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      What the Democrats Need to Understand About America

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      The most-watched election in the world is over, and the United States will have a new president. Democrats succeeded in removing Donald Trump from office — the first one-term president in nearly 30 years and the fourth in the last century — but the Republican Party won this election. Joe Biden will begin his presidency …
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      in US Politics

      Biden's cabinet could do a lot – if he resists the urge to fill it with 'consensus' picks | Max Moran and Miranda Litwak

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      If this election was the beginning of the end of “the Trump Show,” the writers didn’t pick a very satisfying conclusion. True, despite a deadly pandemic and organized Republican voter suppression, more people turned out than ever before to vote for Joe Biden. But, unless Democrats are successful in Georgia, the Senate will likely still be controlled by Mitch McConnell – a man whose life’s work has been to stifle government action – come 2021. McConnell’s continued power seems to temper any hopes of the bold action we need in this moment.At least, that’s the narrative being pushed by the one group delighted by this outcome: big corporations and Wall Street, who were hoping for a divided government from day one of the 2020 campaign. Bankers celebrated the electoral outcome, telling Vanity Fair: “Wall Street will love it. Are you kidding me? A growth agenda without overburdensome regulation or tax reform? C’mon. Are you kidding me? [T]hey live for fucking gridlock.”For corporate America, divided government is a blessing. A dysfunctional legislature will struggle to pass laws raising corporate taxes or cracking down on corporate malfeasance. But just as importantly, by pushing the narrative that no progressives could ever get anything through a Republican-controlled Senate, corporate executives can position themselves as bipartisan “consensus” picks for powerful cabinet posts and regulatory jobs. In fact, they’re already jockeying for them. Before election results were clear, former Lehman Brothers executive and failed Republican presidential candidate John Kasich immediately chastised the left, claiming progressives nearly cost Biden the election. Kasich, who himself hasn’t won an election in six years and utterly failed to deliver Ohio to Biden, has been angling for a cabinet post for weeks.In reality, corporate executives and lobbyists are only “consensus” cabinet picks among their fellow CEOs and corporate lawyers: by a staggering 2 to 1 margin, voters of all stripes – including Republicans – say that Biden should not hire big business executives to run his government. If democracy means anything in this country – and the 2020 election’s jaw-dropping turnout means the people still believe in democracy – Biden cannot pick a corporate cabinet. It’s perhaps the one issue on which Americans are united.And so long as Biden resists the pressure to sell his executive branch out to the highest bidder, there’s still plenty he can do to improve average people’s lives without trying to appease McConnell.Biden’s Plan B for filling out a cabinet involves the Vacancies Act, which lets the president temporarily make a senior staffer at a given agency the secretary, or bring a different Senate-confirmed individual (like the many Democratic commissioners at independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission) into the cabinet job temporarily. He can also make appointments while the Senate is in recess, as presidents of both parties do all the time. Biden could even force the Senate into recess by playing a bit of constitutional hardball – the kind of hardball McConnell plays constantly.Likewise, corporate America might want you to think that a Republican Senate means that any hope of tackling big business’s abuses – and thus improving working conditions, cleaning air and drinking water, and granting Americans a life of economic dignity – is now gone. These fatalists ask how exactly Biden is supposed to get these policies past McConnell, failing to mention that Biden doesn’t need to.Biden’s treasury department can implement financial regulations to impede investments in the fossil fuel industry and reallocate funds to tackle Covid-19 and provide support to the most harmed Americans. Biden’s justice department can prosecute Big Oil companies or seek breakups of corporate monopolies. Biden’s labor department can enforce OSHA rules and crack down on wage theft like never before, making sure people’s hard-earned wages actually make it into their pockets. His IRS can focus on ensuring the rich pay their fair share, instead of auditing poor Americans making mistakes on their taxes. He can even, with one directive to his acting education secretary, cancel 95% of student loan debt. There are at least 277 actions broadly popular within both wings of the Democratic party which Biden could take on day one of his administration. And he needn’t even walk near a McConnell-controlled Senate to do them.Yet all of these actions depend on Biden appointing committed soldiers for the public good – not corporate allies. A treasury secretary Gina Raimondo would prioritize slashing aid to struggling cities in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as she has in her home state. If ex-Googlers like Roger Ferguson or Eric Schmidt pepper the executive branch, it will undercut the authority of the most important antitrust suit in a generation. Appointing Seth Harris to labor secretary will give the intellectual architect of California’s Prop 22 an insider’s angle to spread pain for gig-economy workers.Stopping these people must be a priority for the Democratic base. Activists can and should make clear to Biden that their repayment for hard work should be a highly-motivated and public interest-minded executive branch.Executive actions represent the best hope for aggressively tackling our many interlinked crises – not to mention the best hope for Biden’s party to stand any chance in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Democrats must have something to show for the trust the American people has placed in them. Failure in the coming years could mean a second Trump term, or worse: a new far-right nationalist who is better organized and more serious than Trump.Biden and the Democrats can only defeat such a threat by showing the American people that, yes, their government is still capable of improving their lives in tangible, substantive ways. Executive authority provides Biden with no shortage of ways to do that – but only if he resists the false “bipartisanship” that corporate lobbyists are furiously pushing across Washington. Such individuals cannot populate a Biden cabinet. More

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      Ivanka Trump obsessed with status, says former friend in tell-all essay

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      Ivanka Trump shared her father’s craving for money and praise – and his apparent disdain for poor people – from a young age, according to a former schoolfriend who has written a tell-all essay.Donald Trump’s daughter was obsessed with status and used to blame classmates for her infractions of school rules while projecting a refined persona, Lysandra Ohrstrom, who was a maid of honour at her wedding, claimed in Vanity Fair.“She had the Trump radar for status, money, and power, and her dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself,” alleged Ohrstrom, who described Ivanka, 39, as her best friend growing up.In the most scathing passage, Ohrstrom claimed that in their mid-20s she recommended to her friend the book Empire Falls, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Richard Russo about working-class characters in a small town in Maine.“‘Ly, why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people?’ I remember Ivanka saying,” she wrote. “‘What part of you thinks I would be interested in this?’”Beneath her polish, the future president’s daughter occasionally betrayed “rougher, more Trumpian edges”, she wrote. “Ivanka would regularly relay stories of teachers or observers who had commented that she had the most innate talent they had ever seen for whatever new pursuit she was taking up.”Ohrstrom, a journalist who used to report from Lebanon, said a necklace with her name in Arabic irked Ivanka. “One night in the middle of dinner, she glanced at the necklace and said: ‘How does your Jewish boyfriend feel when you are having sex and that necklace hits him in the face? How can you wear that thing? It just screams ‘terrorist’.”Ohrstrom befriended Ivanka in seventh grade, when they were about 12, at Chapin, an all-girls school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with famous alumni including Jackie Kennedy Onassis. They bonded during a school trip to Paris and Ohrstrom was a maid of honour at Ivanka’s 2009 wedding to Jared Kushner, after which the friendship cooled, she wrote.Quick GuideBooks that exposed the inner workings of Donald Trump’s White HouseShowMichael Wolff – Fire and FuryWolff’s sensational White House exposé paints Donald Trump as a childlike nonentity. It alleges the self-styled “very stable genius” has been described as an idiot by Rupert Murdoch and a moron by Rex Tillerson. Wolff says the thing that interests the US president most is watching himself on television. “I consider it to be fiction,” said Trump of the book. Many others were not so sure.Read the review.Sean Spicer – The BriefingSean Spicer’s 182 days as press secretary yielded a book that tells of a White House where people would routinely bring in “burner phones” to avoid being caught leaking, He describes Trump as sometimes being his own worst enemy with his manic tweeting, and recalls his downfall essentially started on day one, when Spicer was responsible for attempts to spin the news on the president’s dismal inauguration crowds. Perhaps, though, the highlight is when Spicer describes Trump as “a unicorn riding a unicorn over a rainbow’.Read the review.Omarosa Manigault Newman – UnhingedThe most prominent African American in the Trump White House before she was abruptly dismissed, Newman spread her criticism liberally. Her description of the vice-president, Mike Pence, as the “Stepford veep” is one of the kinder sideswipes.Of the more jaw-dropping revelations, the suggestion Trump had initially asked to be sworn in over a copy of The Art of the Deal, instead of the Bible, is a hard image to shake.Read the review.Cliff Sims – Team of VipersCliff Sims’ book suggested he had made enemies and alienated people throughout the administration. He was particularly scathing about Sarah Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary. Her “gymnastics with the truth”, he said, “would tax even the nimblest of prevaricators, and Sanders was not that”.Read the review.Anonymous – A WarningFrom a senior official in the Trump administration – and so many have left and fallen out with the president – Trump is described as “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower”.The unknown author adds: “It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pants-less across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him”John Bolton – The Room Where It HappenedJohn Bolton’s damning indictment of the Trump presidency soared up the chart despite withering reviews describing it as “bloated with self-importance”, after the Trump administration made a last-ditch attempt to prevent its publication.The book claimed that Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election, he suggested he was open to serving more than two terms, offered favours to authoritarian leaders, praised Xi for China’s internment camps and thought Finland was part of Russia.Ohrstrom said she had written the article to show the true Ivanka, despite the risk of being branded a hypocritical, privileged elitist looking to capitalise on her first family connection.“Although friends and family have warned that this article won’t be received the way I want, I think it’s past time that one of the many critics from Ivanka’s childhood comes forward – if only to ensure that she really will never recover from the decision to tie her fate to her father’s.”When Ivanka joined Donald Trump’s White House team as an adviser in 2017, Ohrstrom expected her to moderate the president’s most regressive, racist tendencies. “Not out of any moral commitment, but because caging young children and ripping up global climate agreements was not a good look in the halls of Davos,” she wrote.Ivanka had spent her career projecting a more polished and intellectual version of the Trump brand, blending millennial feminism with a “mythical narrative” of business acumen, but this dissolved when she endorsed her father’s policies and judicial nominations, said Ohrstrom. “I’ve watched as Ivanka has laid waste to the image she worked so hard to build.”It is unclear what Ivanka will do after Joe Biden moves into the White House in January. She shut her eponymous clothing and shoe company in 2018, reportedly over scrutiny and conflict-of-interest issues related to her work with her father’s administration.There is speculation she may run for public office. In a recent RealClearPolitics interview, she described herself as a “Trump-Republican” and “a pragmatist when it comes to everything”. She came out strongly against abortion, a position shared by the Republican party base. “I am pro-life, and unapologetically so,” she said.The article claims that Donald Trump paid close attention to the attractiveness of his daughter and her friends when they were teenagers. “He would barely acknowledge me except to ask if Ivanka was the prettiest or the most popular girl in our grade. Before I learned that the Trumps have no sense of humor about themselves, I remember answering honestly that she was probably in the top five. “Who’s prettier than Ivanka?” I recall him asking once with genuine confusion, before correctly naming the two girls I’d had in mind.”The future president never remembered Ohrstrom’s name but noticed when she gained or lost weight, she wrote. Once, while dining at Mar-a-Lago, Ivanka scolded her brother Donald Jr for taking Ohrstrom’s grilled cheese sandwich. Their father chimed in: “Don’t worry. She doesn’t need it. He’s doing her a favor.” More

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      in US Politics

      Think Joe Biden's victory marks the end of rightwing populism? Think again | Benjamin Moffitt

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      It is tempting to conclude that Donald Trump’s defeat – which he still hasn’t accepted – is a sign that the “populist wave” that saw many rightwing populists triumph across the 2010s is finally receding. With the populist commander-in-chief losing office, rightwing populists around the world must surely be feeling nervous, wondering if it is all over, and whether they might be next.
      We’ve heard this one before. In 2017, when Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in France and Mark Rutte defeated Geert Wilders in the Netherlands within the space of a few months, many a thinkpiece was written asking: are populism’s days numbered? I think we all know the answer to that, as do the likes of Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
      Make no mistake: Joe Biden’s win over Trump is a monumental and important victory, not only for the Democrats in the US, but for small-d democrats worldwide. There was a collective sigh of relief in liberal democracies across the globe when the news came through that the most prominent and famous case of rightwing populism would soon be packing his bags. But to assume that Biden’s win sounds the death knell for populism, or that it provides a clear model for defeating populism that should be imitated in other countries, would be a mistake.
      There are three key problems here. The first is assuming that a single election in a single country acts as a bellwether for global trends – even if it is the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. While political scientists often speak about a process of “diffusion” in which political events in one country influence those in others, this is by no means a linear process. While parties and movements across the globe that are opposed to rightwing populism and nativism will undoubtedly take heart from Biden’s victory and study what worked, there is no indication nor guarantee that the dominoes will fall for populists in other countries, many of whose success is far more entrenched and longstanding than Trump’s. Beyond this, while Trump may (eventually) be gone, that does not mean populism is: populist-right leaders and parties tend to have long institutional legacies, and we can expect the GOP to grapple with its post-Trump future – and the question of whether it wants to continue down the populist path he has set them on – for months and years to come.
      The second problem is, strangely enough, overlooking what a singularly and uniquely bizarre, venal and odious character Trump is, even compared with the rogues’ gallery that make up the global populist right. While populism is a political style that revolves around the appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”, the invocation of crisis, and the use of “bad manners” to demonstrate your closeness to the “real people”, Trump took this to an extreme.
      His was a populism on steroids. I have spent my professional life studying populism across the globe, so should be inured to these kinds of things, but constantly found myself shaking my head in disbelief at the depths Trump was willing to plumb. Only Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or perhaps Bolsonaro come close in terms of their ability to court outrage and offend: most rightwing populists at least know when to tone it down and when to play it up, a balance that Trump seemed unwilling or perhaps even unable to achieve.
      In this regard, it is probably the case that this election should not be read as a vote for Biden, but as a strong vote against Trump. This is what political scientists refer to as “negative partisanship” – the idea that you vote against candidates and parties, not for them. Trump is such a detestable figure that many people probably held their noses and voted for Biden as there was no other realistic choice if they wanted to save the republic. Now that Biden will take office, those people will probably stop holding their noses.
      This relates to the third, perhaps deepest problem: the kind of “anti-populism” put forward by Biden does not represent a lasting response to rightwing populism. By anti-populism, I refer not to a clear ideological disposition or mode of governance, but rather the phenomenon by which opponents of populism are drawn together in a temporary alliance to “defeat” populism. Such anti-populism usually has a centrist and moderate flavour, offering a return to “normal”, a privileging of “rationality”, and the offer of the grownups being in charge once again: precisely what Biden was offering in comparison with the utter chaos of the Trump administration.
      Let us be clear: anti-populism worked here. Biden was able to pull together a loose coalition of disparate groups in the name of defeating Trump – leftists, centrist Democrats, the so-called moderate Republicans of the “Never Trumpers” and Lincoln Project strand. But what now? With Trump (nearly) out of the way, what on earth do these groups have to agree on? “Decency”? “Normalcy”? These are not the basis for a sustainable ideological project or the makings of newly forged political identity. They have served their purpose as part of an electoral strategy, but there is little long-term to grasp on to here, and serious political imagination and courage is needed to forge a way out of this.
      As such, while the embrace of centrism may be enticing at present as Biden calls for unity, compromise and consensus, it is important to keep in mind that such a form of politics often ends up eventually feeding into the desire for populism. Indeed, political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe have explicitly blamed such “third wayism”, which seeks to steer “not right, nor left”, for the rise of right populism in Europe. The American people have every right to demand not “normal”, but serious systemic change in a fractured and deeply unequal nation. It is not difficult to imagine how a failure to meet these challenges could create the conditions in which enough of the populace is discontented and alienated from political, economic and social life that they are willing to roll the dice on a right-populist once again.
      So, let the anti-populists enjoy a much-deserved electoral victory. The Trump era is over, and, in the end, Biden was the person to deliver them from the misery that Trump had lorded over for the past four years. But let’s not be naive: you don’t defeat populism in the long run simply by being anti-populist. The longer struggle of what a Biden presidency will mean now begins.
      • Benjamin Moffitt is a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His latest book is Populism More

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      in US Politics

      End the odes to political 'civility'. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate? | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.Biden, committed to re-establishing “normalcy”, will probably rejoice at the prospect of returning to the good old days of chummy bipartisanship. Dianne Feinstein already gave a preview, when she thanked Lindsey Graham for his “leadership” in the plainly illegitimate Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process and literally embraced one of Trump’s worst lackeys. In the coming two to four years, political moderation might be a particularly alluring siren call to a weak Democratic president who may not control the Senate or have a strong majority in the House of Representatives.Here’s the problem, however: “working across the aisle” is not an ideal in itself. If we expect politics to look like an impartial pursuit of the common good or think that there will be consensus if we all follow the rules, as the neoconservative writer Anne Applebaum has suggested, then we are bound to be disappointed over and over. Rather, we must learn to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic forms of political conflict – and properly sanction those engaged in the latter.Polarization is not a given. Culture does not automatically determine politics; we are not fated to debate all issues in terms of cliched contrasts between “flyover country” and “liberal coasts”. Some social scientists like to reduce politics to psychology; they claim that humans are hardwired for “tribalism” or, put less politely, for groups hating each other. That isn’t true. In fact, such accounts are curiously apolitical, as well as ahistorical. They cannot explain why, if tribalism is our universal fate, some democracies miraculously appear to escape it, and why some get by without endless culture wars, even if their internal differences are no smaller than in the US.Polarization isn’t an objectively given reality; it’s a rightwing political project and, not least, it’s big business – just look at the talk radio millionaires. Rightwing populists deepen divisions and reduce all policy questions to questions of cultural belonging. What makes them distinctive is not their criticism of elites, but the invidious suggestion that not every citizen is part of what such politicians often call “the real people”. Trump told four congresswomen to go home to their shitholish countries; his sycophant Jim Jordan tweeted that “Americans love America. They don’t want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco.”This strategy has worked well enough for a Republican party whose economic policies are utterly out of line with what large majorities of Americans actually want. For a counter-majoritarian party of plutocratic populism, riling people up with apocalyptic visions of “real America” being destroyed by black and brown people is not an add-on, but the core mechanism of an electoral outrage-and-grievances machine oiled with resources from the 0.01%. The noise of that machine effectively keeps people distracted from the plutocratic policies most Americans find unappealing.Fierce partisanship is not in itself a symptom of politics gone wrong. On the contrary: we would not need democracy if we did not have deep disagreements and divisions – which are inevitable, as long as we live in a free society. The problem arises when disagreement translates into disrespect. Disrespect doesn’t mean just being impolite; it means denying the standing of particular citizens – and, as a logical next step, actively trying to disenfranchise people. Republicans have been working towards a situation in which a combination of voter suppression and what the philosopher Kate Manne has called “trickle-down aggression” – acts of private political intimidation tacitly endorsed by Trump – shrinks the political power and relevance of many Americans in a way favorable to the interests of the Republican party.None of this is to say that culture is off-limits for democratic conflict. Of course, it’s not always clear how abortion, for instance, is really about “culture”. But even deep moral disagreements can be accommodated in a democracy – provided that both winners and losers have another chance to fight the fight. Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s gloating, losers don’t just “go home”, but get to hold winners accountable and develop systematic policy alternatives. Democracy always allows for second thoughts; it’s only when the stakes become absolutely existential, or religious, that society gets locked in a scorched-earth, zero-sum battle.What if rough play in politics – not pretty, but not illegitimate – becomes truly unfair play? Some theorists think the losing side should sacrifice for the sake of keeping the greater democratic whole together. But democracy cannot mean dividing politics between suckers and scoundrels, as the political scientist Andreas Schedler puts it. Game theorists tell us that we can re-establish proper rule-following by answering every tat with a tit. But responding to unfairness with unfairness might lead to a downward spiral of norms violations; fighting fire with fire could burn down the house as a whole.It is crucial to realize that not all norm violations in political conflict are the same. Not every invention of an insulting nickname on Twitter must be answered with the same childishness (of which even Trumpists must be tired by now). The best answer to suppression of our voters is not somehow keeping out partisans of the other side. Mechanical tit-for-tat retaliation – even if sometimes emotionally satisfying – should be resisted in favor of could be called democracy-preserving or even democracy-enhancing reciprocity: measures the other side won’t like, but which can be justified with genuine democratic principles: such as giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, or abolishing the electoral college.Of course, McConnell sees these proposals as merely a power grab; yet a party that tries to construct new majorities, as opposed to just capturing counter-majoritarian institutions like the supreme court and relying on the votes of what Lindsey Graham once called “angry white guys”, would welcome the contest for new voters. Fair partisan fights can restore democracy, not kitschy appeals to unity and bipartisanship. More

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      in World Politics

      Welcome to Joe Biden’s Socialist States of America

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      One of the sillier notions advanced during this US presidential election campaign was that if Joe Biden were to win, he and his party would transform the United States into the promised land of socialism. I guess not even the Republican strategists who promoted this canard seriously believed it to be true. Unfortunately, the message …
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