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      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting bill

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      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billSB202 is forcing officials and voting rights groups to use every resource to ensure elections run smoothly In 2021, the Election Integrity Act sent shockwaves across Georgia as citizens learned of new restrictions, such as curbing the way churches could provide pizza and water to voters. However, there are much broader effects of the bill being felt across the state as communities across Georgia prepare for midterm elections, the first major election since the signing of the controversial bill.The 98-page bill, also called SB202, impacts a litany of election elements ranging from voter ID laws to the distance at which food and water can be distributed to voters waiting in line. Election officials say they are being forced to use every resource at their disposal to navigate the bill and ensure this election season runs smoothly. But there is widespread concern that the new law will create fresh barriers to voters of color and the changing Georgia electorate.Kamala Harris says ‘everything on the line’ in midterm elections Read more“Internally, we are taking a multifaceted approach, strengthening leadership and expertise throughout departments, and working to beef up skillsets,” said Dele Lowman Smith, chair of the Dekalb county voter registration and election board. “Externally, we are expanding poll worker training and modernizing it to help better address voter concerns when they come up.”Lowman Smith, who was appointed to the position in July 2021, said it will take an all-out approach to ensure elections run smoothly in her county of more than 500,000 active voters.Although there were once 31 ballot drop boxes across the county in the 2020 election season, they are now allowed only six for the entire county as the bill prescribes one drop box per 100,000 voters. The time to request and return absentee ballots has dropped from 176 days to 59 days – more than 50% – forcing election officials to contend with a much quicker turnaround. Additionally, rather than completing absentee ballot applications solely online, voters must now include an original signature on their application, requiring access to a printer.Liza Conrad, deputy executive director of Fair Fight, a voting rights organization based in Georgia, said SB202 significantly burdens voters. “For voters who wish to vote by mail, many are now overcoming these barriers while attempting to make their voices heard,” she said. “If we look back to Georgia’s primary election in May, the rate of rejected vote by mail applications was much higher than that of 2020.”And while voter education once focused on civic engagement and political education, voting rights organizers such as Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, says engaging voters now has to include education around technology and intricacies of the law out of necessity.“What we have to do now is canvassing to really educate people about the process. We are trying to make sure people are still able to exercise their right to vote,” said Butler. “Every little thing seems to have had some kind of change. Even the secretary of state ‘my voter’ page [website] has changed, and now voters have to navigate through tabs instead of just having it all on one page, so we’re having to train voters on that now too.”Conrad, Butler, and Lowman Smith all think it is critical to note that the full breadth of the law goes well beyond absentee ballots, voter IDs and drop boxes. SB202 also limits poll workers’ ability to work at polls outside their county, limiting the capacity of many counties in Georgia as they struggle to find an adequate number of already dwindling poll workers.Shanice Amira Bennerson worked as a precinct manager for multiple elections between 2020 and 2022. However, after witnessing the impact SB202 changes had on voters during the May primaries, Bennerson decided not to continue her work as a poll worker.“Trying to help voters who were just so confused and dejected is heartbreaking. When you have limited precincts and voters who are confused by these changes, some voters just left. Tensions are high, and voters were understandably frustrated,” said Brennerson. “When you couple this with all of the new rules from [SB202] and the limited training we get, it almost feels like a disaster waiting to happen.”Voting organizations such as the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and Fair Fight have sought ways to engage and encourage poll workers and election boards across the state to address capacity and education on a larger scale. Fair Fight is hosting a “Vote Gold Georgia” tour calling for intentional and expanded voting sites and voting times.Still, some voting rights organizations hope to call attention to the many changes prompted by SB202 by highlighting the voters most impacted by the law.“Anti-voter bills like SB202 are a response to Black, brown and young voters turning out and claiming their power in 2020,” says Conrad. “And so, we are working to continue to make sure that these communities continue to participate and make their voices heard and that the poll workers who keep our democracy functioning are empowered and protected.”Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, also thinks the bill unjustly targets voters of color, and hopes to bridge the gap in access it could create.Her group is reallocating resources and shifting its voter education approach to fully educate its communities around changes in timelines, requirements and other recent election changes.“Overall, the impact of the bill is on voters of color, and it was not an accident or unknown to legislators that these communities would ultimately be affected,” says Yoon. “These sorts of tactics are traditionally the types of restrictions that are intended to impact voters of color on the assumption of how voters of color will vote.”TopicsGeorgiaUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022RaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem Bill Keller, once editor of the New York Times, now with the Marshall Project, shows how the US came to imprison so many of its citizens, disproportionately Black and brown, and how such a gross injustice might yet be addressedThe statistics are familiar but remain startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 is “roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times of England’s, six times Canada’s” and nine times that of Germany. In addition, “parole and probation regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans” – more than twice as many as are confined in prison.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreThese numbers come at the beginning of Bill Keller’s smart, short new book, in which he tries to explain how America became so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we might finally reform a system which houses a disproportionally Black and brown population.Keller is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first New York Times posting as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on to be executive editor and then a columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice was never one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, tapped Keller to be founding editor of The Marshall Project, an ambitious effort to produce great journalism about the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.Keller’s book highlights many of the best pieces by Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses plenty of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.The “good news”: the incarcerated population has actually been in slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by early releases because of Covid.America’s unfortunate exceptionalism on this subject is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the rate of incarceration mostly held steady at around 110 out of every 100,000 Americans. But it is nearly 500 today.Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A Democratic House speaker, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, sharply overreacted to the crack cocaine overdose of Len Bias, a Boston Celtics draftee, pushing through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which imposed mandatory sentences, asset forfeitures and outlandishly severe sanctions on crack cocaine” favored by Black ghetto residents, while white consumers of powdered cocaine faced much more lenient penalties.As Keller writes, “Rehabilitation was denigrated on the right as coddling”. But a Democratic Senate judiciary committee chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made everything much worse by championing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a prison-building boom but also eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners enrolled in college courses. President Biden has acknowledged his mistake.It was President Reagan who inserted the profit motive into the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer “the idea of privately run, for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since the new prison owners were paid the same way as hotel proprietors, by occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house about 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal.Keller makes an unintentional argument for sending more Republicans to jail, by pointing out that three of the more unlikely advocates of prison reform are Republican officials who ended up in prison.Patrick Nolan was the minority leader of the California assembly when, in 1993, he was indicted on charges of racketeering and extortion. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a famous Watergate felon from Nixon’s White House who found religion “shortly before serving seven months himself in a federal prison”.Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who then did three years in federal prison for tax fraud and other crimes, became an advocate for voting rights for ex-felons.It’s not all good news. By the end of Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a rightwing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was masterminding a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.Keller points to Norway and Germany as providing the best examples for systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely get more than a few weeks of training, Germans get two years of college courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German jails are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.One reason Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, has pointed out that in the US, during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and arrests for violent crime both declined, the number of felony cases in state courts” suddenly shot up. Because of political pressures, “tens of thousands more prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s had stalled out”.A Question of Standing review: how the CIA undermined American authorityRead morePfaff attributed the racial inequality in numbers of prisoners to “an imbalance of political power – tough-on-crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see the community destruction of mass incarceration from a distance”.Keller reports the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious ones:
      Make low-level drug crimes “non-crimes”.
      Divert people into “mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service”.
      “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances”.
      Give “compassionate release to old and infirm inmates” who don’t pose a real threat to the general population.
      The challenge is to get these common-sense ideas to prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still rail against anyone who is “soft on crime” – the knee-jerk ideology which got us into this catastrophe in the first place.
      What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration is published in the US by Columbia Global Reports
      TopicsBooksUS prisonsUS crimeUS domestic policyUS politicsPolitics booksRacereviewsReuse this content More

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
      The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
      TopicsBooksUS politicsRaceCivil rights movementAmerican civil warHistory booksPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantled

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      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantledThe commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamed An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.West Point’s Ku Klux Klan plaque should be removed, commission saysRead moreRetired Army Brig Gen Ty Seidule, vice-chair of the commission, said the final cost for all of its renaming recommendations will be $62.5m. The total for the latest changes announced Tuesday is $41m, and is included in that amount.The latest group of assets includes everything from the Arlington memorial, two Navy ships and some Army vessels to street signs, water towers, athletic fields, hospital doors and even decals on recycling bins, according to the panel.The bulk of the remaining costs – or $21m – would cover the renaming of nine Army bases, and about $450,000 for recommended new names at the US Military at West Point in New York.Seidule said the panel determined that the memorial at Arlington was “problematic from top to bottom”. He said the panel recommended that it be entirely removed, with only the granite base remaining.The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American south. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”The pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the 13 Confederate states and Maryland, which didn’t secede or join the Confederacy. Some of the figures also on the statue include a slave woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.And the Latin inscription translates to: “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato,” and was meant to equate the south’s secession to a noble “lost cause.”Seidule said the panel decided early on to propose new names only for the nine Army bases. It said that the Navy secretary has the authority to rename the two ships, which are the USS Chancellorsville and USNS Maury. The Chancellorsville was named for the civil war battle and the Maury was named after a Confederate soldier.He said the service secretaries can find new names for the handful of Army ships and the Air Force’s Fort Fisher Recreation Area in North Carolina. The panel recommended that the defense secretary rename Fort Belvoir, Virginia.The panel’s most sweeping recommendations were released in May, and laying out new names for nine US Army bases that commemorated Confederate officers: Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort AP Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama.The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.For years, USmilitary officials had defended the naming of bases after Confederate officers. As recently as 2015 the Army argued that the names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the south.But in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, and the months of racial unrest that followed, the Pentagon and Congress pushed for a comprehensive plan to rename the military posts and hundreds of other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.The secretary of defense is expected to implement the commission’s plan no later than 1 January 2024.The panel also is recommending that the department set up a process to try and save money and efficiently change the names. And it said the secretary of defense should authorize the military service secretaries and other leaders to remove smaller items – such as portraits, plaques and awards – that honor the Confederacy or those who served in it.Created in 2020, the Naming Commission first met in March 2021 and began taking name recommendations from the public in September. Overall, the commission received more than 34,000 potential names for the nine Army bases.Seidule said that some of the names that were not used can be used by the service secretaries as they determine new names for roads and other base locations and assets.TopicsVirginiaUS CongressRaceUS politicsArlingtonnewsReuse this content More

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      Ad campaign targets Latino voters as key bloc for Democrats in midterms

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      Ad campaign targets Latino voters as key bloc for Democrats in midtermsNon-profit Voto Latino aims to challenge Republican ‘disinformation’ in key battleground states With midterm elections on the horizon, Americans are subject to a flurry of Democratic and Republican ads. As the second-largest voting bloc in 2020, Latino voters are expected to play a significant role in the 2022 elections. They are therefore a key target group.One non-profit, Voto Latino, aims to fight political disinformation and communicate with self-identified moderate Latino voters through a series of ads.Are Latino voters really moving right? The end of Roe may muddy the pictureRead moreAmeer Patel, vice-president of programs for Voto Latino, said: “We’ve seen a lot of Republicans make headway through disinformation campaigns targeting Latino voters, basically through disinformation narratives that are calling Democrats socialists who are trying to erode trust in institutions, calling Democrats unpatriotic.“We’ve seen a lot of inroads Republicans have made in some of those disinformation theories and so what we wanted to do was basically debunk some of those and promote Democratic messaging.”Based on a mid-May poll of 1,600 Latinos in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Voto Latino and Rising Tide Interactive, a political strategy company, developed 10 ads about issues voters said were most important to them.According to a Voto Latino memo reviewed by the Guardian, the issues include taxes, immigration, pandemic relief, small business relief, infrastructure, child tax credits and abortion rights.“There’s been a lot of political communication that comes across as overly promotional or polished,” Patel said. “We’ve seen those ads not have high effect sizes.”Patel said Voto Latino spent a month gathering stories from Latino voters. The resulting ads were tested in online mixed panels, with participants recruited through online ads. Respondents were initially limited to people self-identified as Latino, then to those who also self-identified as politically moderate.Patel said: “Basically we were trying to get them on the record to talk about issues that matter to them, what they see in politics … These are real people, these weren’t actors. Furthermore we wanted it to be a testimonial-style video instead of some of those voiceovers that are more polished.“For a lot of these people, they’ve never done that before. You can see [some of them] are visibly uncomfortable in front of the camera and so we feel that all of those things would basically contribute to the likelihood of success here and make that seem more genuine.”Each ad is 30 seconds long. In one ad, on taxes, a young man named Felipe wears a dark polo shirt as he looks into the camera and says: “My parents broke their back working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.“It made me angry that Republicans passed a law to give millionaires and billionaires a tax break while my parents paid real money … Your vote matters and when you vote for the Democrats, it helps hardworking families like mine to get by.”Voto Latino measured the effectiveness of each ad based on questions in three categories, compared to a placebo ad.The three categories were care, trust and vote choice. The questions concerned whether Democrats or Republicans truly care about the voter and his or her best interests more than the other party; whether the voter trusts Democrats or Republicans to deliver on issues that matter most to him or herself; and if the November 2022 general election were held today, would the voter vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate for US representative in their district.According to Voto Latino, the ads proved very effective at increasing Democratic favorability on trust, care and vote choice, especially when it came to abortion and religion.The group memo said: “In certain instances, these ads had a lift upwards of 26% compared to the placebo group. In general, results recommend using the “Abortion/Religion” or “Taxes” ads when communicating to moderate Latinos.The chief executive of Voto Latino, Maria Teresa Kumar, said: “The numbers we’re seeing are the kinds of results that can transform a race. Latino voters are positioned to help Democrats win some of the most important contests in November. The question is whether or not our groups decide to engage with them.“This is an unprecedented opportunity; we just need to take advantage of it.”TopicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022RaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
      The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
      TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American history

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      Interview‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyMartin Pengelly in New York The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan at the US military academy made headlines. One member of the commission which recommended its removal is a historian of the US army and the lost cause mythIn a 36-year army career, Ty Seidule served in the US, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Kosovo, Macedonia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He retired a brigadier general.Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warRead moreAn emeritus West Point history professor, he now teaches at Hamilton College. His online video, Was the Civil War About Slavery?, has been viewed millions of times, and in 2021 he published a well-received book, Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause.Outside academia, Seidule is a member of the Naming Commission, a body set up in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd and the protests for racial justice it inspired, tasked with recommending changes to military memorials to Confederates who fought in the civil war.Asked how the US military came to name bases, barracks, roads and other assets after soldiers who fought to secede from the union and keep Black people enslaved, Seidule said: “The first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers saw the Confederates as traitors.“That’s not a presentist argument. That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as [Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said, did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So, why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to integration.”Seidule rejects the notion that memorials to Lee and other Confederates – PGT Beauregard, a West Point superintendent fired for sedition, William Hardee, a commandant who fought in the west – might be claimed as symbols of reconciliation.“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people, at the expense of Black people.“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 … reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.”Last week, the Naming Commission made headlines when it highlighted a bronze at the United States Military Academy which depicts a member of the Ku Klux Klan.Seidule told the New York Times that though the Klan bronze fell outside the remit of the commission – the racist terror group was founded after the defeat of the south – the panel chose to highlight it “because we thought it was wrong”.The commission has issued reports concerning military bases and the military and naval academies. It will present its final report in October. Speaking to the Guardian, Seidule cited such ongoing work as reason not to discuss the Klan plaque further. But West Point did so on its Facebook page.It said: “There is a triptych (three bronze panels) at one of the entrances of Bartlett Hall [the science centre] that depicts the history of the United States. The artwork was dedicated on 3 June 1965 … As part of the middle panel titled ‘One Nation, Under God, Indivisible’, there is a small section that shows a Ku Klux Klan member.“The artist, Laura Gardin Fraser … wanted to create art that depicted ‘historical incidents or persons’ that [documented] both tragedy and triumph in our nation’s history.”Noting that the work was dedicated to graduates who served in the second world war and the Korean war, West Point added: “The academy strives to graduate diverse leaders of character for our nation.”Lee did not lead the Confederacy. Its president was Jefferson Davis, a former secretary of war and senator from Mississippi. But Lee, who died in 1870, became the most-memorialised Confederate.Asked why, Seidule said: “If you think of Confederate monuments, of the burning of books which the United Daughters of the Confederacy did in the early part of the 20th century, to ensure that textbooks said the right thing, really it’s that every religion needs its God. And in a way, that’s what Lee became.”Today, conservatives are banning books in attempts to control teaching of history, race, sexuality and other culture-war issues.Seidule concentrates on his historical work. Lee, he said, was in part idealised for lack of other options. James Longstreet enjoyed battlefield victories but after the war “fought for biracial democracy in New Orleans. So you can’t use him.“While Lee ended up losing hugely, completely defeated, his armies destroyed, he was successful for a time before that. And so he was seen by the white south as their best general, as their ideal. And by the 1930s, he comes to represent something not just in the south, but among white Americans in general.”Beyond West Point, the Confederate battle flag has become a symbol of rebellion, reaction and racism more potent than any statue or building. On 6 January 2021 it even flew in the halls of Congress, when Trump supporters attacked.Again, Seidule rejects any notion that use of the flag might in any way be excused.“We have to remember that it really didn’t mean that much different then than it does now. In 1863 it represented the Army of Northern Virginia, which was fighting to create a slave republic. Now, some people say it reflects rebellion. But remember, this was rebellion to create a slave republic. And so, to me, it is a symbol of all that America is not.“It’s a symbol of insurrection, it’s a symbol of somebody that would not take the results of a democratic election. I grew up with it, my dad had Confederate flags over the mantle. I know how powerful these symbols are.“One thing we often do with the civil war as historians is we let the smell of gunpowder seduce us into thinking about the war as American football, [about the] Xs and Os of military history, without understanding the purpose. That’s the thing I always come back to: why this cruel war?”He today that sheds his blood with me: when West Point rugby went to warRead moreSeidule’s next book will be about events at West Point towards the end of another cruel war: Vietnam. In 1971, Richard Nixon decided he wanted to oversee “a moral rebirth” of an army in disarray.“OK,” Seidule says, “that’s great. But the next thing he does is go to Trophy Point”, the focal point of the West Point campus, high over the Hudson river. “If you’ve seen Battle Monument, you know it says on there, ‘the War of the Rebellion’. Nixon says, ‘Where’s the Confederate monument?’ So he orders the superintendent to put a Confederate monument on Trophy Point.“And the Black cadets find out. And they nearly mutiny and they write a manifesto based on the Attica uprising” – at a New York prison in 1971 – “and [eventually] just so many things change.“They put on a concert to raise money for sickle cell anemia research, featuring Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, up at Michie Stadium”, the home of Army football. “They bring Louis Farrakhan to talk. They institute remarkable change, which I’m arguing comes from one of the most successful protest movements in American military history that nobody knows about, and eventually it kills the Confederate monument.“So that’s the book I’m writing now.”
      Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      Biden says his student loan relief is ‘life-changing’. Will it fix the system’s inequities?

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      Biden says his student loan relief is ‘life-changing’. Will it fix the system’s inequities?The initiative’s income cap and unclear bureaucratic process could fail to address the racial disparities that already exist01:15As Joe Biden announced the details of his plan to help those with student loan debt, Kat Welbeck wrestled with the idea. For millions of Americans, the unprecedented relief would be “life-changing”, especially for low-income and Black and Latino Americans, who are disproportionately saddled with decades-long debt, she said.But the plans’ income cap on who can receive cancellation, and its unclear bureaucratic process for Americans seeking debt relief could perpetuate the inequities that underpin the nation’s student loan system, Welbeck, director of advocacy and civil rights counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, said.Student loan forgiveness: what you need to know about Biden’s planRead more“While a $10,000 cancellation is so meaningful for millions of student loan borrowers, there’s a lot that’s still to be done to fix this student debt crisis,” Welbeck says.On Wednesday, the White House released its long-anticipated plan on how to tackle the nation’s mounting $1.6tn student loan debt, accounting for more than 43 million people, with almost a third owing less than $10,000, according to federal data.The initiative would cancel up to $10,000 in debt for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year ($250,000 for married couples). Borrowers whose low income level qualified them for a Pell Grant will receive up to $20,000 in relief. The White House also extended a pause for “one final time” on student loan payments through January.The White House has projected that the plan would eliminate full debt balances for 20 million Americans and that 90% of debt relief dollars would go toward people with incomes less than $75,000. The White House also touted it as an effort to “advance racial equity”, pointing to its targeted relief for those who received Pell Grants. Officials noted that Black Americans were twice as likely to receive such grants as white Americans.Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, like others, have advocated for cancelling at least $50,000 in student debt, praised the administration’s plan as “transformative for the lives of working people all across the country” and would “help narrow the racial wealth gap among borrowers”.Still, some argue that the cancellation of just $10,000 for most borrowers would fail to substantially affect the racial disparities within the student loan system. Black and Latino borrowers disproportionately come from poorer households and, as a result, take on more debt than white Americans. At the same time, white American households have, on average, 10 times the wealth of Black households.Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, which had been advocating for cancellation of $50,000, wrote in an op-ed that Biden’s plan would “do little to help” Black Americans who, on average, hold nearly twice as much student debt as white borrowers. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” he said. Canceling $10,000 in student debt when the average white borrower is $12,000 in debt, while Black women hold on average over $52,000 isn’t just unacceptable, it’s structural racism.— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) August 23, 2022
      The emphasis on income in the White House’s cap represents a possible barrier that could exclude borrowers of color who meet the income threshold yet their families lack the wealth to tackle the debt, Welbeck says. A June 2020 report from the Student Borrower Protection Center found that 90% of Black Americans and 72% of Latino Americans took out student loans, a far cry from the 66% of white Americans.And 20 years after graduating college, the median Black borrower still owed 95% of their original debt while the median white borrower paid down the same amount. For Latinos, after 12 years, they owed 83% of their original debt, more than the white borrower over the same time.Given that Black and Latino Americans typically earn less than white Americans, borrowers of color will start from behind without the intergenerational wealth available to reduce the debt they already hold.“So if you’re already coming from a lower-wealth household, you now have more debt, and then that cuts into opportunities for you to build wealth for the next generation,” Welback says. “You might see higher-income households that are Black or Latino, but that does not take away the fact that you still have those wealth disparities.”Student loan forgiveness: what does it mean for the US debt crisis?Read moreHistorically, the education department has complicated access to loan forgiveness through the programs it creates, such as the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for non-profit and public service workers seeking relief and the borrower defense program for those who were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges.The White House initiative does nothing to address private student loan debt, which accounts for more than $140bn in debt. Although Latino borrowers were more than twice as likely to report struggling with private student loan debt as white borrowers, Black borrowers were a staggering four times as likely to fall behind on private debt payments, according to the Student Borrower Protection Center.An application process could make it harder for people to access relief, Welbeck says. But recent decisions by the education department to automatically discharge debts for hundreds of thousands of students who attended ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges, two for-profit college chains that imploded, show that a widespread relief without bureaucratic hurdles is possible. The two debt cancellations at the for-profit institutions amounted to roughly $10bn affecting more than 700,000 students.“The student debt crisis is a result of the longstanding history of racial discrimination that we have in our country, and it continues to perpetuate them,” Welback says. “So until we address student debt as a civil rights crisis, we’re not going to be able to make meaningful gains toward equity.”TopicsUS student debtBiden administrationUS student financeRaceJoe BidenUS politicsUS educationnewsReuse this content More