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      ‘A history maker’: Karine Jean-Pierre set for White House press secretary role

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      ‘A history maker’: Karine Jean-Pierre set for White House press secretary role She will be the first Black openly gay woman to step into the role, a symbol of change after the Donald Trump era This week the blue door will slide back, a Black woman will walk to the lectern and a piece of White House history will be made.Karine Jean-Pierre, facing rows of reporters and cameras, will be making her briefing room debut as the first Black woman and first openly gay person in the role of press secretary. Not that there will be much time to stand on ceremony.“Karine is the right person to carry the weight of being a history maker but that aspect of it will last all of five warm minutes at the podium,” predicted Patrick Gaspard, a longtime colleague who is now chief executive of the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington.“About five minutes in, being the first ever is going to mean hardly anything to folks who are hearing from her and certainly it’s not a crutch that Karine is going to rely upon. She knows that she’s got to be better prepared than anyone.”‘Long-overdue’: all-Black, female second world war battalion to receive congressional gold medal Read moreIt does indeed promise to be baptism of fire. Jean-Pierre takes over as top messenger for a Joe Biden administration grappling with inflation, Ukraine and a national shortage of baby formula as the Democratic party is bracing for November election losses that could end its control of Congress.But the symbolism of the appointment is inescapable after the Donald Trump era in which all four press secretaries were white. Jean-Pierre once declared: “I am everything that Donald Trump hates. I’m a Black woman, I’m gay, I am a mom. Both my parents were born in Haiti.”The 47-year-old was born in Martinique to Haitian parents and raised in the Queens Village neighborhood of New York. Her early career included a stint working for James Sanders, then a city council member in New York, now a state senator, and at the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, pushing big companies such as Walmart to change their business practices.She has not always picked winners. Jean-Pierre was press secretary to Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York, later jailed for sending sexually explicit text messages to a minor, and served on the presidential election campaign of John Edwards, who also fell from grace in a sex scandal.But her big break came when Gaspard hired her to work on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and then in the Obama White House as a regional director in the office of political affairs. Gaspard, the son of Haitian immigrants, said: “She and I have been in the trenches together. We’re Haitian-American family.“She and I can sometimes finish one another’s thoughts just on the basis of the culture that we’re steeped in. There is a deep sense of public service and the integrity of governance that’s really important to most immigrant communities and certainly for Haitian-Americans who appreciate that there are opportunities in democratic service available to them here that are tragically denied at home.”Jean-Pierre was deputy campaign manager on Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign, then chief public affairs officer for the progressive grassroots group MoveOn.At one of its events in 2019, an animal rights protester leaped on stage and tried to seize then Senator Kamala Harris’s microphone. Jean-Pierre kept her cool, springing from her chair to shoo him away. Old colleagues say she has the ideal temperament for the pressure cooker of the briefing room with its sometimes hostile questioning.Ben Wikler, a former senior adviser at MoveOn, now chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, said: “One of Karine’s superpowers is to keep her nerve in the face of chaos and high stakes.”“She has a deep wealth of experience in working on the political side and communications roles and doing a lot of live television work has really given her a sense of poise and confidence about handling delicate and breaking news situations.”He added: “Everyone’s blood temperature went down when she had the microphone because they knew that she is so effective at bringing things back to the message that needed to be conveyed.”Jean-Pierre appeared as a political analyst on the NBC and MSNBC networks but, with Biden’s election, returned to the White House. As principal deputy press secretary she has sometimes briefed in Psaki’s absence, for example when the latter was ill with coronavirus.Psaki, a self-declared policy wonk, has told the New York Times that, before the door to the briefing room slides open, both women often do a dance to shake off their nerves. With Psaki now reportedly heading to MSNBC, Biden offered the top job to Jean-Pierre in the Oval Office.A day after her appointment, she received a standing ovation at a recent media awards ceremony in New York organised by the LGBTQ+ organisation Glaad. Sarah Kate Ellis, its chief executive and president, said: “Just when we thought her standing ovation would subside, the audience at the Glaad Media Awards issued another wave of applause, because representation matters.“When Karine takes the podium as press secretary, every little girl, especially Black girls, and every LGBTQ kid, will see they can belong just as they are, that you can be LGBTQ and can contribute and be valued wherever you go. Karine represents the best of America and what we can be.”Jean-Pierre’s partner is Suzanne Malveaux, a correspondent at CNN. Amid questions over potential conflicts of interest, the network has said Malveaux “will continue in her role as CNN National Correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House”.On Friday, at her 224th and final briefing – more than all Trump’s press secretaries combined, though with rather less drama or viewers – Psaki was asked what lessons she wants to pass on to Jean-Pierre, who smiled from her familiar position at the side of the room.“The last thing I would say is that it can be repetitive in here from time to time,” she reflected. “That’s not a critique. You are all doing your jobs. But in the age of social media, always provide the context and all of the details, because you never want to be a meme with one line.“But otherwise be yourself and Karine, as I said last week, is going to bring her own magic, her brilliance, her style to this briefing room.”TopicsBiden administrationUS politicsRaceLGBT rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      What caused the rise of anti-Asian hate crime in the US? Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      Last year, President Biden signed the anti-Asian hate crimes bill into law. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Claire Kim of UCI about what’s behind the recent rise in anti-Asian hate in America, why this is an issue both sides of Congress can actually agree on, and what influence Asian-American voters could have in the midterms and in 2024

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archive: NBC, ABC Claire Jean Kim is professor of political science and Asian American Studies at the University of California Irvine Listen to this week’s episode of Politics Weekly UK with John Harris Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over ‘prohibited topics’ including critical race theory

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      Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over ‘prohibited topics’ including critical race theoryMove follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to alter teaching in schools as governor welcomes news Florida’s education department has rejected 54 mathematics textbooks from next year’s school curriculum, citing alleged references to critical race theory among a range of reasoning for some of the rejections, officials announced.The department said in a news release Friday that some of the books had been rejected for failure to comply with the state’s content standards, Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking [Best], but that 21% of the books were disallowed “because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT”.Department officials disapproved an additional 11 books “because they do not properly align to Best Standards and incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT”.Critical race theory is an academic practice that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.The release does not list the titles of the books or provide any extracts to offer reasons why the books were removed. The announcement follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to alter teaching in schools as conservatives thrust the issue of critical race theory into the country’s ongoing political culture wars.In June last year, the Florida board of education ruled to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. That included the teaching of the New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning series the 1619 Project, which re-examines American history in the context of slavery and its consequences.In a statement, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis welcomed the education department’s announcement and accused some textbook publishers of “indoctrinating” children with “concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students”.Florida Democrats rebuked the announcement. Democratic state representative Carlos G Smith argued on Twitter that DeSantis had “turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning”.Swathes of Republican-controlled states in the US have passed measures seeking to ban the teaching of critical race theory, which will probably be a prominent conservative talking point in this year’s midterm elections.Many of those bills and orders are vaguely worded, leading to fears of censorship on school and college campuses around the country.TopicsFloridaRon DeSantisUS educationRaceUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Mood as light as spring air as Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers words to remember

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      Mood as light as spring air as Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers words to remember After 232 years, a Black woman is on the supreme court – and the atmosphere on a sunny Washington day was celebratoryThey could all feel the weight of history. Yet the mood was as light as spring air when Ketanji Brown Jackson looked out at the crowd of smiling faces.‘It means the world to us’: Black lawmakers’ euphoria greets Jackson confirmationRead more“It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the supreme court of the United States,” the judge said in bright sunshine. “But we’ve made it!”The audience on the South Lawn of the White House rose and clapped and hollered with a rare purity of emotion.Jackson added: “We’ve made it – all of us. All of us. And our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.”It felt like the culmination of a journey. A day earlier, Jackson was confirmed by the Senate as the first African American female supreme court justice. In moving remarks on Friday, she spoke not only of her journey but that of her ancestors: the 400-year story of African Americans meeting slavery and segregation with resilience, creativity and hope.The atmosphere at the White House was joyful and celebratory – not a sentence there has been much cause to write over the past five years. No doom and gloom over Donald Trump’s lies, the deadly pandemic or the war in Ukraine. Instead, the marine band played songs from the shows, including West Side Story. (“I like to be in America…”)And after a week of sombre grey skies, lashing rain and surging coronavirus, the White House looked a little more majestic than usual in radiant sunlight. Fifty Stars and Stripes flags fluttered in a row. Birds could be heard singing. The relaxed, jovial crowd of hundreds erupted as Joe Biden, wearing shades, Vice-President Kamala Harris and Jackson strode to the podium, to the strains of “Hail to the chief”.But it was Jackson’s grace note at the end of the 45-minute pageant that will linger in the memory – and the heart – and be studied by future historians and, she evidently hoped, generations yet unborn.The 51-year-old invoked figures such as Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, and her “personal heroine”, Judge Constance Baker Motley, a former district court judge and New York state senator.“They and so many others did the heavy lifting that made this day possible. And for all the talk of this historic nomination and now confirmation, I think of them as the true path-breakers. I’m just the very lucky first inheritor of the dream of liberty and justice for all.”Becoming tearful, putting a tissue to her nose, Jackson continued: “To be sure, I have worked hard to get to this point in my career and I have now achieved something far beyond anything my grandparents could have possibly ever imagined. But no one does this on their own.“The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion, and, in the poetic words of Dr Maya Angelou, I do so now, while ‘bringing the gifts my ancestors gave’.”There was applause and she took a deep breath.“‘I … I am the dream and the hope of the slave’.”It was a quotation from Angelou’s poem Still I Rise.A shiver of emotion ran through the crowd, which rose as one. It included Jesse Jackson, 80, a civil rights veteran who was there when King was assassinated.Her voice quivering with feeling that seemed to match the enormity of the moment, Jackson, watched by her parents, husband and daughters, went on.“So as I take on this new role, I strongly believe that this is a moment in which all Americans can take great pride.“We have come a long way toward perfecting our union. In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the supreme court of the United States.”It was hard to believe this was the same country that less than two years ago staged a similar outdoor event for the justice nominated before Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett.On that grey day, Trump gloated at the prospect of tipping the court firmly in conservatives’ favour. The audience was appreciably less than diverse than for Jackson. It also proved to be a Covid super-spreader event. Time will tell if Friday goes the same way.Ketanji Brown Jackson brings a personal narrative no other justice can matchRead moreJackson is replacing the retiring Stephen Breyer, 83, and so liberals will remain firmly in the minority when, from October, she begins hearing vital cases on affirmative action, gay rights and voting rights.This week, Mitch McConnell refused to say whether he would even grant another Biden pick a hearing if Republicans regain the Senate majority. Friday’s heady euphoria was only a brief respite from demands for structural reform to restore balance to the court.But what a respite it was. Trump presented one vision of America, infused with white identity politics and great men of history. This presented another, more generous in spirt, more authentic to the nation’s true origin story.Biden said: “This is not only a sunny day. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. This is going to let so much sun shine on so many young women, so many young Black women, so many minorities that it’s real. It’s real! We’re going to look back – and nothing to do with me – we’re going to look back and see this as a moment of real change in American history.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonThe US politics sketchUS politicsDemocratsUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)RacenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘It means the world to us’: Black lawmakers’ euphoria greets Jackson confirmation

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      ‘It means the world to us’: Black lawmakers’ euphoria greets Jackson confirmationCongressional Black Caucus hails ‘historic pick’ of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman in the court’s history The confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court marked a moment in American history many in public life waited over decades for – and one some thought they would never see happen.When the day arrived, it inspired an outbreak of euphoria for many Black Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.Republicans’ ugly attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson show lurch to far rightRead more“I’m glad I’m alive,” said a joyful Yvette Clarke, a New York congresswoman.Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) filed on to Capitol Hill, through corridors lined with portraits, busts and statues of the white men who have dominated Congress since its inception.Clarke’s district was once represented by the first Black woman ever elected to the Congress, the late Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, who was first elected in 1969.“I’m glad I’m around to witness this,” Clarke told the Guardian. “I wasn’t around for Thurgood Marshall,” she said, referring to the lawyer and civil rights activist who became the first African American on the supreme court in 1967, and who served until 1991.Clarke entered Congress in 2007. “This is so historic on so many different levels,” she said.After the 53-47 Senate vote that included the support of three Republicans, Jackson will take her place as an associate justice on the nine-member court. She will be the 121st justice to join America’s highest judicial body, established in 1790.In October 1967, Marshall became a supreme court justice. In September 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to serve on the court. In August 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the court’s first Hispanic member.And in April 2022, Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the bench in its 232-year existence.“I’m very proud that my very first vote to confirm a supreme court nominee will be to confirm this historic pick,” Raphael Warnock, who won his own milestone race in January last year to become Georgia’s first Black US senator, told the Guardian as he headed to the Senate chamber to vote for Jackson.“I had the opportunity to meet her, and she brings talent and integrity and as we saw during those scorched-earth hearings, a great deal of grace and civility,” he added, nodding to Jackson’s confirmation sessions before the Senate judiciary committee last month where she endured vicious attacks from several Republicans.The chair of the CBC, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, swept on to Capitol Hill on Thursday and witnessed Jackson’s triumph.“It means the world to us, because when you think about voting rights, when you think about our children, when you think about all of our fundamental issues – it starts at the supreme court,” Beatty said.“For the first time, a Black woman sitting there. It gives us balance. Not only because she’s Black, but because of her judicial temperance, and because of her reverence for the rule of law. But also when you look at her background and culture: she attended public [publicly funded] schools,” Beatty continued.Members of the caucus gathering in an ornate room in the Capitol near the House floor for a group photo after Jackson was confirmed included those holding black T-shirts saying “Black Women are Supreme”.Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia said: “Despite all of the dog-whistling and appealing to racist instincts among the Republican base, there are three Republican senators who have been able to work their way through all of the QAnon-conspiracy nonsense being spewed by Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, and folks trying to outdo themselves with outrageousness directed toward [Jackson].”Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah broke with their fellows who went along with Republican leadership, and those who attacked Jackson outright, and voted for Joe Biden’s nominee.“I’m glad we had three Republican senators who saw through that, and recognized how eminently qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson is, and the fact that she will bring more experience to the bench than just about every one of the justices on the supreme court – including the chief justice [John Roberts],” Johnson added.Jackson has a connection to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida, who represents parts of Miami, and has known the judge’s parents for decades.“Her father was the first Black school board attorney when I was serving on the school board. Her mother was a principal when I was a principal … so [for] the Black people in Miami, you can imagine what’s happening now as we watch this,” she told the Guardian.“Young kids know her name, and they’re talking about her in schools. They’re talking about her in barbershops,” she said. “This was a young lady who grew up with people telling her you can be anything you want to be.”On Thursday afternoon, a beaming Kamala Harris also became emotional as, in her other role as president of the Senate, she announced that Jackson was officially confirmed.The first female and first Black US vice-president marked another historic moment that, as Harris said after she won the 2020 election with Biden, may be the first but “won’t be the last”.TopicsUS politicsRaceKetanji Brown JacksonUS CongressUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them | Gary Gerstle

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath themGary GerstleWhen it comes to economic questions, there’s more agreement between culture war opponents than you might think The neoliberal order that triumphed in America in the 1990s prized free trade and the free movement of capital, information, and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments could no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It hailed globalization as a win-win position that would enrich the west (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. A remarkable consensus on these creedal principles came to dominate American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order, binding together Republicans and Democrats and marginalizing dissenting voices to the point where they barely mattered.Somewhat paradoxically, this broad agreement on matters of political economy nurtured two strikingly different moral perspectives, each of them consonant with the commitment to market principles that underlay the neoliberal order. The first perspective was ‘neo-Victorian’, celebrating self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption.These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess – accumulating debt by buying more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family – heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing.The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways | Osita NwanevuRead moreSuch families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray were among the intellectuals guiding this movement, the legions of evangelical Christians mobilized in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority its mass base.The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order was cosmopolitan. A world apart from neo-Victorianism, it saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from liberation movements originating in the new left – black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them.Cosmopolitanism was egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami among them – flourishing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists, and immigrants, and for stigmatizing the black poor for their so-called “culture of poverty”. The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing what they deemed to be deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference, and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph – the 1990s – was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars”. In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years.Just beneath this cultural polarization, however, lay a fundamental agreement on principles of political economy. This intriguing coexistence of cultural division and economic accord manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the new America, one welcoming of racial minorities, feminists, and gays. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the new left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values. Gingrich publicly pledged himself and his party to obstructing Clinton at every turn. Clinton, meanwhile, regarded Gingrich as the unscrupulous leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine his presidency.Yet, despite their differences and their hatred for each other, these two Washington powerbrokers worked together on neoliberal legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. They both supported the World Trade Organization, which debuted in 1995 to turbocharge a global regime of free trade. Their aides jointly engineered the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the US economy from government regulation.Major pieces of legislation deregulating the electrical generation industry and Wall Street followed closely in the telecom bill’s wake. Clinton and Gingrich also worked together to pare back the welfare state, sharing a conviction that the tough, disciplining effects of job markets would benefit the poor more than state-subsidized “handouts”. Clinton’s collaboration with Gingrich had facilitated the neoliberal order’s triumph.That order is now on the wane, its once unassailable principles of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people now disputed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, public attention focuses on yet another chapter in the culture wars, with the American people divided, irredeemably it seems, over vaccination, critical race theory, and whether Donald Trump should be lauded as an American hero or jailed for acts of treason.Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve. But these developments underscore, once again, the importance of looking beyond and beneath the culture wars for clues as to where American politics and society might be heading.
      Gary Gerstle is a Guardian US columnist. Excerpted and adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022)
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      Republican Hawley’s attack on supreme court nominee Jackson is wrong, says senator

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      Republican Hawley’s attack on supreme court nominee Jackson is wrong, says senatorSenate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin says Hawley’s attacks should be ignored in confirmation hearings this week The Missouri Republican Josh Hawley is wrong to attack Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s supreme court nominee, and should be ignored in confirmation hearings this week, the Senate judiciary chair said.How Ketanji Brown Jackson became Biden’s supreme court nominee – podcastRead moreHawley, the Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said, is “part of the fringe within the Republican party … a man who was fist-bumping the murderous mob that descended on the Capitol on 6 January of the last year.“He doesn’t have the credibility he thinks he does.”If confirmed, Jackson will be the first Black woman on the court. If Democrats hold their 50 votes she will be installed, via Kamala Harris’s vote as vice-president.Jackson has attracted Republican support before and some have indicated they may back her this time. Jackson’s confirmation will not affect the balance of a court which conservatives dominate 6-3, as she will replace another liberal, the retiring Stephen Breyer.Hawley is however one of several hard-right members of the judiciary committee, alongside Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, to harbour presidential ambitions. Such senators could see attacking a Biden nominee as a way to appeal to supporters.This week, in tweets echoed by the Republican National Committee, Hawley highlighted a potential line of attack.“I’ve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children,” Hawley said.He did not raise the issue when he questioned Jackson last year, before voting against her confirmation to an appeals court. The White House said the senator was pushing “toxic and weakly presented misinformation”.Jackson sat on the US Sentencing Commission, an agency meant to reduce disparity in federal prison sentences. The sentencing expert Douglas Berman, an Ohio State law professor, has said her record shows she is skeptical of the range of sentences recommended for child pornography cases, the subject seized upon by Hawley.“But so too were prosecutors in the majority of her cases and so too are district judges nationwide,” Berman wrote.Durbin told ABC’s This Week: “As far as Senator Hawley is concerned, here’s the bottom line – he’s wrong. He’s inaccurate and unfair in his analysis.“Judge Jackson has been scrutinised more than any person I can think of. This is her fourth time before the Senate judiciary committee. In three previous times, she came through with flying colors and bipartisan support, the last time just last year.“And now Senator Hawley is making these charges that came out of nowhere. The independent fact checkers … have discredited his claims already. They should have. There’s no truth to what he says.“And he’s part of the fringe within the Republican party. This was a man who was fist-bumping the murderous mob that descended on the Capitol on 6 January of last year. He doesn’t have the credibility he thinks he does.”This week, Politico demanded Hawley stop using for fundraising purposes a picture of his famous raised-fist salute to protesters before the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Hawley indicated that he would not stop using the image.12:30PM: Senator Josh Hawley pumps his fist at pro-Trump crowd gathered at the east side of the Capitol before heading into the joint session of Congress. #Jan6NeverAgain #TheBigLie pic.twitter.com/rEFsfLY4x9— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 16, 2021
      On ABC, John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of Senate Republican leadership, was asked if Hawley was guilty of “character assassination” in his attack on Jackson.“The whole process is going to be fair, respectful and thorough,” Barrasso said, adding that he found Jackson “clearly, very intelligent”.Using a key Republican attack line in an election year, Barrasso added: “Going through the record, there are some concerns that people have about her being perceived as soft on crime. That’s all going to come out with the hearings but they’re going to be respectful, they’re going to be thorough and they’re going to be fair.”Asked if Hawley’s attack was fair, Barrasso said: “Well, he’s going to have his opportunity to question the judge as will all the members of the committee.“The last time we had a hearing with [Brett] Kavanaugh, he was accused of being a serial rapist with no evidence whatsoever. So, I think we’re going to have a fair process and a respectful process, unlike what the Democrats did to Justice Kavanaugh.”In fact Kavanaugh – who denied allegations of sexual assault detailed by an alleged victim in confirmation hearings – was the second of three justices installed by Republicans under Donald Trump. The third, Amy Coney Barrett, was jammed on to the court shortly before the 2020 election, after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, told CBS’s Face the Nation he and Jackson “had a very good conversation”. He asked her, he said, to “defend the court” against those who say Democrats should expand it beyond nine justices to redress its ideological balance.Mug shot: Republican Josh Hawley told to stop using January 6 fist salute photoRead more“Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Breyer both publicly opposed court packing,” McConnell said, “that is trying to increase the number of members in order to get an outcome you like. That would have been an easy thing for [Jackson] to do, to defend the integrity of the court. She wouldn’t do that.”The man who drastically shifted the balance of the court in part by denying a nomination to Barack Obama in 2016 and swiftly confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett four years later also said: “I haven’t made a final decision as to how I’m gonna vote.”Hearings begin on Monday. Jackson is expected to make a statement and answer questions. Harvard-trained, she spent two years as a federal public defender. That makes her the first nominee with significant criminal defense experience since Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American on the court.The American Bar Association has given Jackson its highest rating, unanimously “well qualified”.Janette McCarthy Wallace, general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said she was excited to see a Black woman on the verge of a seat.“Representation matters,” Wallace said. “It’s critical to have diverse experience on the bench. It should reflect the rich cultural diversity of this country.”
      The Associated Press contributed to this report
      TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)RepublicansDemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More