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      in World Politics

      The Real Scandal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Exclusion

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      Earlier this year, an internal report from the UK’s Labour Party revealed that some of its influential members worked to sabotage former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral chances in 2017, the election in which he nearly achieved an unexpected victory against Prime Minister Theresa May. 

      Over the next two and half years, leading up to last December’s election, a group of diligent party members, echoed by much of the media, including The Guardian, collaborated on undermining Corbyn’s chances in the 2019 snap election called by Boris Johnson. They did so by focusing on the theme of anti-Semitism.

      How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

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      After Labour’s defeat last December that confirmed Johnson as an elected prime minister and led to Corbyn’s resignation as the party leader, Labour’s establishment elected Keir Starmer to replace him, but apparently that wasn’t enough. As discreetly as possible, they continued relentlessly to shame Corbyn. Last week, exploiting the anti-Semitism theme thanks to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report, Labour took the extraordinary initiative of suspending Corbyn from the party in an act that Joseph Stalin’s politburo could only have admired.

      With a tone resembling a subdued cry of victory, The Guardian announced that “Labour has suspended its former leader Jeremy Corbyn after he said antisemitism in the party was ‘overstated’ following a damning report from the equality watchdog.” The article contained this somewhat surprising assertion: “A separate issue for Labour officials to work out is their precise legal culpability for online sentiments expressed by officials and others.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Online sentiments:

      Ideas, opinions or feelings expressed on the dangerous borderline between public and private discourse known as on social media, which means that random utterances in that medium can be targeted by groups specialized in shaming individuals who fail to agree with or conform to their own agendas.

      Contextual Note

      By suspending Corbyn, Labour has demonstrated that today’s technology has enabled Stalinist tactics far more sophisticated than Uncle Joe could have imagined. It provides them with the power to neutralize opponents without the bother of having to eliminate them physically.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Perhaps a better comparison to today’s public shaming would be to the Spanish Inquisition, immortalized in modern times by Michael Palin who famously cited its three weapons, “fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency,” before adding a fourth, “an almost fanatical devotion to the pope.” Labour’s equivalent to the pope is, of course, Tony Blair, the former prime minister. In terms of papal politics, Blair could best be compared to Benedict XVI as a quiet voice in the wings, who shouldn’t even be there, working discreetly to undermine his successor. 

      Starmer demonstrated his ruthless efficiency when, as The Guardian reports, he “spoke at a press conference where he said those who ‘deny there is a problem are part of the problem … Those who pretend it is exaggerated or factional are part of the problem.’” Like the Spanish Inquisition, the Labour Party has seized on a hint of criticism of the true faith (the EHRC report) that brooks no criticism but stands as infallible dogma. Suggesting that the report — which identified a total of two culprits in a party of 500,000 members — may have “overstated” the case or that there may be factions in the political church can only be deemed heresy.

      Whether the Labour Party subjected Corbyn to the rack or even the “comfy chair” remains unknown. What is clear is that after Corbyn’s claim that the case may have been overstated, the inquisitors noticed that the former leader had committed the ultimate sin: failing to “retract” his heretical statement. “In light of his comments made today and his failure to retract them subsequently, the Labour party has suspended Jeremy Corbyn pending investigation,” a Labour spokesman said.

      Historical Note

      In the guise of reporting political news, The Guardian, known as the respectable newspaper of the left, has played a major role in remodeling the Labour Party in the image of an anonymous group of improvised moralists who, through their mostly invisible lobbying, have demonstrated their sentimental attachment to the Tony Blair era and to everything Blair himself still represents.

      Labour has effectively assimilated the Stalinist tradition but given it a humanistic face. Dame Margaret Hodge, for example, offered this gentle version of excommunication: “Jeremy is a fully decent man, but he has an absolute blind spot, and a denial, when it comes to these issues. And that’s devastating.” If she believes he’s a decent man, she should object to his being accused of anti-Semitism. It’s all about perspective. If Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t see the same things as Hodge, who happens to be Jewish, it may be that he sees something else that Hodge may be blind to: the question of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

      Corbyn has not accused Hodge, Starmer or anyone else of being anti-Semitic, which he might do on the grounds that Palestinians are also Semites and are the target of not just hatred but physical oppression. Corbyn’s anti-Semitic crime is simply that his defense of one group of Semites calls into question the unconditional support every British citizen owes to another group of Semites, a nation considered an indefectible ally.

      This sums up the hypocrisy of the entire controversy. It turns around a denial of two dimensions of historical reality. None of Corbyn’s accusers, nor The Guardian itself, dares to mention the significance of events in the Middle East and the effect they can have on judgments and opinions that may or may not entail the evocation of stereotypes.

      The second obvious but unmentioned historical dimension concerns the recent history of the leadership of the Labour Party. It is also linked to events in the Middle East. Blair has been the most electorally successful Labour Party leader in recent times. He has also been its most egregious warmonger, responsible — along with former US President George W. Bush — for a vast and ongoing humanitarian disaster, extensively documented in the Chilcot report. Clearly, electoral success in politics counts more than probity or human rights, even though the worst perpetrators of human suffering, such as Blair, claim they are acting in the name of human rights.

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      The drama of Labour leadership reveals that the entire anti-Semitism campaign had a single purpose. It was designed not just to cripple the left but to definitively crush it. The Guardian quotes Peter Mason, the national secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), who, before Corbyn’s suspension, made the intentions clear: “Jeremy Corbyn does not have a future in the Labour party, he is yesterday’s man.”

      In an interview with Chris Williamson, Aaron Maté, the American investigative journalist, explores the historical background of the issue. Williamson had earlier been suspended from Labour on the grounds of anti-Semitism but was fully exonerated by the EHRC inquiry. His detailed testimony, critical of Corbyn on political grounds, provides some much-needed context.

      The late and deeply regretted David Graeber — an influential American anthropologist who taught in the UK before his premature death in September — provided a thorough historical perspective on the anti-Semitism question in a video apparently no one at The Guardian seems aware of. Had they seen it, they might have used some of Graeber’s historical knowledge to nuance their judgment of Corbyn.

      For a declared and condemned anti-Semite, Corbyn had a surprising number of Jewish supporters ready to claim that he “has a proud record of fighting all forms of racism and antisemitism.” Will those Jewish supporters and the 60,000 members who signed the petition also be suspended? Will they be asked to retract?

      The Guardian’s role in promoting the controversy and shaming Corbyn has been as appalling as it has been successful. The only trace of someone offering pertinent historical perspective published in The Guardian is a letter to the editor they can easily dismiss as someone’s mere opinion. 

      The New York Times at least offered a dry appreciation of the meaningless of Corbyn’s suspension: “The party did not immediately make clear what rule Mr. Corbyn had breached, though analysts said it likely had to do with bringing the party into disrepute.” Labour didn’t need Corbyn to bring it into disrepute. Blair accomplished that with panache 17 years ago. Keir Starmer has jumped on Blair’s bandwagon.

      *[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

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      'What a spectacle!': US adversaries revel in post-election chaos

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      Rivals and enemies of the United States have come together to revel in the messiest US election in a generation, mocking the delay in vote processing and Donald Trump’s claims of electoral fraud in barely veiled criticisms of Washington’s political activism abroad.“What a spectacle!” crowed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office.”With a large dose of schadenfreude, Washington’s fiercest critics declared deep concern about the US elections and the state of the country’s democracy.Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman on Thursday panned the “obvious shortcomings of the American electoral system”, calling the framework “archaic”.“It’s a show, you can’t call it anything but that,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s Duma, said earlier this week. “They say it should be seen as a standard for democracy. I don’t think it’s the standard.”In China, state media savaged the delayed results, with one daily writing that the process looked a “bit like a developing country”.Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, could not resist baiting the US over what he called its “surprising electoral process”, and seemed so amused that at one point he broke into song with a rendition of the theme tune to the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant: “On a night as beautiful as this, either of them could win,” he crooned, before adding with a chuckle: “The United States. I don’t stick my nose in.” In two recent local elections, he noted, all the votes had been counted by 11pm.As a parliamentary campaign kicked off in Venezuela this week, Maduro claimed there were important lessons the US could learn from its elections rather than lecturing the world about democracy. Venezuela was a showcase of “civilised and peaceful” voting using “proven and transparent technology” and biometric voting machines that provided same day results, he said.Trump has spent the last two years unsuccessfully trying to topple the Venezuelan president and in a Wednesday night broadcast Maduro delighted in the electoral confusion gripping his northern neighbour.“The state department puts out statements that say: ‘In this country we don’t recognise the election. In that country we don’t like the election. In the other country we don’t like this or that,’” Maduro said, adding that the US would be better off focusing on its own problems.As Trump demanded states stop counting mail-in ballots, the US embassy in Abidjan issued a poorly timed statement urging Côte d’Ivoire’s leaders to “show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law”. “We also need a Côte d’Ivoire statement on US elections,” quipped one BBC editor on Twitter.For many, it was a chance to give the US a taste of its own medicine. “Neither free nor fair,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russian state-backed RT, parroting the language of a UN or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) statement.And the OSCE itself did weigh in, with mission leader Michael Georg Link attacking Trump for making “baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies” and “[harming] public trust in democratic institutions”.The irony was not lost on many at home. A cartoon by the Russian critic Sergei Elkin made the rounds on Thursday, featuring an elderly babushka lugging buckets of water past a man in a rundown village somewhere in Russia. “They still haven’t finished counting in Pennsylvania and in Michigan,” the man says. A stray dog walks along an unpaved street behind him. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      US Senate and House election results: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As nail-biting as the US presidential election has been, Jonathan Freedland and Lauren Gambino have been following the battle for control of Congress. They discuss the latest in both races.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      The Democrats were hoping for the “blue wave” to crash over the Senate, but that didn’t happen. As it stands, Biden is edging ever closer to the White House but we still don’t know for sure. Democrats are still in control of the lower chamber, and the Republicans still have the upper chamber. There wasn’t a wave, but there were some interesting tidal changes over the last few days and to navigate us through some of these, Jonathan Freedland is joined by senior political reporter for Guardian US Lauren Gambino. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Trump’s tactics: calculated brazenness | Editorial

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      Rarely have a few thousand votes in a handful of places mattered so much to so many. America – and the world – spent much of Thursday hanging once again on every twist of the long vote-counting battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the remaining battlegrounds. When it finally comes, the verdict will nevertheless be decisive. One of these two utterly different political leaders will become the United States president until 2025. History will be shaped by both the result and the aftermath.
      This election has highlighted deep weaknesses in the American democratic system, all of which are amplified by Mr Trump’s determination to test things to destruction in real time. Fortunately, the armed intimidation of voters and election officials by militias supporting Mr Trump did not happen on any scale. But other outrages did. The most egregious of these remains the scandal of systemic voter suppression by Republicans against minority ethnic voters across most of the US. This scandal has now been joined by Mr Trump’s brazen readiness to use his lawyers, often on the basis of lies, to try to stop the counting of votes.
      Underlying this is the electoral college system itself, which may yet deny the presidency – for what would be the third time in 20 years – to the candidate for whom most Americans voted. This anachronism may have been what America’s 18th-century white founders intended, when they tried to empower the states against the popular majority. But in an era of equal rights, it is an extraordinary hangover. The electoral college is not a check or a balance. It is an abuse that is ripe for the scrapheap.
      In most respects, the 2020 US election has proved less of a watershed. In the American system, voting at state level is often almost as important as the presidential contest. State elections, which choose members of the US Congress as well as of state legislatures, shape much of what a president can do at home. They provide a homeland context for the president’s actions on the world stage too. They define how far the presidential writ will run. Here the verdict this week was almost the opposite of decisive. In some ways it seems like a vote in favour of gridlock.
      Tuesday confirmed America is a country divided down the middle. These divides are at their most glaring in the Trump-Biden battle. This week, though, voters clearly drew back from handing all the power to one side of the divide. Republicans seem likely to keep control of the Senate, despite some losses. Similarly, Democrats survived setbacks to keep their grip in the House of Representatives. Many on both sides will interpret this as a mandate to fight every issue every inch of the way, with no concessions. A minority may see it as an ultimatum from the voters for the two sides to compromise and cut deals. This seems deeply unlikely.
      The calculated shamelessness of Mr Trump’s disregard for facts and propriety in his response to the election suggests the coming days and weeks will also be vicious, bitter and explosive. Even if Mr Biden eventually enters the White House as president in January, he will be immediately confronted with entrenched opposition. There is a newly strengthened conservative majority on the supreme court. Now there will also be a Senate that will claim a mandate to obstruct. Meanwhile, after a strong performance at state level, this week’s results ensure that Republicans will have the upper hand in the always dirty business of redrawing the states’ electoral maps for the coming decade. More

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      in Elections

      'This is our moment … I love you': Cori Bush's electrifying victory speech

      by

      I was running … I was that person running for my life across a parking lot, running from an abuser. I remember hearing bullets whizz past my head and at that moment I wondered: “How do I make it out of this life?”
      I was uninsured. I’ve been that uninsured person, hoping my healthcare provider wouldn’t embarrass me by asking me if I had insurance. I wondered: “How will I bear it?”
      I was a single parent. I’ve been that single parent struggling paycheck to paycheck, sitting outside the payday loan office, wondering “how much more will I have to sacrifice?”
      I was that Covid patient. I’ve been that Covid patient gasping for breath, wondering, “How long will it be until I can breathe freely again?”
      I’m still that same person. I’m proud to stand before you today knowing it was this person, with these experiences, that moved the voters of St Louis to do something historic. St Louis: my city, my home, my community. We have been surviving and grinding and just scraping by for so long, and now this is our moment to finally, finally start living and growing and thriving. So, as the first Black woman, nurse, and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me just say this. To the Black women. The Black girls. The nurses. The single mothers. The essential workers. This. Is. OUR. Moment.
      Six years ago, St Louis captured the eyes and ears of the entire world during the Ferguson uprising. We could not stand the injustice any longer, so – in the tradition of every one of our ancestors who fought for a better world – we organized for Michael Brown, Jr. We organized for 400 days, side by side, arm in arm, St Louis strong. And now in the face of a global pandemic and relentless attacks on our right to vote, we organized all the way to the ballot box. We mailed in our ballots, we voted absentee, we reached our families, friends, neighbors, and peers – and we showed up … St Louis strong.
      For years, we’ve lived under leadership that shut us out of our own government. For years, we’ve been left out in the cold: protesting in the streets, sleeping in our cars or tents, working three part-time jobs just to pay the bills. And today, today, we, all of us, are headed to Congress – St Louis strong!
      My message today is to every Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, and trans person, and to every person locked out of opportunities to thrive because of oppressive systems; I’m here to serve you. To every person who knows what it’s like to give a loved one that “just make it home safely baby” talk; I love you.
      To every parent facing a choice between putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head; I’m here to serve you. To every precious child in our failing foster system: I love you.
      To every teacher doing the impossible to teach through this pandemic; I’m here to serve you. To every student struggling to the finish line; I love you.
      To every differently abled person denied equal access; I love you.
      To every person living unhoused on the streets; I love you.
      To every family that’s lost someone to gun violence; I love you.
      To every person who’s lost a job, or a home, or healthcare, or hope; I love you.
      It is the greatest honor of my life to accept the responsibility to serve every single person across Missouri’s first congressional district, as your first-ever Black congresswoman-elect. This is our moment.
      Tonight, we the people are victorious. We, we the people are going to Congress. Because we the people have committed to a vision of America that works for all of us. An America that treats every person with respect. That recognizes healthcare as a human right. That believes every person deserves food to eat, a home to live in, and a dignified life. Our America will be led not by the small-mindedness of a powerful few, but the imagination of a mass movement that includes all of us. That is the America we are fighting for.
      Everything I do begins with those who have the least, who’ve suffered the worst, and who have the greatest to offer. Why? Because I myself have lived paycheck to paycheck. I struggled for years under the burden of student debt. I’ve been evicted by landlords. I’ve worried about how I was going to put food on the table for my two kids. I’ve been underinsured and uninsured. And for every one of those stories that I can tell you about my life, I know there are thousands more in our community. And those are the stories that I am carrying with me and will uplift in the People’s House as your congresswoman.
      It is my job now to serve you – not just lead, not just demand, but serve you.
      This moment is brought to us by us – by our movement for social, racial and economic justice. Now, our movement is going to Congress. And we will meet the challenges of this moment as a movement: side by side, arm in arm, and with our fists in the air – ready to serve each other until every single one of us is free.
      This is a written version of the victory speech Cori Bush gave on 3 November More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Whatever the final US verdict, we're mourning the ‘blue wave' that never was | Emma Brockes

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      In the aftermath of the 2016 election in the US, there was a hope among Democrats that rose to the level of conviction: the results were devastating, yes, but they were also surely anomalous. Donald Trump had won, it would be a lousy four years, then his celebrity would wear off, he would do a terrible job, and the argument of his awfulness would make itself. For the first time in history, people would soberly examine the evidence, come to their senses and, without need of a crushing military defeat, admit they’d been horribly wrong.Obviously that hasn’t happened. As the agonising creep towards a possible Joe Biden victory advances, the only certainty is that the “blue wave”, so anticipated on Tuesday night, hasn’t materialised. Not only have the Democrats failed to secure a resounding win, but in plenty of constituencies, support for Trump has actually increased. Early electoral data showed that in parts of Texas, for instance, while record numbers in the state voted – 6.6% more than in 2016 – in some rural communities, turnout for Trump more than doubled, and Biden lost counties won four years ago by Hillary Clinton. At the national level, whereas four years ago 35% of voters thought Trump had the temperament to govern well, exit polls this week indicated a rise in that figure to 44%.All of which, frankly, is staggering. Weeks of parsing and processing the data will follow, but in the first instance, the only possible response to all this is to scream: “My God, what is wrong with these people?” What has to happen, if alleged tax evasion, a rape accusation and the small matter of 234,000 dead Americans doesn’t tip them off that this guy is bad news? What can be said to be wrong with the people of Florida, 5.6 million of whom – just over half of those who voted in that state – voted for Trump? What’s in the water in rural Pennsylvania? After the election in 2016, there was a rush to understand and empathise with Trump’s supporters with a view to understanding exactly how this had happened. This time, there is only disgust.It isn’t purely emotional. (Although, three days after the election, it is still mostly emotional. A tweet put out by the Gap retail group this week featured a Gap sweater, half red and half blue, beneath the words “Together we can move forward”, inviting many spirited responses as to where precisely Gap and its sweater might be shoved.) But while it is dismal to feel such loathing towards large numbers of one’s countrymen, the deeper hit has been the dawning of what this election might mean. In 2016, Trump was a one-off, an aberration, a dumb novelty whose appeal would surely wane over time. You can’t say that any more. Trumpism – even to name it seems to give it a coherence it lacks – has taken seed, and if Biden wins, this election might still in some ways augur more doom than the last one.Meanwhile, the Trump machine rolls on. As with everything the man does, even at his worst he appears darkly comic. When, on Wednesday, Trump randomly declared victory in states where he had already lost, it had the mad, manic tone of Basil Fawlty denying the reality of a rat in his dining room. On cable news, there was the newly slimmed-down and full of beans Chris Christie, saying with relish that the Democrats would lose because black people didn’t vote. There were similar efforts by Republicans to set white Democrats against Hispanic voters, who on the earliest evidence marginally increased their support for the president.None of it made any sense beyond the knee-jerk Republican need to sow division. There may be small increases in the numbers of black and Hispanic voters for Trump, but those numbers are still dwarfed by support in what nobody calls the “white community”. In Florida in 2016, Trump won two out of 10 minority ethnic votes, a number that increased this week to three out of 10. But early polling data suggests that, as in 2016, Trump’s capture of the white vote held steady at six out of 10 – this in spite of practically every white person in power promising to “do the work”, stop being so racist, and log-jamming a bunch of books about antiracism on the bestseller list for most of the summer. So much for all that. On Wednesday, exit polls nationwide showed that while 55% of white women voted for Trump – up three percentage points from 2016 – some 58% of white men voted to re-elect the president. Men suck. White people suck. Everything sucks.So here we are, awaiting the final verdict, queasy with anxiety and mixed feelings. If, as looks increasingly likely (spit three times), Biden wins, we will celebrate, of course. There will be a huge collective sigh of relief. The country will start to correct and recover. But there remains a clenched sense that something has shifted, an argument has failed to be won, and that none of what has happened over the past four years is going away any time soon. More

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      in Elections

      Trump has not been repudiated – a Biden presidency would face obstruction at every level | Adam Tooze

      by

      Whatever else emerges from the US’s 2020 election, one thing is clear: it has not delivered a comprehensive repudiation of Donald Trump. The shock of 2016 has not been undone. There is nothing in the result to expiate the humiliation of the last four years, the disgraceful vulgarity and illegality. Even if Joe Biden is ultimately sworn in as president, the fact that Trump was not booed off the greatest stage in world politics in disgrace will be hard for Biden’s supporters to come to terms with. This is an inconvenient truth not for the US alone, it has implications for the rest of the world too.Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As in 2016, Trump lost the overall vote, but he continues to command overwhelming majorities in small-town and rural white America. Despite his vituperative hostility towards immigrants, Trump made remarkable gains among the rather diverse group crudely lumped together under the label Latino. Confusingly, he did well not only with anti-socialist communities of Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami, but with Mexican-Americans in Texas too. And he continues to garner a majority of votes from white women and white men of all backgrounds.In the meantime no one, either inside or outside the country, should be under any illusion about the scale of the nationalist and xenophobic electoral bloc. The GOP has lurched into the territory of Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and, nevertheless, commands solid support. Indeed, for a sizeable minority of the electorate, it is precisely the stridency of Trump and the GOP that appeals. They love Trump’s aggression, and his gleeful slaughter of liberal sacred cows. Now he has modelled the style, there will be plenty of others who will want to follow.In a divided country, virtually every facet of reality is seen through a partisan lens. Not unreasonably, the Democrats tried to make the election into a referendum on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. But that did not prove to be a winning card. Almost half of Americans did not agree that Trump’s disastrous and irresponsible performance disqualified him from the presidency. This hardly bodes well for the effort to gain control of the disease, which would be the first task of a Biden administration.If there is no collective will to take preventive action, then everything continues to ride on a magic bullet: a vaccine. But even that will not guarantee success. Opinion polling suggests that no more than a bare majority will agree to be vaccinated, with Republican-leaning Americans particularly resistant. The implication is that the US will limp along, not effectively controlling the outbreak and going through repeated lockdowns. The impact on communities and small businesses is likely to be devastating.Even assuming the virus can be mastered, a Biden administration would face an uphill political battle. Its formidable foes are the GOP in Congress, led by Mitch McConnell, the sulphurous boss of the Senate Republicans. Ahead of the election, riding a wave of over-optimism about the likely result, Nancy Pelosi played a dangerous game. The House speaker held out for a gigantic second stimulus package in excess of $2tn, but no “blue wave” swept the Democrats to control of Congress. Now, with a diminished majority, Pelosi will have to return to the bargaining table to negotiate with McConnell. To the pleasure of Wall Street, he has announced that he is willing to make a deal, but this is an ominous sign. Any package that McConnell will agree to is more or less guaranteed not to meet the social crisis facing tens of millions of unemployed Americans, and struggling cities and states across the country. And yet, to save the economy from catastrophe, the Democrats may well be forced to accept McConnell’s terms.However necessary, any deal with McConnell should be regarded as a poison pill. Every item of Biden’s progressive agenda – health, childcare and education – would be on the block. The wider world would be pleased to see a Biden administration reverse Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement. But any talk of a Green New Deal would likely be cut off at the knees. The Republicans like to talk about infrastructure but in four years in office, Trump never delivered an investment programme. If Senate Republicans were won over to a Biden green energy plan, you can count on it being tailormade for the business lobby. There is no chance whatsoever that the Senate would grant Biden the formal ratification of the Paris agreement, a legal victory denied to Barack Obama as it was to Bill Clinton over the Kyoto protocol.This would leave the United States unable to credibly commit to carbon neutrality. The progress of technology and the falling cost of renewable energy may be the trump card, but a technical fix can only take you so far. Deep decarbonisation may in due course open the door to a new green growth model. But, in the medium term, it requires painful structural change that will have to be initiated from the top down.Any progress in the next four years would depend on administrative makeshift and painful compromise. The Obama administration delivered a masterclass in both the potential and the limits of that kind of governance. A Biden administration would no doubt benefit from this experience, but it would face what may be Trump’s most formidable legacy: a court system packed at every level with pro-business, anti-regulation judges. In a single term Trump managed to appoint a quarter of federal judges, who will be enacting his agenda for decades to come.Faced with obstruction in every direction, we should not be surprised if the de facto lead on economic policy continues to lie not with the elected executive branch, but with the Federal Reserve. The Fed chairman, Jay (Jerome) Powell, has been nothing if not accommodating. And, from the point of view of the rest of the world, Fed leadership may be no bad thing. Cheap dollars ease the pressure on the world economy. But there are distinct limits to what any central bank can do in responding to the economic shock caused by the virus. And there are seriously toxic side-effects of an endlessly expansionary monetary policy, notably in inflating speculative bubbles that benefit the fortunate minority who own shares.What the Fed cannot deliver is what the US desperately needs, a major upgrade in public services, starting with electoral machinery, childcare, healthcare and 21st-century infrastructure. Without that, the impasse of a divided American society and a dysfunctional politics will continue. That is the prospect that should most worry the rest of the world. Far from closing the book on the last four years, even if there is a change of incumbent in the White House, this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo. More

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      Can America Restore Its Democracy?

      by

      You know about the five-second rule. According to conventional wisdom, food that has dropped on the floor can be safely eaten if retrieved within five seconds. Some scientists have even set up experiments to confirm this folk saying. Of course, all bets are off if your toast falls on the floor buttered side down and you haven’t mopped the kitchen in recent memory.

      How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

      READ MORE

      Today, after a contentious election and with the results of the presidential race still uncertain, we are all now looking down at the ground. It’s been four years since Donald Trump dropped the buttered toast of our democracy onto the floor. After four years face down in the dirt, can our democracy be picked up, dusted off and restored to some semblance of integrity?

      The 2020 Election

      The polls made it look like Joe Biden would be an easy winner, maybe even in a landslide. The Democrats were expected to retake the Senate. The huge number of early votes — nearly 100 million — suggested that the 2020 turnout would be the greatest in more than 100 years. The Democratic Party is supposed to benefit from more souls at the polls.

      The polls were off. If Joe Biden wins, he will do so by a slender margin and only after considerable legal wrangling by both parties. The Democrats are now a long shot to win control of the Senate. And the huge turnout has translated into Donald Trump getting more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, more in fact than any Republican candidate in history.

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      Texas did not go blue. Neither did Florida or Ohio. The Republican Party went all in for Trump, and he delivered beyond his base. But Arizona may have flipped, and Georgia might as well. If the infamous “Blue Wall” holds — at least Wisconsin and Michigan if not Pennsylvania — then Biden will become the next president.

      Still, who in their right mind would want to lead the United States at this perilous moment? The pandemic is surging. The economy hasn’t climbed out of its hole. Donald Trump has applied his scorched-earth approach to both foreign and domestic policy. The Republican Party has demonstrated that it delights in playing dirty, refuses to compromise for the national good and embraces the most malign of Trump’s many fictions from the uselessness of masks to the myth of climate change.

      Exit polls, meanwhile, reveal a country divided by more than just party affiliation. Democrats, for instance, overwhelmingly want to contain the current pandemic while Republicans want to focus on reopening the economy. This dynamic explains why so many Trump voters believe the president better handles both the economy and the pandemic, even if the evidence of his mismanagement is obvious to everyone else.

      Trump’s “law and order” message also proved influential among Republican voters, despite the president’s blatant violations of law and disruptions of order. Heck, according to a recent judicial ruling, even the president’s Commission on Law Enforcement broke the law!

      Perhaps the most sobering conclusion from the election is that nearly half the country is indifferent to the actual mechanisms of democracy. They just don’t care that their president refused to endorse a peaceful transition of power if he loses. They don’t care that he has derided the very act of voting by insisting, as he did early Wednesday morning, on enlisting the Supreme Court in an effort to stop the counting of the remaining ballots (except in those states, like Arizona, where he hopes to catch up). Nor do they see anything wrong with the Republican Party’s efforts to keep certain groups of people away from the polls.

      That doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy, especially if the country continues to abide by the Electoral College. For the last several decades, US presidential elections have resembled Groundhog Day — and I don’t mean the movie. Why should one groundhog determine the length of winter? Don’t the other groundhogs get a vote? Likewise, why should a voter in Pennsylvania matter more than a voter in Maryland or Wyoming?

      Trump is not the only culprit here. The ground was dirty before he dropped our democracy on it. The Democrats and their patronage systems, like Tammany Hall in New York and Richard Daley’s machine in Chicago, set some dismal precedents. But now it is the Republican Party that, to preserve its governing majority in the absence of a popular mandate, is warping the rules of the game and breaking the few rules that remain.

      People vs. Putative Adults

      Let’s say that Biden ekes out a victory. What’s the damage report on Trump’s four-year assault on democracy? After the 2016 election, the pundit class asserted that one man, however powerful, could not tear down the 250-year-old edifice of American democracy. There was much talk of “guardrails” and “adults in the room,” all of which were supposed to contain the ungovernable id in the White House.

      Over the course of four years, however, Trump systematically disposed of the supposed adults in the room — Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly — in favor of yes-men and one or two yes-women. In addition, through executive orders, judicial appointments and obsessive Twittering, he moved the guardrails so that he could steer America wildly off the road.

      Just before the 2018 midterm elections, I wrote, “it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Over the last two years, those mechanisms were in fact on full display. Despite Trump’s full-court press, the judiciary has represented an important check on his power, blocking some of his attacks on immigrants, his efforts to withhold his financial information and to throw out ballots. The mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to nip at Trump’s ankles. The New York Times, for example, published one expose after another about Trump’s record on the pandemic, his taxes, his financial relations with China and so on.

      And now the voters have had their say. Despite all the efforts by the Republican Party to suppress the vote, around 67% of eligible voters turned out this year, the highest percentage since 1900. Trump supporters did what they could to push against that tide. They intimidated voters. They disrupted Democratic Party events and even tried to run a Biden bus off the road in Texas. They restricted the number of ballot drop-off locations. The post office, run by a Trump appointee, ignored a court order to locate 300,000 mail-in ballots at risk of not being delivered. But voters gonna vote.

      Let’s also salute all the people who have made that vote possible. Despite the pandemic, tens of thousands of people showed up to staff polling sites and count ballots. Then there are all the volunteers who participated in get-out-the-vote campaigns by knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending texts and doing grassroots fundraising to keep the operations going. Democracy, in other words, is not just about the politicians and the voters. It requires an immense effort by a veritable army of people. They, not the candidates, are the winners of the 2020 election.

      Democracy’s Future

      Trump is not done. Even if he doesn’t get his presumed entitlement of four more years, he has two more months to trash his frat house of a presidency before turning it over to the next administration. That means more executive orders like the recent ones that opened up Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and removed workplace protections from federal civil servants. If Biden manages to take his place in the Oval Office, he’ll likely face a Republican-controlled Senate that will block his every move, just like Republicans adopted a no-compromise position after the election of Barack Obama.

      Certainly, Biden aims to reverse many of Trump’s executive orders with his own ones. That will work in the foreign policy realm, for instance recommitting the United States to the Paris climate accords. But any domestic orders will face court challenges, and suddenly the Republican Party’s strategy of pushing through an unprecedented number of federal judges takes on an even more ominous cast. Popular will be damned. The Republicans will rely on senators, lawyers and judges to institutionalize Trump’s legacy.

      Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election. Trump voters, meanwhile, are not going away. They’ll continue showing up with guns. They’ll refuse to wear masks. They’ll spread fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories.

      They’ll also challenge the federal government — now led by an adversary, not an ally — at every turn. Remember the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, when a bunch of right-wing extremists seized government property and faced off against law enforcement? Expect an uptick in outright confrontations between federalists and anti-federalists during Biden’s presidency.

      Let’s face it: The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.

      *[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