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      How Dinkins and Giuliani Foretold the Future of American Politics

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      I remember being at the hotel on election night in 1993 where Mayor David Dinkins and his supporters had gathered to celebrate what they hoped would be his re-election. I was a reporter for The Village Voice, and the polls had been close.But it was not to be. At a certain point in the evening, the local cable news network NY1 (just about a year old at the time) called the race for Rudy Giuliani. Shortly after, some members of the mayor’s entourage thundered past me.In the mayhem, I managed to make eye contact with Lee Jones, the mayor’s press secretary, whom I had known since he worked for Mayor Ed Koch (Mr. Dinkins kept him on). I could see he was distraught. “Well,” he said, “by and large, the coalition held. The coalition held.”That may sound like spin, but it wasn’t. We knew each other quite well. I took it that he was just trying to think of something hopeful to say — and in retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.As I’ve thought back on those years in the wake of Mr. Dinkins’s passing last week, I’m floored at the extent to which the politics of New York City foreshadowed the national politics of today. If the American polity consists of two warring camps right now, we might say that the New York of that time helped blaze that unhappy trail.The 1993 race was a rematch of their 1989 contest, when Mr. Dinkins beat Mr. Giuliani by less than 50,000 votes out of nearly two million cast. In the rematch, Mr. Giuliani won by about 53,000.Both men’s coalitions were remarkably sturdy. Even with a series of tumultuous situations — like the AIDS, heroin and crack cocaine epidemics, and dark economic times that forced Mr. Dinkins to enact severe budget cuts — two relatively marginal factors seemed to tip the election. First, Mr. Dinkins lost a few thousand mostly white voters over his too-tentative handling of a riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood Crown Heights and the boycott of two Korean-owned grocery stores by Black residents. Second, Mr. Giuliani benefited from a Staten Island secession referendum that Republicans had led the way to getting on the ballot. It goosed turnout in that borough, which benefited Mr. Giuliani (Republicans knew how to put a finger on the electoral scale even then).Mr. Dinkins’s coalition was liberal, multiracial and multiethnic. It arose and came together over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. For decades before him, New York City politics had been dominated by “the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel. For three citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and City Council president — it was often the case that one would go to an Italian, one to an Irishman (or by the 1970s, Irishwoman) and one to a Jew.In that arrangement, Black people and Latinos were junior partners, and they could not win the mayoralty because they could never coalesce around a single candidate. Meanwhile, the 1980s were happening: raging inequality and the AIDS crisis; a wave of crime and homelessness; the decade of the rise of the hedge-fund titans and Manhattan real estate celebrities (including you-know-who). In addition, Mr. Koch played increasingly to white racial backlash as the years went on. The Dinkins coalition — Black people, Latinos, gays, liberal Jews, immigrants, assorted others — was an emerging New York that was mostly not invited to the conspicuous prosperity of the ’80s enjoyed by Wall Street financiers and real estate developers. Mr. Dinkins’s most historically significant accomplishment was arguably not anything he did as mayor; it was to have assembled this coalition and, with his widely admired strategist Bill Lynch, proved to the world that it could win.The Giuliani coalition was the traditional and aging New York of wealthy Manhattan elites and white ethnic populations in other boroughs — the police and firefighters, the owners of the hardware and liquor stores in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (the “red” parts of New York City), the pressmen at the Daily News plant, the sons and daughters of the men and women who had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.They were white. As such, they were privileged, even if it often didn’t feel that way to them. By and large they did not like the changes, like letting Black and Latino people into their unions and neighborhoods, that the emerging New York was seeking to impose on them. In Mr. Giuliani, they found their avenger.Fundamentally, those two coalitions in our largest city are now our two coalitions in the United States. And just as those two mayoral elections were close, hard-fought referendums on which New York would have power, our recent national elections have followed exactly the same pattern. Emerging America won in 2008 and 2012. Backlash prevailed narrowly in 2016. Then, a few thousand votes switched, and multiracial America won again.In some ways, I feel like I’ve been watching the same movie for 30 years. It even has some of the same stars, saying some of the same kinds of things. Of that 1989 election, Mr. Giuliani once told the journalist Jack Newfield: “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights.”Mr. Dinkins, though a good and decent man, in the end didn’t have the political vision and will to transcend the divisions. Mr. Giuliani, like his friend President Trump, didn’t have them, either (in his case, more by choice).But these days I wonder who can transcend them. I know Joe Biden wants to, but I sure don’t get the feeling the other side wants to play along. Lee Jones was righter than he knew, not just about 1993 but also about what’s unfolded ever since: The two coalitions have not only held; they’ve metastasized. I may be watching this movie the rest of my life.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Will Biden Deal With Republican Sabotage?

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      When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.It goes without saying that Donald Trump, whose conspiracy theories are getting wilder and wilder, will never concede, and that millions of his followers will always believe — or at least say they believe — that the election was stolen.Most Republicans in Congress certainly know this is a lie, although even on Capitol Hill there are a lot more crazy than we’d like to imagine. But it doesn’t matter; they still won’t accept that Biden has any legitimacy, even though he won the popular vote by a large margin.And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s G.O.P. doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern, no matter how many votes they receive.After all, in recent years we’ve seen what happens when a state with a Republican legislature elects a Democratic governor: Legislators quickly try to strip away the governor’s powers. So does anyone doubt that Republicans will do all they can to hobble and sabotage Biden’s presidency?The only real questions are how much harm the G.O.P. can do, and how Biden will respond.The answer to the first question depends a lot on what happens in the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll have effective though narrow control of both houses of Congress. If they don’t, Mitch McConnell will have enormous powers of obstruction — and anyone who doubts that he’ll use those powers to undermine Biden at every turn is living in a fantasy world.But how much damage would obstructionism inflict? In terms of economic policy — which is all I’ll talk about in this column — the near future can be divided into two eras, pre- and post-vaccine (or more accurately, after wide dissemination of a vaccine).For the next few months, as the pandemic continues to run wild, tens of millions of Americans will be in desperate straits unless the federal government steps up to help. Unfortunately, Republicans may be in a position to block this help.The good news about the very near future, such as it is, is that Americans will probably (and correctly) blame Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, for the misery they’re experiencing — and this very fact may make Republicans willing to cough up at least some money.What about the post-vaccine economy? Here again there’s potentially some good news: Once a vaccine becomes widely available, we’ll probably see a spontaneous economic recovery, one that won’t depend on Republican cooperation. And there will also be a vast national sense of relief.So Biden might do OK for a while even in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition. But we can’t be sure of that. Republicans might refuse to confirm anyone for key economic positions. There’s always the possibility of another financial crisis — and outgoing Trump officials have been systematically undermining the incoming administration’s ability to deal with such a crisis if it happens. And America desperately needs action on issues from infrastructure, to climate change, to tax enforcement that won’t happen if Republicans retain blocking power.So what can Biden do?First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing.Now, I don’t mean that he should sound like Trump, demanding retribution against his enemies — although the Justice Department should be allowed to do its job and prosecute whatever Trump-era crimes it finds.No, what Biden needs to do is what Harry Truman did in 1948, when he built political support by running against “do-nothing” Republicans. And he’ll have a better case than Truman ever did, because today’s Republicans are infinitely more corrupt and less patriotic than the Republicans Truman faced.The results of this year’s election, with a solid Biden win but Republicans doing well down-ballot, tells us that American voters don’t fully understand what the modern G.O.P. is really about. Biden needs to get that point across, and make Republicans pay for the sabotage we all know is coming.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?

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      President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.How could a president responsible for one of the gravest failures of governance in American history nevertheless maintain such rock-solid support? Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame.When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies. Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share.Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. That is where it gets interesting — and Democrats get uncomfortable.Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal.Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Turkey on the Brain

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      So, what do you think Donald Trump is giving thanks for this year?A) Peace and good fellowship throughout the land.B) His thrilling campaign to overturn the election.C) Melania’s new blond look.I know, you’re hoping it’s going to be C. But the man is obsessed with his re-election resurrection.“One thing has become clear these last few days, I am the American People’s ALL-TIME favorite President,” he wrote to his mailing list, a very large group of citizens who’ve gotten hundreds of missives along these lines since Election Day.The all-important bottom line of this correspondence is that everyone should send Donald Trump $5 right away. And, of course, more is OK.In his real outside life — the one he’ll be returning to in just a few weeks — Trump is definitely in need of those fivers. He owed tons of money when he first ran for office. Now a $400 million bill is coming due. And his prize customer, the Republican faithful, is looking a bit shaky. Republicans spent over $23 million at Trump-owned businesses since he started his campaign for president five years ago. That’s more than 100 times as much as in the five years prior. And not necessarily a sum that will continue through his Mar-a-Lago exile.Something needs to be done! And you cannot help but notice that currently, Trump’s one absolute prize Guernsey of a cash cow seems to be his postelection re-election campaign, “Save America.”“Friend,” he asks in another mass email, “Will you allow the CORRUPT Democrats to try to STEAL this Election and impart their RADICAL agenda on our Country? Or will you step UP and DEFEND your Country?” It’s both a plea for cash and a reminder that when the nation looks back on the Trump era it will see a time when capital letters ruled the earth.But if an eager reader decided to send “Save America” a donation to “protect the integrity of this Election,” it’s hard to know where it’d go. According to an email sent under Eric’s name, the money is earmarked for “legal teams in each critical state.” Which is certainly possible. Although experts say the money could also pay consulting fees for the kids. Or even the kennel fees for the family pet, if only Trump didn’t hate dogs.(This last bit of information has nothing to do with Save America. It’s just a sneaky way to work in another reminder that Joe Biden has two shepherds, Major, who came from a rescue center, and Champ.)Back to the money.Our president does have trouble hanging onto cash, whether it’s his or ours. The guy who vowed to eliminate the national debt if elected is leaving office in a fiscal year that recorded the biggest one-year debt figure ever, $3.1 trillion. And during the entire glorious four years, the national red ink went from $14.4 trillion to $21.1 trillion.The return of Trump to his business empire is not going to solve its problems. First, because he seems very bad at handling money, and second, because he doesn’t really intend to go back to a civilian life. If he did, history suggests he’d only succeed in building another tower of overdue bills.While the alleged Trump agenda right now is overturning the national election results, clearly the real plan is to gear up for a comeback in 2024. It’s a pretty dramatic goal. There has been only one president in U.S. history who lost re-election and then ran and won four years later. That would be Grover Cleveland.If you’re ever talking about Trump’s political ambition, be sure to refer to it as “pulling a Grover.”Almost everything Trump does to challenge the election returns or raise money for his next presidential campaign can trickle over to something more personal and short-term. For instance, is he going to try to collect cash for a presidential library? That’s normal for a person in his position. Even though the first noun you connect with Donald Trump is not “contemplation” or “scholarly research.”Or even “book.”It’s become expected for former presidents to raise money for a place to display their memorabilia, host gatherings and sponsor research. But if you get a request for a Donald Trump Library contribution, do not feel compelled to follow through. Even if they offer you a free copy of Ivanka’s “Women Who Work” or Donald Jr.’s magnum opus on “How the Left Thrives on Hate.”Short-term, of course, it’s perfectly OK to blot this out. Spend the holidays on the easy stuff. Biden’s dogs. Don Jr.’s career options. And the inauguration — how do you think Trump will behave? Defeated presidents usually go to see their opponent get sworn in. Even Herbert Hoover, who really, really resented Franklin Roosevelt’s victory, rode with F.D.R. from the White House to the Capitol. Didn’t talk much, just sort of sulked and stared. F.D.R. found other ways to keep himself busy as he rode through the rapturous cheering crowd.But Hoover-Trump is not a great comparison. Unless you can imagine Donald spending his post-presidential career working on famine relief projects.Trump certainly regards himself now as a once and future candidate, and a recent Politico poll showed 53 percent of Republicans are ready to vote for him in the 2024 presidential primaries. Twelve percent prefer Mike Pence and 8 percent opt for Donald Jr.I hope Pence is aware that only 4 percent of his party regards him as a better potential president than Junior. Really, if you want to invest in the future of any Trump minions, I’d go for a line of Rudy Giuliani hair products.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in World Politics

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

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

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

      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

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

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Center-right country:

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

      Contextual Note

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

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

      Embed from Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Historical Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Lindsey Graham’s Campaign Falls Below the Political Poverty Level

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      Senator Lindsey Graham, the archetypal Southerner, has throughout the 21st century been regarded as a pillar of the Republican establishment in the US. His talent with the media has also made him a consistent star thanks in part to his lethargic, emotionless eyes and his honey-glazed South Carolinian drawl. The media — and not just Fox News — love him for always making himself available for interviews in which he displays serious rhetorical skills in making his opinion on major issues sound as if it represents the authoritative truth.

      His Senate seat in South Carolina, which formerly belonged to Strom Thurmond, has always been deemed secure. During the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, Graham has cleverly navigated the issues to appear independent of Trump — notably in his condemnation of Saudi despot Mohammed bin Salman — and yet totally loyal to the US president as the ultimate wielder of power. He was counting on this dual image of a man who knew how to balance an image of brave individuality with the right level of obsequiousness to power to guarantee victory in this election and others to come.

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      But this year’s senatorial election in South Carolina has produced what may be one of the major surprises of an exceptional moment in politics. Graham has now fallen behind in the polls to an African-American challenger, Democrat Jaime Harrison. The Democratic nominee has benefited from an exceptional war chest now evaluated at $57 million compared to the mere $28 million remaining for Graham in the final stretch of the campaign. By September, Harrison’s campaign had, since the beginning, raised $85 million compared to Graham’s $58 million. And as every American knows, money talks.

      In normal times, Republican politicians like Graham celebrate the fact that money talks. But as he complains about Harrison’s war chest, Graham is at least being consistent. In late 2015, when he was campaigning in the presidential primaries against a slate of Republican hopefuls that included a political outsider named Donald Trump, Graham was the one Republican who promised “to add an amendment to the Constitution curtailing money in politics.” That was a bold idea. His plan, if successful, would have prevented the Supreme Court from defending its notorious Citizens United decision establishing the principle that “corporations are people” and that “money is speech.”

      Now, Graham is worried about his own hide. The logic of fundraising has betrayed him, leading him to complain: “Where is all this money coming from? You don’t have to report it if it’s below $200. When this election is over with, I hope there will be a sitting down and finding out, ‘OK, how do we control this?’ It just seems to be an endless spiral.’”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Endless spiral:

      1) A series of causes and effects that develops a dynamic of its own to escape the control of American politicians, a group of people who feel that, as the greatest nation in the history of the world, nothing should escape their control
      2) In the political system of the United States, the perennially repeated ritual of enthroning, in election after election, the same personalities, whose successful association with power derives from their skill at using the power of the media to become the name that will always prevail on a ballot

      Contextual Note

      Newsweek reports that “Graham’s team has accused his rival of trying to ‘buy a Senate seat.’” That privilege was traditionally reserved for Republicans, though Democrats in recent decades have become adept at the skill of gleaning dark money from corporate donors, which helps to explain why their politics have become indistinguishable from that of the Republican.

      Graham feels just as justified today in accusing Harrison of buying a Senate seat as he felt justified in pushing through the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court weeks before a presidential election, after claiming in 2016 that no president should ever be allowed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in the year of an election. Graham clearly understands how political opportunism works.

      He also understands how, in modern times, the media works concerning the idea of outsiders meddling in elections. He has decided to mobilize the Democrats’ favorite trope concerning elections. It consists of blaming evil foreigners (mostly Russians) for interfering with the integrity of electoral processes. Because this is a state election, Graham’s outsiders needn’t be a foreign power but simply masked interlopers from other states.

      Though the mysterious donors remain unidentified, their characteristics can be surmised. Just as establishment Democrats draw conclusions about foreign interference on the basis of their suspicion that certain actions bear “all the earmarks of a classic Russian information operation,” Graham sees a cabal of out-of-state Democrats undermining his hopes for reelection. Vox quotes Graham, who appears literally shocked: “He also shared a statement outlining what were described as ‘shocking numbers from Jaime Harrison’s record-setting fundraising haul,’ describing the money as coming from ‘liberal out-of-state donors angered by Sen. Graham’s support of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.’”

      At least Senator Graham is comforted by the fact that he is a true conservative in a truly conservative state. “National Democrats will invest more than $100 million of out-of-state money to buy the race, but the voters of South Carolina know a liberal Democrat when they see one,” Graham’s campaign spokesman said earlier this month. Liberals have never been welcome in the Deep South.

      Historical Note

      Thanks to his skill with the media, Lindsey Graham has become a fixture of US politics. He established himself as a symbol of continuity in the culture of the formerly Confederate South. At the same time, he has successfully avoided appearing simply as a caricature of the traditional Southern politician committed to rural values, historical nostalgia and deeply ingrained racism. Throughout his career, he has understood how to appeal to his peers in both parties while maintaining his own staunchly conservative identity focused primarily on an aggressive militaristic stance.

      In 2002, Graham seized the opportunity of running for the Senate seat that became available at the retirement of the iconic racist and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate, later turned Republican, Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond had held onto his Senate seat for 48 years. Graham knew that with the right PR and the unrelenting support of Fox News, he would most likely be poised to demonstrate a similar longevity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      His African-American opponent, Jaime Harrison, is now unexpectedly threatening Graham’s political longevity. Who could have imagined a black man occupying Thurmond’s seat in the Senate? Harrison understood that Graham’s Senate seat was very secure, if not beyond reach. Harrison has expressed his own surprise: “I got into this race because I knew I had a shot, but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine a campaign growing like this campaign has grown.”

      In a statement like this, Harrison demonstrates his own mastery of the art of electoral rhetoric. It would have been more honest and accurate to say: Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine the funding of my campaign growing like this funding has grown.

      It wasn’t the campaign that grew, but the amount of cash in his coffers. Although he may not want to admit it, Harrison too knows that money talks.

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

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

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      The Mad Complicity of Trump, Pompeo and the Media

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      In an article published by Al Jazeera with the title, “What is behind the hype about the new Iran-China partnership?” Pakistan-based journalist Tom Hussain weighs in on how media in the US have become dedicated to magnifying real events not to further our understanding of them, but to create a climate of conflict, if not war in the Middle East. 

      Hussain cites two stories that US media have been running with in recent weeks to generate emotional heat while depriving them of the light of intelligible analysis. The first is the strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China. The second is the normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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      Hussain notes that both stories have been interpreted in the US as “escalations in the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran.” Seeking some needed perspective, he points out that “the first development was a media creation. The New York Times (NYT) ran a front-page story citing a ‘leaked’ draft of the 25-year strategic partnership agreement under negotiation between China and Iran since 2016.” The Times story summed up its case in its misleading headline: “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Media creation:

      1) Fabricated melodrama masquerading as news provided by respectable media outlets to prove that they can be just as disrespectful of the truth as social media 
      2) The state of hyperreality induced by society’s obsessive addiction to professional media and the entertainment industry, effectively canceling the public’s relationship with reality 

      Contextual Note

      The methodology of media creation has achieved something close to perfection in the Donald Trump era. It reflects a complex team effort shared by an infinitely creative political superstructure and the complicit media.

      Before Trump, this novel dynamic that now regulates the news cycle had never existed in the political world. Trump didn’t invent “alternate facts,” even though a member of his team made the term a permanent item of US political vocabulary. Politicians have always lied and exaggerated, but it was always about specific issues. With Trump, it has now become a way of life. Without hyperreality, the news would be too boring to pay attention to. The public now expects it. For their profitability, the media now depend on it.

      Building the hyperreal system required two critical components. At its core is a democratically elected clown show whose members are skilled at turning every utterance into a deliberate distortion and often inversion of reality. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have perfected that role. For a while, they were accompanied by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. But when that began to look too much like the Three Stooges, the production team pared it back to make it look more like Abbot and Costello.

      Embed from Getty Images

      One member of the show’s technical crew, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, has compared the Trump administration’s show to Alice in Wonderland. Once the hyperreal wonderland sets were in place, the media could play their role of amplifying every absurdity in the actors’ actions and discourse and presenting it as the essential news of the day. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and many others then had an open field for manufacturing scoops designed to reveal how artificial and distorted the starring team had become.

      In the example Hussain examines, the lead player was Pompeo, a man whose commitment to hyperreality includes a personal belief in a marvelous work of American evangelical fiction that claims to be inspired by the Bible: “the rapture.” Hussain recounts that when interviewed by Fox News in early August, “Pompeo claimed that the prospective China-Iran deal would put Communist cash in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s hands.” Hussain then mentions Pompeo’s warnings: “China’s entry into Iran will destabilize the Middle East. It’ll put Israel at risk. It’ll put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates at risk as well.”

      No patriotic American is allowed to doubt that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the good guys on the world stage. It doesn’t matter that any of these good guys may from time to time slaughter civilian populations (in Gaza or Yemen), seize land that is not theirs in violation of UN resolutions, ambush, assassinate and dismember the occasional dissident journalist or blockade an allied nation (Qatar) that doesn’t toe their line. Washington long ago elected those three nations to the good guys club. If any of the three detects or even invents a threat from elsewhere, the US will be by their side.

      In the interview with Fox News, Pompeo amplified his warning: “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and to have access to weapons systems and commerce and money flowing from the Chinese Communist Party only compounds that risk for that region.” It doesn’t matter how much truth or falsehood there may be in Pompeo’s claim. What matters is that the evil force he has identified combines the two permanent objects of US paranoia in a single historical event: terrorism and communism.

      Breaking free from the envelope of hyperreality his reporting has focused on, Hussain offers this extraordinary moment of sincerity so rare in today’s media: “At the risk of spotlighting my own inadequacies as a journalist, I [cannot] help wondering why editors and writers seem so willing to fan the flames of war.” 

      To answer his own question, he might have simply reviewed the past 75 years of US history to realize that the Cold War has always been a Hollywood production, courtesy of the military-industrial complex and its pervasive economic logic. But unlike Hollywood action films, US foreign policy as modeled by the media has real world consequences. Hussain makes this clear: “The long-suffering peoples of the Middle East could do without journalists once again playing cheerleader for American politicians who perpetuate their domestic power by igniting conflict in others’ backyards.”

      Russiagate is one obvious manifestation of the hyperreal campaign. It’s the one chosen by the Democrats. Pompeo and the Republicans prefer demonizing China. The New Yorker has just published an article debunking in glorious detail the entire Russiagate ideology so assiduously pursued by the most respectable media in the US, starting with The New York Times. But the principle goes beyond Russia and President Vladimir Putin. “Foreign interference is now a trope in American politics, at risk of becoming as cheap and meaningless as the term ‘fake news’ became once it was co-opted by Trump,” The New Yorker reports.

      Historical Note

      Future historians centuries from today will wonder why the US empire of the late 20th and early 21st centuries required the non-stop fabrication of an imaginary all-powerful enemy to maintain its identity as an empire. The Roman Empire did quite well for centuries without requiring a cold war ideology. Neither did the British Empire, Genghis Khan or the ancient Persian Empire. Once they had the military might to move and conquer, they focused on the supposed pragmatic rationality of their ability to control and exploit resources to occupy an ever-expanding geographical zone of influence.

      Analyzing the US empire from the perspective of Pakistan, Tom Hussain reminds those Americans who happen to read his column of this simple truth: “There is no grand alliance or ‘evil axis’ – just tentative diplomacy and proxy warfare amid shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East, necessitated in part by the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as the seepage of power to Beijing from Washington.”

      Only a small minority of Americans today are willing to accept the idea of “shifts in the balance of power,” knowing that the “greatest nation in the history of the world” has monopolistically exercised power over the globe for decades. Nor are they about to countenance the idea of “seepage of power” because that would call into question America’s divine mission to spread its enlightened but fundamentally elitist democratic-capitalist ideology across the globe.

      In the age of Trump, it appears useless to point out that enlightened leaders — and even benevolent despots — have throughout history consistently recognized and dealt with the historical reality of shifts in the balance of power. Power is never absolute and never stable, but when it does approach becoming absolute — as happens, at least in people’s minds, when hyperreality takes over — Lord Acton’s wisdom dating from 1887 ends up prevailing: it “corrupts absolutely.”

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

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

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      The Stirring Case of Mary Elizabeth Taylor

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      Although the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, Mary Elizabeth Taylor, was not a high-profile member of the Trump administration, her resignation last week gathered the attention of the media due to the reasons she cited. It was all about what one of the rare black remaining members of the administration was willing to […] More