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      Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump

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      BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
      Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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      Reign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and Iraq

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      BooksReign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and IraqSpencer Ackerman, once of the Guardian, displays a masterful command of the facts but sometimes lets his prejudice show Lloyd GreenSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTThis 11 September will be the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93. Two wars have left 6,700 Americans dead and more than 53,000 wounded. After the Trump presidency, America roils in a cold civil war. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the move again. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone but Iraq remains “not free”.‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell usRead moreIn other words, the war on terror has produced little for the US to brag about. In an April Pew poll, two-thirds of respondents rated international terror as a “big” problem, albeit one that trailed healthcare, Covid, unemployment and 10 more.Against this bleak backdrop, Spencer Ackerman delivers his first book under the subtitle “How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. It is part-chronicle, part-polemic. The author’s anger is understandable, to a point.Ackerman displays a masterful command of facts. No surprise. In 2014, he was part of the Guardian team that won a Pulitzer for reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency.Ackerman stuck with the topic. A contributing editor at the Daily Beast, he has also been its senior national security writer. Ackerman is fluent in discussing the so-called security state, and how it is a creature of both political parties.In the face of Snowden’s revelations, congressional leaders came out for the status quo. According to Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate majority leader, senators who complained about being left in the dark about the NSA had only themselves to blame. All other Americans were to sit down and shut up.Nancy Pelosi, then House minority leader and a persistent critic of the Patriot Act, a chief vehicle for surveillance powers, declined to criticize Barack Obama or high-tech intrusion in general. Instead, she called for Snowden’s prosecution. He made Russia his home.Ackerman notes that the American Civil Liberties Union and Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior senator, were notable exceptions to the rule. At the time, Paul remarked: “When you collect it from a billion phone calls a day, even if you say you’re going to keep the name private, the possibility for abuse is enormous.”Ackerman also shines a light on how the far right played an outsized role in domestic terrorism before and after 9/11, reminding us of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, teasing out McVeigh’s ties to other white nationalists.The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year is one more chapter in the story. Trump falsely claimed Antifa, leftwing radicals, were the real culprits. The roster of those under indictment reveals a very different story.In congressional testimony in April, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, described “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as the greatest domestic threat. Garland also singled out “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.Chad Wolf, Trump’s acting homeland security chief, made a similar point last fall. Of course, his boss wasn’t listening.Ackerman delves meticulously into the blowback resulting from the war on terror. Unfortunately, he downplays how the grudges and enmities of the old country have been magnified by key social forces, immigration chief among them.Joe Biden, then vice-president, condemned the Boston Marathon bombers as “knock-off jihadists”. But Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had received asylum. The immigrant population stands near a record high and the US fertility rate is in retrograde. On the right, that is a combustible combination. When Tucker Carlson is in Hungary, singing the praises of Viktor Orbán, the past is never too far away.In his effort to draw as straight a line as possible between the war on terror and the rise of Trump, Ackerman can overplay his hand. Racism, nativism and disdain for the other were not the sole drivers of Trump’s win, much as Islamophobia was not the sole cause of the Iraq war, a conflict Ackerman acknowledges he initially supported.Trump’s victory was also about an uneven economic recovery and, when it came to America’s wars, who did the fighting and dying. Overwhelmingly, it wasn’t the offspring of coastal elites. In 2016, there was a notable correlation between battlefield casualties and support for Trump.According to Douglas L Kriner of Boston University and Francis X Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.” Residents of red states are more than 20% more likely to join the military. Denizens of blue America punch way above their weight when it comes to going to college.Ackerman, a graduate of New York’s hyper-meritocratic Bronx High School of Science, bares his own class prejudices much in the way Clinton did at a notorious Wall Street fundraiser. Hillary dunked on the “Deplorables”. Ackerman goes after those he sees as socially undesirable.In his telling, Trump is “an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers”. According to his taxonomy, those are “outer-borough whites”, wealth vampires, dignity-free media strivers and landlords.I Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestsellerRead moreThis year, many of those “outer-borough whites” voted for a Black candidate, Eric Adams, in the Democratic mayoral primary. Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, is a former police captain.The real estate industry is a critical part of the city economy. Strivers have been here since the Dutch came onshore. As for “wealth vampires” – come on, really?The city’s economy reels. Murder is way up. Law and order matters. Ackerman’s disdain is misdirected.Nationally, the security state is not going to just disappear. But not all is gloom and doom. In a break with Obama and Trump, the Biden White House has pledged to no longer go gunning for reporters over leaks.The US is leaving Afghanistan. Unlike Trump, Biden was not dissuaded. And last Wednesday, the Senate foreign relations committee voted to end the 1991 and 2002 authorizations of use of military force in Iraq. Even the leviathan can budge.TopicsBooksSeptember 11 2001Donald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Battle for the Soul: can Joe Biden beat Trump’s Republicans in the war of words?

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      Joe BidenBattle for the Soul: can Joe Biden beat Trump’s Republicans in the war of words? The president appeals to the ‘civil religion’ of Washington and Kennedy. His opponents use weasel words and seek to limit democracy. The stakes could not be higherMichael CornfieldSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTJoe Biden declared his third candidacy for president on 25 April 2019 in a three-and-a-half minute video. The format was new, but for Biden relied on an old-fashioned conception of masculinity.Want to make Jim Jordan sing about the Capitol attack? Ask Jefferson Davis | Sidney BlumenthalRead moreHe talked about the 12 August 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, about which Donald Trump (in)famously said there were “very fine people on both sides”. The incident provided Biden with a good vs evil story frame, which he entered as a sort of superhero.“At that moment,” Biden intoned, as viewers saw white supremacists marching with torches, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.”
      I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.
      If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.
      The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake.
      Captain America, out of retirement and to the rescue. The Charlottesville setting, adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, supplied Biden with a pretext to quote the Declaration of Independence. And the video displayed, in colonial cursive font, passages many Americans could recite from memory.The “battle for the soul of America” narrative frame served Biden well. It helped differentiate Biden’s criticism of Trump, as both personal and constitutional. It converted his age into a campaign asset: a man with historic consciousness would be a good choice for Democrats, a party that usually opted for youth. And it ennobled his call for unity as the solution to Trump’s divisiveness. A Biden victory would win the battle for the soul through an appeal to transcendent patriotic values.Two men, longtime adviser Mike Donilon and the historian Jon Meacham, have worked on Biden’s speeches and the “soul” verbiage. But regardless of the authorial division of labor, it has been Biden’s sign-off, delivery, and persona which give the phrase its public meaning.During the campaign, Biden repeated his theme in speeches on national holidays and historic anniversaries, often in Pennsylvania: at an 18 May 2019 campaign kick-off rally at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia; in a 2 June 2020 speech at Philadelphia City Hall (commenting on the eruption of protest for the George Floyd death and the president’s use of tear gas at Lafayette Square in Washington); and on 6 October 2020 at the Gettysburg battlefield:
      You and I are part of a covenant, a common story of divisions overcome and hope renewed. If we do our part, if we stand together, if we keep faith with the past and with each other, then the divisions of our time will give way to the dreams of a brighter, better future. This is our work. This is our pledge. This is our mission.
      Pennsylvania is both the state where Biden was born and a perennial swing state. As the city where America’s foundational documents were written and signed, Philadelphia stands out in the national imagination as the Jerusalem of what sociologist Robert Bellah termed the “civil religion”. In his 1966 analysis of inaugural addresses from Washington to Kennedy, Bellah noted that presidents up to the incumbent at that time, Lyndon Baines Johnson, enlarged and deepened their rhetoric by invoking God. It was neither the God of any particular denomination nor a perfunctory bow to the religiosity of the American people. Rather, such references to God legitimated political authority by “supplying moral consensus amidst continuous political change”. Invocations of the civil religion reassure and integrate the disparate members of a pluralistic capitalist society.Biden relied more on the word “soul” than “God” but the functionality was the same. “Soul” is also a word with extensive philosophical and religious lineage. It denotes the essence of a being (or nation, or people). It connotes reason, feeling, presence, expressivity, depth, the substance of a style. In running for president, Biden was embarked on a moral crusade. He was battling, as he put it in another frequently used phrase, for “hope over fear, unity over division, and truth over lies”.And “the idea of America” at the seat of the civil religion was not an empty notion. Jill Lepore’s 2018 one-volume history of the US identified “These Truths” as the nation’s core values: political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty and the meta-truth that they are “self-evident”, Benjamin Franklin’s Enlightenment amendment to Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable”.Like most campaign slogans, “battle for the soul of America” was an expedient coinage, tinged in this case with a touch of bravado. Yet it has become uncannily apt. Some Americans continue to resist “these truths” and others. And so Biden has justly continued to use the phrase as president.In his inaugural address two weeks after the assault on the Capitol and Congress he quoted Abraham Lincoln’s attestation that “my whole soul is in it” as he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and reiterated his claim that national unity was essential “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America”. On Memorial Day, at Arlington National Cemetery:
      The soul of America is animated by the perennial battle between our worst instincts – which we’ve seen of late – and our better angels. Between “Me first” and “We the People”. Between greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom.
      These Truths review: Jill Lepore’s Lincolnian American historyRead moreOn 13 July, back at the National Constitution Center, Biden zeroed in on the opposition:
      It’s no longer just about who gets to vote or making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote – who gets to count whether or not your vote counted at all. It’s about moving from independent election administrators who work for the people to polarized state legislatures and partisan actors who work for political parties.
      To me, this is simple: This is election subversion. It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history …
      We have to ask: Are you on the side of truth or lies; fact or fiction; justice or injustice; democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to …
      The Republicans on the other side peddle disinformation and bank on partisan polarization. They seek to negate the truth of the 2020 election results and tilt the certification process against a reoccurrence in 2024. Under the banners of a “stolen” and “rigged” election and a vastly exaggerated claim of election “fraud”, they are conducting feckless audits and enacting voter suppression laws in battleground states, including Pennsylvania. They blocked the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the riot on the day they voted to decertify the election. Biden also cited Jim Crow in view of the racial dimensions of the soul battle. The opposition has launched a coded attack on a misappropriated academic term, “Critical Race Theory”.The soul battle is distinct from the programmatic initiatives and negotiations being conducted under another Biden slogan, “Build Back Better”. In that political domain differences can be monetized and split without recourse to dire dichotomies. However, the emotions summoned over voting cannot be easily compartmentalized and hived off from the dollar figures.Wake review: a must-read graphic history of women-led slave revoltsRead moreThe soul battle also bears on the effort to persuade Americans to get vaccinated, both in Biden’s exhortations to get the shot which appeal to patriotic duty and the opposition’s efforts to brand resistance to vaccination as a stand for freedom against the government. Analyzing that argumentation requires an essay unto itself, although I note in passing that Biden’s rhetorical approach has eschewed the designation of a “czar” to coordinate the administration’s public appeals and briefings, which would put distance between the soul battle and the urgent project of pandemic mitigation. As it is, government messaging on Covid runs through the president and state governors. And it is certainly valid to see the battle against the virus as a test of the force of reason in politics.Occasions for more soul speechmaking dot the national calendar. A rally in Washington DC on 28 August will commemorate Dr Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” address, which the president will probably recognize but not attend. The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks will necessarily reference the pullout of troops from Afghanistan, but Biden could also validate the House inquiry into the Capitol riot as being in the spirit of the 9/11 Commission. Thanksgiving is the quintessential holiday of the American civil religion. More occasions will crop up after congressional voting on the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts.But before any of those holidays or events surface on the civil religion calendar there is next Thursday, 12 August, the fourth anniversary of the battle that marked Biden’s starting point. He might do well to travel to Charlottesville and speak at the downtown spot vacated by the 10 July removal of the Robert E Lee statue that sparked the Unite the Right rally. It would be a sign that the mostly nonviolent but deeply conflicted war over the idea of America – for that is what a series of battles amounts to – is being won.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsProtestfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Texans march on capitol to protect voting rights – will Washington listen?

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      US voting rightsTexans march on capitol to protect voting rights – will Washington listen?Beto O’Rourke and the Rev William Barber among speakers in Austin as fight to protect ballot access goes on Alexandra Villarreal in Austin, TexasMon 2 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTWhen a legion of Texans descended on their state capitol on Saturday morning, the signs they carried conveyed raw terror about the erosion of their democracy.Trump tries to defend ‘just say the election was corrupt’ demandRead moreSlogans included “Protect Voting Rights”, “End the Filibuster” and “Say No to Jim Crow”.Some had just concluded a days-long, 27-mile march from Georgetown to Austin, praying with their feet in a desperate attempt to safeguard access to the vote. For hours, they withstood blistering heat to rally round a casket – a poetic nod to lawmakers in states across the country they say are trying to bury voting rights.“When you look out here today and see the thousands, and you look at the diversity in this crowd, this is the America they are afraid of,” cried the Rev Dr William J Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.The high-stakes protest mirrored a historic march in 1965, when voting rights advocates risked their lives in Selma, Alabama, before the Voting Rights Act was secured. More than half a century later, a new generation of activists hope to protect and expand on those victories.“When you get out there and you leave the comfort of your home, and in this case you put on your walking shoes and you cover 30 miles in the middle of the Texas summer in central Texas – you’re saying something through that sacrifice and through that struggle,” former US representative and presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke told the Guardian before participating in the march.Lawmakers introduced more than 400 restrictive voting bills in 49 states during the 2021 legislative cycle but Texas has emerged as a key battleground in a voting rights war that will ultimately shape the American electorate.Its Republican leaders remain hell bent on passing laws that advocates warn will make it even harder to vote. So far, such efforts have been thwarted by a tidal wave of opposition.“There probably are not many states, if any, that have as dark a history of voter suppression – violent voter suppression – as does Texas,” O’Rourke said. “And yet, you know, it may very well be Texas that helps us through this moment.”Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature led the US in new proposals that would restrict voter access, advancing provisions to ban 24-hour and drive-thru voting, empower partisan poll watchers and target vote by mail.At Saturday’s rally, Marilyn White said she was starting to panic.“Texas is such a large state and there’s so many electoral votes and so many congressional seats,” she said. “So many votes that are at risk of being messed with or distorted.”While Texans, faith leaders and politicians gave impassioned speeches, volunteers offered to register eligible voters on the crowded capitol lawn. Yet even they couldn’t ignore the culture of doubt and fear that permeates Texas elections.“A lot of people, when they come up, they’re worried about registration because they’re worried that they’re gonna make a mistake and they might do something that would cause them to get a ticket or go to jail,” said Julie Gilberg, a captain with Powered by People, an advocacy group.“They’re not really sure if their vote will count.”Texas has the most restrictive voting processes in the US. Critics fear further obstacles will disproportionately affect voters with disabilities and people of color. Many believe Republicans touting “election integrity” to justify policies are politically motivated, inspired by rapid demographic change that threatens them at the polls.“You have a lot of people here whose grandparents were effectively kept from the ballot box, who themselves have had issues trying to vote conveniently,” former US h secretary Julián Castro said.“They understand that the legislation being proposed is gonna make it even worse, and they understand that this legislation is born of cynicism and a power grab.”Texas Democrats have twice outmaneuvered attempts to pass sweeping voting bills – first by walking off the state House floor in May, then by fleeing to Washington last month. They have been pushed and bolstered by activists, businesses and regular citizens, who have raised funds, written letters and testified into the night.Yet voting rights champions can only waylay legislation for so long. And although they gathered at the Texas capitol on Saturday, they were effectively appealing to Washington, where federal voting protections have stalled in the US Senate.“Mr President, the time to act is now,” Barber said. “Let me tell you something you might not be used to hearing from a preacher, but ain’t no need to have power if you’re not gonna use it for good.”Frustration rippled through the crowd, where Texans fed up with their state officials demanded a response from the White House.“President Biden I think can do a lot more,” said Tiffany Williams, an air force veteran who joined the march. “If you’re trying to be for the people, actually come down here and listen to us.”TopicsUS voting rightsTexasUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS domestic policyBiden administrationfeaturesReuse this content More