacher insisted is free, we have to pay for the things we consume. After all, any child who had ever been to a restaurant, a movie theater or a hotdog stand could sense what Milton Friedman would later affirm: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

    My teacher’s message, of course, had nothing to do with the price of things. We would learn about price, cost and value later. Like our parents, one day we would have a job, a house and a dog and be saddled with the task of fending for ourselves in a competitive world. We weren’t quite prepared to understand that our teacher’s riffing on the fact that we were a “free country” was, at the time, simply about the fact that another country with nuclear capacity, the Soviet Union, wasn’t free. We children knew nothing about Russia, the Iron Curtain, communism, capitalism and everything else that was talked about on the news, mainly because we watched cartoons on television. Our exposure to Cold War propaganda was only just beginning.

    On that first day of school, we began the task of memorizing the secular prayer that would kickstart the learning process every day of our schooling for the following 12 years: the pledge of allegiance. Its syntax was incomprehensible, but it sounded comfortingly patriotic. The abstract idea of allegiance was too much for our young minds to deal with. But the key words, beginning with “the flag,” offered something concrete and allowed us to begin to understand that our job was to learn to comply with a system we couldn’t yet begin to understand.

    “The flag” had meaning because we could see it in front of us, whereas “the Republic for which it stands” remained a mystery. Even “one nation” failed to make much sense to any of us since we hadn’t yet studied the Civil War — a moment in history when there were briefly two — but clearly one seemed to be the right number of nations to belong to. “Under God” confirmed what most of our parents had already told us, though the idea of who that being was differed from family to family.

    It was the last six words of the pledge that held some meaning and still resonate in people’s minds: “with liberty and justice for all.” That’s when we began to learn what it meant to be a democracy. This became reinforced later, when we began studying the salient facts of history, including the importance of the first three words of the Constitution: “We the people.” The picture of a democratic society where people, on the one hand, are free (both to vote and to be left alone) and, on the other, treated fairly and equally, combined with our belief in the goodness of the complete system, had begun to fall into place.

    Every official text we would subsequently discover, starting with the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal,” delivered the message that we, the citizens (or at least those who could vote), collectively controlled the form of a government that would protect us from various kinds of evil forces. Among those evil forces were, historically speaking, the European monarchies to the east against whom we revolted, and the rampaging Native Americans to the west.

    The first group, the European kings, defined the enemy in our battle for freedom in the 18th century. The second group, the Indians on horseback, defined the 19th-century enemy. Once those two had been neutralized, all that was left in the 20th century, following our victory over the Germans and Japanese in World War II, was the Soviet Union.

    Things had now become remarkably simple. We were a democracy that thrived thanks to our freedom, and especially the freedom of our markets. The Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship with a five-year plan. We were consumers with the widest possible range of choice who knew we would be left alone to consume whatever we chose. Moreover, they were atheists, and we, despite our freedom to believe or not believe, were “under God.” They had the mission of spreading across the globe their elaborate system of government interference in every aspect of everyone’s lives. In contrast, we knew, as President Woodrow Wilson had clearly established decades earlier, that our mission was to “make the world safe for democracy.”

    Reconciling Democracy and Predestined Greatness

    Unlike the Soviets, we had the power to elect our leaders. They had a single party, the Communist Party. We had two, a consumer’s choice. We understood the principles of democracy. The first of those principles consists of having a constitution with a bill of rights. The second is to have regularly planned elections permitting to choose which of the two parties we wanted to be governed by. Any wonderful and wild idea was possible, so long as one of the two parties embraced that idea.

    Communism, of course, or its twin sister, socialism, represented impossible ideas, not only because they made no sense in a consumer society, but because neither of the parties would embrace such ideas. Nevertheless, some feared that the Democrats might be tempted by socialism or even communism. And so, enterprising politicians committed to the idea of democratic choice invented the House of Un-American Activities, making it clear to political consumers — i.e. voters — that some choices, deemed political heresy, would not be available in the political marketplace. Heresy can, after all, happen in a free country that is also “under God.”

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    Throughout our schooling, our teachers and textbooks led us to assume that the nation’s founders, like Woodrow Wilson more than a century later, had one mission in mind, though with a more local focus: making North America safe for democracy. According to the narrative we received, it was in the name of democracy that the Founding Fathers decided to break away from the despotism of the British monarchy. This created the enduring belief that the founders were visionaries intent on creating what would later become known as the “world’s greatest democracy.”

    It’s a trope US politicians today never tire of repeating. The Democrat, President Harry Truman, may have been the first when he uttered the phrase in 1952, just as the Cold War was picking up steam. He cited America’s “responsibilities as the greatest nation in the history of the world.” Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and any Republican, President Donald Trump deems the US to be not only “the single greatest nation in the history of the world” but also “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” In contrast, this year’s Democratic candidate for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden, more modestly characterizes it as merely “the greatest nation on earth.” Perhaps he hasn’t studied history as carefully as Truman and Trump have.

    It isn’t clear whether Cassius Clay, before becoming Muhammad Ali — who famously boasted he was “the greatest” — was inspired by patriotic politicians at the time vaunting the economic power and military prowess of the nation or whether today’s politicians who keep insisting on greatness are inspired by Ali. Donald Trump is not the only American to resonate to the idea of greatness. In every domain, Americans seek to determine who is the GOAT, the Greatest of All Time. There must always be a winner, someone who is totally exceptional.

    American exceptionalism is not just an idea. It has become a dogma that leaders must embrace. Violating it or even trying to nuance it can prove disastrous. At a press conference in Europe in April 2009, fielding a question from a Financial Times reporter, newly installed President Barack Obama tried to limit his patriotic hubris when he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” This was too much for many Americans, such as Republican Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Fox News, who saw this as proof that Obama wasn’t a true believer in American exceptionalism. How could he dare to reduce the nation’s prestige to that of has-been countries like the UK and Greece?

    The Historical Truth

    At the nation’s very beginning, the founders sought and fought simply to create a nation that was no longer attached to Britain. It was a first step in the direction of just wanting to be left alone. They grappled first with the idea of how whatever emerged might define itself as a political entity. After that came the question of how it should be governed. Because of the diversity of the colonies, the founders could agree on the idea of dispersed authority, leading to the idea of a federation that could be thought of as a single federal state. They also, and nearly as emphatically, agreed that it was not about democracy.

    In 1814, John Adams, a revolutionary leader and the second president of the United States, famously responded with this curt judgment to one of his critics who berated him for maligning democracy: “Democracy never lasts long.” Lambasting what he referred to as the “ideology” of democracy, Adams expressed his horror at “democratic rage and popular fury” and insisted that democracy “soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.” The chaos of the French Revolution, which they considered an exercise in democracy, had left a bad impression on the minds of the Founding Fathers.

    Alexander Hamilton, who died prematurely in a duel 10 years before Adams drafted his letter to John Tyler (but who miraculously came back to life on Broadway in a rap-based musical comedy exactly two hundred years later) emphatically agreed with Adams: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” Both men had studied ancient history and witnessed the chaos of the French Revolution. Hamilton concluded: “The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

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    The idea of democracy got off to a bad start in the young republic. And yet, most Americans today assume that US democracy was born with the drafting of the US Constitution. Even if the Founding Fathers clearly stated their preference for the idea of a republic ruled by a patrician elite and sought to define the young nation as fundamentally the opposite of a democracy, for generations, Americans have tended to believe that the Constitution embodied and validated democratic principles.

    Obsessed by the attribute of greatness, Americans also continue to believe that the US deserves the title of “the world’s greatest democracy.” This is a notion that has the potential to irritate people who are not American. Last year, Dutch blogger Moshe-Mordechai Van Zuiden, writing for The Times of Israel, bitterly contested the insistence on American greatness. He lists 10 reasons why the US electoral system in no way reflects the ideal or even the messy reality of effective national democracies.

    After excoriating a two-party system offering “only a choice between two people widely despised,” as happened in 2016 and may even be the case in 2020, he makes a more fundamental complaint: “Top Dog Wins is not democracy. It’s a dictatorship of the majority.” All of the 10 points made by this brash Dutchman are well taken. Despite their national pride, more and more Americans are ready to agree.

    The Last Election

    Americans are clearly unaware of the fact that the revered founders believed that if democracy were to take hold, it would lead to the collapse of a fragile nation. The president who successfully marketed the idea of democracy for the first time, changing the course of America’s political culture, was Andrew Jackson, the president Donald Trump most admires (after himself). It was during Jackson’s presidency that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote and published “Democracy in America.” Thanks to the French aristocrat’s writing and Jackson’s deeds, including displacing and sometimes massacring native tribes, the label stuck.

    It subsequently became dogma that the United States not only is a democracy but exemplifies the ideal of what democracy should be. Abraham Lincoln went on to provide the concept of democracy with a permanent advertising slogan when he called it a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” By the time of Lincoln and the imminent Emancipation Proclamation, the idea of “people” had taken on a much broader meaning than at the time of the drafting of the Constitution.

    As Van Zuiden and others have pointed out, the electoral system in the US was never designed to function as a true democracy. Nevertheless, the belief was solidly instilled that democracy was in the nation’s DNA. It has withstood numerous assaults along the way and only recently begun to reveal some serious flaws that risk undermining Americans’ unquestioning belief in its virtues. For future observers of US history, the illusion of democracy as the basis of government may technically have expired in December 2000 when nine Supreme Court justices, and not the people or even the states, elected George W. Bush as president. At the time and amid such confusion, few had the courage to acknowledge that Bush’s election reflected a permanent change in their perception of democracy.

    The chaos of this year’s election, characterized by the twin evils of a persistent pandemic and the personality of Donald Trump, may well be the election that dispels all remaining illusions. In 2021, a new approach to understanding the relationship between the people and the nation’s institutions will most likely begin to emerge. The rupture with past traditions has been too great for the old dogmas to survive intact.

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    It’s impossible to predict what form that seismic shift in the political culture will take. It now looks more than likely — though prudence is still required — that if democratic processes play out according to recognized rules, Joe Biden will by the 46th president of the United States. But there is no guarantee that democratic processes will play out in any recognizably legitimate way, partly because the COVID-19 pandemic has created a physical barrier to the already troublingly chaotic conduct of traditional elections whose results pass through the archaic Electoral College, and partly because President Donald Trump will be highly motivated to disturb, delay and possibly cancel whatever validated outcome emerges. But further complications and a practically infinite series of complementary risks are lying in the offing. The risk of uncontrollable civil unrest, if not civil war, is real.

    Whatever the official result of the presidential election, whether it becomes known in the immediate aftermath of November 3 or sometime in January, it will be the object of contestation and possibly unpredictable forms of revolt by the citizens themselves. Like any episode of social upheaval, there is a strong chance that it will be quelled.

    Biden’s Dilemma

    But even if quashed and silenced, it certainly will not be resolved. The most favorable scenario for neutralizing the revolt of the Trumpian right would be a landslide victory for Biden, with the Democrats retaking control of the Senate while maintaining and increasing their majority in the House. But even so, the losers will certainly cry foul.

    A resounding majority for Biden and the Democrats would nevertheless buttress what remains of the population’s belief in democracy, legitimizing Biden’s claim to govern the nation. But even in the best of scenarios, a landslide would still leave Biden in a fragile, if not precarious position. Biden has done next to nothing to unite his own party. A Democratic victory will incite the young progressives to contest his legitimate control over an aged and aging party establishment. Gallup reports that “Americans’ frustration with the parties is evident in the 57% of Americans saying a third party is needed.”

    That figure has been stable for at least the past 10 years, but the level of frustration has been magnified by the presence of uninspiring candidates in both parties. As governing structures, both dominant parties have been seriously fragilized in the past two elections, the Republicans by Trump’s successful assault on their traditions and the Democrats by the nearly successful challenge of Bernie Sanders and the party establishment’s resistance to change.

    If elected, Biden will be challenged on the right by the combined force of fanatical believers in Trump as the messiah and hordes of libertarians appalled by the prospect of more “big government.” He will be challenged on the left by the progressives who not only oppose his tepid policies but no longer believe in the integrity of the Democratic Party. If it was just a question of managing the personal rivalries within his party, as it was for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, all might be fine. But with a prolonged pandemic, an out-of-control economic crisis, increasingly lucid and effective racial unrest and a growing anti-establishment sentiment across much of the right and the left, reinstalling the establishment that preceded Trump and restoring faith in its ability to govern will be a task logically beyond the capacity of 78-year-old Biden.

    The End of an Era

    And those issues only begin to define the challenges Biden will be facing. In an essay in The New Criterion earlier this year, James Pierson observed the very real potential for social collapse: “Yet today the United States seems headed in a different direction: toward pluralism without consensus — a nation-state without a national idea — and towards animus among racial, religious, regional, and national groups.” In his article, Pierson deftly summarizes the history of the nation from the convergence of disparate colonies into a “union” and its need for imperial expansion to maintain its unity. Historically speaking, both convergence and expansion are no longer what they used to be.

    Pierson claims that before the Civil War and the victory of the Union forces, the US had not really decided what it was. He asks the question, “what was it: union, republic, or empire — or a combination of all three? Whatever it was, it was not yet a nation.” He claims it only became a nation-state “over a ninety-year period from 1860 to 1950, an era bookended by the Civil War and World War II, two great wars for liberal democracy, with World War I sandwiched in between.”

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    Pierson credits Abraham Lincoln with creating the democracy that eventually came to dominate the world in the 20th century. Although assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before he could begin to implement his plan, Lincoln effectively created a political culture or system of belief that has only begun to fray in the last few decades. Pierson describes Honest Abe’s ideological triumph. “Lincoln envisioned a nation held together by a ‘political religion’ based upon reverence for the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence.” It was a nation “held together by loyalty to political institutions and abstract ideals.’”

    Pierson believes that that stable system began to dissolve after 1950, when what had been clearly a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture began to lose its capacity to impose its norms. He concludes, somewhat nostalgically: “It is no longer possible for the United States to go forward as a ‘cultural’ nation in the form by which it developed between 1860 and 1950. Whether or not this is a good thing is beside the point: it has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.” And then, fatalistically, he adds: “These developments leave the United States without any strong foundations to keep itself together as a political enterprise — in a circumstance when its increasing diversity requires some kind of unifying thread. What will that be? No one now knows.”

    Pierson’s description of cultural decline echoes the thesis of Samuel Huntington’s book, “Who Are We?” It expresses a sentiment that Trump exploited with his slogan “Make American Great Again.” Pierson seems to recognize that a return to the good old WASP order, wished for by Huntington and Trump (and perhaps Pierson himself), is simply not going to happen.

    Joe Biden has promised to provide the thread that will unify the nation. Pierson believes that’s an impossible task. Others, focused on the possibilities of the future rather than a nostalgia for the past, claim it can be done. But Biden, though more conciliatory than Trump, clearly lacks the vision and the personality required to achieve it. And, of course, another Trump victory would only fragment the culture further and faster.

    The obvious conclusion should be that there is little choice for a politician who wishes to survive intact other than to move forward boldly and accept to resolve some serious historical ambiguities and overturn a number of institutions that have created a situation of political sclerosis and accelerated cultural decline. There are plenty of ideas to work with. Some of the younger members of the Democratic Party have demonstrated the kind of energy needed to achieve success. And the population will not be averse to change if they see it is intended to cure the disease and not just temporarily relieve the pain. The opioid crisis has at least taught them that mere pain relief is a dead end.

    The problem is that there will be resistance, though it will not come from the people. They know what they want. A majority wants to see expanded choice and at the very minimum a third party, simply because they no longer trust the two parties that have been running the show. An even clearer majority supports single-payer health insurance. A majority among the younger generations and possibly the entire population expects a serious and thorough response to climate change. But as the actions of past presidents have demonstrated, changing the way of life of a society of consumers appears to be too much to ask of politicians.

    Once the dust has settled from the election — unless that dust becomes radioactive while waiting for definitive results — 2021 is likely to be a year of confused political maneuvering and deep social instability. It will undoubtedly be a period of crisis. In a best case scenario, it will be the type of crisis that enables the nation to focus on a serious project of transformation. Those who see a Biden victory as a chance to return to the former status quo will attempt to manage the crisis, but they will inevitably be disappointed.

    That includes traditional donors, Wall Street, Hollywood and the vast majority of the political class. The two-dimensional chessboard with its 64 squares that they have been playing on for decades has now acquired a third dimension. Their expertise in pushing around the same pieces, according to the same rules on the same traditional chessboard, has lost its validity.

    Fragile Simulacrum

    History has already overtaken the political potential of a fragile simulacrum of a democracy that was never meant to be a democracy. No historian tracing the events as they played out over more than two centuries should be surprised that, while maintaining the illusion of democracy, the system evolved to function essentially as an elaborate, well-armed oligarchy. The oligarchy will use every power it has in its high-tech arsenal, including new forms of apparent generosity, to stabilize those institutions that best resist the seismic forces that have already begun cracking the entire system’s foundations.

    Even if it achieves some form of success and reaches what appears to be a state of relative stability, the world it believes it still controls will be very different and will begin evolving in highly unpredictable ways.

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    Many are predicting collapse. Given the degree to which an individualistic and corporatist culture has undermined most of the principles of human solidarity, collapse may well be the inevitable outcome. But collapse of what? Will it be the supposedly democratic political structures, traditions or ideologies? Will it be the economy? Or, as the coronavirus pandemic has shown, will it be human health, to say nothing of the health of the planet?

    Voters in the November 3 election should be asking themselves not just whom they want to vote for, but a much more immediate question that is nevertheless difficult to answer. What do Biden and his future team think about all the above questions? Are they prepared? What do they seriously think they might do about them as soon as the cracks start appearing, many of which are already visible?

    In the run-up to an election, politicians are unlikely to blurt out the truth, especially if it involves taking on serious problems whose solutions will inevitably cause pain in certain quarters. They will typically try to deal with three somewhat contradictory concerns. Keep the people happy. Reassure the donors. Prepare the next round of unholy alliances just to be certain they will be able to get something done. And then the big question arises: When it comes to taking hold of the reins of power, whom will they accept to disappoint? But the real question is this, whom can they afford to disappoint?

    We are left asking ourselves whether John Adams was right when he wrote that democracy never lasts long. If Biden is elected and serves two terms (reaching the age of 88 at the end of his second term), the kind of democracy the US has created will have lasted exactly two hundred years. John Adams probably would consider that a long time.

    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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    America’s Maestro of Death and Destruction

    Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

    Then he won — and on November 3 (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a “murderer,” but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: As president, he’s proved to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.

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    Nothing so minimalist for The Donald. Nor is it as if, say, he had plowed “the Beast” (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proved to be America’s 21st-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his inaugural address, “American carnage.” In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.

    Back in 2016, he was way off when it came to the scale of what he could accomplish. As it happens, the killing hasn’t just taken place on Fifth Avenue, or even in his (now hated) former hometown, but on avenues, streets, lanes and country roads across America. He was, however, right about one thing: He could kill at will and no one who mattered (to him at least) would hold him responsible, including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen of mayhem.

    His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: He’s daily been on “Fifth Avenue” killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.

    Death by Disease

    We know from Bob Woodward’s new book that — in his own strange way — in February, Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of COVID-19 and made a conscious decision to “play it down.” There have been all sorts of calculations since then, but by one modest early estimate, beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives (the equivalent of a dozen 9/11s); two weeks earlier and it would have been a striking 54,000 in a country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year’s end.

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    If the president had moved quickly and reasonably, instead of worrying about his reelection on November 3 or how he looked with a mask on; if he had followed the advice of actual experts; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he’s championed the Confederate flag, military bases named after Confederate generals and the Proud Boys, we would have been living in a different and less wounded country — and that’s only the beginning of his Fifth Avenue behavior.

    After all, no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were back then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors, it was clear that the president just couldn’t bear a world without fans, without crowds cheering his every convoluted word. That would have been like going on the diet from hell. As a result, he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa.

    Admittedly, that particular crowd would be nowhere near as big as he and his advisers had expected. Still, perhaps 6,000 fans, largely unmasked and many in close proximity, cheered on their commander-in-chief there. It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event, but the commander-in-chief, mask-less himself, couldn’t have cared less. About three weeks later, when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases (likely linked to that rally) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of COVID-19, it didn’t faze the president in the slightest.

    He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented, wildly cheered rambles in the brambles. As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina, the president’s “remarks” that day (which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words) were “practically a novella, albeit a novella that makes Finnegan’s Wake look like See Spot Run!”

    Nothing, certainly not a pandemic, was going to stop Donald J. Trump from sucking up the adoration of his base. Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden he claimed that he’s only been holding his rallies outdoors, in September in Nevada — a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people — Trump held a typically boisterous, adoring indoor rally of 5,000, largely unmasked, jammed-together Trumpsters. When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering, he classically responded, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned” — i.e., not at all concerned about (or for) them.

    If that isn’t the COVID-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue, what is? And it summed up perfectly Trump’s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves (and seems so desperately to need) or keeping Americans healthy. During these unending pandemic months, he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them, while at one point even tweeting to his followers to “LIBERATE” (possibly in an armed fashion) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders. He needed what he’s long called the “greatest economy in the history of America” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go.

    Mimicking his boss’s style, Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery. As he put it, “A national lockdown. Stay-at-home orders. It’s like house arrest. Other than slavery, which is a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”

    Clearly at the president’s behest, “top White House officials” would, according to The New York Times, pressure “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.” (As the president would tweet in a similar spirit: “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is important for the children and families. May cut off funding if not open!”)

    In other words, it didn’t matter who might be endangered — his best fans or the nation’s schoolchildren — when his reelection, his future wellbeing, was at stake. Murder on Fifth Avenue? A nothing by comparison.

    Supreme Assassins?

    And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell. In the end, it could even prove to be the most modest part of it.

    Embed from Getty Images

    For the rest of that death toll, you might start with health care. It’s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years (and that figure, according to the US Census Bureau, includes 726,000 children, some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions). That, in turn, could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration’s ongoing assault on Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) finally succeeds. And after November 3, it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act). A supposedly “pro-life” Trump version of the Supreme Court — unless the pandemic were to sweep through it — would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion. Think of them as potential “supreme assassins.”

    Barrett, in particular, is known to hold negative views of the ACA, and the court will hear the Trump administration’s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day, so you do the math. Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could, in the end, leave tens of millions of Americans with “pre-existing medical conditions” in an uninsured hell on earth.

    Death? I guarantee it, on and off Fifth Avenue — and it will have been The Donald’s doing.

    A Murderous Future

    All of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter. All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change.

    It’s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “hoax.” And as he withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and — like the child of the fossil-fueled 1950s that he is — proclaimed a new policy of American energy dominance (“the golden era of American energy is now underway”), he’s never stopped rejecting it.

    He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season, where he predicted that it would soon get “cooler.” The only exception: when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases. As he said in a speech on September 22 to the UN General Assembly, “China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the US has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.”

    He and those he’s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment. So far, they have rolled back (or are trying to roll back) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, including most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children. Air pollution alone was, according to one study, responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016. Above all, at the service of a still-expanding American fossil-fuel industry, he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil, gas, and coal development in just about any imaginable form.

    In a season in which the West Coast has burned in a previously inconceivable fashion, leaving a historic cloud of smoke in its wake, while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast, Trump has continued, for instance, to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.

    In short, he and his administration have, in a rather literal fashion, proved to be pyromaniacs of the first order. They’ve been remarkably intent on ensuring that, in the future, the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity, creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction. Despite the fact that Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist” as the West Coast burned, somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season.

    If the legend was true, the Roman emperor Nero fiddled — actually, he was probably playing the cithara — while the capital of his empire, Rome, burned for six days. He didn’t personally set the fire, however. Trump and his crew are, it seems, intent on setting fire not just to Rome, New York or Washington, but to the Alaskan wilderness, the Brazilian rainforest and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn’t figure out how to purchase: Greenland. He’s helping to ensure that even the oceans will, in their own fashion, be on fire; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive; that the temperature will rise ever higher; and that the planet will become ever less habitable.

    Meanwhile, intently maskless and socially undistanced, even he (and his wife Melania) contracted COVID-19, officially becoming part of his own American carnage. The White House, Air Force One and the president and his aides became the equivalent of COVID-19 superspreaders, as senators and reporters, among others, also began to come down with the disease. It’s now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order. 

    Donald Trump has, of course, hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet, but it’s certainly eerie that, at this moment, such an arsonist would stand any chance at all of being reelected president of the United States. His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat, but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future.

    Murder, he said, and murder it was, and Fifth Avenue was the least of it.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

    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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    How the US Can Win Back Clout in Syria

    The humanitarian crisis in northeastern Syria is well documented. Nonetheless, despite the devastation that has occurred and the likely peril that is soon to come, pleas from aid groups, journalists and refugees have not been enough to move policymakers to take action. One reason for this is that because the underlying causes of this crisis are political, the solution must be too. Washington could seize considerable political influence in Syria by throwing a lifeline to its strategic allies in the northeast. Unilateral action by US policymakers to open the Yarubiya border crossing between Iraq and Syria could increase American and Kurdish influence at the expense of Iran, Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State (IS) and the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

    A decade of civil war against the Syrian regime, a regional war against IS and a recent Turkish military incursion have turned half of Syria’s prewar population into refugees. More than 6 million Syrians are displaced internally, and 5.6 million are in refugee camps in neighboring countries. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria governs the seven cantons of the northeast. Its alliance of paramilitary groups, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), is led by the Kurdish majority People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara considers a terrorist organization. Of the 3 million residents of this region, 700,000 are refugees living in numerous refugee and displaced persons camps, with 65,000 in the Al-Hol refugee camp alone. 

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    Humanitarian aid shipments were all but cut off to northeastern Syria in January 2020, when the United Nations ordered the closure of the Yarubiya border crossing between Syria and Iraq. As the only port of entry with sufficient capacity to handle the requisite shipments of aid and equipment, Yarubiya was the carotid artery bringing humanitarian aid into northeastern Syria. The border between Turkey and northeastern Syria is effectively closed. The Syrian regime allows minimal, if any, aid to cross from its territory into this part of the country, and it controls the Qamishli airport. The remaining border crossing at Samalka, between northeastern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, is a river crossing over pontoon boats, which heavy rains regularly wash away; it is shut on most days.

    By closing the Yarubiya crossing, the UN was acceding to concerted pressure from Russia, officially to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State, but in reality to choke off aid to anti-Assad regime forces, primarily the SDF. To make matters worse, in August, Turkey cut off the flow of water through the Alouk pumping station, thereby weaponizing water by severing northeastern Syria’s main freshwater source. Aside from leaving hundreds of thousands without water for drinking, cooking and bathing, not to mention hampering the generation of electricity by hydroelectric plants dependent on it, this manmade political crisis has made the medical response to the region’s escalating COVID-19 crisis all the more helpless. 

    Lack of Interest and Resolve

    The squeezing of the ethnically diverse residents of northeastern Syria is the result of political jostling by Turkey, Iran and Russia to increase their respective regional influence at American and Kurdish expense. For Iran and Russia, who are working to rearm their pro-Assad proxy forces, the SDF stands in the way of the Assad regime reasserting control over the country. Although Turkey does not support Assad, it considers the YPG to be a mortal enemy and has even been supporting the Islamic State against it. 

    The Trump administration’s imposition of the Caesar Act — US sanctions targeting Bashar al-Assad’s government and its backers — may create obstacles for regime officials to transfer assets, but their benefactors will find a way to put their money where they want. Regardless, this policy will have no effect on the ongoing loss of American regional influence to Iran, Russia and Turkey. 

    Despite the recurring crises related to Syria over the last four years, it has not received consistent attention from the Trump administration, whose characteristic lack of interest and resolve to carry out complex foreign policy goals has allowed the crisis to escalate. This can be exemplified by the administration’s inconsistent messaging. For example, the official US position to justify the presence of American forces in Syria is to defeat IS, push out Iranian influence and resolve the civil conflict between the Assad regime and domestic opposition groups. However, President Donald Trump recently minimized the American presence to keeping the oil out of the hands of Iran, the IS and Russia, and to allow American companies and allies to benefit from its sale. 

    Aside from statements of support for opening the Yarubiya crossing, congressional committees have not expressed more than a nominal interest in the significant loss of American regional influence. This is despite the trillions of dollars the US has invested to build up the American position in Iraq and Syria over the past two decades. As a result, the harsh reality must be accepted that one cannot expect the US government to do anything to protect American interests or regain its squandered strategic regional influence without the executive and legislative branches being willing and able to design and implement policy to that effect.

    Unilateral Action

    Fortunately, the opening of the Yarubiya crossing is a relatively simple policy that will require minimum resolve to carry out. Nonetheless, it will bolster American regional influence at the expense of its most bitter regional rivals. Pleas to the UN by humanitarian groups and NGOs seeking to reopen the Yarubiya crossing to aid will never overcome Russian opposition. However, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Khadimi has separate authority over Yarubiya. Having spent close to $2 trillion in Iraq on military operations, hardware and training of local military, police and emergency medical staff, as well as operating the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, the US government has more than enough leverage to instruct Khadimi to open the border crossing.

    There are other added benefits to unilateral action. For instance, sidestepping the UN will itself add leverage to both the US position and that of its ally, the SDF. Brokering a deal with its rivals for the UN to open the crossing would require the US to make considerable concessions. By design, all anticipated requests, such as allowing Turkey to purchase Russia’s S-400 air defense systems, would likely be ones the US could never accept, as the status quo benefits all parties involved except the US and the population of northeastern Syria.

    Acting unilaterally would bypass such futile negotiations. Instead, the US would gain considerable leverage that it can save for a final status agreement in the long term or, at the very least, demand concessions from other parties in exchange for limiting what would be allowed through the crossing, thereby ensuring continued and adequate aid shipments. Aside from humanitarian considerations, from an economic standpoint, the move would provide an avenue for oil in northeastern Syria to be brought to market. The windfall profits would lead to a boom of economic development in northeastern Syria as well as Iraq, through which all materials would have to be shipped, and would save the United States millions of dollars in humanitarian aid. 

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    This must be done soon. The Assad regime is being continually strengthened by Iran and Russia in order to reassert control over northeastern Syria, the Deir Az Zour oil fields and the profits they hold. Northeastern Syria contains 90% of the country’s oil and natural gas, but it does not have an efficient route to export these energy resources. As a result, what does get exported goes through markets controlled by Iran, and profits are also siphoned off by the Islamic State as it rebuilds its infrastructure.

    The US finally allowed the export of oil from Deir Az Zour recently, which increased the political leverage of the SDF against Assad in future settlement negotiations. Opening the Yarubiya crossing will further extend that leverage to the United States. The more oil that is exported in the meantime, and the more involved the US is in protecting it, the more leverage the US will have and the stronger its regional ally, the SDF, will become. By fortifying itself, the SDF, which controls northeastern Syria, will be better equipped to cut off Iranian land access to Hezbollah in Lebanon. In effect, the stronger northeastern Syria becomes, the more influence the US will have to counter Iranian and Russian influence in Syria. 

    To reiterate, as America’s frontline ally in the fight against the IS, the SDF has led the fight against the armed group and continues to prevent its resurgence. However, as IS is now receiving aid from Turkey as part of Ankara’s effort to wipe out the Kurds, if the SDF were to lose its fight, American soldiers may be expected to take their place protecting considerable US strategic interests. Otherwise, the oil would fall into the hands of Russia, Iran and the IS. It is therefore imperative to act quickly so as to bolster the SDF as well as to mitigate the disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic that has increased humanitarian suffering in the region.

    Challenging Russia, Turkey and Iran

    Turkey and Russia have outmaneuvered the US in Syria over the last several years. As Seth Franztman writes in The Jerusalem Post, “Moscow has become friends with all sides in Syria — except with the Americans.” As a result, all of these actors have benefitted to different extents in Syria with the exception of the United States. Russian and Turkish efforts to divide up Syria include allowing Turkey to shore up its control in Idlib province in exchange for letting Russia fortify the Assad regime and act against US regional interests. Crucially, the opportunity created by sidelining Washington has allowed and will continue to allow the Assad regime and Iran to fortify their positions.

    Russia punches far above its weight in terms of international influence. As Anna Borshchevskaya reports for The Hill, Moscow’s efforts to defend its imperiled interests around the world by sowing unrest requires considerable personnel and resources. These resources are not unlimited and are effective because of the perceived threat of retaliation by Russian President Vladimir Putin against those who act contrary to his interests.

    Moscow’s interests in Syria are among its most heavily challenged. Russia cannot afford to lose its gambit in Syria and will remain invested no matter what the foreseeable cost. Thus, there is no better way to undermine Russian influence globally than to spread it thin and weaken it by acting against its various global interests concertedly. Russia worked very hard to get the UN to close the Yarubiya crossing, thereby freeing up its resources to fight battles on other fronts. Those resources cannot simply be reassigned back to Syria without being removed from other fights.

    As Turkey asserts itself as a regional political and military power, Ankara’s and Washington’s interests do not always align vis-à-vis Syria. For example, as analysis by the RAND corporation shows, Turkish attacks against YPG forces in northeastern Syria have led to the reappropriating of SDF personnel from fighting the IS in Deir Az Zour region to address Turkish incursions along the northern border. The State Department’s inspector general has accused Turkey of working in concert with the Islamic State to undermine US-supported YPG efforts in Syria. 

    Turkey has been threatening war with Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, and its cutting off of water to northeastern Syria has considerably exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis in the region. Opening the Yarubiya crossing to allow in aid, supplies and water would challenge Ankara’s clout in northeastern Syria. It may cause Turkey to rethink its confrontation with Greece, making it more likely that Ankara will err on the side of diplomacy to resolve that conflict before it escalates into a military clash. It will also show Turkey that, despite its influence as a NATO ally, Ankara does not have carte blanche to act against US interests without facing consequences.

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    The involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Syria has drained its coffers and its personnel. This has considerably frustrated the Iranian population as its resources are sent abroad rather than used to rebuild the struggling economy at home. Applying pressure by opening up the Yarubiya crossing will further drain Iranian resources as it will require even more money, personnel and influence to fight Iran’s battles in Syria and Iraq, which will in turn further inflame domestic opposition to the IRGC. 

    Opening the Yarubiya crossing will aid the Kurds in northeastern Syria to fortify their positions and take a big step toward economic stability in the territory. Historically, the Kurds have been reliable US allies in the region and will undoubtedly continue to be strategic allies in the near future. Leaving them in the lurch by allowing Turkey to attack them in October 2019 shattered American credibility with the YPG, and left them with little recourse other than to put their hope in Russia for protection from Turkey. However, opening the Yarubiya crossing will considerably improve American credibility with the Kurds and work toward improving relations with a critical strategic ally, which will be imperative for American regional influence in the future.

    Opening the Yarubiya crossing between Iraq and northeastern Syria is a singular action that will simultaneously put pressure on Putin, Iran, the Islamic State and the Assad regime. It will also reassert American leadership in NATO, rebuild credibility with regional strategic allies and safeguard US energy interests. Finally, and perhaps most critically, will improve humanitarian conditions on the ground, which will go a long way to win hearts and minds by saving lives.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.] More

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    John Hersey, Hiroshima and the End of World

    Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.

    Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its doomsday clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” — that is, nuclear annihilation.

    A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000 people, wounded another 9,000 and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

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    No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many from radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.)

    In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Times reported on that August 7, and the US government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans — and then the rest of the world — began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

    We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for Time and Life magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima — a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast — thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.”

    Only the Essentials

    When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.

    Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” — the New Yorker article in paperback form — is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.

    Embed from Getty Images

    I know “Hiroshima” well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.

    “Fallout,” which was published in August — the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima — offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.

    Hersey begins “Hiroshima” in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”

    As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors — victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves — speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.

    Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the supreme commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the US military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker — fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act — submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

    Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

    The impact on the US government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”

    Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time

    It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of American-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic doomsday clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.

    The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a US ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.

    Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations — governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water and toxic chemicals — that have been rescinded, reversed or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.

    President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”

    More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts in the 1980s, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies in the 2000s, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.

    The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s “Fallout,” but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the US an image problem — and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” Blume observes. Worse yet for the US government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts — like those he spotlighted — had helped to prevent nuclear war.

    “We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.

    Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now, someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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