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      in US Politics

      Start me up: ‘car guy’ Joe Biden accelerates push to turn America electric

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      On a hot, sunny day in Michigan, Joe Biden zoomed around in a new electric version of the Ford F150, one of the automaker’s most famous vehicles.“This sucker’s quick,” Biden said as he drove up to reporters at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center last month.Biden, a self-proclaimed American “car guy”, was there to tout electric vehicles, a key component of his administration’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure proposal.“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” Biden said. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”The proposed $174bn investment in electric vehicles represents the biggest ever White House push from fossil-fuel based vehicles and toward battery-powered cars. The Biden administration has made environmentalism and sustainability a key pillar to its job creation efforts, and the president wants to dramatically increase the number of electric vehicles on the road and the infrastructure for manufacturing them.This, Biden says, would create a wave of new green energy jobs and also help to fight climate change.At the beginning of the year, electric vehicles made up less than 5% of automobile sales in the US. But Biden’s proposal aims to dramatically push the American auto industry toward electric vehicles, mainly through incentives and tax credits. It would use funds to transition the fleet of federal agency cars such as those used by the US Postal Service, and the plan includes $45bn towards increasing the number of electric school buses and transit buses.It would also set up a national network of charging stations across the country, the current lack of which is seen as one of the bigger advantages combustion engine cars still have over electric vehicles. There are are only 41,400 electric vehicle charging stations (including fast-charging stations) in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. There are omore than 130,000 gasoline stations.It’s not clear, however, how those charging stations would be distributed – and what portion of them would go to poorer parts of America.But the plan aims to change the supply chain so the US depends less on other countries for batteries and other car parts. The administration wants to become less dependent on foreign countries for manufacturing electric vehicles and the parts that go into them.“It’s a systemic transition,” said John Paul MacDuffie, a University of Pennsylvania professor of management and vehicle expert. “Often if you just tackle one narrow piece of it you don’t make progress, because you bump into constraints in the system. So I think the ambition to be systemic is really good, and probably essential, to make progress.”As Biden drove around the Ford campus, hundreds of miles away Republicans in Congress were planning to gut the electric vehicles proposals in his American Jobs Plan.Negotiations over the entire infrastructure bill are continuing, but the last counter-offer made by Republicans slashed spending on Biden’s plan by about $170bn. It’s not clear what exactly the remaining $4bn would be spent on if the Republican proposal went into effect. A factsheet distributed by the office of Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead negotiator, did not specify.In their criticisms, Republicans have cited the price tag on the electric vehicles provision. They say the government should not pour so much money into electric vehicles, and that doing so would end up killing jobs in other alternative vehicle areas, like ethanol.“For a person like me, from Iowa, if you have all electric cars, there’s going to be 43,000 people making ethanol and biodiesel that won’t be employed,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told E&E News.Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, another Republican who opposes government spending on electric vehicles, told the Guardian electric vehicles are prohibitively expensive.“My concern about an all-electric car policy is that it’s truly a social injustice. These electric cars are very expensive. Only the wealthy can afford them, and the wealthy benefit from the tax credits,” Marshall said.“I think we’re getting policy way ahead of technology. Certainly way ahead from a price point … But right now the big picture scares me. I think we’d have to increase our electric grid by 60%. That would take, theoretically 20, 40, 60 years to double or to increase the electric grid by 60%.”The price of electric vehicles varies widely. The Mini Cooper SE starts at about $30,000. The cheapest Tesla, the Model S, starts at about $40,000. More expensive models can run as high as $150,000. The price of electric vehicles is likely to drop if and when they become more popular and the technology improves. And the cost of batteries is dropping – rapidly. It’s going so fast that there’s evidence to expect most cars to be battery-powered by 2035.Marshall also said the environmental cost of battery-powered cars is high.“I think we have to look at the environmental footprint in looking what goes into a battery. The making of the battery,” Marshall said. “And eventually the disposal of these batteries.”Even electric vehicle advocates concede that the environmental impact of the raw materials used for electric batteries are not perfect. And there are also human rights concerns about mining those materials.But in Michigan, state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, said the technology around batteries and electric vehicles was getting better and more environmentally friendly.“I think that there’s a fair criticism in terms of the environmental impact of batteries from the mining perspective. But I think, like everything else, that’s improving,” McMorrow said.Even accounting for battery mining, petrol and diesel cars still have a far more negative impact on the environment than electric vehicles.Right now the American Jobs Plan is still a framework, and the gulf between Republicans and Democrats is vast. It’s unlikely that if a compromise is reached on the entire proposal, Biden will get all the funding he’s looking for. But it’s also unlikely that Republicans will have shrunk that funding to the minuscule amount they have offered so far.And around the country, lawmakers are making moves to nudge the country further toward electric vehicles. Governor Kate Brown of Oregon recently signed a bill to expand electric vehicle infrastructure in her state. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker has set a goal of 750,000 electric vehicles by 2030.McMorrow in Michigan has helped craft a proposal to encourage electric vehicles in the state.Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have introduced legislation that aims to set up a nationwide network of charging stations over the next five years. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, also introduced legislation in 2019 that would help set up a network of charging stations also. Biden added that proposal to his American Jobs Plan in March.Even with a huge investment in electric vehicles, transitioning to where combustion cars are the minority on the road and electric vehicles are the majority will take time.“If you don’t start at some point making some move for the US to have a piece of the supply chain you’ll never be ready for the EV transition – and it will take a long time,” MacDuffie said. More

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      in US Politics

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorses Maya Wiley for New York mayor

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor of New York, a dramatic intervention that could heighten the chances of the city electing a woman for the first time and only its second Black leader.Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive in Congress popularly known as AOC, shot to national fame in 2018 when she beat a longtime incumbent, Joe Crowley, for the Democratic nomination in a district in Queens and the Bronx.“If we don’t come together as a movement we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires, and we need a city by and for working people,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Saturday. “So we will vote for Maya No1.”Wiley is a lawyer and community organiser who was a counsel to the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and has taught urban policy and social justice at the New School in Manhattan.“She will be a progressive in Gracie Mansion,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to the mayoral residence. “We can’t let New York become a playground for the wealthy where working people cannot afford to live.”Wiley lauded Ocasio-Cortez as a strong leader and promised to do the same for the city.“It’s time we have this kind of courage leading us at a historic crossroads,” Wiley said, according to New York Daily News, referring to the city’s prospects after the coronavirus pandemic. “We need the courage to bring every New Yorker back with us.”This week Wiley told the New Yorker: “There’s one progressive in this race who can win this race. And it’s me.”In April, she told the Guardian she wanted to change a history which has seen New York elect 109 mayors – 108 of them white men, the exception David Dinkins, who led the city for three years from 1990 and who died last November, aged 93.For long periods the New York race has been led by Andrew Yang, a centrist tech entrepreneur who achieved his own national fame with a surprisingly strong run in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.After failing to land a place in Joe Biden’s cabinet, Yang entered the race to succeed De Blasio in New York.Gaffes and missteps including choosing to live outside the city during the pandemic, not voting for mayor between 2001 and 2017 and supposedly misunderstanding the subway system did not stop him dominating early polls.Democrats will choose their candidate – and in all likelihood the next mayor, given the political leanings of the city – on 22 June. The primary will be conducted through ranked-choice voting, which lets voters pick up to five candidates in order of preference. Some early results in other contests might be known that evening but the nominees for mayor are unlikely to be known for weeks.Polls have tightened, with Yang, Wiley, Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams and former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia the top four in a crowded field.Garcia has been endorsed by the New York Times. Wiley will hope Ocasio-Cortez speaks to young New Yorkers as the Grey Lady does to the city’s establishment.Hit hard in the early stages of the pandemic, New Yorkers are only now beginning to return to normal life. In her interview with the Guardian, Wiley said Covid “laid bare once again – like all our crises that reveal racial inequity – our failure to invest in our people.“… You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of colour. We are not 80% of the New York City population. The highest rates of unemployment are in the same communities that had the highest rates of death due to Covid. And the highest infection rates, and are the same communities that are over-policed, and are the same communities that are struggling to get the vaccine.“If we want to recover from Covid we have to pay attention to all our people. And what we love about the city … is the fact that 800 languages are spoken here, and the fact that 40% of our people were born in another country, and the fact that we have descendants from North American slaves, and the fact that we have people who live in luxury housing and people who live in public housing, and that’s part of what makes us rich.”She was also asked how she would manage the notoriously difficult relationship between the mayor’s office and Andrew Cuomo, the powerful Democratic governor of New York state.“I would manage the relationship with the governor the way I manage all relationships,” she said. “Open communication, starting with principles and purpose that meets the needs of people.“We have a shared constituency. There are many partnerships, we need to get what we need from the state government. And if you want partnerships that focus on hard problems and real solutions, then pick a Black woman. Because that’s what we do every single day and in every single way.” More

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      in Elections

      Arizona emails show Trump pushed ‘to prove any fraud’ before Capitol attack

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      As Donald Trump digested news of a diminished online presence this week—a two-year suspension from Facebook for inciting the Capitol attack, and confirmation that his blog shuttered due to a “staggeringly small audience”—North Carolina’s Republican convention on Saturday night was poised to potentially strengthen an anaemic political operation.In the wake of his loss to Joe Biden, Trump’s political operation shrunk “to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016,” The New York Times reported. Most of these figures, The Times pointed out, “go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.”Meanwhile, Trump’s brash businessman persona seemed to have waned. While he travels to Manhattan from his New Jersey golf club to work out of Trump Tower “at least once a week,” his commute draws scant attention. In his Trump Tower office, he is “mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.” He no longer has the company of longtime cronies and staffers, nor his children, per this Times report. It’s unclear what Trump will say at this conference, which The Times described as being “billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches.” But Trump’s presence could show just how much sway he holds over the Republican party. It could also test the extent to which his day-to-day supporters remain loyal to him. Facebook announced on Friday that the company would suspend Trump for two years. This announcement follows the recommendation of Facebook’s oversight board. Trump was suspended from the social media site in January, for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol building, in service of his lie that Joe Biden won because of electoral fraud. “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, remarked in a statement on Friday.Suspension from Facebook would likely pose a devastating sucker-punch to most politicians’ aspirations—it’s a platform where beneficial disinformation can proliferate, not to mention an opportunity for direct access to voters. But Trump’s response to this ban might have teased his political future—namely, dropping a strong hint that he’d run for president again in 2024. “Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!” remarked Trump’s statement responding to this suspension. These comments came amid reports this week that Trump believes he will be reinstated to the White House by August. Trump did not say in his Facebook statement Friday whether he thought he’d resume his role due to reinstatement, or due to a successful presidential run in 2024. Regardless of these will he-or-won’t he vagaries, recent metrics showed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party was strong. “Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far,” The Times noted.The extent to which Trump might attempt a comeback was further underscored by revelations about how much he tried to influence results in Arizona’s election. Emails were released this week in which the Republican president of the Arizona state senate said Trump called her after his election defeat last year, to thank her “for pushing to prove any fraud”.The emails add to understanding of the evolution of Trump’s “big lie”, that his defeat by Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud, and how it fuelled the deadly Capitol assault. The Arizona emails were obtained by American Oversight, a legal watchdog, via a Freedom of Information request. They showed how Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pushed officials to act and how a controversial election audit in Arizona’s most populous county came to be set up.Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are prominent among states which produced Biden victories Trump and his supporters insist won by fraud. They were not.The release of the Arizona emails showed how Trump pursued his claim of fraud after the election was called.Election day was 3 November. Biden was declared the winner four days later. The Democrat won by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college. That was the score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result Trump called a landslide.Regardless, Trump went on the offensive with a frantic legal effort to prove fraud, led by Giuliani and almost entirely laughed out of court.In one Arizona email released on Friday, dated 2 December, Karen Fann, the Republican state senate president, told two constituents she had spoken to Giuliani “at least six times over the past two weeks”.Threatened later in the month with being recalled from office by “the new patriot movement of the United States”, Fann wrote that the state senate was “doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done”.Republicans in Maricopa county, the most populous county in Arizona, mounted a controversial audit of ballots. Most analysts view the audit as part of a concerted attempt by Republicans in state governments to restrict access to the ballot or produce laws by which results can be overturned.In the emails released by American Oversight, Fann told the constituent threatening action against her she had been “in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done”.She added: “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”Fann also told a constituent concerned about the use of taxpayers’ money: “Biden won. 45% of all Arizona voters think there is a problem with the election system. The audit is to disprove those theories or find ways to improve the system.”The emails also show the involvement of Christina Bobb. A reporter for One America News Network, a rightwing TV channel praised by Trump, Bobb has raised funds in support of the Maricopa audit.Another fringe rightwing network, Newsmax, has said it will show Trump’s return to public speaking on Saturday evening. More

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      in US Politics

      Get the vax, win a shotgun: US states get creative to encourage vaccination

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      First it was a lottery to win $1m in Ohio. Then another lottery was set up in West Virginia.In Illinois people could get free tickets to the Six Flags amusement park.In New Jersey it meant a free beer.The governor of Minnesota announced giveaways that included fishing licenses, gift cards and state park permits, among others.And West Virginia upped the ante, adding the chance to win hunting rifles or shotguns.Governors across the country are resorting to almost shameless incentives to lure Americans who haven’t gotten a coronavirus vaccine to willingly take a jab. And a few folks who have entered in these raffles have come away winning prizes – even $1m.It’s partially a move of necessity. There are still Americans who are either actively refraining from getting a Covid-19 vaccine or just haven’t got round to it yet.Businesses, too, have stepped in to nudge the unvaccinated. The percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated varies dramatically. Some states are approaching 70%, and others are still below 50%.So governors have had to get creative. On Thursday, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington state announced a “shot of a lifetime” state lottery for getting a vaccine, with prizes including a lottery for $2m, game systems and speakers, and “higher education tuition and expense assistance”.In New Jersey, the governor, in partnership with the state’s department of health, set up a “shot and a beer” incentive program, which lets any New Jerseyan of legal drinking age who gets their first vaccine shot in May to also enjoy a free beer through breweries participating in the program.That sort of approach got a shoutout from Joe Biden on Wednesday when he announced a month of action to reach the goal of vaccinating 70% of US adults by the Fourth of July holiday, with the president nodding to a beer-maker’s proposed giveaway by saying: “That’s right, get a shot and have a beer. Free beer for everyone 21 years and over to celebrate independence from the virus.”The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, echoed this on Thursday at the daily briefing.“Free beer – that seems to be very appealing to the public, it seems, by [the] headlines,” Psaki said.In a video that went viral in May, Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia sat at his desk with his English bulldog, named Babydog, in his lap.“If you won’t do it for your family, you’ve got to get vaccinated for Babydog,” Justice tells the camera. “That’s all there is to it. Now she wants you vaccinated so badly and she’s going to absolutely be the one to lead us through on this all these incentives. And without any questions she’ll give you a high five right now but you have got to get yourself vaccinated.”The incentive programs have become a bipartisan trend with governors from deep-red states like West Virginia or deep-blue states like California offering a range of inducements.And already there have been some million-dollar winners. In Ohio, Jonathan Carlyle of Toledo won the state’s Vax-a-Million lottery.“I kept hemming and hawing about it, and I work all the time, and when the Vax-a-Million thing started I immediately went down there and got it. It pushed me over the edge,” Carlyle told the Toledo Blade. He said he would use the money to pay off some bills and buy a house.Not every governor has rolled out prizes. In Utah, Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, says he’s monitoring how effective the lotteries are.“It would be really great if we didn’t need any incentives at all. Hopefully, not dying is a great incentive,” the governor said according to the Deseret News.In North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is considering a vaccine lottery.“We need to do everything we can to make sure we can get as many shots in arms as possible,” Cooper said according to ABC affiliate KATV.North Carolina already has a $25 cash-card giveaway incentive program for vaccine shots.In South Carolina, the state house of representatives minority leader, Todd Rutherford, has proposed using leftover Covid-19 relief money to set up $1m prizes for people to get vaccinated. In an interview, when the Guardian suggested it was surprising that some people still had not been vaccinated, Rutherford lamented with a groan: “You and me both!“The only way that I think we can start breaking through is to use what’s working in other states and I think Ohio saw a 29% uptick in their vaccinations because of this,” Rutherford said. “And if we can get that kind of uptick by spending a million, two million dollars, I think it’s a no-brainer.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Nixon is much more serious than Trump’: Michael Dobbs and the tale of the White House tapes

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      “I love you, as you know,” says Richard Nixon. “Like my brother.”The 37th president is bidding farewell to chief of staff Bob Haldeman in an unexpectedly intimate phone call that, half a century later, lingers in the air like a ghost.Donald Trump had tweets but Nixon had tapes: 3,700 hours of them, secretly recorded by a White House system the East German Stasi might have envied. The conversations were released between 2007 and 2013, an eavesdropping opportunity never likely to be repeated.They have proved a goldmine for Michael Dobbs, a British-born author and journalist whose elegantly written book, King Richard – Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, zooms in on the hundred days that followed Nixon’s second inauguration and led to his downfall.The narrative follows Nixon from room to room, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. It tells how the tapes capture ice cubes tinkling in a glass, Nixon’s voice softening when his 24-year-old daughter Julie calls and, as the world knows, some bilious rants about the media as the Watergate scandal deepens.Why did this famously secretive president leave such an incriminating trace? Nixon never intended for the tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, to become public. But he did have an eye on posterity.“It’s a bit like Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me because I intend to write it myself,’” says Dobbs, 70.“That was Nixon’s idea as well. This is one difference from Trump: [Nixon] really had studied history in some depth, and compared himself to people like Churchill and De Gaulle. He wanted to write memoirs that would justify his place in history and particularly undercut any attempts by uppity aides like [Henry] Kissinger to claim all the credit for his foreign policy initiatives.The tapes force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself“So he never imagined that the tapes would become public. He thought they were just going to be his private property that he could draw on for writing his memoirs. Of course, he didn’t really understand that just to go back and listen to these tapes, he’d have to spend his entire retirement trying to decipher them. The tapes became completely out of control in the end.”Lyndon Johnson recorded about 800 hours of phone calls but Nixon took it to a whole new level. Dobbs says: “The difference with Nixon was that he was so ham-fisted and a bit of a klutz that he didn’t know how to turn tape recorders on and off so they invented a system which turned out to be completely diabolic: it would just turn on by itself. It recorded absolutely everything without any sort of input from him, which is what really did him in in the end.”Sometimes Nixon could forget the tapes were running as he and his aides plotted dirty tricks, unleashed crude diatribes or made racist asides. In one, Haldeman suggests that the White House counsel, John Dean, must have been taking out “all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex”.Nixon’s Trump-like loathing of the media includes a boast that he “really stuck ’em in the groin”. It also crops up in a conversation with his special counsel, Chuck Colson, on the eve of his inauguration. Dobbs says: “He’s about to give this speech and he’s gloating with Colson, his hatchet man, about how he’s going to stick it to the Washington Post and drive the Post’s share price down. He generally calls the reporters ‘the bastards’.”At this point, Nixon was riding high after a thumping election victory and with a near-70% approval rating. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, seven months prior, was seemingly behind him despite the efforts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.“But then, within just a few weeks and months, the whole thing has completely unravelled and you have all these people within the White House at each other’s throats and, as Nixon says, ‘pissing on each other’ and eventually pissing on the president. So it’s an amazing three-month period in which probably one of the most disciplined White House operations in history completely falls apart.”By July 1973, some of Nixon’s advisers were pleading with him to destroy the tapes lest they reveal his part in the Watergate cover-up. He felt they would strengthen his defence. He was wrong.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s testimony that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and was forced to resign in August 1974, before he could be impeached.Dobbs reflects: “At a certain point, it becomes Dean’s word against Nixon’s word. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to impeach the president at that point. The only reason that he was forced to resign was because the tapes started coming out and that went all the way to the supreme court. Without the tapes, there would not have been a sufficient basis to force Nixon out of office.”And yet, as Dobbs listened, he also found the tapes that ruined Nixon’s reputation in the moment could yet provide a measure of redemption.“What they do is to force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself and destroy his presidency and the pain and agony that he feels.“Unless you’re an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Nixon hater, you have to feel some sympathy for the man, not because you approve of what he did, but just on a personal level.”The president’s conversations with his daughters help humanise him.“You can relate to him the way he talks to Julie, particularly if you’ve listened to the previous tape of him talking to Haldeman. Suddenly he’s switching from being an irascible president who’s barking orders at people to being a loving father.”Then there is that wistful call with Haldeman, who knew the president better than anyone.“Nixon never invited him to a family meal, never shook hands with him, and then suddenly here is Nixon saying, ‘I love you like my brother.’ If you know the background of Nixon’s two brothers dying from tuberculosis when he was a young man, it’s extraordinary.”Dobbs wrote the book during Trump’s scandal-peppered, twice-impeached, one-term presidency. Parallels with Nixon were inescapable: the exploitation of racial resentment, the whipping up of the “silent majority”, the hostility towards the press and east coast elites. But he believes there are key differences too.“Nixon is a much more substantive, serious person than Trump and he had a real sophisticated understanding of history and foreign policy. We don’t know how Trump is going to be treated by historians, 40, 50 years later, but I find Nixon a more empathetic character than Trump.“To some extent, Nixon has succeeded in rehabilitating himself, or at least we have a more nuanced picture of Nixon now. I’m not sure that Trump is going to be rehabilitated, at least among historians.”The author, a dual British-American citizen who has worked for the Guardian and Washington Post, continues: “One distinguishing thing between the two of them is the whole claim that the election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Although Nixon did have a lot of grudges about particularly the 1960 election and felt the Kennedys had stolen it from him, he did not go public with that and he did not try to dispute it in any serious way.“He accepted it because he thought that was one rule of the game. Trump completely threw that rule of the game overboard. Nixon is within the mainstream American presidents. Trump is outside the mainstream.”It remains to be seen whether historians will regard Trump as a Shakespearean figure or conclude he was simply not that psychologically interesting. Dobbs believes Nixon, who rose from poverty to the presidency only to endure catastrophe, does meet the King Lear standard. Along with its theatrical title, the book is divided into four “acts” and has a list of “dramatic personae”.“To call him a Shakespearean tragic hero does not mean that you approve of him or you like him,” Dobbs says. “It means that you’re just struck by this fall from grace and you’ve become aware of the suffering involved. I was more interested in telling the story than to pass judgment.”Exit, pursued by a tape recorder. More

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      in US Politics

      Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?

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      If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”There seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theoriesJust hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, commented: “The most worrying threat is at the state level, the effort to change voting rules, which I think is prompted by the failed effort to alter the election outcome of 2020.“The lesson Republicans have learnt from that is they don’t really suffer any electoral consequences from their base pursuing this kind of thing. In fact, they’re rewarded for it. That’s very ominous because that suggests they’ll continue to try to do this until they pay an electoral price for it, and so far they don’t sense they’re paying an electoral price for it.”Where is this authoritarian ecosystem heading? For many, the nightmare scenario is that Trump will run again in 2024 and, with the benefit of voter suppression, sneak a win in the electoral college as he did in 2016. If that fails, plan B would be for a Republican-controlled House to refuse to certify a Democratic winner and overturn the result in Trump’s favour.Disputed presidential elections have been thrown to the House before, Ziblatt noted. “It’s not unprecedented but in those earlier periods you had two parties that were constitutional, fully democratic parties. The thought of having a dispute like that when one of the parties is only questionably committed to democratic rules and norms is very frightening.”People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutionsIn How Democracies Die, Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that democracies often come under threat not from invading armies or violent revolutions but at the ballot box: death by a thousand cuts. “People use elections to get into power and then, once in power, assault democratic institutions,” Ziblatt said.“That’s Viktor Orbán [in Hungary], that’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [in Turkey], that’s Hugo Chávez [in Venezuela] and what’s distinctive about that is that it often begins incrementally. So people continue to go about their lives, continue to vote, parliament continues to meet and so you think, ‘Is there really a threat?’ But the power concentrates so it becomes harder and harder to unseat an incumbent.”He added: “We shouldn’t overlook that fact that we had a change in government in January. What that suggests is our electoral institutions do work better than they do in Hungary. The opposition in the United States is more well-organised and financed than the Hungarian opposition or the Turkish opposition, so we shouldn’t overstate that. But on the other hand, the tendencies are very similar.”Republicans are also playing a very long game, rewiring democracy’s hard drive in an attempt to consolidate power. Trump is arguably both cause and effect of the lurch right, which takes place in the wider context of white Christians losing majority status in America’s changing demographics.His grip on the party appears only to have tightened since his defeat, as evidenced by the ousting of Trump critic Liz Cheney from House leadership and their use of a procedural move known as the filibuster to block the 6 January commission. Critics say that, in an atmosphere of partisan tribalism, the party is now driven by a conviction that Democratic victories are by definition illegitimate.Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who is now a Democrat, said: “It’s very clear that the next time there is a violent effort to overthrow our government, Republicans in Congress will be knowing accomplices in that effort. They are the getaway driver for the democratic arsonists.”Bardella, a political commentator, added: “It has become painfully transparent that the Republican party platform is 100% anti-democratic and it is their ambition to impose minority rule on the majority going forward, because they know that when the playing field is level, they can’t win and so they have instead decided to double down on supporting a wannabe autocrat, and are doing everything they can to destabilise the democratic safeguards that we’ve had in place since the founding of our country.“We cannot underestimate the gravity of this moment in time because what happens over the next month or year could be the turning point in this battle to preserve our democracy.”The threat poses a dilemma for Biden, who was elected on a promise of building bridges and seeking bipartisanship. He continues to do so while issuing increasingly stark calls to arms. Speaking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week, he repeated his “democracy prevailed” mantra but then warned of a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy” and announced that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would lead an effort to strengthen voting rights.Proposed national legislation to address the issue, however, depends on a Senate currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans (Harris has the tie-breaking vote). In order to pass it with a simple majority, Democrats would first have to abolish the filibuster but at least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out such a step.Facing this stalemate, activists and civil society are trying to create a sense of urgency. More than a hundred scholars this week released a joint statement, posted by the New America thinktank, expressing “deep concern” at “radical changes to core electoral procedures” that jeopardise free and fair elections. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars wrote.Last year’s poll was dubbed “the election that could break America” and the nation was widely considered to have dodged a bullet; it may not be so fortunate in 2024. Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive group Democracy for Action, added: “We’re getting to the place where we might not be able to call ourselves a democracy any more. That’s how dire it is.“It is not just the fact that there is an orchestrated, concerted effort across our country to interfere with the most fundamental right of any democracy but that they’re doing it so blatantly, so out in the open and so unapologetically, and that there have been many attempts and there’s no easy way to stop it.”Simpson compared Democrats’ victory over Trump to the film Avengers: Endgame and warned against complacency. “We just defeated Thanos and everybody was like, ‘OK, let’s take a break,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we cannot take a break because the GOP never take a break’. They know that we’re taking a break and that’s why they’re doing it now and so aggressively: ‘You think you won because Trump is out? Oh, we got you.’”Ibram X Kendi, a historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, added: “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of colour, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.” More

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      in World Politics

      Democracy Is Down but Not Out

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      Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarussian dictator, snatches a dissident from midair. Military strongman Assimi Goita launches another coup in Mali. Benjamin Netanyahu escalates a military conflict to save his own political skin in Israel. In the United States, the Republican Party launches a full-court press to suppress the vote.

      Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

      Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has argued, the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

      Russia Ramps Up Pressure Against Kremlin Critics

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      The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

      Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House survey, for instance, is “Democracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst showing so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also registered a drop for the third year in a row.

      If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

      The Pandemic Recedes in America

      Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s constitutional changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

      But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever increase in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

      This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election theft in 2024.

      The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse themselves and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball pulled its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

      These moves motivated Texas-based companies to protest that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of walking out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now looking to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

      At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the reboot in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

      A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may finally push the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were famously used to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20th century.

      High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

      Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

      Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively saved the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

      But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has begun to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass protests by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have mobilized in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is catching up in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

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      The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has witnessed a significant drop in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also declined in popularity. Golden Dawn has disappeared from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much above 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at around 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen currently leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party leads by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

      Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are protesting throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has fallen to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office, appears to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

      Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular leader in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

      The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63% approval rating.

      Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

      The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

      Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

      Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

      His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, tweeted, “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

      Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like Poland and Hungary, have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

      Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

      But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s ex-counsel to be quizzed on Russia investigation after two-year fight

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      The House judiciary committee is poised to question Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into the former president.The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court. House Democrats then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the justice department’s inquiries into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.That month, the DoJ released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing justice department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described numerous instances of the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.While the panel eventually won its fight for McGahn’s testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members will not learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. Panel chair Jerry Nadler said the agreement for McGahn’s testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives”.It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump, the first time over the Ukraine scandal and the second following the 6 January insurrection. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal and damning witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the investigation and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.Trump’s DoJ fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but US district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington. More