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    Can America Confront Its Deadly Failure?

    Just when you thought you might breathe a sigh of relief in America with the victorious Biden administration on its way, it turns out that over 73 million people voted for Trump, the loser. That is truly difficult to comprehend for most of us who did not.

    Worse yet, since the national response to the coronavirus pandemic was clearly on the ballot, you have to assume that most of those “enlightened” souls were impressed enough with Trump’s pandemic response that they continued to support him. And despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was exponentially rampaging through the populace as the election approached and that well over 200,000 Americans were already dead on his watch, they voted for him anyway.

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    Now, Trump is splitting time between a post-election bunker and the golf course, refusing to do anything to advance a national plan to confront the coronavirus, while continuing to support the coronavirus denial narrative. That leaves those 73 million souls in a quandary — wear a mask or give up all of your freedoms. What to do?

    Too Little, Too Late?

    An initial national plan to move forward has been repeatedly articulated — a mask mandate, enforced social distancing in public places, readily available testing and contact tracing, and consistent messaging from public officials and the scientific community about personal hygiene and the dangers of indoor gatherings of any kind. Starting there and starting now is critical, particularly with the news that there may be a vaccine on the horizon. While this is good news for sure, it cannot be allowed to provide yet another excuse for the nation to avoid the inconvenience of collectively trying very hard to save some lives and protect so many others from tragic outcomes.

    However, the potential for future vaccination of the populace is so fraught with serious logistical and public health challenges that not even the most optimistic vaccine purveyors believe that vaccination will happen in large numbers before the spring. That leaves almost 60 days until the Biden inauguration and four months before spring arrives. At the current rate of over 150,000 new coronavirus cases a day, that is over 9 million new cases by Inauguration Day and more than double that to the first day of spring. The COVID-19 death numbers are equally staggering at a present rate of over 1,500 humans a day.

    There has been and continues to be so much wrong with the US response to the pandemic and the resulting casualties that it is hard to know where to start. But to be clear, Trump and his acolytes are now standing in the way of the development and implementation of any cohesive national plan, only adding to the blood on their hands from the daily death count. As a nation, we were ready to go to war, raise the flag and trumpet our national might when 3,000 of our own were killed by terrorists on 9/11. Now, 73 million Americans seem content to sit on their “patriotic” hands while that number are dying preventable deaths every two days and counting.

    Embed from Getty Images

    To illustrate how we got here, it was not so long ago that the governor of South Dakota, a full-throated cheerleader for the coronavirus denier crowd, welcomed Trump and thousands of guests to a big old July 4th rally at Mount Rushmore. Freedom was everywhere, in every unmasked smile and virus spewing cheer. No need for social distancing, it was all one big Trump-crazed family taking one for the unmasked emperor.

    And then to follow up and reinforce the messaging, how about a huge motorcycle rally in the midst of a pandemic? Another good idea from the governor of South Dakota — bring tens of thousands of drunken and drugged Trump biker “patriots” from all over America in August to celebrate this great country of ours in a place called Sturgis, population 7,000. Well, as of today, the COVID-19 test positivity rate in the great state of South Dakota is just under 50%, and there is still no mask mandate from the governor.

    By looking back just a little and trying to comprehend the present, it should be clear that President-elect Joe Biden has quite a challenge ahead of him. Planning can begin now, but a national plan cannot begin to be implemented until Trump gets out of the way.

    Since Trump and his acolytes are unable to accept being losers, let’s tag them as killers and see if we can get their attention. Now, even more than before, that is surely what they are. They are killing people in America who don’t have to die. While this may not be the time for legal niceties, “negligent homicide” seems to fit the bill. And it is surely time to make it part of the conversation.

    COVID-19 and the Holiday Season

    I am certain as I write this that the number of coronavirus deaths will soar in the days and weeks ahead. This is not a medical conclusion. Rather it is the only conclusion that reason suggests as we watch millions of Americans gather together for the holidays believing that “they” are immune from tragedy, kind of like people who text and drive and keep loaded guns in easy reach of the children they say they love. But more than that, it will be the price that the nation pays for its flailing and failing collective morality.

    As freedom rings and holiday bells jingle, as choirs sing and families gather around a tree sharing good cheer, this will also be the season for many to visit hospitals and funeral homes trying to figure out how it is possible that daddy is dead. Well, let me tell you, daddy is dead because a nation with the resources to keep daddy alive and well collectively failed to do so.

    It is also because of a failure of national leadership that has no historic precedent. Let me repeat this: Trump and his acolytes have blood on their hands. Those who support his continued refusal to cede authority immediately to the incoming Biden administration for implementation of a national pandemic response should check their hands as well.

    Yes, I am a Trump hater, and I will cheer the day that he is held accountable for his crimes.

    *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    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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    American Carnage From a Pandemic President

    The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.

    Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order — until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington’s leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.

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    Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it too would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.

    It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president, George H.W. Bush, in the White House and his son, George W. Bush, waiting in the wings of history — while Iraqi autocrat and former US ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad — the US was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America.

    No, Trump didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist, “John Miller,” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again… well, who could have dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.

    Welcome to American Carnage

    Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.

    So much, I’m afraid, for such “Auld Lang Syne” moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as the “end of history”) to Trump’s America-not-first-but-last world — to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the 200,000 Americans who have already died from COVID-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.

    And don’t think Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage — particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure — had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

    Of course, more than three and a half years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal — whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit.

    In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.

    A Simple Math Problem

    When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican “rapists”). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth, and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.

    As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So, in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.

    In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the US-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate on that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.

    Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).

    And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the First World (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the Second World, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the Third World, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.

    So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So, how about a “Fourth World”? After all, the US remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (First World), but it is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.

    So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s one plus three? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official Fourth-World country in history. USA! USA! USA!

    Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.

    A Hell on Earth?

    Humanity has so far — and I use that phrase advisedly — managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.

    The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)

    In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.

    And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.

    While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever-greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever-greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought — I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.

    In that second category, when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.

    And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again.

    After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for COVID-19 and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.

    Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!

    It was the worst of times, it was… no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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

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    Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

    In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval.” 

    Bobby Chesney, writing for the website Lawfare, describes the order as a “blanket authorization for the CIA to conduct cyber operations against certain named adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—and potentially others.” Chesney remarks that some commentators cited expressed concern “that the reduced external scrutiny of CIA covert activities and the sped-up timeline for approvals will result in undue or unwise risk-taking.”

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    According to the authors of the Yahoo article, the directive was “driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA” but not subjected to political review. They cite a “former U.S. government official” who called the order “very aggressive.”

    The article tells us that once it had the authorization, the CIA went into action. “Since the [order] was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list,” Yahoo reports. 

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Wish list:

    The designation of actions whose implementation by any normal human being is theoretically unrealistic, unaffordable or that would be considered immoral if carried out, but which can be immediately converted into an operational action plan by those who are given unlimited resources and held to zero accountability

    Contextual Note

    The scope of this secret order should not be underestimated. Yahoo cites “former officials” who explain that “it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations.”

    That is a serious innovation that potentially redefines and constrains the very idea of freedom of expression. According to Yahoo, the new powers granted to the CIA “open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

    Not only does this mean that the CIA may do whatever it chooses with no oversight and absolute impunity, but it also means that it can decide what type of expression can be suppressed and which people or groups can be either silenced or disrupted. Theoretically, the CIA’s brief is confined to overseas operations, but by including the right to target everything from media and charities to “individuals affiliated with these organizations,” the scope of such opaque operations appears limitless.

    Historical Note

    At a moment in history when the Democratic Party, despite a lack of any serious evidence, has not stopped its four-year-old campaign of complaining about real or imaginary Russian meddling in US elections via social media, this story about US meddling apparently proved embarrassing enough for its preferred media to largely ignore it.  

    Embed from Getty Images

    And yet the fact that Donald Trump, the incarnation of political evil, granted the CIA the power not just to disseminate propaganda or spread lies — as Russia is accused of doing — but to conduct “aggressive offensive cyber operations” against media, charities and individuals suspected of any form of complicity with an adversary should shock any American who still believes in democratic principles and that antique notion of “fair play.”

    Lawfare calls it “a major story.” But the revelation doesn’t seem to have shocked many people in the mainstream US media. Bonnie Kristian in Newsweek picked up the story and worried, with good reason, that the unaccountable actions of the CIA “could tip the balance of U.S. relations with one of these targeted nations into outright war.” Fox News also reported it, with a tone of general approval, seeing it as part of a “strategy to bolster the government’s defenses against foreign adversaries.” 

    The major outlets identified as the “liberal mainstream” preferred to let the story rot on the sidelines. The New York Times apparently thought it wasn’t news fit to print. The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC treated the story with benign neglect, having more urgent news to promote. This may seem paradoxical since these outlets will usually jump on any item that reveals Trump to be a dangerous wielder of absolute power. In this case, he specifically overturned a safeguard the previous administration had put in place.

    In its permanent campaign to undermine President Trump, the liberal media might have been tempted to pounce on the story for another reason linked to electoral politics. Siladitya Ray, in an article for Forbes, cites a former State Department attorney and national security expert, Rebecca Ingber, who complains of Trump’s hypocrisy. “It’s rich that the President who claims the ‘deep state’ is working to undermine him is happy to delegate such broad authority to cause destruction — it’s almost as though he’s not *really* all that concerned with tight presidential control over the national security state when it’s not about his own personal interests,” Ingber tweeted.

    Ingber is right to point to the paradox, but she unwittingly reveals why the liberal media preferred to ignore the story. The big four mentioned above (The Times, The Post, CNN and MSNBC) have become active promoters of the intelligence community, to the point of complicity, if not hero worship. The two cable TV channels employ former heads of the CIA (John Brennan) and National Intelligence (James Clapper) as their “experts” on everything to do with intelligence, including assessing risks coming from abroad. This of course means that the last thing they would be inclined to warn about or even deign to mention is accrued power to the intelligence agencies.

    In an article for Axios, Zach Dorfman, who is the lead author of the Yahoo story, offers what he sees as the historical perspective. “The big picture: Some officials emphasize that Trump-era shifts in U.S. offensive cyber operations are part of a natural evolution in U.S. policies in this arena, and that many changes would have been granted under a new Democratic administration as well,” he writes.

    This can be interpreted in two ways. One reading is that Dorfman wants us to believe that we have entered a troubled period of history in which people’s democratic rights have been canceled and therefore action may be needed to return to true democracy. The other is the idea that we simply must accept the fatality of a “natural evolution.” 

    This suggests that it has little to do with Trump. Any responsible president from either party would, for the sake of security, do the same thing. It’s the logic of what Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter in the Harvard Business Review describe as “the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”

    By now we know how this plays out. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader at the time, remarked in 2017 about what Americans believe concerning the political economy. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” she said. National security merits a similar remark: We’re cybercriminals, and that’s just the way it is.

    Dorfman’s second conclusion is probably close to the truth — or, as Trump likes to say when referring to embarrassing facts, “It is what it is.” Any president would do the same thing. It’s the system that requires it, not the chief executive. The same is certainly true in Moscow. Some may describe that as proof of the fact that it is pretty much a level playing field, which is probably true. It’s just that it’s a very brutal sport.

    *[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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    Content, Not Culture, Separates Americans

    It has finally come to pass in America that armed bands of federal government thugs in camouflage gear are taking over parts of selected US cities to serve the interests of the country’s fearful “leader” and autocrat-in-chief. At the behest of Trump and his stooge attorney general, unidentified Department of Homeland Security troops have swooped in to bring “law and order” to citizens hoping for some measure of police reform and racial justice. So, while the coronavirus pandemic rages out of control in the face of a chaotic response by the same federal government, Trump has decided to augment his failure by doubling down on leftists, socialists, anarchists and communists. This is real, it is an old playbook and it should be very scary.

    Armed and empowered federal government personnel with absolutely no training in dealing with citizen protests or protesters are being unleashed to confront largely peaceful demonstrators in America who are imploring their government to reduce police violence and address racial injustice. Local leaders and police commanders are confronted with an armed force that they have not asked for and that they do not want. This is American citizens being terrorized by American government personnel, ironically at the command of the federal Department of Homeland Security established to protect us from terrorists.

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    To be sure, this is largely theater. But it is theater that should shock anyone in America who smugly thought that the “land of the free” would never look like “other” despotic lands. It has been a very long time since America has come this close to rock bottom. As a nation, America is an international laughingstock, mocked by all those despots we bribed over the years to transform their way into our way, the American way. But guess what? We didn’t see it coming, but their way has now become our way.

    Turn on the news anywhere in the world, and it will feature some daily tale of woe from America. Turn on the news in America, and it is all a tale of American woe. Yet despite the perception that America has found new lows, amid pandemic and social strife, there is a palpable disconnect between the depth of the problems and a serious consensus about the solutions. As is often the case in America, this situation is a big problem in search of a label that will ensure that not much changes anytime soon.

    Every politician and pundit in the land seems to have settled on something called the “culture wars.” It seems so easy in the facile world in which we live to provide cover for complex problems by finding a meaningless catchy phrase that everyone can define for themselves instead of facing reality, particularly the reality of others.

    “Culture Wars”

    Today, everywhere you turn in American politics, “culture wars” are trotted out to explain away all manner of dysfunction in government and society. I am not sure what that term means. “Culture war” has been defined as “a conflict or struggle for dominance between groups within a society or between societies, arising from their differing beliefs, practices, etc.” The “etc.” at the end of this definition should be a clue that “culture war” means essentially whatever you want it to mean. What kind of definition is that?

    Embed from Getty Images

    Before there was the coronavirus pandemic, there was culture everywhere. Want to see a play, go for it. If art or anthropology is your interest, museums abound. Even a movie, particularly when called “cinema” or “film,” can qualify as a good solid cultural experience. Then there is the whole world of international and local cuisines, more cultural experience. Wines, beers, whiskeys, full of culture. When I think of culture, this is what I think of, along with the rich tapestry that defines some of who we are. 

    Somehow a war based on a film I like, what cuisine I choose to eat or the sports team I choose to root for seems trivial and even unlikely. So, a “culture war” must mean something deeper than that. It must mean, for example, that if you pay attention to public health experts in response to a pandemic, you are on one team and if not, you are on the other team. What a clever way to gloss over stupidity and ignorance.

    “Culture war” also implies something ingrained that cannot be altered or influenced by new ideas, new knowledge or new experience. However, the paralyzing conflict that we are enduring in America is routinely influenced by new ideas and new experiences. It is a policy conflict, a conflict over how best to address real human problems with a policy response. And much of it is driven by an individual’s momentary perception of the role of government in meeting these human challenges. 

    I truly dislike Senator Mitch McConnell, but we are both old white men who drink quality bourbon and could share a cigar now and again. What we disagree about is not culture, but content.

    As another example of what I am trying to convey, the urge to own a gun in America surely does not reflect the groupthink at the core of the “culture war” definition. The reasons for arming oneself or choosing not to cross every demographic and social line — that rich white couple in Missouri armed and ready in their front yard as protesters walked by would share little of cultural significance with a poor white subsistence hunter or a young, inner-city, Latino gangbanger. It is highly unlikely that these disparate gun owners ever cross each other’s paths except as casual observers inspecting the oddities of each other’s cultural foundation.

    I am sorry to take a dump on everyone’s latest label, but I am really tired of labels being used as a substitute for responsibility. If you choose to be ignorant, you can meet others like you at your church, your country club, your gym or your city council meeting. Willful ignorance is found in all cultures. It is a shame that it is so common and so misunderstood as the root of much of what separates us.

    That is not a cultural statement. We are not engaged in a “culture war.” We are engaged in a confrontation to define a better America and to find the policy solutions that will lead us there. This is America’s “war” for its future, not some wistful search for cultural reconciliation.

    *[A version of this article was featured on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    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 Mount of Autocrats

    Donald Trump would dearly like to add his face to Mount Rushmore as the fifth presidential musketeer. His fireworks-and-fury extravaganza on July 3 was the next best thing. Trump’s dystopian speech was almost beside the point. Much more important was the photo op of his smirking face next to Abraham Lincoln’s.

    More fitting, however, would be to carve Trump’s face into a different Rushmore altogether. This one would be located in a more appropriate badlands, like Mount Hermon in Syria near the border with Israel. There, Trump’s visage would join those of his fellow autocrats, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. To honor the illiberal locals, the stony countenances of Bashar al-Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu would make it a cozy quintet.

    Has Putin Won the Vote on Constitutional Amendments?

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    Let’s be frank: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are not the company that Trump keeps, despite his “America First” pretensions. His ideological compatriots are to be found in other countries: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Narendra Modi of India, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Viktor Orban of Hungary and so on. Alas, this global Rushmore of autocrats is becoming as crowded as a football team pressed together for a selfie.

    But Putin and Xi stand out from the rest. They get pride of place because of their long records of authoritarian policies and the sheer brazenness of their recent power grabs. By comparison, Trump is the arrogant newcomer who may well not last the season, an impulsive sprinter in the marathon of geopolitics. If things go badly for Team Trump in November, America will suddenly be busy air-brushing 45 out of history and gratefully chiseling his face out of the global Rushmore. Putin and Xi, however, are in it for the long haul.

    Leader for Life

    At the end of June, Russia held a referendum on a raft of constitutional changes that President Putin proposed earlier in the year. In front of Russian voters were over 200 proposed amendments. No wonder the authorities gave Russians a full week to vote. They should have provided mandatory seminars on constitutional law as well.

    Of course, the Russian government wasn’t looking to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion of governance. The Russian parliament had already approved the changes. Putin simply wanted Russian voters to rubber-stamp his nationalist-conservative remaking of his country.

    At the same time, a poor turnout would not have been a good look. To guarantee what the Kremlin’s spokesman described as a “triumphant referendum on confidence” in Putin, workplaces pressured their employees to vote and the government distributed lottery prizes. Some people managed to vote more than once. On top of that, widespread fraud was necessary to achieve the preordained positive outcome.

    Instead of voting on each of the amendments, Russians had to approve or disapprove the whole package. Among the constitutional changes were declarations that marriage is only between a man and a woman, that Russians believe in God and that the Russian Constitution takes precedence over international law. Several measures increased executive power over the ministries and the judiciary. A few sops were thrown to Putin’s core constituencies, like pensioners. Who was going to vote against God or retirees?

    But the jewel in the crown was the amendment that allows Putin to run for the presidency two more times. Given his systematic suppression of the opposition, up to and including assassination, Putin will likely be in office until he’s 84 years old. That gives him plenty of time to, depending on your perspective, make Russia great again or make Russia into Putin, Inc.

    The Russian president does not dream of world domination. He has regional ambitions at best. Yet these ambitions have brought Russia into conflict with the United States over Ukraine, Syria, even outer space. And then there’s the perennial friction over Afghanistan. Much has been made in the US press about Putin offering the Taliban bounties for US and coalition soldiers. It’s ugly stuff, but no uglier than what the United States was doing back in the 1980s.

    Did you think that all the US money going to the mujahideen was to cultivate opium poppies, run madrasas and plan someday to bite the hand that fed them? The US government was giving the Afghan “freedom fighters” guns and funds to kill Soviet soldiers, nearly 15,000 of whom died over the course of the war. The Russians have been far less effective. At most, the Taliban have killed 18 US soldiers since the beginning of 2019, with perhaps a couple tied to the bounty program.

    Still, it is expected that a US president would protest such a direct targeting of US soldiers even if he has no intention to retaliate. Instead, Trump has claimed that Putin’s bounty program is a hoax. “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted.

    Knowing how sensitive the US president and the public are to the death of America soldiers overseas, Putin couldn’t resist raising the stakes in Afghanistan and making US withdrawal that much more certain. Taking the United States out of the equation — reducing the transatlantic alliance, edging US troops out of the Middle East, applauding Washington’s exit from various international organizations — provides Russia with greater maneuvering room to consolidate power in the Eurasian space.

    Trump has dismissed pretty much every unsavory Kremlin act as a hoax, from US election interference to assassinations of critics overseas. Trump cares little about Ukraine, has been lukewarm if not hostile toward US sanctions against Moscow, and has consistently attempted to bring Russia back into the G8. Yet he has also undermined the most important mechanism of engagement with Russia, namely arms control treaties.

    President Trump’s servile approach to Putin and disengaged approach to Russia is the exact opposite of the kind of principled engagement policy that Washington should be constructing. The United States should be identifying common interests with Russia over nuclear weapons, climate, regional ceasefires, reviving the Iran nuclear deal — and, at the same time, criticizing Russian conduct that violates international norms.

    Territory Grab

    China’s Xi Jinping has already made himself leader for life, and he didn’t need to go to the pretense of a referendum on constitutional changes. In 2018, the National People’s Congress simply removed the two-term limit on the presidency and boom: Xi can be on top ‘til he drops. Forget about collective leadership within the party. And certainly forget about some kind of evolution toward democracy. Under President Xi, China has returned to the one-man rule of the Mao period.

    So, while Putin was busy securing his future this past weekend, Xi focused instead on securing China’s future as an integrated, politically homogeneous entity. In other words, Xi moved on Hong Kong.

    Hong Kong once had great economic value for Beijing as a gateway to the global economy. Now that China has all the access to the global economy that it needs and then some, Hong Kong has only symbolic value, as a former colonial territory returned to the Chinese nation in 1997. To the extent that Hong Kong remains an enclave of free-thinkers who take potshots at the Communist Party, Beijing will step by step deprive it of democracy.

    On June 30, a new national security law went into effect in Hong Kong. “The new law names four offences: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” Matt Ho writes in the South China Morning Post. “It also laid out new law enforcement powers and established government agencies responsible for national security. Conviction under the law includes sentences of life in prison.”

    The protests that have roiled Hong Kong for the past many months, from Beijing’s point of view, violate the national security law in all four categories. So, violators may now face very long prison sentences indeed, and police have already arrested a number of people accused of violating the new law. The new law extends to virtually all aspects of society, including the schools, which now must “harmonize” their teaching with the party line in Beijing.

    What’s happening in Hong Kong, however, is still a dilute version of the crackdown taking place on the mainland. This week, the authorities in Beijing arrested Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and prominent critic of Xi. He joins other detainees, like real-estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who was linked to an article calling Xi a “clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor” and Xu Zhiyong, who called on Xi to resign for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

    Meanwhile, Beijing’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province amounts to collective punishment: more than a million consigned to “reeducation camps,” children separated from their families, forced sterilization. Uighur exiles have charged China with genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

    Like Putin, Xi has aligned himself with a conservative nationalism that appeals to a large portion of the population. Unlike Putin, the Chinese leader doesn’t have to worry about approval ratings or periodic elections. He is also sitting on a far-larger economy, much greater foreign currency reserves, and the means to construct an illiberal internationalism to replace the Washington consensus that has prevailed for several decades. Moreover, there are no political alternatives on the horizon in China that could challenge Xi or his particular fusion of capitalism and nationalism.

    Trump has pursued the same kind of unprincipled engagement with China as he has with Russia: flattery of the king, indifference toward human rights and a focus on profit. Again, principled engagement requires working with China on points of common concern while pushing back against its human rights violations. Of course, that’s not going to happen under the human rights violation that currently occupies the White House.

    And Trump Makes Three

    Trump aspires to become a leader for life like his buddies Putin and Xi, as he has “joked” on numerous occasions. He has similarly attacked the mainstays of a democratic society — the free press, independent judges, inspectors general. He has embraced the same nationalist-conservative cultural policies. And he has branded his opponents as enemies of the people. In his Rushmore speech on July 3, Trump lashed out against:

    “… a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”

    He went on to describe his crackdown on protesters, his opposition to “liberal Democrats,” his efforts to root out opposition in schools, newsrooms and “even our corporate boardrooms.” Like Putin, he sang the praises of the American family and religious values. He described an American people that stood with him and the Rushmore Four and against all those who have exercised their constitutional rights of speech and assembly. You’d never know from the president’s diatribe that protesters were trying to overthrow not the American Revolution but the remnants of the Confederacy.

    Trump’s supporters have taken to heart the president’s attacks on America’s “enemies.” Since the protests around George Floyd’s killing began in May, there have been at least 50 cases of cars ramming into demonstrators, a favorite tactic used by white supremacists. There have been over 400 reports of press freedom violations. T. Greg Doucette, a “never Trump” conservative lawyer, has collected over 700 videos of police misconduct, usually violent, toward peaceful demonstrators.

    As I’ve written, there is no left-wing “cultural revolution” sweeping the United States. It is Donald Trump who is hoping to unleash a cultural revolution carried out by a mob of violent backlashers who revere the Confederate flag, white supremacy and the Mussolini-like president who looks out upon all the American carnage from his perch on the global Rushmore of autocrats.

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

    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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