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      All the President’s Surplus White Men

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      The problem of America today is the problem of white men. Who lies at the intersection of guns, right-wing fanaticism, pandemic and climate change denialism? Who ensures that racism continues to course through the lifeblood of the country? Who stands in the way of gender equality? Who supports foreign wars and the military-industrial complex? Who is getting hit hard by the erosion of the manufacturing base in the heartland? White men.

      White men are twice as likely as non-white men and white women to own guns. Although white women espouse racist right-wing views as much or even more than white men, it is the latter who overwhelmingly show up to vote, to gather with guns on the street, and to intimidate non-whites in person and on social media.

      Conservative white men have been at the forefront of climate denialism, according to a fascinating sociological study from 2011, and it’s not just Donald Trump who hates wearing masks during a pandemic but men more generally. A significant gender gap exists on the use of force, with women considerably less likely to support military intervention.

      Take the example of Brad Pascale, Trump’s former campaign manager. He was detained in Florida this week after allegedly hurting his wife, waving guns and talking about suicide. After his demotion to a digital consultant position on the campaign in July, he no doubt was worried about losing work altogether after the November election. There it is in a nutshell: white male violence, right-wing politics and anxiety over economic security. And residual white privilege. If Pascale were African American, an encounter with the police like that might not have ended peacefully.

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      Of course, I’m not talking about all white men. Plenty of white women have jumped on the alt-right bandwagon. And American conservatives can always point to a few people like Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson and Diamond and Silk to allege that their ideology is colorblind.

      But white men who are all revved up and with no place to go pose the greatest challenge to American democracy. They are the core of Donald Trump’s support. They are showing up on the streets in militia formations and with Proud Boy banners. The “manosphere” of online anti-feminism is the gateway for many right-wing activists who worry about being “replaced” by minorities and immigrants. And white men have been struggling with a long period of enormous economic dislocation that has turned them into a surplus labor force.

      Go West

      If Donald Trump loses in November, these white men will remain a problem. After all, unlike liberals who threaten to decamp to New Zealand if Biden loses, disgruntled Trump bros are not going to just up and leave the United States. Yet that’s precisely how countries have long dealt with the problem of surplus white men.

      In the bad old days, countries handled surplus men by sending them off to populate far-off lands. The political and religious misfits of the incipient British Empire sailed off to settle the land that hugged the eastern seaboard of North America. Later, the British exported its unruliest men to the prison colony of Botany Bay in Australia. The imperial nations of France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal similarly redirected male energy into meeting, enslaving and killing the locals of distant places. Those white men who didn’t have imperial realms to colonize —  Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Irish — ended up founding America’s early immigrant communities.

      Men with little prospect of improvement have always been a potential source of trouble. They turn to drink, to crime, to revolution — and sometimes all three — if left to their own devices. The law of primogeniture, whereby the oldest son inherited all and left the other male heirs penniless, only compounded the problem by producing a seemingly endless supply of dispossessed men.

      For its first 100 years of existence, the United States had a convenient safety valve for such male restlessness: the Western frontier. In the Midwest, the Southwest and the Far West, the industrious built family farms, the greedy sought gold, and the opportunistic robbed banks. Along the way, they did what white men often did in those days: kicked the locals off the land and killed them when they refused to leave.

      When the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century, white men enlisted to expand a new American empire in the Spanish-American War and through expeditionary interventions in Latin America. World War I and the flu epidemic of 1918 “solved” the problem of the surplus with a ruthless cull of more than 100,000 men. Later, World War II removed four times that many from the equation. Since that time, America has continued to go to war. But the US government also made an effort to deal with its white male population by creating well-paying jobs in an expanding manufacturing sector and offering returning soldiers a leg up through programs like the GI bill

      This golden age of American economic growth, however, was primarily a golden age for the white American male. White women, if they broke with tradition to enter the workforce, earned considerably less than their male counterparts. And black Americans, especially prior to the successes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, were relegated to second-class citizenship. In 1960, a mere 2% of women and black men worked in high-wage jobs like engineering and law. Virtually all doctors in the United States were white men. Racism and sexism permeated the immediate postwar government programs.

      Angry White Men

      In the 1960s, as a result of powerful social movements, women and minorities began to rise professionally. They continued to make gains in the ensuing decades, but the US economy as a whole hit a brick wall in the early 1970s. Real wages peaked in 1973. Imports began to appear more frequently on supermarket shelves and in car showrooms. Unions began to shed members in the 1970s and 1980s. And by the 1990s, the manufacturing jobs began to shift overseas — first with a massive expansion of the maquiladora program in Mexico after the passage of NAFTA and then to low-wage locations in Asia. Between 2000 and 2014, the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs.

      These economic transformations left behind many male blue-collar workers. They could still get jobs, but those jobs didn’t pay as well as the manufacturing positions of the golden age. In response, this proletariat didn’t organize against the ruling capital class. Increasingly, these workers listened to sexist, racist and xenophobic slogans that blamed women, minorities and immigrants for taking away their jobs. The financial crisis of 2008-09 swelled the ranks of the new right with many angry white men from the middle class as well.

      This is not a purely American problem. Angry white men have been a fixture in European right-wing politics, in Australia, in Israel. Machismo has long played a role in Latin American politics and, despite the rise of feminism across the continent, continues to influence electoral outcomes from Colombia to Brazil. Even China, where men can get jobs but not necessarily wives, has to deal with a problem of surplus men, given the population’s preference for male babies. India, too, faces an excess of 37 million men.

      But the United States must address a particularly toxic version of this problem because of the country’s endemic racism, polarized politics and Rust Belt economics. Angry white men contributed to the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, the Gingrich backlash of the 1990s and the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. But it wasn’t until 2016 that they found a leader just like them. Enter Trump, stage right.

      The Problem of Surplus

      Donald Trump would seem an unlikely spokesperson for white workers left behind by the deindustrialization of the United States. With his business empire, Trump has invested overseas in more than 30 countries, outsourced the production of his own brand-named items to foreign companies and hired undocumented workers for his US facilities. As his recently leaked tax returns reveal, he has also been spectacularly unsuccessful with his ventures even as he has cheated the government out of what he owes in income tax.

      Trump knows that playing to Wall Street is not a winning political strategy. Rather, as I point out in a piece on TomDispatch this week, the president has put himself at the front of a white male mob, channeling the violent vigilantism that has erupted periodically throughout American history. In this way, Trump lucked out by appealing to just enough white voters in economically distressed states to eke out an Electoral College victory in 2016. One month before the 2020 election, the polls suggest that Trump may not be so lucky this time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The white mob still supports him for all his efforts at closing borders, suppressing minority votes and celebrating the racist history of the United States. And he still supports the white mob, this week refusing to denounce white supremacy in the first presidential debate. But the president hasn’t delivered on the economy, and the pandemic has claimed too many victims to be easily swept under the rug.

      Whoever wins in November, the problem of surplus white men won’t go away. The Democrats, entranced by “third ways” and “post-industrial” economics, have ignored white male workers at their electoral peril. Joe Biden has courted this vote by appealing to his working-class roots in Scranton. But he’ll have to pay more than lip service if he gains the White House.

      The past option of sending surplus white men off to other lands is no longer on the table. In taking the problem of surplus white men seriously, it’s not necessary to jettison identity politics or pander to sexism and racism. Rather, the answer is to create well-paying jobs for all through Green New Deal policies. The bulk of these jobs — retrofitting buildings, creating new energy infrastructure, building a fleet of new electric cars — need to be open to those without a college education. As automation advances, new educational opportunities have to be made available as well or else technology will just add to the problem of surplus labor.

      Racism and sexism won’t magically disappear with a Green New Deal. Nor are jobs alone the answer. They need to be jobs that promise a future and a sense of belonging to something greater. The Trump campaign has provided its followers with this sense of belonging. So, for that matter, have the Proud Boys. Together they have turned surplus white males into an urgent political problem for this country.

      A personnel change in the White House will not solve this problem. But putting into place a dramatic new economic program that relies on working-class Americans to save this country? That puts white men shoulder to shoulder with workers from all backgrounds on behalf of a common purpose? And that links up with Green New Deals in other countries? That might do the trick of turning a surplus into an asset.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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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      in World Politics

      American Carnage From a Pandemic President

      by

      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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      The Science of Voter Suppression

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      Great traditions persist for centuries even as they change their style. New York’s Tammany Hall and its colorful leader “Boss Tweed” in the late 19th century perfected the art of “manufacturing votes” to elect the people they preferred and run the show in their manner. It set the standard followed by many other local political bosses across the nation.

      In his film “Kansas City,” Robert Altman presented a special world of corrupt 1930s politicians, black and white gangsters and late-night jam sessions in KC clubs. The film demonstrates the well-documented fact that “the Kansas City area has a rich legacy of election fraud, stretching from before the Civil War to after World War II.” More recently, former Kansas secretary of state and failed gubernatorial candidate, Kris Kobach, perfected a system he shared with Republican governors that arbitrarily suppressed voters in different states based on the principle that any two people who happened to have the same name must be fraudulently voting in two different states.

      Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have focused on Russian interference to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Greg Palast, who exposed Kris Kobach and Georgia’s Brian Kemp, among others, has found evidence that points to Trump’s 2016 victory being a result of voter suppression. According to Palast, if all the ballots had been counted, Hillary Clinton most likely would have won the state of Michigan. Some 75,355 ballots, mostly from majority-black precincts, were discarded. For some mysterious reason, Democrats have never raised that issue, presumably because there was no way of placing the blame on Russia.

      With a new election approaching, some Democrats may have realized that their party establishment having over-exploited the theme of Russian meddling has to look for a culprit elsewhere. Motivated by the fear of another close election that might favor Trump in the Electoral College, they have found another theme related to meddling to explain their Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

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      Jamie Ross, a journalist at The Daily Beast, cites an “enormous data leak” obtained by the UK’s Channel 4 News that exposes an operation mounted by the 2016 Trump campaign that consisted of using Facebook ads to persuade black voters to stay home rather than vote for Hillary Clinton. The article’s subtitle sums up the scandal: “A huge data leak shows that three million Black Americans were unknowingly added to a list of people that Team Trump wanted to keep away from polling places.” Jamal Watkins, vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is cited as saying that “It’s not ‘may the best candidate win’ at that point, it’s ‘may the best well-funded machine suppress voters and keep them at home thereby rigging the election so that someone can win.’”

      Like the kerfuffle surrounding the Russians, the vehicle for meddling was Facebook. Because Facebook was willing to release private data to Cambridge Analytica — a British political consulting firm at the heart of this still-ongoing data breach scandal — who then made that data available to its clients, the Trump campaign could target black voters with ads or articles critical of Hillary Clinton. Though there is no direct evidence of this practice and even less of its effect, Ross asserts that “it’s likely that it was used to help the campaign micro-target people on Facebook in the months leading up to Election Day in 2016.”

      Anything that is “likely” must qualify not just as “rigging” but as a form of voter suppression. Ross reminds readers that Facebook has recently “cited its new rules prohibiting voter suppression,” presumably justifying his characterization of an act designed to demotivate voters as voter suppression.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Voter suppression:

      A traditional practice that has been refined into an obligatory scientific tool of the two major political parties in the United States, though used more extensively and with far more skill by Republicans than Democrats.  

      Contextual Note

      The Daily Devil’s Dictionary sees three problems with calling this operation “voter suppression.” The first is that the supposed crime has only been qualified as “likely.” This is unconfirmed news. It may deserve a mention in passing, but not as the basis of a news story.

      The second is that whatever it is and whatever its ultimate effects, it cannot be called voter suppression. Discouraging people from voting by exposing them to a negative message about a candidate is standard practice in political campaigning. It may be disingenuous and, when channeled through Facebook, passably devious, but it is little more than an original form of political advertising.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Finally, it implies that virtuous Democrats would never attempt to “micro-target people on Facebook.” Given the professionalism of modern political campaigns conducted by both major parties, that seems very “unlikely.” No one would doubt that the Republicans are always ready to go the extra mile — as they did by engaging Cambridge Analytica and profiting from Facebook’s complicity — but Democrats have always tried their best to hone their own skills. They may simply be more discreet in doing so.

      Evidence of Democrats practicing voter suppression can be found throughout the recent history of political campaigns. The hallowed practice of gerrymandering by both parties has more similarities with voter suppression than negative ads on Facebook. Former Democratic Party Chairwoman Donna Brazile admitted that the party deployed various means to rig the 2016 primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton. There have been documented cases of voter suppression by the Democratic Party establishment, though it was directed not at Republicans but at the Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders.

      Can it be that the Republicans are specialized in voter suppression for general elections and Democrats for primaries? In any case, recent events — from the hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida in the 2000 election to Donald Trump’s outcry against mail-in ballot fraud as a pretext for canceling the result of this year’s election — have shown that American democracy, to the extent that democracy is defined by the act of voting, is seriously broken. The damage goes well beyond simple cases of Facebook advertising.

      In March, The Atlantic published an article by Ibram X. Kendi describing how the political establishment has systematically discouraged young voters from voting. Kendi writes: “Both Republicans and moderate Democrats share a joint interest in not increasing the voting rates of young people. Republicans lose general elections to Democrats when young people vote in high numbers. Moderate Democrats lose primary elections to progressive Democrats when young people vote in high numbers.”

      A sclerotic system designed principally to protect those who settled into a position of power within government and their parties has effectively disenfranchised entire generations, often sanctimoniously referred to as “the future of the nation” but clearly felt by those in power to be a threat to the sovereignty of the elite they identify with.

      Historical Note

      The Republicans have an advantage over the Democrats when it comes to voter suppression to the extent that large swaths of Democratic voters are easier to identify and target. Most minorities, especially blacks and Latino voters, have over the years consistently supported Democratic candidates in preference to Republicans. Since at least the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats have directed their appeal to the working class in contrast with the Republicans, whose ideology aligned with business interests.

      The effective rule of the WASP elite (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) permitted the creation of a class system in which racial and ethnic minorities were left to fester in the bottom rungs of society. The lowly economic and social status of blacks and Mexicans led them to line up behind a Democratic Party that seemed more sensitive to their needs. This turned out to be very convenient for the Republican specialists in voter suppression. Thanks to the statistical distribution of family names, especially for the Hispanics, and even first names, since African Americans have always been more creative and less conformist in naming their children, targeting “duplicate” voters could be done with a simple computer program.

      Some youngsters who study “political science” in college — with its focus on political systems, laws, ideology and economic theory — and manage to drift into politics, end up discovering that their job will really be about “electoral science” rather than political science. They will learn that politics nothing to do with the art of governing but focuses on the science of winning. In other words, it is mostly about intellectual suppression.

      *[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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      Climate Disruption and the American Obsession with Control

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      For this week’s debate between US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the moderator, Chris Wallace, has ambitiously proposed six topics. They presumably represent what he believes are the most important and urgent issues to clarify for the two candidates. The topics are: Trump’s and Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election.

      John Branch and Brad Plumer may feel that something is missing in Wallace’s list. They are the authors of a lengthy New York Times article that appeared last week under the title “Climate Disruption is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.” Perhaps Wallace reasoned that attempting to debate climate change would make no sense since everyone knows Trump simply denies that there is an issue to debate. In such a debate he might just follow Jordan Peterson, who in five minutes dismissed the entire climate issue as “an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess” on which it is not worth wasting our precious time.

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      But there may be another reason for Wallace’s hesitation. It raises other more important issues, too complex to evoke in the type of reality TV show we call a presidential debate. Branch and Plumer describe the severity of the problem: “Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Epochal shift:

      The one type of historical event that modern democracies have no means of dealing with and no hope of addressing even if the entirety of their voting populations acknowledged the need.

      Contextual Note

      After listing some of the types of disasters — droughts, fires, tropical storms — that are observable today and whose frequency is increasing, the authors raise the most fundamental question that concerns “humanity’s willingness to take action.” In other words, like politics itself, it is all about the resolution to act. The proverb reassures us: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The problem the authors evoke but never really address lies in identifying the agent with the will and how it might be empowered to act.

      The article claims that “climate disruption” has now appeared on “center stage in the presidential campaign.” Trump denies there is a problem, but Biden has announced the measures he would take to address the issue. They include “spending $2 trillion over four years to escalate the use of clean energy and ultimately phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal,” building “500,000 electric vehicle charging stations” and “1.5 million new energy-efficient homes and eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035.”

      Sophie Austin reports for Politifact that most environmentally sensitive commentators have expressed approval of Biden’s plan. But she adds that “some climate activists say his plan doesn’t go far enough to reduce carbon emissions and protect Indigenous lands from fossil fuel pollution.” Dan Gearino notes on the Inside Climate News website that, while the Biden plan is praiseworthy on paper, it doesn’t appear to be the candidate’s highest priority: “This doesn’t mean climate change and clean energy are top-tier issues for the candidates,” Gearino writes. Branch and Plumer call the next moves “crucial.” Biden appears to consider talk about the next moves crucial.

      Historical Note

      The Times authors maintain that the only solution will be an epochal shift. That means reversing historical trends embedded deep in the culture. They should be looking well beyond politics toward changes in culture, lifestyle and the rules that govern economic relationships. But, as often happens with The New York Times, its perspectives never seem to go beyond national policies and politics. “Nations,” they write, “have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.”

      Nations cannot cut emissions. They can legislate by establishing quotas. They can tax certain activities and commodities to discourage emissions. But, apart from, for example, reducing the size of their bloated militaries, champion consumers of fossil fuel, nations and their governments do not have the power to cut emissions. People have that power. But at the very minimum that means, as the authors have insisted, “rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life.” 

      Thinking and rethinking may be enough to satisfy journalists, but if it doesn’t lead to action. It serves no other purpose than to provide copy for the media. Don’t journalists spend most of their ink transcribing what politicians “think” before agreeing that nothing ever gets done? Thinking things through, Hamlet style, can sometimes aggravate the problem, creating the equivalent of social melancholia.

      Doing rather than simply thinking implies radically redefining relationships with other people and the environment, including reframing our dependence on technologies and consumable goods most people may not be ready to relinquish. The authors insist that while the problem is grave, it’s not too late. Something can be done. They reassuringly quote an environmental historian: “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

      Some analysts of US culture have identified establishing and maintaining control as the culture’s dominant core value. This nevertheless creates an unsustainable paradox. For three-quarters of a century, Americans have used the dollar to establish control over the global economy. When President George W. Bush pulled out of the timid resolutions for climate control of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, he cited as his compelling reason that “mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way.”

      Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party have never veered from Bush’s logic, justified with this specious line of reasoning: “We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.” In other words, Americans don’t like to think about what they can’t control. They prefer to focus on the one thing they believe they control: the economy. Of course, those who observed how well Bush controlled the economy in 2007-08 or Trump did in 2020 may object that if that’s what they mean by control, maybe they should just give up their global military empire, retreat to their bunkers and let Adam Smith’s invisible hand retake control.

      Embed from Getty Images

      After reassuring readers that everything is “in our control,” the article makes its own “epochal shift” when it tells us that “climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.” The authors reassure us that even if control isn’t total, we can be satisfied with partial control, which could be deemed a good enough solution for control-obsessed Americans: “The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.” By invoking “humanity,” they also seem to be admitting that it is no longer about the US running the show on its own. Returning to the theme, largely neglected in the article, of accepting to change our lifestyle, the authors then pinpoint the real problem: “Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.” The rest of humanity has no choice because, unlike Americans, they have no reason to believe in their capacity to control everything.

      Unsurprisingly, The Times article ends with a reassuring conclusion, though in this case it retains a timid touch of ambiguity. After admitting that “climate change’s biggest problem may be the sense that it is beyond our control,” the authors cite a climate scientist who offers this philosophical wisdom: “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate. We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed. If we choose.” In other words, endowed with free will, we are beautifully free to retake control. The only remaining question is this: Who precisely is the “we” with the “agency to take courageous decisions”?

      *[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 Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

      by

      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

      Will This Be the Election to End All Elections?

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[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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      How Catholics Can Tilt the US Election

      by

      Few Americans these days are likely to recognize the name Thomas Nast. Yet in the Civil War era, Nast was arguably the most famous cartoonist in the United States, responsible for creating and popularizing iconic images, such as “jolly St. Nick” (aka Santa Claus), Uncle Sam and the donkey and the elephant — symbols of the Democrats and Republicans ever since. Nast’s fame was reflected in the Overseas Press Club of America’s decision, in 1978, to name their annual award for best cartoons on international affairs after him.

      Yet 40 years later, the Press Club decided to wipe Nast’s name clean of the official title of the award. This came at the heel of the controversy, a few years earlier, provoked by Nast’s nomination for induction into New Jersey’s Hall of Fame. The nomination, his third in four years, once again ended in failure, despite Nast’s merits of having exposed the corruption of New York’s infamous Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, and despite his commitment to the anti-slavery cause and racial equality.

      When God Hates America

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      Unfortunately, Nast had a serious blind spot: a pronounced hostility to the country’s Catholic, and particularly Irish Catholic immigrant, community. Nast routinely portrayed the Irish as drunkards with ape-like features, bent on creating havoc; one cartoon has an Irishman sitting on a powder keg, a bottle in one hand, a torch in the other. His famous cartoon, “The American River Ganges,” was a perfect expression of the way Protestant Americans viewed the influx of European Catholics. It depicts Catholic bishops as crocodiles crawling onto American shores bent on attacking innocent schoolchildren.

      Blind Spot

      Nast’s kind of bigotry was hardly something new. Anti-Catholic sentiments ran rampant throughout the 19th century, starting with the massive influx of Irish and southern German Catholics in the 1840s and 1850s, regaining steam in the decades of the Civil War, with the emergence of the American Protective Association and a wave of pamphlets peddling anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, most famously the claim that the Catholic Church had been behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

      Catholics were generally regarded with suspicion, if not outright fear, as an alien force sent by the pope to subvert the country’s republican institutions and destroy democracy in the United States. Even those who would concede that these allegations were highly exaggerated maintained that Catholic immigrants were not in a position to act as responsible citizens, lacking the independence of mind indispensable for being a good democrat. They were deemed to be under the influence of the pope and priests, who, in turn, were charged with being fundamentally hostile to American democracy.

      Most of its detractors maintained that the Catholic faith was fundamentally incompatible with the basic values that informed the American republic. Nativist and white supremacist organizations in the 1920s, most notoriously the second Ku Klux Klan, routinely targeted the country’s growing Catholic community.

      It took more than a century for American Catholics to be accepted as fully equal citizens. In 1937, when Gallup first asked the question, no more than 60% of respondents said they would vote for a Catholic presidential candidate. It took until the late 1970s that that number surpassed the 90% mark. As late as 2003, a prominent book on anti-Catholicism referred to it as the “last acceptable prejudice” in the United States. Some 15 years later, a commentary in the Catholic News Agency charged that it was “becoming more and more obvious that the Catholic Church is being targeted as the public enemy of our society.” For the author, a retired bishop from New Jersey whose diocese was marred in sex abuse scandals during his tenure, the main reason for anti-Catholic hostility was the church’s standing firm on “her teaching on contraception, abortion, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, marriage and divorce.”

      This is one side of the story and certainly an important one that must not be ignored or trivialized. For large parts of American history, Catholics represented a besieged minority, particularly if they happened to be of Irish or Italian descent. At the same time, however, as the size of the Catholic immigrant community grew in size, so did its influence. Many in the first wave of Catholic immigrants settled in large northeastern cities, such as New York and Boston, where they quickly became a major political factor, primarily for the Democratic Party, which built a whole patronage system on the largely Irish Catholic vote. From this perspective, Nast’s crusade against New York City’s Tammany Hall and his anti-Irish cartoons acquire a certain logic.

      It is also a fact that the American Catholic Church actively opposed abolitionism in the United States. And it is also a fact that there was little love lost between the Irish, and later Italian, immigrant communities and the African American minority, with animosities coming from both sides. Catholic immigrants had always voted for the Democratic Party, and the outcome of the Civil War only strengthened the association, as did Lincoln’s Republican Party’s association with the anti-Catholic cause, albeit rather subtle, even if it was well known that in some parts of the country there were strong ties between the Republicans and the American Protective Association.

      Historical Irony

      It is important to keep this in mind in order to appreciate the significance of the role of the Catholic vote for the November election. Gone are the days when Catholics formed a dependable vote bank for the Democratic Party, when the Republicans were seen biased, if not hostile, to the Catholic faith. In 2016, according to Pew Research, 56% of registered Catholics voted for Trump, 44% for Hillary Clinton. Generally, nowadays, about half of registered Catholic voters identify themselves more or less as Republicans; roughly the same share more or less as Democrats. This implies that the Catholic vote is a perfect reflection of the pronounced political polarization and partisanship that has characterized the country as a whole for the past few decades.

      At the same time, Catholics are no longer considered unfit for high political offices, their republican credentials questioned, as was still the case when John F. Kennedy ran for office. To be sure, this has not yet played itself out with respect to the presidency. Joe Biden, if elected, would only be the second Catholic to be elected to the country’s highest political office. It is, however, the case for the other branches of the American political system — the Congress and particularly the Supreme Court. It is perhaps one of the great ironies of American history that today, the majority of the Supreme Court justices who are supposed to interpret and uphold the Constitution of the United States happen to be Catholics — members of a faith that once was considered anathema to everything the country stood for, or at least claimed to stand for.

      With the passing away of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, the Supreme Court has once again become a focal point of attention. This might appear a bit strange. After all, the Supreme Court is generally seen as “‘the least dangerous branch’ because it can only tell you what the law means.” Its principal task is “to settle conflicting judgments from lower courts, and determine whether laws are in conflict with the Constitution or other federal laws.”

      This, however, is not how America’s Christian fundamentalists see it. For them, the Supreme Court is the one crucial institution that is in a position to reverse what they consider the greatest abomination in American legal history, Roe vs. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal countywide. President Donald Trump’s choice of Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic and mother of seven (two of the children by adoption), to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court is, therefore, of supreme significance. Not only because it would tilt the court decisively to the right, but also because it might help sway the outcome of the November election in Trump’s favor, particularly with respect to the Hispanic Catholic vote.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In a recent commentary in The New York Times, Linda Chavez called upon the Democrats not to take the Hispanic vote for granted. In 2016, almost 30% of Hispanics voted for Trump, despite his blatant denigration of migrants from south of the border. There are numerous reasons for the way Hispanics vote the way they do, not least their national origins. And there is the religious factor. As Chavez points out, a growing number of Hispanics identify themselves as Protestants or even evangelicals, and as such are more prone to vote for Trump.

      In addition, there is the question of abortion — an abomination to evangelicals and devout Roman Catholics alike. In a recent poll, more than 50% of Hispanic Catholics thought abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. In fact, Hispanics were the only distinct ethnic group to think so. Among white Catholics, for instance, roughly 40% took the pro-life position. To complicate things even more, a study from 2007 found a marked difference between first and second-generation American Hispanics on the question of abortion. Among the former, almost two-thirds indicated at the time that it should be illegal; among the latter, only a bit more than 40% thought so.

      God’s Tool

      In an earlier article, I have suggested that Trump’s core constituency, evangelicals and devout Catholics, have supported him not because they believe he is a man of God — he quite clearly is the opposite, all his pretending notwithstanding — but because they believe he is “God’s tool.” Ginsburg’s passing away a few weeks before the election, allowing Trump to choose an avowed abortion opponent to fill her seat, cannot but strengthen their belief that the president is on a mission from God. Trump, of course, has far more mundane motives, first and foremost to lock in all the conservative, reactionary and far-right groups in American society that might put him over the edge in crucial states.

      There is a certain irony to the fact that the most widely loathed president, both at home and abroad, in recent American history might be put in a position to impose himself for four more years both on the United States and the world at large with the help of a community that for a long time in the past was one of the most disparaged, if not outright abhorred religious minority in America. One might be tempted to see in this an instance of belated revenge for the treatment received in the past. As the good book states in Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Poor Thomas Nast must be spinning like a mad top in his grave.

      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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      Trump at the UN: A Failure to Lead

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      True to himself, US President Donald Trump completely failed to address any of the issues confronting the global community in his keynote speech to the 74th General Assembly of the United Nations. Instead, he used the platform to criticize China, to excoriate Iran, to boast of how big and dangerous the US military has become, and to urge every nation to close its borders to even the most hungry or persecuted migrants. He did, however, think it appropriate to support the right of all Americans to own as many guns as they want.

      In the same speech, Trump made headlines with his words urging the world to hold China accountable for having “unleashed this plague on to the world,” in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for deliberately encouraging the coronavirus to spread. The White House cut these words from the transcript posted on its website. Perhaps even the administration’s press office did not have the stomach to publish such libel.

      This speech to the UN was a moment when the leader of the free world — as a US president might once have been seen — could actually attempt to lead. The speech was an opportunity to inspire and to set out a roadmap to a better future. Trump chose to do the reverse. The world is facing a triple crisis of an international pandemic, economic collapse and climate emergency. Trump could only reach out for people to blame: the Chinese, Iranians or Venezuelans. He failed to mention that the United States has the biggest coronavirus death toll of any country in the world, with over 200,000 dead and counting. 

      Nor did Trump comment on the millions out of work or that America’s west is burning at the same time that its southeast is inundated by hurricane after hurricane. These are not just America’s problems: Trump did not address the dire straits of billions of non-Americans impacted by these dangers. Why would he? This is the true measure of “America First.”

      The American leadership vacuum is a grave danger to not just Americans but to us all. Trump’s failure to act early to stem coronavirus infections — a deliberate decision he made to fatuously “avoid panic” — will likely cost the lives of tens of thousands more Americans on top of the current staggering death toll. The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic signaled that Trump wanted no part of the international leadership out of the health crisis. The resultant deaths will be beyond imagination.  

      Trump has employed the same approach to international economics. His regime’s policy has been to withdraw from trade agreements, set up sanctions barriers against competitors and allies, and complain that everyone else’s industrial policies are more successful than his. Trump has also embarked on a determined effort to weaken the international institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on — that have enabled the world economy to prosper for the past 75 years. The world is going to need a great deal of leadership to emerge out of the current economic wasteland, on a scale of what was done to repair the damage of the Second World War. We can rely on Donald Trump to be absent from that role, too.

      As for the climate emergency, Trump has chosen to deny it. More than that, he has proceeded to undo everything previous US governments and the international community had done to try to save the planet from disaster. All of these crises are going to produce millions of refugees across the world. Trump couldn’t care less.

      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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      Will This Be the Election to End All Elections?

      by

      When drafting the United States Constitution in 1787, the Founding Fathers of the new nation sought to formalize the nature of what they wished to be an innovative form of government. Trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, they devised a series of complex arrangements designed to ensure that the country would exist not as a simple nation-state governed by a hierarchy along the European model, but as a fragmented association of local governments, called states. These fundamentally autonomous entities would share a general political philosophy and mutually ensure their collective defense.

      Among the innovative but historically bizarre innovations was the mode of calculating representation in the federal government based on population. More than half of the states allowed slavery. In the southern states, slaves were the working class and represented an important percentage of the population. To satisfy the demands of those states to include slaves in the calculation while depriving them of all human rights and considering them nothing more than property, the founders agreed to count slaves considered at three-fifth the value of free white citizens. 

      The founders created one other bold innovation. Because there was no unified nation, the president of the United States would not be elected by the American people, but by a kind of negotiation among the states. Each state could send a slate of electors to an institution called the Electoral College to express its preference for a presidential candidate. If any historical model existed for this “democratic” innovation, it was the Vatican’s system for electing a pope.

      For decades after its founding, a growing number of Americans in the North found slavery to be not only inconsistent with the democratic aspirations of the young nation but also in violation of the stirring ideal expressed by a former president and slaveholder who, in 1776, proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” But slavery was one of the essential pillars of a Constitution that was designed to allow states to run their own affairs. Calling slavery into question challenged an essential premise of a Constitution built around tolerating it. 

      The US Presidential Election and the Armies of the Night

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      When the Southern states seceded from the federal union, the entire logic of the original Constitution imploded. After the Union victory, the US should have written a new Constitution. Instead, the Congress amended the existing one, keeping much of its dead wood. What emerged was a Constitution that turned the original concept of the nation on its head. Americans were henceforth called upon to pledge their allegiance to an “indivisible” nation, meaning that the states were now more like provinces or semi-autonomous districts than what they had been previously: the political core of the system.

      Thanks to this patchwork, the nation was unified. The American people theoretically became more important than the states as the ultimate reference in the definition of rights. The implicit sovereignty of the individual states was compromised but not erased from the Constitution. It was as if a diversity of clans suddenly decided it was just one big, happy family.

      Another ambiguous shift in the democratic concept was taking place in the background. By 1880 every state accepted to cast their votes in the Electoral College for the presidential candidate on the basis of the popular vote within the state. Unlike the abolition of slavery, this shift required no modification of the Constitution. Accordingly, as the Supreme Court declared in Bush v. Gore in 2000, states “can take back the power to appoint electors.” 

      The Trump 2020 campaign noticed this loophole. The states can choose to ignore the popular vote. In a sobering article for The Atlantic, Barton Gellman writes that Republicans are “discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” Gellman pressed the Trump campaign to explain its eventual strategy and only received this response: “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Free and fair election:

      The title habitually used by parties to describe elections which they have found the means to distort and even overturn the results of — a phenomenon formerly observed with some frequency in some South American and African republics and which, since the year 2000, has become a respected trend in at least one North American nation.

      Contextual Note

      The hypothesis laid out by The Atlantic is that Republican governors could declare the official results suspect and arbitrarily nominate electors favorable to Trump to vote in the Electoral College. Were this to happen, there is no question that Democrats and indeed most Americans would call foul. The nation would be faced with a constitutional crisis of major proportions, leading to serious civil unrest and possibly a citizens’ civil war.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Most reasonable people would see this as the kind of outlandish violation of democracy that only someone as brazen as Donald Trump would dare to attempt. They could not imagine that any respectable politician would accept to be party to such a transparently anti-democratic ploy, tantamount to a coup d’état that could irreparably tarnish their reputations.

      But Gellman cites Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman, who appears to find the scenario palatable: “It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” Another Republican, Pennsylvania’s state Senate majority leader, Jake Corman, used the classic I- would-never-do-this-by-choice argument: “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law.”

      For many assertive Americans, the law has become the screen behind which major offenses against public morality can conveniently be justified. If it’s legal, it’s moral, and hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Everyone is expected to use the advantages the law provides. Politics is all about gaining and holding on to power anyway. The law provides the required setting. 

      Historical Note

      The laws written in 1787 that President Trump’s people are relying on were written for a totally different political entity. But for them, everything the Constitution contains, however inappropriate to today’s world, is sacred. Whether it’s gun rights or the Electoral College, Americans must learn to live with it and even love it.

      Because of the mythology surrounding its Constitution, the United States has become a nation that attributes an inordinate amount of its authority to lawyers. It was, after all, the first nation in history to be defined by law rather than secular cultural heritage. Americans see the Constitution as the nation’s virtual birth certificate. The Constitution can be amended, but it can never be replaced. In contrast, since the founding of the US, France has had five different republics, each with a new constitution. The French are currently toying seriously with the idea of moving on to drafting a sixth one.

      The impending constitutional crisis is unprecedented, though Gellman refers to one similar incident that occurred in 1876, a contested election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. One major difference is that neither candidate was an incumbent who could use the tools of presidential power. Another notable difference is that neither had quite the reputation that Donald Trump has of twisting both the law and the truth to secure a “deal” on the terms he prefers.

      Gellman warns the nation that these are not normal times: “Something far out of the norm is likely to happen.” The consequences are impossible to predict. “The political system,” he tells us, “may no longer be strong enough to preserve its integrity.” Is the sacred Constitution in peril?

      Democrats appear to be hoping that Joe Biden will emerge victorious, either on election day or after months of legal wrangling and the trauma of massive civil protest. They believe his victory will usher in a return to “normalcy” and business as usual, similar to the Obama years. But before he can begin the rituals of governing, whenever that may occur, the life of the nation is likely to have undergone a series of radical changes. Alongside an ongoing pandemic, a deepening economic crisis and a general loss of faith in all forms of institutional authority, the vaunted system of checks and balances imagined by the founders in 1787 may find itself both seriously unchecked and totally unbalanced.

      *[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