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A Judge Bans Trump’s Authoritarian Orders – Will SCOTUS?

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue,” U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a 102-page opinion. Howell was referring to Trump punishing a law firm that a president, without evidence of the firm violating a law, ordered the government to cancel their contracts and to block their employees from entering government buildings, interacting with government officials, or being hired for government jobs.

The firm being punished was the Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential race. Aside from representing Guantanamo Bay inmates, Trump declared that “Perkins Coie worked with activist donors.” 

Trump specifically mentioned George Soros as one of those activists whom the far-right connects to a Jewish left-wing conspiracy. It seemed like a spurious reference, but was it a nod to some of his MAGA base? Trump claims that leftist activists used the courts “to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.” 

In other words, Perkins Coie lawyers assisted those examining election laws that could have suppressed voter turnout among specific populations, such as Black Americans. Howell wrote that the order was so broad as to “issuing an executive order targeting the firm based on the president’s dislike of the political positions of the firm’s clients or the firm’s litigation positions is retaliatory and runs head-on into the role of First Amendment protection.”

She previously blocked its implementation with a temporary restraining order before her this judgment. In the first case, Perkins Coie presented evidence to Howell that it had suffered immediate damages from the penalties. Its 15 biggest clients, which account for about 25 percent of its business, hold government contracts. 

Other firms suing the Trump Administration, which he labeled “rogue law firms,” presented similar arguments, asserting that they were not breaking the law but were perceived as aiding Trump’s enemies in investigating the possibility of his violating the Constitution. In all instances, he punished entire law firms, even though the attorneys involved in what Trump describes as bad behavior are merely a handful of a firm’s hundreds of lawyers. 

Nine other firms that Trump attacked capitulated to his demands by discontinuing their DEI efforts and providing Trump with hundreds of millions in pro bono legal work, which I describe in Trump Is Trying to Subvert His Biggest Threat – Lawyers.

However, Howell’s latest ruling stands out from the other court rulings that halted Trump’s Executive Orders aimed at crippling the law firms. In each case, Trump’s actions were stopped because the plaintiffs obtained a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO). 

Howell’s ruling, on the other hand, permanently blocks a Trump order on constitutional grounds. 

Howell bases her ruling on past Supreme Court decisions. She wrote that SCOTUS, in NRA v. Vullo, ruled that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics . . . or other matters of opinion.” Additionally, she noted that absent their crucial independence, lawyers would “become nothing more than parrots of the views of whatever group wields governmental power at the moment,” citing Cohen v. Hurley.

Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo to other federal agencies, stating that Howell’s ruling was “erroneous” and the law firm’s actions “dishonest and dangerous.” Her argument was mild but still aligned with Trump’s descriptions of judges’ rulings against him as “a hater,” “a so-called judge,” “an Obama judge,” or “Radical Left Lunatic.” 

The Justice Department still accused Perkins Coie and other firms of attempting to muzzle Trump’s freedom of speech. Bondi also referred to what she called “an unelected” judge who “invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the executive branch” by making demands beyond their jurisdiction.

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Even though President Barack Obama nominated Howell to be a United States district judge, she is no soft-hearted liberal. She advocated for strict national security measures. As a congressional counselor, she helped draft the USA PATRIOT Act, which received significantly more Republican than Democratic support in Congress. Still, the Coalition to Support and Expand the Freedom of Information Act honored her for working to keep the federal government’s authority in check. 

As a judge, Howell struck down a regulation of the  Federal Election Commission 

allowing dark money groups, including nonprofit organizations involved in political activities, to hide their donors. The conservative-dominated SCOTUS chose not to review her decision, allowing it to stand. 

Howell’s ruling is not final. The Justice Department may appeal her ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has a mix of liberal and conservative judges. House Republicans questioned whether the court’s chief judge, James Boasberg, who has ruled against Trump on several major issues, is unfairly favored in receiving litigation challenging Trump’s executive actions.

However, Courthouse News examined approximately 100 cases challenging actions taken by the Trump administration that came before the Appeals Court. They found that Boasberg’s assignments are roughly average for the bench. His fellow D.C. judges, including Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, and Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, have presided over more such cases than Boasberg. 

If Trump directs Bondi to go to the appeals court to overturn Howell’s ruling, he faces the possibility that the ruling will favor Howell’s decision. Of course, Trump will appeal to SCOTUS. However, with all of the lower district judges ruling against Trump’s orders, the swing justices on the Supreme Court might determine that his orders are unconstitutional. 

It will be a moment of truth for SCOTUS to determine whether it is an independent institution from a president whose politics appeal to six of the justices. Will that political alignment prevent them from opposing his unconstitutional actions?

Being a Trump appointee does not guarantee a favorable ruling. Two federal judges he appointed, Fernando Rodriguez Jr.  and Trevor N. McFadden, have already ruled against him in high-profile litigation challenges to his authority. 

The Supreme Court justices will read Trump’s Executive Orders and the judges’ decisions that ruled in favor of the four other law firms—WilmerHaleJenner & BlockCovington & Burling, and Susman Godfrey—that challenged those orders.

Trump’s orders resembled a list of complaints he reiterates at his rallies against the radical left. The judges’ rulings implied that, at a minimum, Trump retaliated against three of the firms for assisting in investigations regarding his possible violations of the Constitution. 

WilmerHale hired Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Trump during his first term. Jenner & Block brought on Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s deputies. Both Mueller and Weissmann left their firms in 2021 after Trump won the election.

Covington & Burling represented Jack Smith pro bono as he led the federal investigations of Trump for allegedly mishandling classified materials and trying to block the 2020 election results. 

The attack on Susman Godfrey hit at the core of Trump’s effort to protect election laws that could suppress voter turnout. Trump accused the firm of being a national security threat because its clients were degrading the quality of American elections by “spearheading efforts to weaponize the American legal system.” Judge Loren AliKhan, who ruled against Trump’s order, stated that the US did not demonstrate that the law firm was a national security threat and could not substantiate Trump’s claims that the firm was leading efforts to “weaponize” the legal system. 

The brief filed by the bar associations could be seen as demonstrating how Trump was weaponizing our legal system, stating that Trump’s executive order against Perkins Coie was intended to “discourage other lawyers from daring to provide legal advocacy of which the president disapproves.”

Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, best summarized a situation that all of the judges noted: “Chilling the lawyers who represent those people hurts the rule of law because when the government can’t be legally opposed, the law provides no protections to anyone, and you start to live in an autocracy.”

The question is whether the Supreme Court will bend a knee to Trump, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said some firms had. If it overturns Howell’s ruling, our nation is on the road to an autocracy. All citizens, regardless of their political affiliation, must raise this concern loudly enough in the public forum so that all nine justices on the Court hear it. 

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Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Trump is Trying to Subvert His Biggest Threat – Lawyers

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Trump’s blitzkrieg rolls over liberal law firms.

It took six weeks for the German Army to trample over France. In roughly the same period, President Donald Trump scattered his biggest legal opponents into disarray by issuing over a hundred Executive Orders. The key to both victories, although short-lived for one and still to be decided for Trump, was having a plan and executing it quickly.

Trump had two well-funded research and planning organizations draw up what he wanted to accomplish and execute it through the legal process. These would be the Heritage Foundation (see How Trump Would Destroy the Deep State)and AFPI ( see Fifth Column: The Right Wing Think Tank behind Subversion of the Justice Department ).

Trump’s Executive Orders deny his opponents the right to choose the best counsel provided by aggressive liberal law firms in future court battles. Ellen Podgor, a Stetson University law professor and legal ethicist, told CNN, “We’ve never seen a president put out a specific order about a law firm.” She sees Trump as “depriving our whole right to counsel. This is a major amendment to our Constitution.”

Some law firms got Trump to withdraw his draconian orders by agreeing to some infringements on their lawyering. They just had to donate about a billion dollars in legal fees that could support Trump’s conservative agenda.

Recognizing Trump’s wins, lead White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, gloated in his effort by telling the media, “Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda.”

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Why are big law firms significant?

With the Republican Party controlling Congress, it is doubtful that it will restrain presidential executive orders that ignore fundamental constitutional rights. If the Republican Party remains mute, it will legitimize future liberal or conservative presidents issuing executive orders that bypass or violate Congressional and judicial constraints.

While Trump appointees do not dominate the entire court system, his ideological allies control the Supreme Court, which he anticipates will overturn district court decisions. Only a few Trump-appointed judges have ruled against his orders to date.

Appealing to the judicial system to apply the laws that limit or deny certain assumed presidential powers relies heavily on having a fair opportunity to present a robust case before any judge. This requires time and money. The most prominent law firms spearhead many significant cases that set precedents. Furthermore, the liberal firms have taken the lead in challenging the legality of his decisions. Therefore, Trump needed to declare war on them before they lawyered up if he wanted to enact his MAGA agenda. 

Fear of Bankruptcy Results in Bending The Knee

Trump may not be a fan of William Shakespeare’s plays, but he could sympathize with Jack Cade, who seeks to overthrow Henry VI, by agreeing that the first thing to do “is kill all the lawyers.” Trump would not go that far, but he would stomp on them into bankruptcy if he could.

Fearing financial disasters, prominent firms that have challenged Trump’s policies and actions in the past have reached settlements with him. However, critics and firms fighting Trump’s orders consider these “settlements” more akin to extortion to avoid bankruptcy due to extreme penalties based on no evidence of wrongdoing by those firms.  

The capitulation of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison provides a stark example of how the fear of Trump’s denial of government resources punishes his court opponents. Paul Weiss is considered one of the most liberal firms with a long history of leading court fights for civil rights.

Many of its firm members are Democrats. Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’s chairman for the last two decades, hosted a “Lawyers for Biden” fund-raiser in 2023. He had also called on major law firms in “a call to arms” to fight Mr. Trump in court on various issues. 

Then, Trump issued his Executive Order directing his Attorney General and other executive departments to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Paul Weiss, terminate any contracts with Paul Weiss or with entities that disclose doing business with Paul Weiss, and limit official access to Federal Government buildings for Paul Weiss employees. 

New York Times reporters assessed these restrictions, determining they could have led to the firm hemorrhaging clients and lawyers. In essence, Trump was wielding a financial punishment large enough to ruin one of his fiercest legal opponents. This was roughly the same threat that other firms succumbed to in avoiding financial calamity. In the Paul Weiss case, Karp talked to some of the firm’s 200 partners to weigh their options and received majority support to settle to get Trump to withdraw the Executive Order.

At the University of Washington, Professor Scott Radnitz made a relevant observation in an interview with Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka. He found that Trump’s primary lever for threatening his most powerful foes is withholding money. This contrasts with other autocrats using physical and mortal threats to get people to bend. 

I add that, like any other business in the market economy, a legal profession is in trouble if you destroy its product. If a law firm can’t sell its legal advice to those in need, its value plummets. Even the cost of fighting the federal government with an eventual partial win is enough of a threat to seek immediate relief. 

Radnitz and other political scientists “have found it shocking how quickly and rapidly and easily so many institutions, independent of the government, have given in to Trump’s demands.”

Their capitulations may seem minor initially; however, they are designed to move the firm’s activity from obstructing Trump to supporting his agenda.

Trump’s Settlement Demands are designed to gut the law firms’ liberal missions. 

After accusing the Biden administration of weaponizing the government to investigate and unfairly accuse him of unconstitutional or illegal behavior, he is now weaponizing the government to make those charges against select individuals and firms who were involved in those efforts.

On his first day in office, Trump issued Executive Order 14147 of January 20, 2025 (Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government). Its general goal of not using discriminatory federal power is sensible. However, Trump cites it in every Executive Order sent to law firms to justify the settlements they must accept before he removes those orders. 

The settlements require firms to rebuke their DEI efforts in their offices and possibly as issues to defend in court. This demand is made as a matter of national interest to stop racial discrimination. But the implications of these demands go much deeper. 

For instance, they cannot use political affiliations to determine who to hire. Trump is drawing a parallel between discrimination against conservative attorneys and discrimination against racial minorities. By agreeing to these settlements, the firms may leave themselves open to repeated federal scrutiny that they could be breaking civil rights laws by only supporting groups that oppose Trump’s MAGA beliefs. That effort could have Trump’s Attorney General charge the firm with discriminating against the groups they are not representing. 

Firms agreed in all settlements to spend hundreds of millions on free legal services for what they saw as uncontroversial causes. However, Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, thinks they are short-sighted if “They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill.”

Koh believes that, based on Trump’s early statements, “the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.” Rather than representing groups suffering from Trump’s policies, they could be called upon to defend his allies who benefit from them. The NYT reporters investigating Trump’s orders and how he described the settlements concluded that Trump has hinted at seeing the promises of pro bono legal services as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.

Ever mindful of how to shape public opinion, Trump released his version of the settlements on his social media platform, Truth Social. That’s not necessarily the interpretation of what the firms thought they had agreed to. Brad Karp found significant differences in Trump’s description of Paul Weiss’s settlement. Karp informed his partners that he had not agreed to abandon DEI, nor had he agreed that former law partner Mark Pomerantz, the lead prosecutor in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, had done anything wrong. 

The uncertainty surrounding the existence of formal contracts has left law firms on edge. They are unsure whether the attorney general will pursue them if Trump accuses them of failing to comply with the settlement. Karp and other law firm leaders who settled with Trump assert that their agreements effectively codified work their firms have already been doing. They are about to discover that Trump will expect them to support groups and issues they have never represented, nor would they have. 

Some Law Firms and Most Courts are Challenging Trump’s Actions

Five law firms are counter-suing Trump, and the district courts have temporarily halted his orders. In addition, the American Bar Association has organized its associations to file an amicus brief in support of the law firms. Ultimately, SCOTUS will decide which portions, if any, of the orders are legally valid. 

One should understand how those resisting Trump’s actions rely on laws, court rulings, and historical norms that protect our democratic republic from drifting into an autocratic government. That effort requires a straightforward review of Trump’s specific demands on these firms and their rebuttals. This review must also consider the politics and history surrounding how this conflict affects our society. The next Citizenship Politics will attempt this.

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Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Fifth Column: The Right Wing Think Tank behind Subversion of the Justice Department

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President Donald Trump is openly transforming the Department of Justice’s primary role of advising presidents on the limits of their authority under the Constitution into one that justifies and advocates his MAGA philosophy. This overlooks the reality that the public does not adhere to a single philosophy other than preserving their rights as guaranteed by our constitutional government.

Congress established the position of Attorney General in 1789, and the Department of Justice was founded in 1870 to serve the AG. The department was necessary to legally enforce the Constitution’s 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments following the Civil War. The Attorney General now possessed expanded powers, shifting from defending the government against civil lawsuits to enforcing laws and pursuing criminal prosecutions.

President Ulysses S. Grant appointed a former Confederate Army officer to prosecute those who resisted the transformation of the Southern Confederacy into a democratic institution, utilizing intimidation and violence against these amendments. By the end of Grant’s first term, there were over 3,000 indictments, with more than a third resulting in convictions. 

A 154 years later, we have another Republican President appointing an Attorney General who directs the Justice Department to punish individuals, schools, and businesses if they promote Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) classes. The classes explain why the reconstruction of the South along democratic principles was needed. However, Trump’s MAGA movement sees it as anti-American because it could make white citizens feel guilty about America’s history. 

Trump had a small but well-funded right-wing think tank help him turn our justice system on its head. The DOJ would not seek to protect the constitutional civil rights of oppressed groups. Instead, its objective was to preserve the status quo of groups traditionally benefiting from laws not being enforced. In short, its mission was to reverse the clock to a time when those with the most political and economic power were not threatened by the federal government chipping away at their entitled benefits.

Two right-wing think tanks drew up plans for accomplishing this critical task. Although the Heritage Foundation received the most attention through its Project 2025 report for developing Trump’s policies, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is now executing them.

AFPI was founded in 2021 by two former Trump administration officials to promote Donald Trump’s public policy agenda. Like the Heritage Foundation, it prepared for Trump’s return to the White House. The AFPI president revealed, at a women’s event it sponsored, that they had already “298 executive orders drafted and ready for day one of the next president.”

AFPI was writing executive orders that could utilize the President’s muscle to overpower any opposition to Trump’s policies. The executive orders would then be carried out by Trump’s appointed cabinet members, of whom at least seven out of fifteen are former AFPI employees. 

The incoming secretaries of education, agriculture, veterans affairs, housing, and now the Department of Justice have all been employees of AFPI. We are not talking about interns. These are folks at the top, like Brooke Rollins, the president of AFPI, who heads up agriculture, and Linda McMahon, chairwoman of the AFPI board, who runs the Department of Education. 

Other cabinet posts held by former AFPI employees are Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Turner for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Doug Collins for secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Matthew Whitaker for U.S. Ambassador to NATO.

Most importantly, AFPI folks are running the Justice Department. Pam Bondi is the General Attorney. She previously controlled the litigation arm of AFPI, which brought at least five lawsuits against the Biden Administration. According to the Brennan Center’s research, AFPI intended to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise specific groups of voters in swing states. 

However, even conservative judges saw their lawsuits as political conjectures without evidence. For instance, a Texas federal trial judge, who is a conservative Trump appointee known for his nationwide injunction on the abortion pill, denied AFPI’s request to stop a three-year-old Biden Executive order that encouraged federal agencies to integrate voter registration opportunities into their services. 

The judge held that AFPI’s request provided “no direct evidence to support its claim” that the executive order “weaponize[d]” and “partisan” scheme to register noncitizens to vote to benefit Democratic candidates.

The other AFPI implant in the justice system is Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, who serves as a paid Senior Fellow at AFPI’s Center for American Security. Previously, he was a senior aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, which alleges that officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation abused their authority during the investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.

Patel claimed in a podcast before being appointed that “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was involved in allowing, if not helping, incite the January 6th insurrection. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report discrediting the claim that the FBI corruptly used this network to instigate January 6th in December 2024, before Trump was in office. Trump did not fire him because he believed that this inspector general had been fair to him in the past.

Nevertheless, Trump ordered the FBI, presumably through Attorney General Bodi, to turn over a list of everyone who worked on the January insurrection 6 cases. The agents sued, believing Patel would reveal their identities, endangering them and their families from MAGA movement members. While a judge temporarily blocked the public release of names, Trump said he’d fire some for being corrupt. 

Trump and his appointees to the highest public offices in the nation have consistently asserted that their opponents are corrupt. They have defined corruption not as accepting bribes but as sabotaging Trump’s reactionary agenda by neglecting to execute his orders.

This definition of corruption is at the core of how the DOJ has become a tool for Trump to apply the law to retaliate against all federal employees and any citizen or business that questioned or challenged his authority. Bodi and Patel were prior employees of AFPI, so they could work as a team to defend and justify Trump’s orders as legal. 

Consequently, the only avenue for challenging them is through the court system. According to Just Security’s tracking, there are 170 open legal challenges to Trump administration actions as of April 6, 2025In the 67 cases before district courts, where multiple lawsuits produced a single, consolidated ruling, 46 halted a Trump administration action from 39 judges appointed by five presidents. While both Democrat and Republican judges were represented, every judge appointed by Trump ruled in favor of him.

Nevertheless, Bondi considered that the judges who had stopped a Trump executive order needed to be removed. During an interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” show, she said, “These judges obviously cannot be impartial. They cannot be objective. They are trying … to obstruct Donald Trump’s agenda.”

That attitude aligns with how judges should comply with Trump’s executive orders, much like AFPI believes all executive agencies should. On AFPI’s website, one of its primary objectives is to make all agency heads “serve to the pleasure of the president,” not serve all citizens by upholding the Constitution. 

This goal reflects Donald Trump’s vision of the unitary executive theory, in which the president directs the decisions of all agencies, including the DOJ. The Supreme Court has never endorsed this legal doctrine, even though Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970.

Trump has corrupted the DOJ’s intended purpose, which is evident by how Bondi is punishing them if they do not comply with Trump’s political agenda.  Bondi placed a Justice Department attorney on leave after he told a judge that he did not know what authority was used to arrest and mistakenly deport an El Salvadoran national even though an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling protected him from deportation to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.

The Department of Justice provided no evidence that he had no criminal record or was a gang member. However, Bondi insisted that “every DOJ attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” In reality, Bondi means to “advocate” Trump’s political agenda of deporting anyone legally living in the U.S. who is deemed a national threat, not by providing evidence but by being a suspicious immigrant. 

If an attorney fails to vigorously enforce that assumption, like acknowledging that there is no evidence to pursue a legal motion, they could be fired. Bondi clarified this in her statement: “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

This was not an isolated incident. The White House press secretary said that more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies had been fired “in coordination with” the Justice Department since the end of March. Almost all lawyers who worked on the prosecutions against the president were fired, and many others were demoted because they were seen as insufficiently loyal. 

These employees may have included more than a dozen who worked before he was reelected or prosecutors in the cases against the people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. These measures appear illegal because firing many of them requires a specific reason not cited in the firings. 

Trump uses AFPI as a fifth column within the judicial branch of government to eliminate any federal attorney who might not “zealously advocate” his philosophy on how Americans should behave. This top-down approach emphasizes loyalty to superiors, with Trump at the pinnacle. Requiring personal loyalty to a president is an action that is not covered in the Constitution or Congressional laws.

Although Trump has referred to himself as a king, in a half-joking manner, a U.S. District Judge, in a ruling against him, wrote that “a President who touts an image of himself as a “king” or a “dictator” misapprehends Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which tasks “the President to be a conscientious custodian of the law, enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the Judiciary.”

Federal employees are the first and easiest citizens to be targeted by Trump because he can claim executive authority over their jobs. However, they are not his only targets. Other constituents who he sees as possibly resisting his MAGA agenda are already on the receiving end of his executive orders. These are schools, law firms, and cultural institutions. Each necessitates a more thorough examination of how his aggression is impacting them.

If citizens cannot rely on the government to protect their freedoms, they must learn to utilize the legal system as a peaceful avenue for achieving a just and fair society. 

To help citizens better understand and protect their rights, the Washington State Bar Association is launching the Rule of Law Ambassador Program. This program will teach volunteer ambassadors in constitutional law so they can educate community members and secure constitutional law as the foundation of our democracy. This effort is based on the “rule of law” principle that government power is bound by law and human rights are guaranteed to all. Email ambassadors@wsba.org to receive updated information on this effort. 

Nationwide, 98 bar associations endorsed the American Bar Association’s statement on the Rule of Law. Unfortunately, the ABA’s website does not mention national or state initiatives like the Washington State program. If readers know of such programs, please email nick@citizenshippolitics.org, and they will be posted.  

Please email this issue of Citizenship Politics to others or post it on a website. 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Trump’s lying strategy is to destroy our republic’s liberal institutions

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Mainstream media detailed Trump’s multiple false and misleading claims but ignored how that was a deliberate strategy for demolishing our democratic republican institutions.

About 36.6 million people watched President Donald Trump’s Address to the Joint Congress on 15 different networks. Academics note that his address differed from all previous presidential speeches and that he lied more than any other president. 

Thomas B. Edsall is the Pulitzer Moore Professor of Public Affairs Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He wrote: “Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency.”[30] George C. Edwards III is the Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies Emeritus at Texas A&M University.  He wrote: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president. There is no one that is a close second.”

The following nine networks summarized the takeaways each found in Trump’s address: CBS, CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, AP News, Fox News, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the Washington Post. The consensus was that Trump promoted blatantly false claims and used them to attack Democrats and their policies.

A wealth of data shows how Trump’s flood of executive orders and appointments has created immediate confusion and chaos in delivering services. But detailing that process demands a separate effort.

First, it is necessary to understand that Trump’s strategy was to repeatedly accuse established successful liberal programs and institutions of corruption without the slightest evidence. Second, his strategy succeeded in gaining many viewers who approved his Address. 

Trump’s narcissistic boasting of fantastic accomplishments sets him apart from other presidents. 

Trump’s personality is shiny, like fool’s gold. CBS News and YouGov survey results showed that most viewers of his congressional address described the president as “presidential,” “inspiring,” and more “unifying” than “divisive.” A significant majority also called it “entertaining.” 

That last attribute explains why many citizens do not take his draconian measures seriously. Trump is entertaining to many, and the media reports his half-joking comments without challenging their impact on citizens. Time Magazine’slead apprehends it soundly: Trump Uses Big Speech to Spin Alternate Reality of ‘Astronomical Achievements.’  

Time described his behavior this way: Facts were not the point of the speech; if it felt ‘overwhelming, that is because it is, and by design. He made too many false claims to recount them all. NPR did an in-depth annotated fact check of more than 20 things that Trump said, which can be found here. Below are three that capture the Trumpian reality that his followers dwell in.

“It has been stated by many … our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation. Do you know No. 2 is? George Washington.” The White House presented no list to substantiate this comparison.

“For the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction.” CNN Poll conducted by SSRS was released the week Trump spoke. CNN found that just 39% of Americans said the country was moving in the right direction, compared with 45% who said it was in the wrong direction. That’s a drop from when Trump started his first term.

“I terminated the ridiculous green new scam. I withdrew from the unfair Paris Climate Accord, which was costing us trillions of dollars. Biden’s State Department announced it had allocated $5.8 billion by 2022 to finance international climate issues. US finance contributions to climate change have never reached trillions of dollars.

While the network reviews saw Trump making multiple false claims, most viewers were unfazed, if not supportive of his speech. 

Over 15 different news organizations ran fact-checks on Trump’s address. There has been more fact-checking of Trump’s speeches than any other president’s. That’s probably because Trump throws out so many outrageous, unheard-of declarations that are easy targets to rebut. 

Lying is typical of Trump, according to academics and observers. Carole McGranahan, for the American Ethnologist, wrote that Trump is the most “accomplished and effective liar” to have ever participated in American politics. Donnel Stern, writing in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2019, declared: “We expect politicians to stretch the truth. But Trump “lies as a policy” and “will say anything” to satisfy his supporters or himself.

The TV audience of Trump’s congressional speech felt good about what they heard, regardless of whether major media networks factually repudiated its claims. Seventy-six percent of people approved of the president’s remarks, while only 23 percent disapproved, as reported in the CBS News and YouGov survey results. Sixty-eight percent said the speech made them feel hopeful, and 54 percent said it made them proud. 

CNN’s instant polling captured a similar response, with 44 percent of speech watchers viewing Trump’s remarks as very positive. However, that’s lower than the 57% of viewers who rated Trump’s initial address to Congress to begin his first term in office as very positive and lower than the 51% who saw President Joe Biden’s initial address in 2021 as very positive. 

The response was shaped by the viewers’ party identification, which consisted of 51% Republicans, 27% Independents, and only 20% Democrats. Multiple media commentators described Trump’s speech as more of a partisan campaign speech than a report to the nation. Republican viewers and conservative-leaning independents could be expected to be fine with Trump giving a campaign pitch they are used to hearing. 

Chaos invites citizens to seek a safe reality; repeating a phony solution provides it. 

Remember, Trump was a TV actor. He knows how TV audiences respond to presentations. This is particularly true when he delivers and repeats a simple, strong message, like “You’re Fired.”  That’s how advertising works. Trump has applied this method to politics by convincing Americans he is telling the truth. 

According to his former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, Trump told her, “As long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” Grisham defended never having held a White House briefing, saying, “It’s because, unlike my boss, I never wanted to stand at that podium and lie.” 

Scientists call this pattern of carelessly lying as creating a truth effect through manipulating repetition to build people’s confidence in the truth of what they hear. When statements on data are unfamiliar, mental processing makes distinguishing between true and false statements more difficult. 

Experiments show that if a message is simple and quick to understand, it is easy to process new and unfamiliar statements as incoming valid information. And researchers have found that hearing an opinion repeatedly, even if only from one person, makes the opinion seem like a popular one.

This process of understanding reality becomes acceptable and necessary in a chaotic environment. Trump created this by signing nearly 100 executive orders and taking over 400 executive actions within two months of becoming president. In the first statement of his Address to Congress, he boasted that in six weeks, “it has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action.” Trump’s promotion of action as the solution to a problem has been used before.  

Taking some action is a medicine that relieves anxiety about facing a terrible future. Revolutionary students formed “action factions” in the sixties to attack the police. Mussolini came to power promoting a solution of taking “action” to make Italy a better place to live. When asked what Fascism is, he replied, “It’s Action.” It’s the kind of action that led thousands to march on the U.S. Capitol to stop what they saw as an illegal election.

Trump’s swift actions include deporting as many immigrants as possible, abolishing laws trying to mitigate climate change, promoting oil exploration on environmentally protected public lands, and halting medical research that doesn’t provide a sure profit. Trump’s MAGA movement is to reverse liberal policies that have shaped our society and economy.

To carry out this effort, Trump is eliminating federal departments. He directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to facilitate closing the Education Department, which disburses billions of dollars in federal funding to colleges and schools, manages federal student loan programs, and enforces civil rights laws in schools.

His appointee Elon Musk, as the head of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), is eliminating or phasing out departments and firing thousands of employees providing necessary services to Americans. For instance, he plans to cut more than $1tn from the Medicaid and food stamps programs. Musk also laid off 7,000 IRS employees recovering unpaid complex taxes from large businesses, allowing more time to investigate the easiest-to-conduct audits on middle and lower-income taxpayers.

Trump’s directives create fear, confusion, and anxiety about one’s future economic security for those not in the top 10% of the wealthiest, having assets of $1.9 million or more. And yet, Trump carried the plurality of the 90% who will pay for Trump’s actions. This begs the question: How did Democrats respond while listening to Trump’s accomplishments in the Capitol Building?

Trump trashed the Democrats, and their response was muddled.

Al Jazeera summarized their response as “Democrats struggle to muster a response,” as they heard Trump denigrated Democrats, their policies, and the government departments that delivered them.

 Trump’s address mentioned Biden 13 times, saying “Joe Biden, “the worst president in American history,” to the rousing applause of the Republicans present. In comparison, Biden only referred to Trump only as “my predecessor” 13 times in his first speech before Congress, his strongest accusing his predecessor of “bowing down” to Russia.

Trump referred to Democrats as “these people” and “radical left lunatics” when he said, “In recent years, our justice system has been turned upside down by radical-left lunatics.” And adding that they were “weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents like me.”

Multiple media sources described Trump’s speech before Congress as “relentlessly partisan” in criticizing Democrats. However, they are not his voter base; a February Gallup poll found that only 4% of Democrats approved of Trump’s job performance overall, while it was 93% of Republicans. The 89-percentage-point partisan gap in Trump’s overall job approval rating is among the highest Gallup has measured for any president.

Given that level of support, Trump could enjoy tormenting the Democrats seated in front of him without fear of any voter reprisal. AP News reported that Democrats registered their dissent with stone faces, with some holding placards calling out “lies” and walking out during his speech. And they did not grant him even a perfunctory applause. These collections of individual actions are the signs of flailing in Trump’s swift current of actions. 

The formal Democratic response, like the mainstream media, missed an opportunity to strike a chord with the public. 

As is customary, an opposition party member responds to the other party president’s congressional address. Just-electedSen. Elissa Slotkin delivered a ten-minute Democratic response to President Trump’s 100-minute speech. She had won her Michigan race in a state that Trump carried, so she is an ideal candidate to rebuke Trump. 

The New York Times described her as delivering a simple, centrist message, devoid of partisan animus, aimed at voters across the political spectrum. She took a rational approach, saying, “America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way,” 

She said voters must hold elected officials accountable by going to town halls, organizing, and taking action. That was a jab at Republican legislators whose national party urged them to stop holding town hall meetings because critics showed up complaining about Trump’s policies. 

Slotkin’s solid arguments probably made some folks think about how Trump’s actions will impact their lives. Nevertheless, like the major media outlets, she failed to hammer home the message that Trump is purposefully trying to demolish institutions that have served Americans for generations. 

Slotkin needed to identify who would benefit from that effort: Trump’s cronies. They have poured hundreds of millions into campaigns to elect him and his supporters. 

The Democratic Party can expose this effort by delivering a straightforward message. Trump and his appointees create chaos based on the lie of massive government corruption in every institution they wish to eliminate. Musk is attempting to control protected government data as the head of DOGE, so their effort will go unchecked.

Going forward, Democrats must openly oppose Trump’s dismantling of the institutions that inhibit the concentration of wealth onto fewer families. 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Trump’s Oval Office Blowup: a Clash of Personalities for Resources

At the abrupt end of an intended photo-op meeting, Trump noted, “This is going to be great television.” 

Was there some irony in this statement? Both Trump and Zelensky became famous as TV actors; Zelensky played a fictitious president, and Trump played himself as a company president. Then, they shared the Oval Office in front of the world in a riveting one-act skit.

It was good television, but politics was bad for both. Trump lost his hoped-for victory celebration for ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky lost an agreement tying American military support to investing in Ukraine. 

During the meeting, Trump demanded that Zelensky talk only about achieving peace by rapidly ending the war and not raising doubts about Russia’s starting the war again. Zelensky pushed back, citing Russia’s past broken promises. As soon as the TV cameras went dead, their dinner was canceled, and Zelensky was ushered out of the White House. 

Within a week, Trump cut off military support and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, saying they would only be reinstated if Zelensky followed Trump’s directive.

The transcript shows Trump criticized Zelensky first.  

The exchange among Trump, Zelensky, and Vance reveals that Trump initiated deprecating statements about Zelensky when he responded to a reporter who asked how he saw himself aligning with both Zelensky and Putin. His response was if “I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi, Vladimir. How are we doing on the deal?’” 

Trump firmly stated he would not offend Putin. Then Trump attacked Zelensky as a person filled with hate, not reason. “He’s got tremendous hatred. You see, the hatred he’s [Zelensky] got for Putin, it’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.” Zelensky had not criticized Putin in the meeting before Trump made these accusations. 

Vance also jumped to respond to this question,The path to peace and prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.” Vance did acknowledge that “Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country.”

Zelensky replied to both of their comments by relating how Putin, from 2014 to 2022, during the terms of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, was killing Ukrainians, and nobody stopped him. “And God bless President Trump will stop him.”

He reminded them how Putin broke a signed ceasefire deal with Ukraine in 2019, which included an exchange of prisoners, which he did not complete. Exasperated, Zelensky asked Vance, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you talking about?”

Zelensky put Vance on the spot and challenged him to recognize Putin’s past actions as casting doubt on his trustworthiness in promising not to invade Ukraine in the future. It was the kind of question that should have been dealt with in private, not televised. 

Vance just jabbed back at Zelensky, accusing him of being 
disrespectful “to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.” 

Then Vance did some litigation arguing that Ukraine had very big problems recruiting soldiers. Vance switched to asking Zelensky if he thought that it was “respectful to come to the Oval Office to attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

Zelensky said, “During the war, everybody has problems … you have a nice ocean buffering America, and you don’t feel Russia’s aggression, “but you will feel it in the future.” 

Trump couldn’t ignore that taunt: “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem.”

The exchange was raw, rough, honest, and disastrous for both parties. Trump did his usual slightly off-hand blustering about how great he is. But Zelensky is a serious person, seeing his country being destroyed daily by Russian bombing. 

You could see how annoyed he felt being scolded by those who had not visited his war-torn country, but Vance said he felt satisfied seeing it on TV. 

Was this a David versus Goliath battle? 

Although Trump could physically loom over Zelensky, with Trump standing at 6′ 3″ and Zelensky at 5′ 7″, the difference in the economic and military resources between Ukraine and the U.S. is astronomical. 

The U.S.’s GDP is 164 times larger than Ukraine’s, and the U.S. spends more on defense than the following nine countries combined. While the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP on defense, Ukraine spends 37%. 

Trump summed up Zelensky’s position, with Vice President J.D. Vance sitting beside him and Cabinet members in a small circle around them. He bluntly told Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. You people are dying.” 

Trump proclaimed that Zelensky had no option but to acknowledge America’s power. It was a classic battle tactic: pick the ground to fight on and surround your enemy, then ask them to surrender peaceably or face annihilation. 

Afterward, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended the meeting and appeared on news shows praising Trump and ridiculing the Ukrainian President for not thanking Trump.

Democrats accused Trump of setting up a trap for Zelensky to fail in their meeting. That’s not likely, given that it would significantly damage Trump’s chances of receiving a Nobel Peace award, which he has been yearning to receive if the agreement was signed leading to an immediate cessation of the war.

Trump thought he deserved a Nobel Prize in 2019, saying he should get one “for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly — which they don’t.” Norway’s parliament appoints the awards, and Trump has been nominated for a Nobel several times during his presidency. 
Nevertheless, Trump has complained that they gave President Obama a Nobel shortly after he became president without him earning it. 

Trump’s script for clobbering a competitor didn’t play out as planned. Since Zelensky is like Trump, he doesn’t like being lectured. Unlike other Republican politicians, including his Vice President, past critics have succumbed to Trump’s leadership and apologized for being mean or discourteous to him. 

Secretary of State Mark Rubio, the most obsequious cabinet member, claimed that Trump was the only person in the world “who has any chance” of bringing Russian President Putin to the negotiating table. 

World leaders, from the United Kingdom and France, are careful not to ruffle Trump in public. Zelensky ignored that strategy, cautioning Trump on dealing with Putin. And Zelensky paid the price for such independence. 

Zelensky can still protect Ukraine’s future as an independent nation.

Zelensky now understands that he should have let Trump blow his horn and then sign the proposed mineral-rights dealas they had planned. Zelensky called the heated meeting with Trump ‘regrettable’ and posted on X that he would sign the deal. Yes, Trump would have beat his chest and declared he was a mastermind negotiator. 

However, as the agreement is written, the negotiations would not be in the Oval Office; they would happen elsewhere, and Zelensky would have much more leverage to determine the final document’s contents.
 
While the main media outlets focused on this brawl, they didn’t dive into the proposed document that Trump and Zelensky were to sign. It was not a giveaway to American interests and presented Zelensky with significant leverage in negotiating the final agreement. 

Zelensky could use the additional time needed to reach a final agreement to shore up his European financial and military commitments. Zelensky and European leaders know that Trump would walk away from the final deal, blaming Ukraine for the loss if he didn’t like it. In the meantime, Ukraine would continue receiving military assistance and time to stock up supplies. 

Here are six key sections within the Ukraine — US Minerals Agreement that provide Zelensky leverage to achieve an acceptable final agreement, formally identified as the Bilateral Agreement Establishing Terms and Conditions for a Reconstruction Investment Fund.

  1. Ukraine’s primary legal obligation is to begin negotiations, not to sign one with the US. It will not be formed if there is no agreement on a more detailed description of the “Reconstruction Investment Fund” activities.
  2. Neither Participant, i.e., America or Ukraine, will sell, transfer, or otherwise dispose of any portion of its interest in the Fund without the prior written consent of the other Participant. This allows the Ukrainian government to stop any action that does not benefit Ukraine.
  3. The Ukrainian government will contribute 50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets to the Fund, as agreed by both Participants. Ukraine has the power of veto over these decisions. The revenues as described do not include the current sources of revenues, which are already part of Ukraine’s general budget revenues. Consequently, Ukraine forfeits future revenues that do not currently exist and are uncertain and a ways off from being available. It is expected to take years to identify the exact locations of the key minerals and extract and transport them.
  4. Contributions made to the Fund will be reinvested at least annually in Ukraine to promote the safety, security, and prosperity of Ukraine, to be further defined in the Fund Agreement. If the size or percentage of those contributions is unacceptable to Ukraine, they do not have to sign the agreement.
  5. The Government of the United States of America supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace. Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments, as defined in the Fund Agreement. This is the weakest part of the proposal since there is no specific commitment to providing any type of resources. As noted in this proposal, those specifics still need to be defined. If they remain unsatisfactory to Ukraine, then the agreement will not proceed.
  6. The Parliament of Ukraine shall ratify the Fund Agreement. This is the most crucial element of the proposal because it allows Zelensky to adjust his negotiations to reflect the needs expressed by the government’s legislative branch. It also provides an opportunity to mobilize the Ukrainian population to support the agreement. It also offers Congressional supporters time to argue for its acceptance so that the decision goes beyond the two presidents’ agreeing.

One last thought: Zelensky can exploit two of Trump’s weaknesses.
 
First, Trump has a narcissist’s grandiose sense of self (Trump’s Personality Will Deliver a Perilous Second Term — for Everyone) where he knows how to solve problems that no one else can. For instance, he suggested that had he been president, he could have avoided the unnecessary, bloody Civil War through “negotiation.” The American public must see that Trump’s reasoning would have led to the end of the U.S. by allowing the South to succeed. And he is asking for the same for Ukraine.
 
Trump’s second weakness is openly admiring authoritarian governments (Trump is not a Tyrant — he just admires them). After the first 100 days in his first term as president, he described our constitutional checks and balances as “an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.” Trump wants to replace Zelensky, who became president by a far more significant margin than Trump. He would prefer to negotiate with a Russian-approved Ukrainian president who will ignore the tedium of a democratic process. 
 
Zelensky can highlight these traits without directly attacking Trump. By doing so, it frames a message that Trump’s self-interests do not secure a safe future for Ukraine. If the deal falls apart, Zelensky’s record of cooperation will bolster most European governments and American citizens’ opposition to Trump’s abandoning Ukraine to an authoritarian Russia.

 

Diversity Has Expanded Individual Freedoms

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America obtained universal democracy through the diversification of our electorate.

To understand American democratic society is to understand how liberalism and conservatism apply citizenship to individual rights.

Although they have had different party affiliations throughout America’s history, as I describe in Why did the Parties Switch to Conservative & Liberal?, today, the Democratic Party represents liberalism and the Republicans, conservatism. 

Liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party, recognizes that diverse groups can strengthen our democracy. However, liberalism, as an economic philosophy, emphasizes individuals’ right to control their property as they wish, aligning with conservative beliefs. This is an example of how both philosophies hold sometimes competing beliefs. 

Liberals have always protected individualism, dating back to the influence of the Enlightenment on our nation’s founders. It began with the right of individuals to interpret the Bible directly without being interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church or a monarch. 

Conservatives supported the status quo; in the Middle Ages, it was to abide by the distribution of power and rights. Part of that orientation was to align with the local community’s beliefs and prejudices. 

Liberals, not conservatives, believe individuals should have equal rights across all communities. That extension allows greater participation in determining government policies. Broadening citizenship is a step toward creating a universal democracy rather than one stratified by groups having different rights. 

Liberalism has amended the Constitution to accommodate the needs of individuals in unrepresented communities. Consequently, liberals have been more successful than conservatives in altering America’s society. Expanding citizenship rights to new communities is a prominent conservative concern in the twenty-first century, but it stretches back over a hundred years. 

Diversification allowed three huge communities to be eligible to vote.

President Andrew Jackson opened the gate to diversity by changing how we select our national representatives. He was the first major presidential candidate to call for “universal” suffrage, ending the property requirements that barred small landholding, mainly white male farmers, from voting. 

Jackson gave rise to the Democratic Party by allowing white males to vote regardless of whether they lacked property in various states. Jackson’s efforts pushed voting participation from 360,000 in 1824 to 1.2 million in 1828. It enabled him to win the presidency after losing it by a close margin in the prior election.

However, that process was not completed within all states until 1856 when, in effect, all white men, including migrants and transients, had the right to vote. The 1860 election of Lincoln saw a total of 4.7 million voters. In the space of two generations, voting increased by a thousand percent. Our Civil War immediately followed, which ushered in the second major step to diversify American citizenship: ending slavery and allowing Black citizens to vote. 

Like Jackson, Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the presidency in 1864 by endorsing a radical new idea. He supported a constitutional amendment that would override states’ sovereignty by abolishing slavery throughout the country. After Lincoln won, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, doing just that. 

However, it took another five years for all the states to ratify it. Even before it was ratified,  the margin of General Grant’s popular majority vote in 1868 to become president resulted from winning a high percentage of the half-million newly enfranchised black men. He won reelection in 1872, with his popular vote increasing by half a million. Grant won over half of the old Confederate states, with Black citizens able to vote in the reconstructed Confederate states.  

The last significant diversity occurred when women gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920. However, women’s suffrage took 72 years to achieve, beginning in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, the first public gathering to advocate for women’s rights.

The 1920 election saw Republican and Democratic Party conventions endorse the Susan B. Anthony (woman suffrage) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the Republican Party was the liberal party, promoting the suffragette movement to amend the constitution before the Democrats. 

Consequently, Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding lobbied the last state to ratify it just months before election day. Harding won, his vote tally doubling that of the previous Republican presidential candidate. This was likely due to a huge wave of new women voters. The total votes cast in the 1920 election exceeded the 1916 total by 8 million votes, a 40% increase. 

Conservatives failed to stop diversity.

The ultimate form of diversity is expanding citizenship among a diverse population. Conservatives have continuously opposed this expansion because it could disrupt the political system dominated by the community they represent. While their reasons have varied, their core objective has been to conserve the culture and resources of this community. By protecting the rights of the existing dominant group, conservatives restrict the rights of individuals not part of that group.

Before the move to broaden our citizenship, our government was generally controlled by the largest community – property-owning white males. This was the standard arrangement for European countries, adapted to establish the United States of America. 

Our country’s founders believed that property ownership was a strong indicator of the virtue necessary to participate in a new democratic government. This new expanded form of government shifted ruling from a monarch, most beholden to the landed gentry and the most prominent commercial and financial families, to a much broader base of people owning property who elected a leader from among them.

Our democracy adjusted and strengthened as our population changed through immigration, the expansion of land, and population growth. Diversity in citizenship made that transition possible, expanding in three stages by admitting all white males, all males regardless of race, and all women as equal citizens. 

These transitions took decades – at least four for extending legal citizenship to all males and over double that for women. Although Amendments were passed to allow all citizens to vote, conservative-endorsed obstacles still hinder voting access for some. 

However, individual rights extend far beyond equal access to the ballot box. They are about the freedom to live a full life without trampling on the rights of others. Finding this balance is at the heart of our cultural war over how individuals can exercise their freedoms in America as a single, open culture.  

Why MAGA Conservatives fear diversity.

MAGA conservatives fear diversity will endanger their rights because it legitimizes behavior that deviates from America’s established White dominant culture. 

Liberals support individuals accessing abortion, recognizing institutional racial discrimination, allowing for gender identification, tolerating non-traditional marriages, and respecting different religious principles. Conservatives see these beliefs and practices as anti-American because Conservatives define America as their community. 

Two leading conservatives describe individual freedoms wholly within the context of being a proper American and not diverting from conservative values.   

Kevin Roberts is the President of The Heritage Foundation, which created and spent $22 million to staff and write the Presidential Transition Project 2025 report that Trump is proceeding to enact. Roberts wrote that the federal government, “must protect and promote the values that most Americans espouse and to “revive—marriage and family, church and community, private enterprise and public spirit.” He then ties “the rights of the individual” to “the virtue of local communities” and “the centrality of the family.”

Those are beliefs anyone is free to express in America. But Roberts goes one step further. He says “we”, meaning the majority of Americans, need to figuratively burn down federal “institutions like the Department of Homeland Security, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the Department of Education.”  Adding that they are the enemy and “function as anti-American, anti-constitutional predators. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered.”

Roberts makes no direct mention of stopping DEI or opposing diversity training, but Trump is following Project 2025 by attacking these institutions as spreading hate against America through DEI. 

Michael Shellenberger founded the conservative Substack publication Public and is a journalist and book author. He uses classic liberalism to promote meritocracy as an antidote to DEI manipulating Whites to feel guilty about their heritage. He writes, “They love America. They built America as the greatest nation because of individual initiative. The Democrats just want to tear down that image, tear it down as a flawed myth.” 

Shellenberger appeals to the “common sense” underlying the anti-DEI movement, that individual responsibility rewards achievement based on personal effort and ability rather than external factors like inheritance or race. This line of reasoning acknowledges no immense wealth being passed from one generation to another or institutions that have and continue to discriminate based on color. 

His position reflects what Trump said in a Time Magazine interview, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”

Shellenberger is more direct: “The big idea behind DEI programs is that white people, all white people, are responsible for the bad behaviors of a few white people in the past, and they are uniquely advantaged, or ‘privileged.”

Liberals must link diversity to protecting individual liberties.

Democrats must expose the Republicans’ “illiberal” crusade against diversity as a threat to dismantle our commonly shared belief that we all should have the freedom to exercise rights that are not bound or enhanced by belonging to any group. 

Those rights have been extended for over 150 years by expanding who can vote. Similarly, individual rights in choosing how to live peacefully with others must continue to develop for the next 150 years as our society changes. 

Republicans’ assault on diversity, as exemplified in attacking DEI programs, does not protect the dominant white and traditional family culture. It is a distraction from obtaining a more informed and caring citizenry. 

Understanding our collective history does not elevate the status of Blacks and other minorities above that of Whites. It does not undermine the nuclear male and female marriages by upholding LGBTQ rights.

If presented properly and respectfully, the message of obtaining and sustaining equal citizenship across all communities is at the heart of liberal and Democrats’ efforts. That effort can build trust across communities and not feed the anxiety we all feel about change. 

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

And share it with others on the internet.

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Trump’s New Civil Rights Era Begins Without Diversity, Equity, Or Inclusion 

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Three African American Civil Rights protesters at Woolworth's Sit-In, Durham, NC, 10 February 1960, a protest that led to the end of legal segregation. Photos taken by The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC.

Within 24 hours of becoming president, Donald Trump released his first White House Fact Sheet, “Ending the Radical and Illegal DEI.” He signed an Executive Order claiming that eliminating programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”

Trump, and by extension the MAGA Republican Party, link eliminating diversity and equality to promoting civil rights. This is not a new concept. However, one must understand our history to understand how these two practices are linked to civil rights. 

The civil rights movement exploded after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 rejected African American citizenship claims. This decision was not based on economic claims of owning slaves as property but on racial claims that citizens who were seen as Black had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War to protect not only the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons but all people treated as Black, and in due course, it was extended to all minorities. Nearly a hundred years later, with the majority of Supreme Court justices being Republican-appointed, the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision was released. It found that denying racial diversity in public schools through segregation was unconstitutional. 

In other words, achieving and sustaining equality and diversity among our citizens in our legal and educational institutions is guaranteed within our Constitution, according to our Supreme Court. 

The bizarre importance of attacking transgender people.

Trump links civil rights to restoring “biological truth to the federal government.” This was a direct attack on citizens who identify with a gender different from what was determined at birth. We are talking about a minuscule percentage of Americans. Published findings show that 1.6% of U.S. adults are trans or nonbinary.

 Is this a national emergency? Or is this a hot cultural issue among Republicans? According to a Pew Research Center survey, 66% of them say society has gone too far in accepting people who are transgender. Still, roughly eight in ten Americans say transgender people face at least some discrimination, with 35% of Republicans saying there is a great deal or a fair amount of discrimination against trans people.

Despite the majority of Americans believing that defining the rights of transenders requires a thoughtful approach, one of Mr. Trump’s most aired ads attacking presidential candidate Harris ended with a tagline raising the issue of transgender people as not part of America’s society: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The implication is that Democrats would treat transgender citizens better than everyday Americans.

On his first day in office, he issued an executive order mandating that those federal agencies “that prompt users for their pronouns” in their email systems, like Outlook, be turned off. They had 72 hours to comply or jeopardize their job.

It seems petty, but it does conjure up an image of Big Brother closely looking over your shoulder to see how you sign off on your emails.  This is being done to force federal workers to adhere to the new administration’s rules: Employees must repudiate their freedom to declare their gender. 

It’s unclear how Trump’s attorneys will align this mandate with the Supreme Court’s decision protecting the rights of trans and gay citizens from being fired due to their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Trump is setting up a “spoils system” of government patronage.

Although Trump denied reading the Heritage Report Project 2025, his newly appointed public officers immediately implemented its reactionary objectives. 

Trump appointed Russell Vought, coordinator for Project 2025, as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought supports withholding funds appropriated by Congress and vows to roll back the merit-based career civil service. This goes beyond civil rights by tossing out legal contractual union rights, which Heritage’s Report ignored.

For instance, the report’s Equity Agenda recommended that employees breaking the law by openly promoting diversity could lose their jobs. It stated that participation in any DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, would be grounds for termination of their employment.

In line with that objective, the Washington Post found that dozens of federal agency workers who didn’t work on diversity or inclusion issues were placed on administrative leave in the week that Trump was sworn in as president. Their findings showed that some federal agencies targeted “people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to DEI.”

By pushing these employees out of government jobs, he borrowed a practice from President Andrew Jackson, who created a “spoils system” of government patronage. This was accomplished by rewarding his supporters to fill the empty seats available after he removed about 10 percent of all government postings.

For both Jackson and Trump, having supporters fill taxpayer-funded federal jobs instills personal loyalty to the president in their party’s ranks. See – Trump uses 3 Jacksonian Strategies.

Trump downplayed attacking diversity to allow others to do so. 

Other Trump executive orders demanded that DEI “language in Federal discourse, communications, and publications” be removed.  These orders merely resuscitate his prior Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,which he signed two months before the 2020 election and was revoked by President Joe Biden.  It’s possible that he saw this order as cementing his voter base by declaring that anti-American race and sex stereotyping would be eliminated from government agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, he may have decided it best not to broadcast messages that frightened too many people about losing their civil rights. So, he let others do that so he can deny responsibility for their statements but enact those policies once elected. Project 2025 identified the most reactionary decrees that Trump should pursue. 

Within the first 24 hours of being in office, Trump abolished all DEI training or discussion groups in the Federal Government. Historically, such a sweeping move would have been foreshadowed in a newly nominated party’s candidate at their convention.  In Trump’s 90-minute acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, not a word was spoken about DEI or diversity.  

That’s because Trump didn’t want to give the media and Democrats a paper trail exposing his anti-diversity strategy before taking office. Since promoting diversity is tied to promoting civil rights to those who are disenfranchised from voting or receiving social services, Trump would have to defend those intentions. Better to execute this strategy after taking office and avoid any pushback beforehand. 

It helped avoid a public debate by not warning the public what the Republican Party would support. What better way to secure its silence than to have its platform not mention DEI, diversity, equity, or inclusion? This was accomplished by eliminating the chance of any questions being raised in an open-air platform committee to approve the text.

No committee discussions would happen because Trump created the Republican Party’s Platform with his advisors in private without formal party involvement. When he completed the final document, he presented it to the Republican Party to adopt as their new platform. It was accepted without question, not a surprise given that Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, was the Co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

The RNC’s acquiescence to Trump allowed him to adopt the most severe measures of the Project 2025 report without submitting them to a traditional debate within a president’s party.

Democrats, having no leverage in Congress, are not mounting a systematic response to this new Trump Civil Rights Era. 

The reality is that Democrats cannot move any legislation through Congress without attracting at least several Republican House and Senate members. Consequently, individual Democratic members have threatened to take Hail-Mary efforts to block Trump’s executive orders. 

Unfortunately, both parties have used presidential executive orders to get what they want without the other party’s support. So they have contributed to an executive-dominated government using those orders to accomplish tasks that would have been an act of Congress.  

Democrats are baffled on how to mount an effective opposition. They hope that enough of the public will turn against the Trump administration as they lose critical services customarily provided by departments being effectively shut down.

Rather than relying on hope, Democrats need to go beyond challenging Trump’s MAGA agenda through a hopelessly compromised legislative process. They need to alter the mindset that Trump has successfully instilled in a plurality of voters that diversity is a threat to American freedoms. 

Political movements grow out of a society’s most emphatic values. My next Citizenship Politics will examine why diversity is seen as repudiating those American values and how Democrats need to respond within that framework.  

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Social Housing Emerging in Cities need Local Govt Support 

Seattle is the most recent city to see a populist movement get behind social housing. 

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Six cities and a county have initiated social housing programs to provide permanently affordable, publicly owned, and controlled housing for lower and middle-income working families. 

Seattle, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, and Montgomery County, MD, are the most prominent ones in North America to have passed social housing laws that are being implemented or are in development. All five U.S. cities started their programs in the last four years.

Local Progress, a national network of progressive municipal officials, has released a detailed report on the status of social housing programs in these cities and Montgomery County, not including Toronto. 

Some city governments are reluctant to promote social housing because they have limited revenues and little or no surplus to fund it. However, North America’s oldest and most successful entities building mixed-income affordable housing, Montgomery’s Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), have survived. They are even able to expand because of supportive local governments. 

Below are descriptions of how a social housing approach requires time and cooperation from the local government. 

Seattle is the most recent city to see a populist movement get behind social housing. 

Two competing housing plans, which voters must choose from this February 11, illustrate how establishing one can challenge the marketplace and established public institutions. 

The grassroots organization House Our Neighbors (HON) is presenting Proposition 1A (a.k.a. Initiative 137) to the voters.  Previously, they put Initiative 135 up for a vote in 2023, which passed with a yes margin of 14% over a no vote. 

It established the new public developer, the Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD), to create and own social housing in Seattle. The housing would be available to the working class, which includes those earning from zero to 120% of Seattle’s area median income (AMI). 

Proposition 1A introduces a progressive tax derived from levying a 5% payroll tax. Employers pay it on the amount each employee earns over $1 million a year in compensation. The tax is projected to deliver $50 million a year to SSHD.

With the mayor’s support, the city council rejected implementing Initiative 137’s funding plan and instead placed an alternative plan on the ballot, Proposition 1B. It requires no new taxes; instead, it withdraws $10 million yearly from the JumpStart business tax. 

Most of that tax already goes to low-income housing, plus some funding for sheltering people experiencing homelessness. The net gain in housing units would be around 10% of what 1A could deliver. The plan would end after seven years unless renewed.

Also, unlike social housing plans, the 1B plan would not include a mix of low-cost and market-rate housing. Such a mix provides an additional revenue stream to continue building affordable housing. Instead, with 1B, every resident must be eligible for publicly funded rent subsidies. As a result, it does not provide a consistent revenue stream to keep its plan operational, produces less housing over a shorter time, and has no plan to continue operating.

If the public wants a long-term approach to providing more affordable housing in Seattle through social housing, as other cities are pursuing, Proposition 1B is not the way to go. Proposition 1A is the path, but if passed, it will require local government cooperation to obtain enough funding and public accountability to succeed in a major city’s housing market. 

Two cities demonstrate how Social Housing can successfully work with government support. 

Toronto’s TCHC started over 20 years ago and has developed over stages. It’s now the second-largest housing provider in North America, with over 58,000 units across 2,100 buildings and approximately 105,000 residents. 

Most of its funding is from resident rent payments and subsidies directly from the City of Toronto. However, 89% of its tenants pay rent geared to income, with their median income at 28% of Toronto’s AMI, as of 2016 data. The balance of tenants pay market rent or affordable rent rates. Applicants are placed on a centralized waiting list and selected based on their income and housing needs. 

TCHC is a municipally owned corporation with independent corporate status as a non-profit. It is managed by a 12-member board appointed by the City Council. The board comprises nine public members: two tenants and three City Council members, one of whom can be the mayor. The board supervises the management of TCHC’s business and affairs. 

Montgomery County’s Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) was formed in 1974. It is a quasi-governmental organization similar to Toronto’s public developer of social housing. The HOC is also designated Montgomery County’s Public Housing Authority and Housing Finance Agency, enabling it to finance construction through essential purpose bonds and State and County subsidies.

The county executive, with the concurrence of the county council, appoints the seven volunteer commissioners and its president/executive director, who conducts daily operations. 

In the last forty years, it has developed and owns a controlling interest in new mixed-income housing where 20-50 percent of the residents are low- or moderate-income households. Critical government support has augmented HOC’s outreach by passing a landmark law requiring developers to set aside about 15 percent of the units in all new housing projects for households making less than two-thirds of the area’s median income.

HOC established the Housing Production Fund (HPF) in 2021 to fund mixed-income social housing. They partnered with a for-profit developer to build their first social housing project, The Laureate, a 268-unit apartment building with mixed-income housing. Rents from people in higher income brackets help to contribute to the costs of poorer tenants.

Although these two social housing programs are not perfect, they still produce more affordable housing for low and middle-income households than other cities. 

Most importantly, they retain ownership or management over their buildings and keep them off the market to keep them permanently affordable. This practice decommodifies housing units, i.e., not making them an unaffordable commodity.

Could Seattle and other cities eventually have similar success?

The Atlanta and Chicago governments initiated and committed funding for their social housing programs, which are directly tied to the city government. San Francisco and Los Angeles went outside the city government by passing initiatives with margins of over 56% to fund social housing. Funding was provided by increasing the real estate tax on high-valued transfers, with more than 90% of transfers, like home sales, not subject to the levy.  

The initiative’s voter response shows that residents will support making affordable housing available if an additional tax is levied on those most capable of paying it, e.g., high-income people or businesses. This push comes from renters and small homeowners who need affordable housing near their jobs. Often, these are public employees like schoolteachers and social service providers.  

Renters may comprise most voters demanding social housing, considering the percentages of residents who live in these cities: 65% in San Francisco, 55% in Seattle, and 54% in Los Angeles.

Sixty percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-controlled units, where rent increases are limited. However, 17,565 low-income renter households must earn 3.8 times the City’s minimum wage to pay the city’s average monthly rental rate.

In Seattle, 41% of renter households have incomes at or below 50% of the annual median income (AMI). However, less than two-thirds of rentals are affordable and available to them.

Los Angeles has 494,446 low-income renters looking for apartments. They must earn 2.9 times the LA minimum wage to afford the average monthly rent.

Private investors dominate housing production.

Although Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles have new social housing entities, they have yet to build or acquire a building. It takes time.

Advocates and providers of social housing are playing the long game and preparing the public to understand that producing social housing depends on intermediate steps, not overnight miracles. They face the reality that private investment forces, not government policies or financing, shape the housing market. 

Seattle is a perfect example of how private investors dominate housing production. In the first 10 months of 2024, the market produced 12,730 new housing units. Over the past decade, the average increase has been over 6,000. In comparison, only 600 units would be expected to be produced yearly by SSHD and the seven-year Seattle Housing Levy.

Here’s how the numbers work out. Using a low-ball estimate of $250,000 to create each new affordable unit, SSHD can produce 200 with its $50 million; another 400 would be provided by the Housing Levy property tax, which provides $100 million a year. 

Seattle has added approximately 200,000 new residents in the last twenty years, and the growth will continue. King County projects that Seattle will need 5,600 new homes annually over the next twenty years. This leaves private investors with the task of filling the need to create 5,000 affordable homes annually that are not covered by social housing. However, the market incentives for producing that number are not there. 

Consequently, future years will present challenges for working families looking to live in Seattle, as they do in other cities. By 2044, 44,000 people making less than 30% of the area’s median income (AMI) will need housing. If the percentage increased to 100% of AMI, the need for more affordable housing units would likely double.  

This exercise shows that the demand for affordable housing is enormous. It drains the resources of any government entity, and investors will not provide it because they can make more money from higher-end homes.

Until a national party is willing to stop the concentration of wealth that rules the marketplace, the best any city government can do is support social housing programs. SSHD’s additional 200 affordable units produced annually would help address the demand for affordable housing. 

The public will benefit if the local government helps the production of social housing through its legislative powers and funding authority. City residents would then have a financially secure and publicly accountable social housing developer.

Accountability is critical to maintaining popular and institutional support.

San Francisco and Los Angeles have a dedicated but limited funding stream for social housing. However, they can tap general obligation or dedicated housing-fund bonds for low-cost construction. In that case, they can use that revenue to operate and maintain their housing while paying interest on the bonds.  Meanwhile, Chicago and Atlanta have funds from public bonds to provide low-cost construction loans but have no independent tax dedicated to social housing.

Toronto and Montgomery demonstrate how working with local governments can expand secure funding for operations and new production. Seattle and other cities should collaborate with them and each other to form a network of mutual support. A shared strategy for accessing public resources must be developed to provide permanent, affordable housing for working families.

The key to obtaining broader public support for a social housing developer is involving the existing government bodies, such as the city council or housing authority, in helping to manage their projects. Working with those institutions establishes a level of accountability that engenders public support for future funding of developers that do not create housing units treated as a commodity on the market. 

The cities’ social housing developers mentioned have institutional links except Seattle’s. All have some resident participation on their boards or oversight committees. However, Seattle is the only one with most board members selected by social housing residents and no institutional representation on its board. 

Should Seattle’s Proposition 1A pass this February, SSHD’s board and new executive director need a long-range plan to secure and maintain public support. Including institutional representatives on its board is critical in obtaining public support. 

In turn, the city council and mayor must recognize the public’s demand for creating SSHD to generate social housing. The city government needs to work with SSHD without shifting money away from emergency shelters for people without housing. 

Framing social housing as competing with emergency shelters for limited funds is a zero-sum game. That approach will weaken both efforts when each needs to be addressed.  Portland has aggressively worked to provide adequate emergency shelters, and Seattle can learn from their approach. However, it does not eliminate the need for more affordable housing.

Passing Proposition 1A is not the only solution; however, as in other cities, it begins a new chapter. 

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Is the Republican Party now the Working-Class Party?

Conservatives claim that Donald Trump’s electoral victories show that his Republican Party, not the Democrats, now represent the working class.  

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Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted on election night 2020, “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.”  Although unions only represent 10% of the working-class labor force, since 1980, Democrats have not dipped below 51%. However, as the data below shows, most working-class Whites have become Republican voters.

Using Vanderbilt data, most White working-class voters voted for Republican presidential candidates in seven of the last 11 elections, from 1980 through 2020.  Since Bill Clinton’s elections, only Obama’s first race has a Democrat won the majority of White working-class voters. However, Obama dramatically lost their support in his second election, with 57% of them going to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 

Who are the working-class folks?

Like most surveys, the 2021 report defines the working class as people without a college degree. However, it added that they also belong to the bottom half of the household income distribution. This eliminates those who don’t finish college but still go on to earn high salaries, like Bill Gates. I’ve used Vanderbilt’s definition where possible but note when data is based only on education level.

The Vanderbilt Project’s Political Science Professors Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes found that among GOP voters, working-class Whites (using their definition) have remained at the 31% percentage level the Republicans achieved in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against Obama. 

Have they become Republicans?

Lupu and Carnes take solace in saying, “Trump’s term in office stalled a long-term trend of White working-class voters moving to the Republican Party.” However, they did measure the proportion of those who voted Republican in past elections, which provides a less optimistic trend. White working-class voters’ proportion going for a Republican president reached new heights with Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. 

Before Trump’s 2016 campaign, the proportion voting for a Republican peaked at 57% when Obama ran for reelection in 2012. Trump raised it to 62% in 2016, which remained high at 59% when he lost in 2020. Lupu and Carnes have not posted any data analysis on the 2024 election.

However, an exit poll by TRT World of the 2024 election was available. It defined working-class voters as those without college degrees. In 2024, 42 % voted for Kamala Harris, while Trump took 56%, marking a six-point increase over his 2020 election against Biden. 

According to Pew Research, White working-class voters, defined solely by not having a college degree, comprise 41% of all eligible voters. College-educated White adults make up just 24%. Traditionally, they tipped Republican, but in the past four elections, they have favored Democratic candidates, but not as enthusiastically as the White working-class workers favoring Republicans. 

Men are the core of Republican White working-class supporters. That began with Ron Reagan’s campaigns. Washington Post reported that an exit polling by ABC News found that Reagan won 54% of the votes of White males earning less than $5,000 (working class) and 57% of those earning $5,000 to $10,000 (middle class). 

Trump repeated that pattern in 2024 by receiving 56% of White males with no college degree and 51% earning less than $100,000, which includes more middle-class workers. 

In brief, the majority of White working-class voters have drifted to Republicans over the past forty years. Unless Democrats recapture a chunk of these voters, they could lose future elections because there are more White non-college degree -class voters than college-educated White voters.  

Do White working-class voters turn away from the Democrats because of cultural or economic concerns? 

The pro-Democratic public opinion research center Blueprint. Their study posted on X found that the third-most cited reason voters in swing states had turned away from Harris was because “she focused more on cultural and social issues, like transgender rights, rather than helping the working class.”

A 2012 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) defined White Americans without a four-year college degree who hold non-salaried jobs as working class. These Americans make up roughly one-third (36%) of all Americans. 

The survey showed that White working-class voters are more culturally conservative than White middle-class voters, being 150% more likely to identify as evangelical Protestants. Overall, Romney also enjoyed a 2-to-1 advantage over Obama among Protestant voters. White working-class voters stood out by 70% believing that God has granted America a special place in human history versus only 42% of college-educated White voters. 

Despite this religious orientation, in 2012, their positions appeared to be much more liberal than they are assumed to be today. Only half (50%) of the White working class were opposed to allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. By that same percentage, they said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 

More importantly, the survey found that “only 1-in-20 White working-class Americans say that either abortion (3%) or same-sex marriage (2%) is the most important issue to their vote. By contrast, a majority (53%) of them say the economy is their most important voting issue. 

The bottom line is that White working-class voters are more concerned with achieving financial security than with solving cultural grievances beyond their community. 

Who do Americans blame for their frail financial security?

Seven in ten (70%) of White working-class voters believe the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy. They also think corporations are getting too many benefits from the government. However, they don’t see corporations as the cause of their financial difficulties; they see politicians as giving them advantages over others.

Trump recognized their anger and turned it against the government, Congress, federal agencies, and courts for being weak and wasteful. Voters who felt that the established Democratic and Republican leaders had done little to improve their lives are willing to give Trump another try.

Democrats tend to assume the White working class’s economic populism is inherently conservative and broadly anti-government. They are partly correct since only 39% of the White working class thinks about the U.S. government as “our” government. Still, only 51% of the White middle class also feel that way.

White working-class Americans are a growing base within the MAGA movement, and they want solutions that meet their expectations. And that 62% favor raising the tax rate on households with incomes over $1 million yearly. This is a policy promoted by the Democratic Party, not the Republican. 

Trump sidesteps the reality of wealth disparity and taxes favoring the rich. He recognizes that polls show over half of Americans believe corporations moving American jobs overseas are very responsible for our current economic distress. His messaging identifies a simple step to quickly solve the financial stress of the working class and middle-class households: promote higher tariffs to keep our factories and businesses open.

Critical economists drag out charts showing that higher tariffs will increase inflation. However, those facts do not puncture Trump’s message because they are abstract, not visual.  Trump’s simple image of more workers in the factory and more sales of American goods and services has an intuitive attraction. Trump is a crude bully, but he is a damn good storyteller. 

But the reality is that all working-class households have seen their annual incomes shrink, while their wealth has stagnated since 2008. This has created more significant concern about their future. Sanders noted that more see themselves as living paycheck by paycheck and perhaps returning to a lower economic status.

Donald Trump resonates as the outsider who wants to return to better days when household incomes have not stagnated. 

People will not remember that Obama increased the median household income by 12% in his second term. However, they will recall feeling better under Trump, probably because their household income had risen by 8.3% and contracted by 1.3% under Biden’s first three years.

 In Biden’s defense, his term began as the Covid pandemic caused businesses to close and lay off workers. Nevertheless, polls show that the public generally felt better during the Trump years than during Biden’s watch. 

Ironically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment declined for all races during Obama’s and Biden’s last term.  With Biden, unemployment rates fell, decreasing for Blacks and Hispanics at 5%, while Whites declined just 3.5%. Trump’s administration, on the other hand, saw unemployment rates increase for minorities by 60% more than for Whites. 

So, what was the result of these trends? The Democratic administration that lowered unemployment lost elections, and Trump, who ruled when unemployment increased, won. Voters do not dwell in a world of data analysis; their lives consist of listening and believing stories.  

Perception shapes reality, not data. As financial security has worsened for all working families under Republican presidents, their support for Republicans has grown. 

Democrats don’t organize around economic issues.

In 2024, 60 percent of American working-class folks were “living paycheck to paycheck,” as Senator Bernie Sanders said. And he could have added that one in five White working-class Americans do not have health insurance.

This data is presented in Democratic campaigns, but it is insufficient to convince the working class that Democrats prioritize solving economic problems over cultural ones. As Sanders points out, Democrats are perceived as ignoring the needs of the working class by not pushing for specific solutions.   

He notes a prime example: When the Democrats controlled the Senate under Biden, they did not even introduce legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour, even though some 20 million people in this country are working for less than that amount. 

Even though Democrats do not control either chamber of Congress, they must highlight the distinction between promoting the nation’s general welfare and narrow financial interests. Consequently, if the Democrats want to represent the working-class voters truly, they should introduce specific legislation in Congress and promote it through coordinated social media campaigns to reach them in every state. 

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata, a five-term Seattle City Council member, is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a network of  1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Nick’s Request: Support Citizenship Politics, Question Authority & Seek Solutions

Dear Citizenship Politics Reader,

I’m encouraging you to be a paid subscriber to Citizenship Politics, where I try to provide reliable information and analyze political developments. In this effort, I ask what social and institutional forces shape our lives. And what, if anything, should we do to steer it in the right direction? 

Your contribution helps me continue to write and expand Citizenship Politics’ reach to new readers. I measure my success primarily by the number of readers rather than revenue. Subscribers entirely support my work; no government, business, or organizational funding is received. 

Monetary support can come as a monthly contribution through Patreon or a One-Time Contribution, which has the option of an Offline Check directly to me or through PayPal.

No matter whether you can afford or care to contribute, please share a piece that you like with others who may appreciate reading it. 

I am also using this email to explain why I write Citizenship Politics, what my work involves, and how I ended up here. 

Why I write CP

I write Citizenship Politics to encourage readers to think of themselves as “citizens” of a democratic republic. I believe being a citizen is more than a legal term; it is defined by respecting the democratic process for creating laws and protecting our right to “pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as stated in our Declaration of Independence. 

Interestingly, an alternative phrase, “life, liberty, and property,” is found in the Declaration of Colonial Rights, a resolution of the First Continental Congress. However, the writers of our final Declaration of Independence went with “the pursuit of happiness,” not “property” or “estate,” the latter of which is found in Jefferson’s first draft. The selection of the final wording strongly implies that happiness is more than possessing property; it is about securing our overall welfare.  

I try to provide reliable information and analyze political developments. In this effort, I ask what social and institutional forces shape our lives. And what, if anything, should we do to steer it in the right direction? 

Rational discussions are necessary to understand, explain, and respond to our republic’s challenges. Consequently, I want an audience that would like to dig deeper into a topic.

With that approach, about two-thirds of my readers are sociology, political science, and communications academics. The rest are journalists from across the spectrum, non-profit workers, Democratic Party members, and those who have been reading my newsletters from the 18 years I served on the Seattle City Council. 

I’ve noticed from reading an extensive array of writers, from right, center, and left views on the internet and in print, that few take a historical or international comparative perspective. I try to include those elements.

A historical perspective creates a context for the challenges we face. Examples of my prior CPs taking that approach are in Extremism of Student Protests Today and in the ’60s and Why did the Parties Switch as Conservative & Liberal?

I compared how other democratic republics struggle with similar problems; I wrote about how voters rejected moderate European governments at the polls in  Surging Immigration has led to right-wing governments

In South America, I showed how the progressive, popular Chilean President Gabriel Boric presented a sweeping and detailed new constitution for a public vote. It was overwhelmingly rejected by 62% of the voters in How could citizens reject a perfectly progressive constitution?

What is my work

Newspapers do not print CPs because it is first released to my subscribers. In addition, they are longer than the average length of an opinion column. The current trend in the plethora of commentaries posted on social media and platforms like Medium and Substack is to push a strong position, which often ignores exploring the complexity of an issue.

Covering a topic requires more space to dig into it, so my pieces have averaged 1,800 words for a total of 42,000 words in 2024, including my last issue, Trump uses 3 Jacksonian Strategies: Define Citizenship, Use the Military, Hire Loyalists.

Consequently, I’m trying to build a community of readers who appreciate reading pieces with a more reflective approach to evaluating our political environment. 

I started writing my original newsletter, Urban Politics, in 1998 during my first term of five on the Seattle City Council.  I renamed it Citizenship Politics a couple of years after I left the council to reflect its broader national coverage. Readership has gone from 1,600 while on the council to over 10,000 in the last two years.  

I only write two pieces monthly because I’m a slow reader, writer, and editor. However, based on the editing suggestions I receive from readers, I could take more time to edit. I review anywhere from a dozen to three dozen articles on a particular topic to see how conflicting opinions are expressed. That effort results in collecting information that no other single piece ties together.  

I also enjoy seeing how assumptions are repeated without being challenged. For instance, it was initially thought that the folks attacking Congress on January 6, 2020, could be easily identified by some common characteristic. However, analyses revealed an unexpected conclusion: The inspired terrorists who invaded the Capitol were your neighbors!

Likewise, Democrat activists have campaigned to eliminate the filibuster as only a reactionary tool, but that isn’t so; Democrats Say Eliminate the Filibuster – but they use it more than the Republicans.

Meanwhile, for decades, Republicans accused the Supreme Court of being too liberal. Nevertheless, Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970

These are just a few examples of why it is necessary to question all authorities, whether government, media, business, or any group that makes assertions. Questioning is not to complain or rant but to open the door for discussing why we should accept something as reliable. By being more accountable, all organizations will grow stronger. 

I believe my open rate shows that I’m succeeding in growing a community of interested readers who want to consider how to sustain our democratic republic through thoughtful citizen participation. Of my 24 issues of CP released in 2024, not one had a unique open rate of less than 50%.  A unique opening is how many individuals opened it; it does not count how many times a CP was opened. 

Only five issues had an open rate below 60%, while eight were above 70%. Readers are engaged. They read and send me their comments, and I try to reply to all of them. 

How did I end up here?

Since I was 10, I’ve been writing newsletters, which was a stretch for me since I was dyslexic and couldn’t read until I was nine. I started with the Astronomers’ Club, and forty-one years later, I was writing Urban Politics and have written three published books.

Throughout this journey, I’ve consistently recognized a connection between culture and politics. I see culture as the waters we swim in. It has many different currents; it has swift currents, stagnant tide pools, and whirlpools that can suck us down. 

I see politics as the boats we occupy that navigate these waters; some are as simple as a raft barely able to hold a family, and others are ocean cruisers that break huge waves and create wakes that reach further than the eye can see. 

We all do what we can to help keep our nation afloat. Among the many needed tasks, I’ve found myself as an observer of the horizon, trying to spot developing storms or the safety of a peaceful bay to keep our boat on course.

On this journey, I’ve commented on cultural gatherings that diverged from mainstream culture. I’ve attended some popular ones (What happened at Woodstock? ) and some unconventional ones ( The Strange Tale of a Paradise Lost ). But all created social currents that affected our society and our politics. 

I hope Citizenship Politics allows us to consider solutions we hadn’t expected to find. For example, I was surprised when I visited a small midwestern college and found that a philosophy class was reading one of my pieces. 

The professor used it to illustrate how to view change in the world. It was a small article that reflected my living experience ( Every Politician Should Live in a Commune). You never know what others will find to introduce a new perspective they have yet to consider. Being open to this opportunity results from a culture that encourages the free exchange of ideas. 

I hope Citizenship Politics serves that purpose for you and prompts you to share it with others. This ends what is probably the longest request you will receive this season to solicit a donation. 

Take care,

Nick

Photo by Dan Lamont, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lamontdan/ Multimedia Producer, Content Consultant, Editor, Visual and Text Journalist 

Trump uses 3 Jacksonian Strategies: Define Citizenship, Use the Military, Hire Loyalists

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Presidents Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump are not just changemakers or disruptors but revolutionaries who campaigned to overthrow the established political apparatus (see The Return of a Demagogic Populist President after 200 Years ).

In their eyes, Jackson and Trump are leading a working-class movement to gain more power by dismantling government institutions. For Jackson, it was eliminating the institution of the National Bank, but Trump goes further; it is eliminating many federal agencies and departments.

As the president-elect Donald Trump selects his new cabinet and advisors, it is evident that he was truthful in promising to destroy what he considers the deep state (see How Trump Would Destroy the Deep State)

If approved by the Senate, Russell T. Vought will return as Trump’s first-term Director of the Office of Management and Budget. After Trump lost the election, Vought shaped Project 2025, a detailed guideline for deconstructing federal government services.

Unlike President Andrew Jackson’s administration, Trump has a consortium of conservative intelligentsia that drafted instructions on where his revolution must go to obtain political power. He will employ three main Jackson strategies to achieve that power: energize his voter base by beating up a weak enemy, use physical force to enforce his objectives, and replace a significant core of government officials more personally loyal to him than any other institution. 

  1. Define who is Non-American, Then Deport Them

Jackson dealt with Native Americans hindering white farmers and frontiersmen from acquiring farmland by forcibly removing nearly 125,000 of them from millions of acres of their cultivated land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida. The federal government forced them to walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian Territory” across the Mississippi River. This march was afterward known as the Trail of Tears.

Trump’s solution to increase wages is not to raise the $7.50 federal minimum wage but instead to promise to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. He argues that they are getting jobs that should go to “real” citizens. This is similar to how Jackson saw that taking Native American homelands would open up now vacant land to farmers and frontier families.  

Both immigrants and Native Americans lived in peaceful communities, but when any one individual among them committed a violent act, the entire community was characterized as evil. This allowed the use of force to remove them as a danger to U.S. citizens.

2. Use the U.S. Military to enforce Executive Decisions.

Jackson did not illegally use the military domestically, but he did use it with the acquiescence of Congress. Trump is depending on this response from Congress.

When South Carolina would not enforce federal tariffs, Jackson had Congress approve his use of the army to enforce the law with the state. South Carolina avoided bloodshed and relented. 

Most famously, Jackson had the military forcibly remove Native American tribes from their lands in the southeastern United States. It was a legal action since Congress passed the Force Bill authorizing military action, which initiated a decade of a “Trail of Tears.”

Trump will follow the same strategy. He will threaten and then obtain Congressional approval to engage the military in domestic efforts. He will avoid confrontations with the military command as long as his defense secretary can keep them in line. 

Given that Trump controls the Republican Party and they control both houses of Congress, Congress would likely approve his deployment of the army.  However, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution requires that federal intervention to address domestic violence in a state decision since using federal troops domestically must come at the request of the state legislature or governor. This restriction could prevent Trump from using the military in the Blue States, where Democratic governors and legislatures rule.

Nevertheless, Trump could ignore American tradition and democratic norms to override a state’s objections by defining a situation as an extreme circumstance. This approach allows him to declare a national emergency without a congressional vote and deploy troops in a state without their request. Although Congress could end it with a veto-proof majority vote, that likelihood is narrow if the Republicans support their Republican president.

Trump’s first effort to deport millions of immigrants could require soldiers to either work with state or local police or directly in apprehending illegal immigrants. Knowing who is an illegal immigrant just by sight could result in stopping U.S. citizens to ask them for their papers showing they are not illegal immigrants. 

I could see a MAGA Republican Party pushing for a national I.D. card issued to all legal citizens to carry with them to avoid being needlessly stopped by the authorities looking for illegal citizens. Congress may also see some Republican Party in-fighting if it pushes for government budget cuts while expanding government oversight of a citizen’s movements by requiring a national identification card. 

3. Appoint Federal Jobs Based on Party Loyalty, Not Qualifications

Both Jackson and Trump campaigned to reduce the size of government by firing federal employees. However, they framed their efforts differently.  

Jackson created the “spoils system” of government patronage, which instilled discipline within party ranks by appointing supporters to fill jobs. He called it a practice of instituting a “rotation in office” philosophy. Removing governmental officials would be a democratic reform preventing nepotism. In that manner, he removed about 10 percent of all government postings. 

Similarly, Trump appointed fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run a Department of Government Efficiency to carry out “large-scale firings.” Creating an advisory body but calling it a department exalts its influence and puts it under the direct control of the Executive Office, not subject to Congressional meddling.  

Musk and Ramaswamy have called for ending remote work for federal employees, which could result in 10% of the federal workforce being pushed out of service. These workers currently hold remote positions and are expected to work in person only occasionally.

As outlined by Project 2025, Trump will appoint MAGA loyalists to newly opened federal positions. This is a new spoils system of creating patronage within a civil service designed to stop politicians from filling federal jobs based on their loyalty to the candidate.

Americans enter the Trump Revolutionary Era 

Trump is appointing MAGA loyalists committed to tearing down the established federal departments that promote the principles of equality and justice, which his supporters consider the liberals’ “woke” culture. But rather than overturning our federal institutions as a cultural objective, Trump and his conservative intellects describe their effort as freeing the nation from the grips of independent federal agencies who have taken away our freedoms.  

And what do those agencies do that is so horrible? They regulate the largest corporations in the world. According to these intellects, our economy will prosper by freeing them from the government’s egregious regulations. These regulations stop pollutants from being dumped into our rivers and streams, test our agricultural products for bacteria infections, stop the production of defective transportation equipment, and so on. 

Trump’s appointed agency directors may not know how to manage huge departments, but they are committed to a philosophy that frees capital investments from restrictions regardless of their environmental or health impact. 

President Trump can execute his agenda since his supporters control Congress and the Supreme Court. His ability to alter government far exceeds Jackson’s attempts because Jackson’s administration did not control the other two government branches.

The more one party dominates all three branches, the greater the concentration of political power and wealth that benefits that party’s followers, not the nation. The public will not be aware of this imbalance, as the effects of reducing regulations will take time to impact our health and safety. 

Meanwhile, the media has become more concentrated as well.  Over the past two decades, fewer companies have controlled TV, radio, and social media outlets with the largest audiences. They have reduced funding for in-depth investigative reporting as that function is not a profit center. Instead, they provide a diet of presenting singular atrocities that unveil an anguished victim’s face and a distinct group as the perpetrator. It’s a story of good guys and bad guys.

In this new revolutionary era, media coverage will be lacking or distorted. That happens in revolutionary times and significantly when democratic and locally controlled institutions are compromised or, if not eliminated. Consequently, party loyalty identifies what is the truth for public consumption. Those in power become the judges, and those that oppose them are the criminals. 

In these times, citizens must question authority and demand answers. To remain silent is to be a sleeping lamb, unconcerned about its fate. 

If you like reading Citizenship Politics, become a Patreon patron or directly contribute to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials, and a five-term Seattle City Council member.

The Return of a Demagogic Populist President after 200 Years

This year, our nation experienced the mobilization of the lowest economic class against the establishment controlled by the elites for the second time. It’s not a Marxist revolution or a fascist coup; it’s a significant portion of American voters uprising to overthrow the established order. 

This bare majority may not endure, but a visible eruption has abandoned the liberal normality of prioritizing rational thought and humane behavior. But it is not a foreign-inspired movement. It is a domestic insurrection born from our political culture dating back to the 1800s.

Many voters probably saw the Democrat’s and Liberals’ Presidential campaign as a cry that the sky is falling. It may be, but it won’t be the first time. Two hundred years ago, a prior demagogic populist president was elected, and our democracy survived.  It remains to be how if it will again. 

If you like my piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Demagogic Populists Rise from Outside the Political Parties

Upon winning his first term, President Donald Trump prominently hung a portrait of Jackson behind his desk in the Oval Office. President Andrew Jackson was President Donald Trump’s hero. Trump visions himself as another populist outsider and the scourge of Washington elites. 

Perhaps he would also like his portrait to be seen by 11 billion people, which is the number of $20 bills in circulation stamped with Jackson’s picture – a larger number than the world’s population. 

Donald Trump’s and Andrew Jackson’s political trajectories are eerily similar. Both ran for president three times. Both claimed that the election was unfair when they lost. Both had two different vice presidents and were sympathetic to having their first one hanged. And they both dominated their cabinet, forcing out members who would not execute their commands, preferring to concentrate power in the White House with handpicked advisors. 

More importantly, they projected images that won them the presidency by running against the establishment to defend the common man.  Jackson’s disdain toward the “better classes,” which he said claimed a “more enlightened wisdom” than commoners, can be seen in Trump’s MAGA movement, which disdains “elitists,” like federal scientists who supported shutting schools during the Covid pandemic. 

Yet, both presidents were from the wealthiest 1% of all citizens, with Trump’s wealth far more significant than Jackson’s. However, they considered themselves savvy businessmen who occasionally sustained substantial losses from speculative land and property ventures. 

Trump has Mar-a-Lago as a home that also operates as a recreational club for the elite. Jackson’s thousand-acre Hermitage was his home and was one of the most extensive cotton-growing plantations in his home state of Tennessee, sustained by over 100 enslaved Black people. 

Before becoming president, Trump and Jackson were nationally known among ordinary people but not for their government experience. Trump had none, and Jackson held two short-term appointed positions that lasted less than six months. 

Nevertheless, they had a national persona. After hosting the reality TV show The Apprentice for ten years, Trump gained popularity. It was a clever publicity stunt for Trump, having businesspeople vie for the show’s prize: a one-year $250,000 contract to promote one of his properties. The show’s audience averaged just over 10 million a year, with its 2004 first-season finale drawing 28 million viewers. Trump also appeared on TIME’s cover five times before election day between June 2015 and October 2016.  

Jackson and Trump had a popular base of admirers who wanted them to lead the country. Their supporters did not seek a government manager but a disruptor of a perceived docile government that did not meet their needs. They were angry, and Jackson and Trump magnified their anger and rode it like a general on a warhorse into an electoral battle. 

Jackson achieved fame by getting results even if he had to break the rules. He was the hero who saved New Orleans from the British in the War of 1812. He then declared martial law in the city and arrested a Louisiana legislator for writing a letter in the local paper criticizing his continuation of martial law. 

Two years after the war, as a military general, Jackson tried to seize Spain’s Florida territory, an act that neither Congress nor the president had sanctioned. Subsequently, some in Congress called Jackson a “man on horseback” who wanted to transform the U.S. into a military dictatorship. 

Jackson’s political opponents accused him of steering up discontent among poor farmers and frontiersmen and characterized them as the “mob.” Something akin to when Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton let slip her comment that Trump’s supporters were “deplorable.”  However, Congressional resolutions condemning Jackson’s actions failed, much like Trump’s House impeachments were not sustained in the Senate. 

Trump and Jackson’s Presidential Campaigns overturned existing parties and brought about a new alignment of voters.

Each instigated a new political movement that dislodged the existing dominant political party. Jackson was the critical founder of the Democratic Party and ran as its first presidential candidate. In less than a decade, Trump overhauled the Republican Party into a new MAGA Republican Party loyal to him, not to its entrenched elected leaders. 

Eight years earlier, when he won the presidency in 2016, his first White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, declared that Trump would follow in Jackson’s footsteps. Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter, “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.”

Jackson and Trump created their new parties by appealing to low-propensity voters or new voters. Jackson’s votes came from poor white farmers who gained the right to vote for the first time. Trump beat out the Democratic party by appealing to the economic and safety-security needs of those rarely voting.  

Glenn Young explains in The Winning Words V1 that Jackson’s approach was to begin the most significant voting rights campaign up to that time. While he had the plurality of the votes in 1824’s election, he lost the electoral votes. In 1824, the nation’s population was nearly 11 million. However, only 360,000 votes were recorded, with six states choosing the electors by state legislatures, not the popular vote.

Jackson made sure he would win in 1828. The number of new voters exploded when Jackson called for “universal” suffrage, ending the property requirements that barred small landholding, mainly white farmers, from voting.  

These new voters had an overriding concern to acquire the land that was available for them to exploit once Jackson used the military to force Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi. Jackson’s campaigns honored rural folks while ridiculing big city voters, as later presidential candidates William Jennings Brian and Donald Trump did. 

Similarly, after losing his 2020 election, Trump doubled down on going after “low propensity” voters, which traditional Democratic and Republican party campaigns mostly ignored. 

Consequently, Trump appealed to these voters’ need for greater security from a domestic enemy. They weren’t “Indians” living close to you. They were “illegal immigrants” moving into your neighborhood. It wasn’t land they possessed that you needed, but jobs you should have, not them. Accompanying that economic threat was the physical threat of illegal immigrants being rapists, just as Jackson characterized “Indians” as savage warriors. 

The people have spoken. Our nation is about to experience a second Jacksonian revolution. The next step is to recognize and prepare for its unfolding. 

If you like my piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials, and a five-term Seattle City Council member.

Trump – “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Special Note: Please go to my interview with Brian Callanan of the Seattle Channel on his podcast  Seattle News, Views, and Brews. I describe why Donald Trump won the election and what we can expect from his second presidential term.

Bill Clinton’s strategist, Jim Carville, coined the quip “It’s the economy, stupid!” to explain his successful strategy for winning the 1992 U.S. presidential election against incumbent George H. W.  Although Carville advised Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, he apparently didn’t share that advice with Harris. 

In Harris’s defense, as one pundit explained, any incumbent president, and by extension, the Vice President, would have been blamed for the hammering our economy suffered by Covid’s tailwind.  Inflation was a scourge that hurt Harris as it did for two previous presidents, Ford and Carter, who lost after serving one term due to significant inflation.

Multiple polls before the election ranked the economy as the top issue, and Trump received a higher approval rate for managing the economy than Biden. However, these views were based on perceptions, and the data often didn’t support them. 

For instance, small businesses have grown by over 50% since Trump’s administration. Biden’s regulations on large corporations allowed smaller businesses to survive. This growth was also due to a bi-partisan vote in Congress, which Trump supported, pumping a $2 trillion of economic stimulus legislation in response to COVID. 

Trump claimed credit for the $1,200 stimulus checks that 70 million Americans received. He ordered that “President Donald J. Trump” appear on the payment in an unprecedented requirement. 

In addition, the legislation provided $790 billion in low-interest loans to small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The money saved the economy but triggered inflation, which stretched into Biden’s term in office.

Unfairly and manipulatively, former President Donald Trump accused Harris of creating our economic troubles by allowing a flood of illegal immigrants to cross into our country. In coupling these two trends, Trump linked financial problems with cultural biases, stoking financial and safety insecurities and framing them within a cultural context.

Asylum seekers, some sneaking into the country, were portrayed as foreign strangers invading our nation without any checks on their character. At the over 250 rallies that he held in the last few months of his campaign, Trump called them criminals, rapists, and drug dealers preying on peaceful communities. 

Trump targeted his outreach to low-propensity and first-time voters from all ethnic groups. These potential voters are wage workers most affected by inflationary prices at grocery stores and gas stations. They were likelier to compete with migrants for low-paying service and industry jobs and the most affordable housing. 

Pursuing low-propensity voters, other than youths, is a longshot play since they generally have low interest in elections. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, found that in a recent poll, the national average for interest in this election was 77%. However, it was nearly 10% of Hispanic voters, and 18- to 34-year-old youths were only 52%. 

This was a dangerous sign that the Democrats’ most reliable voting blocks were not motivated to vote for Harris. Trump’s messaging may account for the fact that 66% of Hispanic men saw Trump as better for the economy than 33% of them seeing Harris the same way. 

While Trump was trying to fuse economic concerns with cultural biases, Harris was focused on allowing women access to abortion. However, she didn’t highlight the significant financial burden on families by denying that access. So, she missed connecting economic concerns with the abortion issue. 

Consequently, for all the legitimate concerns about the Republican Party promoting a cultural war over policies, the Democrats appeared to be more concerned about cultural issues, like abortion and gay rights/Trans rights, than inflation. Trump’s campaign took advantage of that orientation. 

They spent over $17 million on 30,000 TV ads replaying Harris’ past talks supporting access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender individuals. Audiences of NFL and college football broadcasts were targeted to reach a predominantly male audience in the swing states. 

Nevertheless, Harris understood that women’s freedom over their bodies was fundamental to women voters. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she did not emphasize running as a woman. Instead, she reached out to women through the abortion issue. 

Before the final votes were tallied, Harris would seem to have some success in a get-out-the-vote strategy that emphasized abortion as the top issue for women. In Pennsylvania, data suggested that early voting included a relatively high proportion of Democratic women who did not vote there in 2020.

If you like my piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Since women make up a larger proportion of the population and historically have voted at higher rates than men, the Brookings Institute ran the numbers. They predicted that if women voted in the same proportion as in 2020, Harris would win Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—enough to win the election. Surprise, all those states went for Trump.

Men supporting Trump from strong Democratic constituencies illustrate how the Trump campaign officials created a “boys vs. girls election.”  Their campaign reinforced the values of adhering to traditional gender roles. Trump’s vice president running mate, J.D. Vance, suggested during interviews that the sexual revolution made it too easy for women to leave bad marriages.

In the final weeks of his campaign, Trump appeared alongside former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who popularized the notion that the country needed Trump to be a “dad” who would deliver a “spanking.” Meanwhile, Trump dumped former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley from the campaign trail. He wasn’t interested in appealing to her independent female voters.

Trump winning the popular vote lends credence that his tactic of peeling off enough Black and Hispanic men, who traditionally vote Democratic, could offset losses among independent women voters. 

We now know that the Republicans’ appeal to men was far more successful than the Democrats’ appeal to women. Here are a few statistics.

Although exit polls found women backed Harris over Trump by a 12-point margin, 55% to 43%, however, the majority of white women (52%) voted for Trump. In comparison, men turned out for Trump by 16 points more than for Harris. And Hispanic men backed Trump over Harris 54% to 44%. 

The Free Press, a conservative medium, noted that the Democrats’ vote share among women actually fell. Harris won 53% of female voters this year, while Biden won 55% in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump increased his percentage of female voters by 3% from the 2020 election. More significantly, Trump’s margin of young male voters leaped by 28%. 

Does Trump’s victory mean we will Make America Great Again by getting women back in the kitchen? I don’t think so. But the Republican Party, despite Trump declaring that he loves women, will now have to deliver a better economic future for women and their daughters. 

Democrats must take the opportunity to introduce specific plans to achieve that goal. They can initiate working with constituents to write new legislation to protect the Obama and Biden administrations’ programs that improved women’s health and welfare. However, this task will be a challenge if Republicans control both chambers.

That challenge must strengthen the party’s resilience in thoughtfully listening to citizens’ needs and systematically addressing them with innovation and persistence, regardless of the hurdles they face. 

If you like my piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials, and a five-term Seattle City Council member.

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Trump’s Playbook to Win Regardless of Election Night Results

Should Donald Trump lose the initial and final vote tally, he still has a game plan to win the election and has set it in motion. 

Election deniers (defined by USA Today as those who have publicly denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election) are positioned as election officials to scan the ballots to challenge their validity.  

If Donald Trump loses to Kamala Harris, the election denier’s objections will become material for lawyers filing lawsuits to challenge state or county results. Judges on various levels, including the Supreme Court, can toss the decision of who the next president is to the state legislature or directly to the House of Representatives. 

Election night results put the plan in motion. 

Multiple polls show that the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is too close to call. However, after the initial votes are released, Trump will likely again ignore the results if he loses. 

I will not explore how he will respond or what actions he could take if he wins; that is a different problem. I also am not addressing the issue of intentional violence to overturn the results, as happened with the mob attacking Congress in 2021. Instead, I’m examining how Trump can legally play the political system

Trump’s election-night statements will dominate the media and the public’s minds more than Harris’s because his personality (see Trump’s Personality Will Deliver a Perilous Second Term—for Everyone) makes a sport of breaking the norms of presidential conduct. 

Trump and his Vice President candidate partner, J.D. Vance, have already gone there, refusing to acknowledge that they would concede should Harris win the 2024 election. They condition any concession upon the election being honest and fair. However, Trump has repeatedly said the election will not be fair if he loses.

Most recently, in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump declared at his campaign rally, “They’re going to cheat. It’s the only way they’re going to win. And we can’t let that happen, and we can’t let it happen again.” Throughout our nation’s history, every presidential candidate assisted in transferring presidential authority to the opponent – until Trump refused to accept defeat in 2020. 

The first vote tallies on election night will determine what political disruptions Trump may ignite in the six weeks before December 17, 2024, when the electors meet in their respective states to cast their votes and have them tabulated. 

Swing state election night vote tallies will be incomplete.

All six swing states will report an initial vote count by 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time on the evening of election day. The count will show who is ahead, but in tight races, a winner will not be confirmed until days later, when all legitimate votes are included.

North Carolina election officials estimate that 80 percent of the total vote could be announced right after polls close at 7:30 p.m. However, absentee ballots that arrive as late as Nov. 12 will be counted and could determine the outcome. 

While Georgia polls close at 7 p.m., the secretary of state told WSB-TV, “For the races that are very, very close, we believe that we’ll have them by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.”

Michigan’s secretary of state estimates that it could take until Friday, Nov. 8, for all ballots to be counted and a winner to be declared.

The final count in Pennsylvania, the state with the most electoral votes, will be delayed the longest. Around half of the absentee ballots can’t be processed until two days before the polls close. Since absentee ballots account for the majority of votes, the count will take days for many counties. 

These four swing states have a total of 66 electoral votes. Arizona and Wisconsin, the last two swing states to release their ballots, have a total of 21. The soonest they could confirm the presidential tallies would be Wednesday at the end of the day.

Except for North Carolina, Joe Biden won the other five swing states, which gave him 77 electoral votes, putting him over the top to win the election. The media and the candidates will be razor-focused on the first vote count in these six swing states. The candidate leading in all swing states will likely be our next president. 

This first count will signal if a storm engulfs our election results. 

Suppose Harris leads in all the swing states. In that case, Trump will declare massive fraud and repeat the accusation he made during his Republican National 2020 Convention acceptance speech, “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

If he splits the leads with Harris, it’s a bit trickier for him. Trump doesn’t want to jeopardize losing states he won with a recount. So, he will focus on the swing states he lost. 

Election denier officials are Trump’s Fifth Column. They are ready to save him from defeat by attempting to stop the certification of ballot tallies based on possible fraud. Trump will defend them as patriotic citizens, keeping our country safe from an invasion of illegal immigrant voters. 

With 69% of Republicans and Republican leaners saying Biden’s win was not legitimate, there is a good chance many of them will be counting and certifying the election results on the county level. Most are not occupying elected positions; they may be appointed or, most likely, be volunteers. Naturally, they are prepared to see a 2024 Trump election loss as a repeat of 2020’s “corrupt” process.  

They can object to validating votes that they consider to be illegally cast for any number of reasons. But let’s be clear: election deniers are working within the legal process until they break explicit regulations or violate constitutional rights defined by the courts.

In a war analogy, they are Trump’s foot soldiers. But to be successful, they need heavy arterial cover. And that is expensive and highly technical power. In the political world, it’s the law firms. 

The handoff from election-line workers to lawyers. 

Trump’s playbook moves to winning the election through his law firms defending the election-denier officials questioning the validity or just tossing out ballots. Their objective was made very reachable in 2024. 

That’s because the Republican-controlled state legislatures in the swing states established voting procedures that are easy to accidentally violate because of their specificity in the ballot instructions for the vote to be validated.  Those errors will be the most straightforward targets for lawsuits. 

According to Reuters, in the last presidential election, Trump unleashed a barrage of over 50 lawsuits alleging election fraud and other irregularities, claiming that he lost due to massive fraud. 

This year, the Republican National Committee has already filed over a hundred pre-election lawsuits. The Trump campaign will continue with a legal onslaught to eliminate ballots where errors are found, betting that more Democratic than Republican votes will be tossed out.  

By going to the courts, Trump hopes to overturn the final vote tallies in states that he lost. 

The best protection for receiving honest election results rests with nonpartisan judges who follow the letter of the law. However, all laws are subject to interpretation. Trump appointed many federal judges because they were members of the Federalist Society (see What is the Federalist Society and what does it want from our courts?).

State courts are not part of the federal system and, therefore, are not appointed by the president. While the Federalist Society has supported the election of its members or sympathizers to elected judicial seats, most state judges lean either conservative or liberal. At this time, few are committed to a particular political dogma and will follow the law’s letter.

The non-profit Brennan Center concluded that voter certification is not a discretionary act. Unless state judges use some of the Federalist Society’s questionable theories, they will rule, as they have always done, that election officials are legally obligated to count all the votes. This is how the state judges in Arizona and Georgia ruled.

Georgia state Judge Robert McBurney ruled, just three weeks before this November’s election, that county election officials “have a mandatory fixed obligation” to count all votes despite any perceived fraud.  They can bring their concerns to the appropriate district attorney, who will determine the course of future actions.

In 2022, Arizona county officials broke tradition and voted against certifying the election results based on vague doubts about voting machines. A state judge subsequently ordered them to certify. A year before, Trump unsuccessfully lobbied the Detroit County election board members to reject votes based on his claims that the election was stolen from him. 

As a proactive protective procedure, the Brennan Center published a series of state-by-state guides laying out the legal protections for election certification in each battleground state and the process to ensure that officials carry out that duty.

Trump’s law firms don’t need to win their lawsuits; they only need the court to kick the final decision over to the state legislature.

During the 2020 presidential election, conservative politicians and justices argued that the

independent state legislature” theory (ISL) would allow the state legislature to nullify popular votes and assign electors to the losing candidate in an election. It was never attempted in 2020. Afterward, the theory was rejected by North Carolina’s Supreme Court state’s high court. 

When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved, it also rejected the ISL theory in the Moore v. Harper decision by a 6 to 3 vote. With that decision, many liberals have assumed that Trump’s lawsuits would be worthless even if the election results were referred to the state legislatures.

However, like many SCOTUS rulings, Moore v. Harper allows the losing party to take a second bite at the apple. In this instance, conservative Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh cautioned that the courts must remain within “the ordinary bounds of judicial review” when overruling state legislature decisions regarding federal laws.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas insightfully observed that federal dockets will “swell” with state constitutional claims. He noted that SCOTUS did not define the “ordinary bounds” threshold for upholding courts’ rulings. 

That slim opening is all that Trump’s lawyers need to win in court. If they get a favorable ruling, the state legislature will decide who receives that state’s electoral votes. This could give Trump enough electoral votes to win the election.  

State Legislatures may have enough election-deniers to swing the electoral votes to Trump. 

Election deniers represent a third of the Arizona legislature and nearly half of the Pennsylvania Senate. In Georgia, Republicans control both chambers. In the House, an election denier is a committee chair, and in the Senate, four election deniers hold party leadership roles, and three are committee vice-chairs in election-related committees.

Although election deniers represent a smaller share in the other swing states, they hold leadership positions or are on committees that can introduce, suppress, or kill election-related legislation.

The Constitution requires the House of Representatives to select the winner if the various lawsuits result in a tie in electoral votes or an unresolved conflict in assigning them. Each state has just one vote, and the District of Columbia has no vote since it is not a state. 

As of 2020, Republicans control 26 delegations, and Democrats control 23, with one tie (Pennsylvania). The last time the House chose a president was 200 years ago. In 1824, they chose John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson even though Jackson originally received more popular and electoral votes. History could repeat itself.

If you like my piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials. And was a five-term Seattle City Councilmember.

A note from Nick:

Once a month, Citizenship Politics will post a guest essay, book review, or author interview, encouraging us to consider what it means to be a citizen of a democracy. 

To kick off this effort, I’ve chosen an interview by Robin Lindley of Professor Chad L. Williams’s book The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War.

Williams covers an unpublished book by the legendary American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in defense of the service of African Americans in the war—originally intended to celebrate their exploits and acceptance as equal citizens. However, this expectation was crushed when he unearthed a painful record of racist hate, military injustice, gruesome assaults and murders, and belittling of Black military contributions during the war.

Lindley allows Williams to dig deep into this story, describing the intellectual journey that W. E. B. Du Bois took in writing his book. Readers will find The Wounded World very enlightening in recognizing that reality may not match our ideals of what it should be. 

Read the entire interview on my Substack webpage https://nlicata.substack.com/p/citizenship-politics-presents-a-guest

Harris Can Stop Losing the Senior Vote to Trump

Harris is losing senior voters to Trump by not presenting crisp, short points that can be easily understood, such as addressing their concerns that Social Security Income (SSI) benefits are too meager and may not continue. 

For instance, regarding the social security issue, Trump is precise about what he will do for seniors.

On the X media platform, Trump wrote: “To help seniors on fixed incomes who are suffering the ravages of Comrade Kamala Harris’ inflation nightmare — I’m promising NO TAX on SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS!” On his campaign website, he adds that there will be no cuts to Medicare or changes to the retirement age for receiving SSI benefits. 

These promises translate quickly into dollar amounts. A senior can easily think, “I’ll be paying less taxes, and I won’t have to work longer to receive SSI.” 

In comparison, Harris makes two sweeping aspirational generalizations that do not draw a line in the sand and say, “This is where I stand on this issue.”

On her campaign website, she has two statements. She will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and his extreme allies. She will strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the long haul by making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.

Harris’s language appeals to Democrats. They want somebody to fight Trump. Someone who will call out how he is attacking SSI and helping billionaires. But for those not steeped in political party identification, it sounds like vague promises. 

Independent-minded seniors may not assume that Trump is out to threaten SSI or that if billionaires pay more taxes, seniors will directly benefit. Harris’s statements do not convert into daily pocketbook concerns that will impact their future.

And seniors are very concerned about their future. With just a decade until retirement, 55-year-old Americans have less than $50K in median retirement savings. One-third have already postponed retirement due to persistent inflation because they are the first modern generation without defined benefit pensions or full societal security benefits.

The senior constituency overlayed on the most crucial swing states in this election shows that four of the critical seven swing states are in the top ten states with over a million people aged 65 and older: Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, the latter with about two-and-a-half million. 

Every one of their votes is critical to Harris. According to a New AARP Poll, Trump has a 2% lead over Harris in this age group in the crucial state of Michigan. That may also be true in the other swing states since exit polls of the 2020 presidential election showed that Trump got three percent more of the senior vote than Biden.

Seniors are very motivated voters. Eighty-eight percent of voters ages 50 and older say they are “extremely motivated” to cast a ballot in November. Democrats have garnered younger voters’ support, with Harris holding a 31-point lead over Trump among likely voters ages 18 to 29. However, seniors are 12 points higher than voters ages 18-49 in being “extremely motivated” to cast a ballot.

They are motivated because the future stability of SSI benefits and Medicare costs is the major economic issue for seniors. They need the security of knowing a predictable retirement budget will allow them to stop working before their health fails.

Compounding the danger of Democrats ignoring potential senior voters is that they are the largest voting group. Democrats should be proud that Harris has won over a significant percentage of the younger voters. Nevertheless, there are many more older voters than the younger ones. KFF, a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, calculated thatin the November 2022 congressional races, voters aged 18 and 45 accounted for 41 million, and those older than 45 accounted for 81 million. 

How Harris Should Increase Senior Support

It’s not too late for Harris’s campaign to make a hard drive to reach seniors, particularly white male seniors who are one of Trump’s key voter bases. 

First, her campaign needs a message that Harris would eliminate taxes on SSI benefits. This nullifies Trump’s pitch. It doesn’t matter if he complains that she is stealing his program. Her response should be, “I accept all good ideas, no matter what side of the aisle they come from.” 

Just as important is her follow-up knockout punch line, “But I’ll make it work, and not endanger SSI, because Trump has no plan for saving SSI. He pitches a great-sounding promise, but without doing the hard work of developing a plan, he will cut future funding for all senior’s SSI benefits.”

That is not an empty Democratic swipe at Trump. The only piece of Republican legislation that represents Trump’s promised plan is H.R.9359 – which amends the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the inclusion of Social Security benefits in gross income. 

It’s all 20 lines long and does not mention how to fill the hole in SSI revenue or the estimated increase in the federal deficit by $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion through 2035 due to Trump’s proposed law. The nonpartisan public policy organization Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that this law would increase Social Security’s 75-year shortfall by 25% without an infusion of revenue to replace lost taxes. 

Trump’s law will cut future benefits because SSI trust funds are already expected to run dry in 1935 since Social Security is already paying more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes.Unless Congress acts sooner, beneficiaries could see an across-the-board 17% benefit cut. Trump will dig the SSI debt hole deeper. 

Despite these significant adverse impacts, most voters will never know about them; instead, they will hear Trump say he will eliminate taxes on their SSI benefits. 

Harris must tear about this narrative. She must be loud and brief. She must unequivocally say that she will introduce legislation to eliminate the tax on SSI benefits. And the Ds have already introduced bills in Congress to do that and much more. 

U.S. Representative Angie Craig has a bill, You Earned It, You Keep It Act, which would eliminate all federal taxes on Social Security benefits beginning next year. The bill would be paid for by raising the Social Security payroll tax cap for higher-earning Americans, so more Americans would continue paying into Social Security.

According to an analysis of the Office of Chief Actuary of Social Security Rep. Craig’s bill, it would allow the Social Security Administration to continue making all payments on time and in full through 2054 – 20 years longer than the current projection of 2034. It would also reduce the federal debt by $8.9 trillion over 75 years.

Last year, Democratic Representative John Larson introduced H.R.4583 – Social Security 2100 Act. Among a dozen improvements to SSI, it increases benefits by 2% across the board for all Social Security beneficiaries for the first time in 52 years. And, unlike Trump’s pithy SSI plan, it extends the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. It does so by FICA being applied to earnings above $400,000, with those extra earnings counted toward benefits at a reduced rate.

Neither Biden nor Harris has publicly endorsed Craig or Larson’s bills, but their legislation reflects their own statements on improving SSI. Harris must identify them as stepping stones to working with Congress to initiate a bipartisan discussion to pass legislation in her first year as president—legislation that would cut SSI taxes, increase SSI benefits, and ensure that SSI does not collapse due to insolvency. 

Seniors on SSI or older Americans approaching retirement need to receive this clear and strong message from Harris for her to be our next president. 

If you like it, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

How Are Biden and Harris Endangering Trump’s Safety?

Former President Donald Trump blames Vice President Kamala Harris for the assassination attempt on himHe told Fox News Digital that the would-be assign had “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.”

What did the potential assassin believe that the Democrats had said? 

Harris posted on X, Sept 9, she said, “Take it from the people who worked for him: Donald Trump is a danger to our troops, our security, and our democracy.”  Is Trump saying those former employees are threatening him? Or should Harris not have made those beliefs public? 

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin went public with her views. She told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “that one of the biggest offenders of escalatory rhetoric is Donald Trump and JD Vance. And by the way, it does put people at risk.”

Focusing specifically on Harris, calling her Comrade Kamala on X, Trump said she had 

“taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.” At their televised debate, he said that bullets were fired at him “because of the things that they say about me.” According to Trump, for her to say that he endangers our democracy is “Communist Left Rhetoric.” 

Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, talking at a convocation of the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition, said that we can’t say that a candidate is a fascist and that “if he is elected, it’s going to be the end of American democracy.” 

Apparently, Vance did think that way about Trump. In 2016, Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message to one of his former roommates while Trump was running for president. But that wasn’t a public statement, or he might not have been picked as Trump’s Vice President candidate this year.  

In his talk, Vance most likely was referring to President Joe Biden telling an audience in August 2022, “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Saying that one’s philosophy “is like semi-fascism” is not as incendiary as when, 11 days before Vance’s speech,  Trump on C-Span said, “Kamala Harris is the first major party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism.” 

Like any citizen, Trump has the freedom of speech to say anything he wants. He can freely accuse his opponents of being anything across the political spectrum from communist to fascist. He can label anyone he wishes as the enemy of the nation. That is how free speech works. 

Accordingly, it is not unlawful for Trump to break with our democratic norms by seeing his opponents not as differing in policies that shape legislation but as existential threats to our nation. Trump said during a Fox News interview on September 16, “They are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out . . . It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”

On his Truth Social platform, he reposted messages to his 7 million followers calling for his political opponents to be jailed and for some, like former President Barack Obama, to face “public military tribunals.”  

Given Trump’s blustering style, he may not believe what he’s saying. However, Trump’s maliciously calling other public figures enemies of our country could incite his supporters to do something, like invading Congress and calling to lynch his vice president. The problem with vilifying your opponent is that once you start the hate ball rolling down the hill, it’s hard to stop it from morphing into violence.  

He kicked that ball on January 6 by igniting tens of thousands, telling them to fight Congress from accepting the electoral college results that showed Joe Biden winning by a fraudulent vote. Trump sees the insurgents as the ones protecting America’s freedom, and he has since called them “patriots.”  

Two hundred and ten of those patriots, charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection, argued to the federal judges that they considered Trump, their leader and believed they were following his lead by joining the insurrection. They purposefully tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, which needs to occur every four years to sustain our democratic republic. 

Most citizens would consider this peaceful transition of power critical to our democracy. By extension, someone who rewards those who try to overthrow the democratic process by stopping it would be considered dangerous. 

This was precisely the attitude of Venezuela’s past President, Hugo Chávez, when he thanked those who had tried to overthrow their democracy before he became president. He didn’t want to leave office and manipulated government and media outlets to sustain his presidency. 

Trump’s belief that he is still the legitimate president sounds familiar to Nicolas Mudaro, who took control of the government after Chavez died. Mudaro uses his executive authority to stay in office and deny his opponents fair access to the media and the voting booths. 

Trump is not pursuing those objectives through edicts or direct intervention. However, he can rely on Supreme Court rulings to extend his executive powers and give him greater influence over the previously independent federal agencies like the Department of Justice, which has objected to voter-suppression state rules. 

Trump found the DOJ to be less compliant than he wished. Russell T. Vought, who headed Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, boasted that it would no longer be an obstruction in Trump’s second administration: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Recent SCOTUS rulings promote the unitary executive theory, which legal experts describe as “an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House.” 

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4  in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, that under the Vesting Clause of Article II, “the entire ‘executive Power’ belongs to the President alone.” Consequently, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him unlimited powers. 

Furthermore, in alignment with this theory, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling on Trump v. United States by the six conservative justices gave the president even more power. Their decision would make it difficult to legally challenge presidents requiring independent executive agencies to be personally loyal to them.

The SCOTUS rulings tilt the balance toward the presidency over Congress, which all presidents would find attractive.  For instance, Barack Obama campaigned loudly against the theory but embraced some aspects after the 2010 midterm elections.

In a sense, Trump’s accusations that Democrats are a danger to democracy would carry some weight if they were making the same threats that he makes to his enemies in the government. Any president will now have more court decisions to back up their decisions that bend the norms of democratic decision-making.

Trump, not Biden, has a record of promoting conspiracy theories that create a fear of the “other” who are out to destroy our nation. By selecting the loyal Attorney General to head up the DOJ, Trump can investigate any number of conspiracies. 

He directed his former AG, Bill Barr, to discover how the election had been stolen from him. Barr dutifully investigated and then informed Trump there was no conspiracy – indeed, he lost the election. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Donald Trump “knew well he lost the election.” To this day, Trump claims he won. 

If elected president, Trump will continue to believe he has enemies he needs to expose and punish. In his next term, he will have more legal power to find and punish them. He could tag them as communists or fascists, as he has to date. If so, they would face social, employment, and legal repercussions. Who would dare say that Trump is a danger to democracy?

If you like it, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Two Democracies Voted for Autocratic Rule – Could We?

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You can read this piece on my website, Medium, and Substack, and you can also continue to read below.

If you like it, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Since 2000, two functional democracies have fallen under authoritarian rule. It wasn’t through insurrections but when authoritarian governmental laws accumulated incrementally. 

Is America experiencing that trend? Consider how Venezuela and Hungary’s young democracies fell to an authoritarian populist movement. 

The leaders came from opposite ends of the spectrum. One advocated creating a socialist state, and the other an “illiberal state.”  However, both wanted to tear down the existing political system and never have it return. 

So, they methodically pursued taking control of the government’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches.  Institutions intended to protect a democratic society became tools to concentrate power and capital among a few.

An Atlantic article describes how moving toward authoritarian rule occurs when people are sickened with politics and want someone to fix it. They believe it’s already happening in the U.S. It did materialize in Hungary and Venezuela – here’s how it occurred.  

It Begins with Electing a Charismatic Populist Leader to Eliminate a Corrupt System

From 1989 to 2011, Hungary had an established functioning constitutional democratic government. The same was true in Venezuela from 1958 to 1999. Both had free elections, a representative government, a constitutional court, and a democratic opposition. Governing parties lost elections, and the media aggressively criticized politicians. 

However, Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s President in 1999, and Viktor Orbán became Hungary’s Prime Minister in 2010. Under their administrations, the freedoms described above began to weaken and become merely demonstrative. 

Each experienced a methodical transformation to authoritarianism as a political party effectively controlled the three branches of government. 

Hungary

Orbán became Hungary’s national hero in 1989 by publicly demanding that Soviet armed forces leave their country. That year, a peaceful transition occurred with the Soviet-backed Communist party conceding control to a constitutional democracy, where Orbán served in their National Assembly

Orbán was elected prime minister for the second time in 2010 after losing twice to the Socialist Party.  Two years before, his populist-nationalist party, Fidesz, initiated a referendum approved by more than 80% of the electorate suffering from the worldwide financial crisis of 2008-2009. 

The Fidesz referendum radically addressed their condition by abolishing fees for doctors, hospital visits, and university tuition. Consequently, Fidesz received 53% of the vote in the 2010 general elections, solidly beating the ruling liberal-socialist coalition. 

Since then, Orbán has been Prime Minister, reelected in 2014, 2018, and 2022, and Fidesz has controlled their parliament. During this time, the civil service became easily and legally dismissible, with Fidesz party supporters filling all leading positions in the independent public institutions. This process is part of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project to guide his second presidential term. Mr. Trump’s former budget director led a section dealing with executive orders.

András Bozoki, former president of the Hungarian Political Science Association, writes that Orbán has transformed Fidesz from a democratic to a highly hierarchical, centralized party controlled exclusively by him. He describes Orbán squeezing his critics out of Fidesz, which is what former President Donald Trump has done with his critics within the Republican Party, calling them RINOs, standing for Republicans In Name Only.

In a major speech during his 2018 reelection campaign, Orbán promised to hold his opponents “morally, politically, and legally accountable.” As a result, retroactive taxation regulations were introduced to punish the personnel of the previous governments, and government-directed campaigns targeted the “criminal elements” within them.

Trump has a similar attitude toward his opponents. Believing that he lost the election due to fraud, he wrote on social media, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”  

Venezuela 

Hugo Chávez, a former paratrooper who led a failed coup attempt in 1992, was elected president of Venezuela with 55% of the vote in 1998. He swept to power with a 16% margin, vowing to remake a system led by a corrupt elite. 

Washington Post’s  Foreign Service reported, “His victory reflected the discontent among Venezuela’s poor with the political establishment.” That election ended four decades of domination by the two major parties, assailed for corruption, government mismanagement of the country’s oil wealth, and catering to a small elite.

Chávez said he would be more representative of the people than the Venezuelan Congress and root out government corruption. He also sided with those who attempted two coups against the democratically elected government in 1992, saying:  “With all my heart and all my soul, I send greetings. Boys, it was all worth it . . . for your honor, for your sacrifice, and for the honor of the nation we all love.” This is another similarity with Trump’s behavior, labeling as martyrs and warlike heroes those who physically invaded Congress to top it by peacefully transferring the presidency to Joe Biden.  

The Leader’s Party Gains Absolute Control of The Legislature 

Both countries have unicameral legislative bodies. Hungary has a unicameral National Assembly, with the Prime Minister being the leader of the strongest party to form a ruling coalition. Venezuela has a president who a plurality of votes can elect. There is no prime minister position. 

However, both Orbán and Chávez have found ways to usually obtain a supermajority in the legislative body, which allows them to change the electoral laws, including the constitution, which gives the president ultimate authority to make regulations governing elections.

Orbán and Chávez are not classic dictators because their power derives from the political parties they formed, which most voters, or the plurality, support in elections. So, on paper, both have democratic republics; however, they are ruled by autocrats. 

Hungary

In Orbán’s first year of his second term in 2010, he quickly moved to modify election rules.

With Fidesz having an elected supermajority in the National Assembly, his party wrote and adopted a new constitution, the Fundamental Law of Hungary, without a public vote. The law changed the country’s electoral laws, asserted government control over independent media, and made other procedural changes that tipped the election process to favor Orbán’s party. 

The existing constitution would not allow these changes, so it was considered obstructionist to implementing Orbán’s plans. Trump, likewise, has expressed frustration with the U.S. Constitution’s stopping him from becoming president to pursue his changes. He called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and allow him to be president again. 

As opposition groups began to look for ways to circumvent Orbán’s restrictions to reach the public, Fidesz changed the new Constitution nine times in the first six months after its adoption. According to Professor András Bozoki, a former Fidesz spokesman, those changes destabilized legal security, responsiveness, and accountability.

 In Orbán’s third year in office, his ruling Fidesz party had Hungary’s parliament adopt constitutional changes. The opposition parties boycotted the vote, saying that the changes undermined democracy. Among other measures, the government restricted political advertisements during election campaigns in publicly run media, i.e., radio and television channels that the government controls or owned by businesses aligned with the Fidesz party.

From a hardcore base of one-third of voters, Fidesz has won four national elections with between 45% and 55% of voters since 2010, maintaining a supermajority to pass legislation. Similarly, because of our U.S. federal allocation of Senate representation, Republicans need fewer total votes to control the Senate, which allows them to block Democrats’ SCOTUS appointments and legislation. 

Venezuela

Chávez ’s first term as president began in 1999 after he won his election with 56% of the popular vote—the largest percentage of any winning candidate in four decades. His first decree asked citizens to convene a National Constituent Assembly (ACN in Spanish) to write a new constitution. His request came as a referendum, which received a 92% vote for approval, along with adopting the electoral system proposed by Chávez. 

As Wikipedia describes, “Of the 1,171 candidates standing for election to the ACN, over 900 were opponents of Chávez. Chávez’s supporters won 52% of the vote; despite this, because of voting procedures chosen by the government beforehand, supporters of the new government took 125 seats (95% of the total), thus giving them a supermajority.” 

The ACN met for three months, during which the delegates gave themselves the power to abolish government institutions and dismiss officials perceived as corrupt or operating only in their own interests.

 If a leader or a party gets to define corruption and who is dismissed, then you have taken the first step to control a government based on loyalty to the person with that power. The ACN also proposed replacing the two-house Congress with a single National Assembly and creating an “emergency commission” to reorganize the Judicial Power. 

These actions concentrate government power upon fewer people and thus make it easier to diminish the presence of dissidents. In a similar effort, the ACN proposed substantially reducing the legislative branch’s powers and transferring them to the president.

The ACN’s proposed new constitution was approved by 72% of voters in a referendum, but turnout was very low at 44%. 

Before ACN’s proposed constitution was submitted for a public vote,  Chávez launched an antipoverty program, including road and housing construction and mass vaccination. The voters responded gratefully to these benefits, and Chávez was reelected with a 60 percent vote in 2000.

Chávez created the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) after being reelected to another term in 2006. He won with 63% of the vote and the support of roughly twenty other parties. However, the three largest coalitions did not join PSUV, citing concerns about the party’s lack of diversity of thought.

Those concerns were reflected in a 2008 Human Rights Watch report citing threats of revenge. Chávez intimidated the media, labor unions, and civil society by disregarding the separation of powers. Trump is also well known for intimidating others. Would he continue with a vengeance by becoming president again? 

When Chávez died in 2013, Vice President Nicolas Maduro ran to replace him. He received a slight drop in the percentages that Chávez had been receiving but still won with 51% of the vote. However, PSUV maintained substantial control of the National Assembly due to changes in voting rules and the manipulation of public and private media. 

Under Maduro, authoritarian measures increased. For instance, major political parties and some opposition figures were barred from running for office. His Supreme Court also dissolved parliament and temporarily assumed its powers. This brings us to the courts, the last branch of government to secure authoritarian rule.

Appoint judges loyal to a leader or sideline the courts. 

Hungary

The Constitutional Court is Hungary’s most important court. Parliament elects its justices, and it is not part of the judicial system. It helped shape the legal framework of the political transition after state socialism.

As per the court’s preamble, its main tasks were to guarantee that people be ruled by laws that protect their fundamental rights under a constitution and create a balance between the branches of government. The court was created before Orbán was elected in 2010, so his party did not control the parliament and appoint the judges.

The court insisted on a media law guaranteeing public access to impartial information. This law led to the creation of public television and radio stations that were to be independent of the state and private economic influence. This objective was undermined after Fidesz dominated parliament. 

Consequently, an overarching loyalty to Orbán replaced the balance between executive, legislative, and court powers. This transition was initiated when Orbán’s 2011 new constitution overturned earlier Constitutional Court rulings and limited the court’s right to challenge laws passed by parliament in the future.

The new constitution also changed the retirement age for judges. According to the Associated Press, it forced hundreds of judges into early retirement and vested responsibility for appointing new judges through a single political appointee. 

Human Rights Watch reported that “the Orbán government has packed the Constitutional Court with its preferred justices.” Trump has followed along similar lines, with nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate judges appointed to the Circuit Courts being members of the right-wing Federalist Society.

In 2020, Orbán was granted emergency powers to bypass the courts and suspend elections. Meanwhile, his parliament mandated harsh penalties for disseminating false news, such as jail for up to five years, aimed at “anyone who intentionally spreads what the government classifies as misinformation.” 

Subsequent legal reforms passed by Fidesz’s supermajority allowed Orbán, who had won his fourth straight election in 2022, to amend the constitution as president. 

Venezuela

In 1999, the new National Constituency Assembly restructured the nation’s judiciary, claiming the power to fire judges. It expedited corruption investigations against over several thousand judiciary officers.

Subsequently, the Venezuelan judiciary was overhauled with sympathetic judges to Maduro’s rule. The National Assembly no longer appointed them. Instead, judges were installed after passing public examinations under the scrutiny of PSUV. 

By 2020, Venezuela’s Supreme Court justices, loyal to Maduro, ordered the takeover of the nation’s two most influential opposition parties just before parliamentary elections.

Economic and Social Crisis Leads to Needing a Strong Central Authority

The transformation from democratic to authoritarian rule finds fertile ground during an economic or social downturn when the government fails to secure the trust and confidence of the population in resolving the hardships that emerge. 

Many voters have lost their confidence in our democracy due to the economic downturn resulting from COVID. Currently, polls show that most voters (68%) are unhappy with how our democracy works. 

Orbán came to power in Hungary with such despair. He was elected after the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008-9 struck the average citizen. Hungary’s national currency depreciated by 23 percent, and household debt increased by 4 percent of national GDP. 

A few years later, a wave of asylum-seeking immigrants started in 2012. The flow peaked in 2015 with about 400,000 migrants, mostly from predominantly Muslim countries.

Foreign, non-Christian migrants provided a perfect enemy to blame for causing Hungary’s domestic problems. Orbán was then reelected in 2018 on a campaign singularly focused on stopping what he described as a “Muslim invasion threatening the national security, social cohesion, and Christian identity of the Hungarian nation.” Although, there were only 671 asylum seekers in 2018.

In Venezuela, during Maduro’s first term in office, extreme poverty increased when the price of oil collapsed in 2014. Until then, oil export revenue accounted for 25% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Chávez used this single source of revenue to build a welfare state that benefited many who had been ignored by the centrist parties that had controlled the government for two decades. 

However, the oil revenue crisis contributed to shortages in food, medication, and other necessities. The U.N. estimates that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015. 

Maduro responded by preventing the major opposition parties from electorally challenging him and exposing his misuse of state funds. Opposition parties were treated as enemies, not democratic opponents, akin to Trump attacking Democrats as radicals that are “enemies of the democracy” and are “running a Gestapo administration.”

Lessons for Americans

Former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson described Hungary as a “country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” He’s right – for studying how a party takes control of all government branches to extinguish debate.

When one party has the power to eliminate laws that protect diversity in thought, then we have a nation like Venezuela or Hungary. Who wants that?

No politician is praising Maduro, but Orbán? Well, Trump hosted him at Mar-a-Lago this March, saying,  “There’s nobody that’s a better leader than Viktor Orbán.” Trump admires his autocratic style: “This is how it will be. And that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss. He’s fantastic.” 

If Donald Trump wins in November, we can expect such a “fantastic” president. 

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Understanding the Fear of the U.S. Becoming an Authoritarian State

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Across the political spectrum, there are concerns and predictions that the US government could become authoritarian. A shared theme is that power will be concentrated at the top and not originate from below. 

Liberals fear an authoritarian future is coming. 

Liberals see former President Donald Trump as the leading perpetrator of creating an authoritarian state. Organizations backing him, like the conservative Heritage Foundation, which released Project 2025, reinforce this perception. 

Trump claimed not to know who was behind Project 2025; however, a CNN review found that at least 140 people who worked for him were involved. The 900-page document details how the federal government’s “deep state” must be destroyed in a new Trump Administration.  

Liberals from the west to the east coast feared a possible authoritarian future. From the heartland, the Nebraska Examiner contributor professor Steve Corbin writes in his piece, Authoritarian rule threatens America’s democracy, that 147 congressional Republicans voting to overturn the 2020 election results was authoritarianism in action.

Veteran national political columnist Dick Polman, in the Progressive Populist, describes today’s political fight as between a pro-democracy party and an authoritarian cult.

Ralph Nader accuses Roberts and his “clique” of five like-minded Supreme Court judges as 

authoritarians who re-installed the doctrine of “The King Can Do No Wrong.”

Donald Trump is seen triggering authoritarian views.

Because Trump ignited the MAGA movement, he is viewed as the embodiment of authoritarian behavior. Even mild-spoken President Joe Biden remarked at a Maryland fundraiser that the MAGA philosophy was “semi-fascism.”

Consequently, liberal commentary interprets Trump’s language and actions as displaying approval for authoritarian government leaders.

He has expressed admiration for Russian President (Dictator) V. Putin. At a campaign rally in 2022, Trump said, “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart.”

Just before one of his other rallies, Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was his kind of guy: “He speaks, and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.” His list of dictators he respects or envies goes on to include others.

Trump provides liberals a big easy target for fearing a coming authoritarian state. Biden does not offer that target for Conservatives. Also, Democratic presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris lacks the baggage of quotes that can match the veracity of Trump’s allegiance to exercising raw power. 

The far right believes we are already halfway to being an authoritarian state.

Trump’s MAGA is a core group fearful of the federal government. The large crowd attending Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech at the White House Ellipse shared that belief. They cheered when he said he would “never concede” the race and that if his supporters didn’t “fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Mainstream media rarely notes the size of the crowds that Trump attracts other than in general terms. Trump also contributes to doubting their size when he describes them in absurd comparisons.

For instance, Trump claims that his January 6 crowd was larger than the 250,000 people who attended Martin Luther King’s DC speech in 1963 from the Lincoln Memorial. However, by repeating the Associated Press’s estimate that it was at least 10,000, the media diminishes the level of Trump support. Rarely mentioned is that according to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, the crowd size before heading to the Capitol was possibly as much as 80,000.

However, despite Trump’s language, some conservatives critical of Trump do not see him as a danger to democracy. John Bolton, former US national security adviser and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, says former President Donald Trump is not fit to be president. Still, he’s not a threat to our democracy.

As faith in our democracy falls, support for more authoritarian rule increases.  

What does endanger our democracy is that many citizens see the federal bureaucracy as currently or potentially restricting their freedoms. 

A Monmouth(“Mon-muth”)University Poll in the summer of 2023 found the following. A majority (55%) of Americans are very concerned that their fundamental rights and freedoms are under threat – with Republicans (63%) being more likely than Democrats (53%) or independents (51%) to feel this way. The three top “rights under threat” were speech 26%, guns 21%, and abortion/women’s rights 19%. Republicans were at 38% on speech and guns and 1% on abortion/women’s rights. Democrats were most concerned with abortion/women’s rights at 36%, then speech at 14%, and guns were at 4%.

These threats could explain why polls show low faith in the U.S. institutions necessary to maintain a democracy. A July 2023 Gallup poll measured Americans’ confidence in 16 institutions it tracks annually. Congress was at the bottom at 8%, but the Presidency at 26% and the Supreme Court at 27% were nothing to brag about. The military was at 60%, and the police were right behind them at 43%. 

Both polls suggest that people fear losing their freedoms under elected government officials. However, the most trusted institutions are those that use force, the military and police, to ensure their safety. This may explain why the following polls strongly support a strong, authoritative government run by a strong leader or the military. They may see how using state-authorized violence could free them from chaos and insecurity.

According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader would be a good way of governing the country “without interference from Congress or the courts.” The U.S. had the highest percentage of citizens holding this belief among the 14 wealthiest nations surveyed in Europe, including Australia and Israel. 


If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Support for authoritarian rule varies by political leanings and personality traits.

Support for authoritarian rule among Americans registered at 37% from the center, 29% from the right, and 25% from the left. The right’s support for authoritarian rule was the highest percentage in 16 nations of the 18 nations polled, with the center having the highest percentage in the U.S. and Australia. These labels are self-identified by those surveyed. 

The high percentage of those in the center who support authoritarian rule would indicate that the term “moderate” is not the same as being in the center. It’s just that these folks don’t like the major parties representing the right or the left. They still want drastic measures that are more reflective of their core beliefs than affiliating with a party.  

Historians have observed that the tendencies of the farthest wings of the left and right movement overlap. In the Atlantic, psychiatrist Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, points to some research that supports that belief. She writes that researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.” 

These traits are shared by political and religious groups across the spectrum who strongly believe that the policies they support are best for everyone. For them, our democracy is failing to pursue their policies. Given the results of a Pew Research Center survey in July 2023, they also have many potential followers to preach to. Pew found that 63% of Americans are exhausted by politics, and 55% are just plain angry with politics. Just 16% of the public say they trust the federal government always or most of the time.

Where do we go from here?

Remember Barack Obama’s campaign theme, “Hope”? That Pew survey found that only 10% were hopeful about American politics. Nevertheless, although many other polls show dissatisfaction with our government, that level is similar to that of other functioning democracies in wealthy countries. 

In a 2022 Pew survey, France, Japan, Italy, and Spain, like the U.S., had majorities dissatisfied with their democracies. The political orientation of those governments didn’t matter; Japan was conservative-nationalist, France was centrist, Italy and the U.S. were liberal, and Spain was Socialist leaning. 

When asked if their political system “allows people like them have not much or none at all influence on politics,” Japan, Australia, and the U.S. all scored 71% for those polled who agreed with that measurement. 

However, complaining is not the same as rejecting the principles democratic institutions protect. Americans surveyed by Pew in 2020 were asked, “What are very important” functions of their democracy to possess? The following six, in order of importance and percentage, were: Fair Judiciary 93%, Gender Equality 91%, Free Religion 86%, Regular Elections 84%, Free Media 80%, and Free Speech 77%. These conditions could easily be restricted if not eliminated under authoritarian rule.

To sustain a functional, not a fake, democracy, we must measure whether these conditions are being provided. Failing to provide and protect them will gradually transform any country into an authoritarian state. 

The political conditions in Venezuela and Hungary provide two recent examples of how democracies can drift afar when authority is concentrated at the top. In the next Citizenship Politics, I will analyze what lessons we can learn from them.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Harris’s picking Walz over Shapiro was all about electoral votes

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Many commentators have said that VP Kamala Harris should have selected Josh Shapiro,

Governor of Pennsylvania rather than Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The most repeated reason for selecting Shapiro was that he could have probably secured Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes. They assume that Harris cannot win the election without winning that state. 

Their logic is faulty when it comes to adding electoral votes.

Those commentators ignore that Michigan and Wisconsin have a total of 25 electoral votes, six more than Pennsylvania. Harris and Walz must win them just as much, if not more, than Pennsylvania.

A critical battleground for electoral votes is the swing states that hug the Great Lakes region. The voters there have two key constituencies that the Democrats need to reach out to. The first are white working-class men, and the second are rural residents. 

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have chosen VPs who could attract those groups. On paper, JD Vance seems to be a perfect candidate. His childhood personal story aligns with both of those groups. 

When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, it was assumed that Biden would remain the Democratic nominee for president. That allowed Vance to run against Harris, whom the Republicans tagged as a liberal Californian—worse yet, she was from San Francisco.

Biden dropped out, and Harris replaced him, which sunk that strategy. Vance privately told donors, “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch” when Vice President Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic candidate.

Meanwhile, Walz is a better sell in Michigan and Wisconsin than Vance, upsetting Trump’s intention of using JD Vance as a VP candidate to win them and Minnesota. Shapiro may have won Penn for Harris, and he still may, but Walz can help carry those three Great Lake states much better than Shapiro. 

As JD Vance said before, the Republicans were sucker-punched – but this time again with Walz on the ticket with Harris. Walz blocks Trump’s reliance on Vance, capturing these blue states from “Californian” Harris. Democrats have a genuine mid-westerner in Walz, who has a visible record of getting rural votes in this region. Shapiro, unlike Walz, didn’t have those advantages over Vance. 

Harris needs Shapiro to take Pennsylvania for her. The poll shows that Trump’s support had only a 2% lead over the Democratic candidate rather than 4% before Biden withdrew. A recent poll shows that 61% of voters in the state approve of the job Shapior is doing as governor. Consequently, believing he can move the dial more toward Harris than Vance could is not a stretch. 

However, the contest between Trump and Harris in Michigan and Wisconsin must be revised. A poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, in partnership with The Telegraph, taken on August 6, showed that both were tied in Wisconsin with 43% for each. In Michigan Trump leads by 1%, but he dropped by two points since their last swing state voting intention poll when Biden was the Democratic presidential candidate. Harris leads by five points in Minnesota, and Walz will only strengthen that lead. 

Despite Harris closing the gap between Biden and Trump in overall national support, the Redfield & Wilton poll found the race is a toss-up in the swing states. In a hypothetical match-up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included as an independent candidate, Trump leads Harris by between one point and six points in five of the ten swing states.

Assessing the value of a vice presidential candidate on their ability to carry their home state is never a certainty. Barbara Norrander, a professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, studies polls and concludes that it only matters a little who the vice presidential candidate is. People tend to focus on the top of the ticket.

However, the VP candidate can hurt the presidential candidate. It is often stated that Sarah Palin, then the incumbent Governor of Alaska, running in the 2008 presidential election as the VP to Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, did hurt his image. Her image is blamed for his loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The question that Trump and Harris had to answer correctly was whether their VP pick would hurt their campaign. At this point, Walz looks like the safer bet not to hurt Harris more than Vance appears to be already doing to Trump. 

The bottom line is that Walz has a better chance of acceptance among the swing voters in at least two key swing states than that displayed by the two other contenders for being Harris’s VP, Shapiro, or Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly. 

Now Walz and Harris only have to convince those voters that they are not “radical liberals.”

Republican probing-attacks on Kamala Harris 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick
 
 
The Republican party faces a new, perplexing challenge in making Donald J. Trump president again. Now, they confront a surge in enthusiasm for a Democratic candidate Biden could not generate. 
Let’s see how the Republicans found themselves in this predicament.

Vice President Kamala Harris bolted out of the gate.
A Trump campaign operative told The Bulwark at the Republican National Convention, “It’s just too good right now. We’re measuring the drapes.” Another journalist described the convention as a preview of a celebration of Donald Trump overwhelmingly beating President Joe Biden in November.


That was before Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris secured two-thirds of the convention delegates needed to be nominated as the Democratic Presidential candidate. That’s more delegates than Biden had pledged to him before his debate.


Worse yet for the Republicans, within 24 hours of announcing her candidacy, her campaign received one hundred million dollars, more than Biden or Donald Trump had collected in a similar time frame. And, by the end of the first week, that amount doubled.


Most importantly, it represented an energetic base of support, attracting over 1.4 million grassroots donors and 100,000 signing up to volunteer within three days of declaring her candidacy. It grew to 170,000 within seven days.


Trump’s campaign was caught off guard.
In defense of Trump’s campaign overconfidence, many Democrats also were surprised by the groundswell of support for Harris.


Nevertheless, the Republican party now faces a new challenge—a surge in enthusiasm for a Democratic candidate that did not exist with Biden. The first Republican casualty was sidelining their more ambitious plan to saddle the Democrats with Biden.


For instance, the Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., bashed the idea that Biden could be replaced on the ticket because of campaign finance laws’ restrictions. After Harris became the candidate, they now intend to spend roughly $12 million per week through Labor Day on TV ads attacking her in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.


Previously, House Speaker Mike Johnson warned that Republicans could challenge Kamala in states where the legal process does not allow replacing Biden with another candidate who did not win that party’s primary election. It was a non-starter since Biden ran with Harris as the V.P. candidate, and the Democrats voted for both.


Texas Rep. Chip Roy even filed a resolution last month calling on Biden Cabinet members to use the 25th Amendment to remove the president.  To avoid Harris from filling the presidency if Biden was removed, Roy implied that she could be impeached if she knew about Biden’s declining health.
These Republican tactics appear as desperate moves to avoid forsaking their year-long expensive campaign against Biden.


Republicans claim the Democratic Party is not democratic.
They accuse Democratic Party elites of staging a coup. “They have subverted democracy [using the legal system] and are coronating the VP without a single vote,” said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said Mr. Biden had “succumbed to a coup” from party elites and donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Trump argued Democrats pressuring Biden to suspend his re-election bid was “an undemocratic move.”


Biden opened the door to that charge by repeatedly citing the 14 million votes cast for him in state primaries as a reason to stay in the race before he withdrew. In a July 8 letter, he wrote, “The voters—and the voters alone—decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.”


However, Susan Stokes, who directs the Chicago Center on Democracy, said the rush “to support Ms. Harris reflects the determination of Democrats not to be consumed by a divisive internal fight with less than four months to go.” The most recent poll showed that 90% of Democrats felt that Biden made the right decision to not remain as their presidential candidate.


Nevertheless, JD Vance, Trump’s selected Vice President candidate, said Harris was part of the “elite Democrats” meeting in “smoke-filled rooms” to throw Biden out of the race. Ironically, he also claimed she “lied” about President Joe Biden’s poor health, which would work to keep him in office. Vance will have difficulty arguing that Harris supported these contradictory objectives on the campaign trail.


Democrats must clearly articulate how party rules for selecting delegates and voting to nominate someone were followed, not broken. Every delegate was free to vote for whom they wished; they were not legally bound to any candidate. The delegates at the convention were the same; they were voted to attend the convention as enfranchised delegates from each state. No new candidates were added, and no existing ones were replaced.


Stokes said the Democrats’ adjusted procedure was “a rather minor point compared to a political party that will not accept a lost election.” She could have also added that a party defending those who attacked Congress while in session on January 6 is not an example of defending democracy.  


Can Trump and his allies refrain from denigrating Harris as a woman or a Black citizen?
At his first rally after the attempted assassination on him, the rally crowd cheered when Trump conceded he was “not going to be nice” about Harris. He proceeded to call her “Lying Kamala Harris, the most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history.” He avoided racial or gender traits.


Nevertheless, Republican politicians have denigrated Harris in a manner that could alienate Black and women voters. Joe Perticone, a national political reporter at The Bulwark, reported that in a closed-door meeting, House Republican leaders requested their colleagues: When attacking Kamala Harris, please focus on policy, not race or gender. 


Right-wing social media didn’t get that memo. According to the data firm PeakMetrics, within hours of Biden’s announcement, more than 11 percent of related mentions of Harris on X involved attacks related to her race or gender.


Harris, as the DEI vice president
Criticizing DEI policies has become a Republican mantra. The acronym DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion and refers to initiatives addressing discrimination against historically marginalized groups. Liberals are blamed for government and higher education for focusing too much on the issues of race, gender, and sexuality.


Speaker Mike Johnson cautioned Republican congressmen at their caucus meeting from attacking Harris based on her race or gender, such as calling her “a DEI vice president.” On leaving the meeting, he added, “This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the competence of the person running for president.”


He didn’t mention previous public statements by Rep. Glenn Grothman and Rep. Tim Burchett. Grothman questioned if Democrats are sticking by her “because of her ethnic background.” Burchett also said that Harris was a “DEI vice president.” He claimed on CNN that Biden said he would hire a Black female for vice president.


Burchett needed to be more informed. In a 2020 debate, Biden stated he would “pick a woman to be vice president” without specifying her race. In a later interview with ABC News, Biden said he “didn’t feel pressure to select a Black woman.”


In another 2020 interview, Biden mentioned that four Black women were among his potential running mates. Biden told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, “I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and among them there are four Black women.”
By Trump supporters tagging Harris as a DEI candidate, the Trump campaign is opening itself up to being called racist, which doesn’t help the campaign’s strategy of appealing to Black voters.


Trump calling Harris a “radical left lunatic” politician will highlight Harris’s accomplishments.
Harris can ask her audiences, “Is providing laws that benefit needy students and homeowners the actions of a “radical left lunatic” politician? As the state attorney general, she won a $1 billion judgment against for-profit colleges that targeted low-income students. She also leveraged California’s economic influence to win $18 billion in debt relief for California homeowners from banks accused of improper mortgage foreclosures.


Trump will have to reconsider accusing Harris of lacking qualifications to be president, given his nonexistent government experience and checkered business record, including multiple felony convictions for falsifying business records.  


Republicans also ignore Harris’s having beaten Republicans who were expected to win.
In 2010, she beat Republican Steve Cooley, a three-term Los Angeles County district attorney, to become California’s Attorney General. This victory ran counter to the Republican wave that year, which saw many Democrats defeated. She won despite a national political action committee spending $1 million attacking Harris’ record on fighting crime.


Trump will strike Harris on the crime issue because she refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer. However, she defended California’s death penalty system in court. And while she implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, she also resisted getting her office to investigate certain police shootings.


Harris ran to the right of her opponent to become the San Francisco district attorney, so she knows how to appeal to crime-weary voters. Enough so that the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her under the headline “Harris, for Law and Order.” Trump is not going to have an easy time framing Harris as being soft on crime.


Both candidates have to hone their messaging on the significant issues of immigration, inflation, and abortion.
Even though all polls show Harris is doing better against Trump than Biden, their margin of error leads one to conclude that this race is a statistical tie.


Democrats take solace that the race has tightened despite polls coming after the assassination attempt on Trump, the festive Republican convention, and his MAGA-oriented VP pick.
Trump campaign staff explain the surge in Harris support as the usual increased enthusiasm after a new candidate is selected—there’s nothing unique to fear from Harris.


Immigration, inflation, and abortion have been and appear to remain voters’ top concerns. Trump and Harris are still refining their thrust and parry on these issues. Future debates will test their verbal skills in explaining why their positions are superior.


If Trump relies on his usual style of steamrolling out unsubstantiated claims, Harris has the skill, sharpened in courtrooms, to decimate them. The question is, can she communicate her positions without sounding condescending to non-Democratic voters?


Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist and Student Power: Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is also the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.


Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Republicans fear Kamala Harris can win the election for the Democrats

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This piece can be read on my website and Medium and Substack. You can continue to read below.

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick

Having received President Biden’s endorsement to run as the Democrat’s presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris said she would seek the nomination, adding: “Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

Harris can unite the Democrats to beat Donald Trump. She has had critics for not being progressive, likable, or charismatic enough. However, she is articulate, moral, and thoughtful beyond what Trump has displayed. If she can focus her energies on reaching out to liberals and independents without scaring conservatives, she will win the election. 

What should Joe Biden do now?

Biden’s endorsement of Harris was critical but was not enough. He must reach out to his 3,850 delegates, who were pledged but not legally bound to vote for him as the Democratic candidate. He must tell them that Harris will continue the values that led their administration to pass historically significant progressive legislation.

Biden needs to talk personally to the other politicians who were mentioned as possible candidates. He must ask them to support Harris and advise her on policy issues and campaign strategies. In other words, the Democrats must demonstrate similar party solidarity around Harris as the Republicans have shown toward Trump. 

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race demonstrates the core values that separate Donald Trump from Biden and those of the Democratic Party. The nation’s welfare is more important than loyalty to any elected official, including the president. 

What Kamala Harris must do now.

She must demonstrably respect all of the other potential presidential candidates. They must feel included in her campaign and, if she wins, have an opportunity to be included in her administration. 

Harris must also contact Biden’s delegates, perhaps in a formal joint statement with Biden assuring them of her commitment to pursuing pragmatic progressive policies. This statement would be a perfect medium for Biden to release his delegates, encouraging them to vote for Harris.

Why Harris should be the Democratic presidential candidate.

Harris might not have been the best candidate if the Democrats had begun an effort to select a candidate through the presidential primaries and caucuses. However, many Democrats resisted that, feeling comfortable with Biden continuing as president. Biden’s decline in health altered that acceptance. 

But history cannot be rerun; the Democrats must accept the cards dealt. 

Harris has access to the $95 million campaign fund. If she were not selected, the Democratic National Committee would receive the funds and decide how to spend them. By inheriting the Biden-Harris reelection campaign infrastructure, she may have more state offices operating than what Trump’s campaign has currently. Any other Democratic presidential candidate would not necessarily obtain all Biden campaign offices.

Any other candidate wanting to be selected must secure a minimum of 300 delegates, which no one has now. With no single state being allowed to provide more than 50 delegates, it would be difficult for any candidate to challenge Harris if she receives the bulk of Biden’s delegates.

Gavin Newsom, a top possibility to replace Biden, has yet to signal whether he plans to seek the presidency or vice presidency this year. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer intends to do everything she can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump. So, as of Sunday, the two top contenders are not pushing to be candidates.

Early polls show that Harris does slightly better against Trump than any other candidate. According to the Washington Post – ABC poll, she is also the clear favorite among other possible presidential Democratic candidates.

In response to the question, If Biden did step aside, who do you think should be the Democratic nominee for president in his place? (Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents), Harris received 29%, Newsom came next with 7%, and Whitmer was at 3%.

Republicans were desperate to keep Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Right after the debate, Bulwark’s reporter Marc Caputo reported that Trump’s team believed it was best for him to lie low to avoid interfering with the drumbeat of coverage of Biden’s debate implosion, initially believing that Biden wouldn’t be forced out. Even after the debate, a top Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., bashed the idea that Biden could be replaced on the ticket because of campaign finance laws’ restrictions. 

After the debate, Trump’s campaign fundraised off speculation that Vice President Kamala Harris could replace Biden: “Biden is dropping out!” and “President Kamala Harris?” read two fundraising email subject lines.

Speaking at the Republican Convention, Donald Trump’s co-campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, said that choosing a candidate after the Democratic primaries was “literally a coup” in trying to halt an effort of  Harris replacing Biden. He intends to bring that charge to the Democrats whenever they mention Jan. 6 and Trump’s threat to democracy.

Republicans seem intent on keeping Biden in the race and not being replaced. Before Biden withdrew from the race, House Speaker Mike Johnson discussed a legal strategy to save Trump from running against another Democrat.  

He said it might be against the legal electoral process in some states for the winner of a major party’s primary election to be replaced on the ticket by another candidate. Johnson suggested that Republicans look into filing legal challenges in states where it could be contested.

Johnson tried another tactic on the day of Biden’s announcement. He said Biden must resign immediately. He conflated not running for president with not being fit to serve as president and then continued the narrative that the Democrats should not be allowed to choose someone other than Biden. 

Democrats must be prepared to face an onslaught of Republican attacks on Biden being replaced. Johnson says they “invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee for president.” 

In defending Biden as the presidential candidate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Democrats that some Republicans would legally challenge Biden’s replacement, leading to “a presidential election being decided by Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court,” like in 2000.

When she made that point, she accused “the donor class” and party “elites” of pushing Biden to leave the race. Expect the Republicans to cut and slice her comments into ads to push progressive Democrats not to trust their party’s leadership.

The Republicans face a more difficult election with Biden gone.

Republicans’ messaging about protecting our democracy reveals that they are not sure Trump would win the election against another candidate. They have spent the last year attacking Biden and only started mentioning Harris more frequently. 

Republicans are now scrambling for a way to denigrate Harris personally. That will be a tricky maneuver. How do they avoid alienating Black and women voters? And since she is 19 years younger than Trump, they must be aware that he is now the doddering old man that he accused Biden of being.  

Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s prediction of what would happen to the Republicans if Biden dropped from the race is unfolding. Replacing Biden would not simply energize the Democratic Party; it would also win back some swing voters who dislike the elderly candidates currently on offer. 

Trump may regret his comments about Harris made at his rally in Doral, Florida, two weeks before Biden passed the baton to Harris: “You have to give him credit for one brilliant decision—probably the smartest decision he’s ever made: He picked Kamala Harris as his vice president.” He’ll find out if he was right in November.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Biden and Harris can enable the Democrats to win in November

Biden and Harris must place the interests of their party and nation first.

Biden clings to the classic belief that only he can save the world. He declared to a meeting with Democratic governors, “No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.” He followed up in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, saying only “the Lord Almighty” could drive him from the race. 

Biden and Harris can allow the Democrats to win in November by relinquishing their candidate mantels and campaign funds. Importantly, they must take leadership in organizing their party to avoid internal discord. In doing so, they can guarantee their supporters that the principles they pursued in office will continue under the new Democratic presidential administration since they will help select those candidates and consider retaining Harris.

They have worked well as a team. Their mission is to avoid the Democrats stumbling into a brokered convention. They have the prestige, the ground support, and the discipline to lift the Democrats out of their befuddlement about how to win the presidency, given Biden’s health and poor polling.

Biden’s debate performance shook the ground under the Democrats.

To understand why this scenario is the best solution for the Democrats, it is necessary to know how Biden’s terrible debate performance altered the Democratic party’s election plans. The debate exposed the weaknesses of both candidates. The Democrats can now unite around a new candidate, while the Republicans are stuck with a very beatable Trump, particularly if he is running against someone other than Biden.

In the recent NYT poll, the response to the question: How well do you think Joe Biden and Donald Trump did in the presidential debate? Biden got trounced by Trump. A whopping 57% thought Biden did “not well at all,” while only 27% had that same impression of Trump. 

Meanwhile, 53% of respondents agreed that Joe Biden is just too old to be an effective president, while only 22% would agree with that assessment for Trump.

Biden narrowly won 2020 against Trump when 36% of voters thought he was too old. Just before the debate, that opinion jumped to 69%. After the debate, which Biden’s advisors pushed as a means to reverse this trend, it climbed to 74%, double from four years ago.

Now, here’s the thing: although being old may slow one’s movements, it does not necessarily hinder one’s ability to think clearly. However, viewers witnessed a confused and muddled Biden. His staff attributed his condition to fatigue from a couple of long world trips filled with meetings just prior to the debate. 

A possible severe medical condition has not been addressed.

There is one excuse for Biden that may be real and even provable. It could account for why New York Times’ reporters heard from interviews with “current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors” that they “noticed that he appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” over the last couple of months.

Biden could be suffering from a series of mini-strokes, aka TIA (transient ischemic attacks), occurring in middle-aged and older adults brought about by higher levels of stress. The results of such strokes are the type of behavior reported to the reporters. 

A person can suffer multiple TIAs and never know it. They do not last long, and while they do not immediately result in any permanent damage, over time, there can be cumulative effects on the brain’s health and physical and mental abilities. 

These attacks are not full-out strokes like the one that sent John Fetterman to the hospital. Fetterman recovered and won his election, but then again, he is 25 years younger than Biden. 

TIAs can be detected after the fact through an MRI, which is often done after a significant stroke. Unfortunately, according to the Mayo Clinic, about 1 in 3 people who had a TIA will eventually have a stroke, with about half occurring within a year after its occurrence. 

This possibility might loom on the horizon if Biden had a TIA, which I assume his physician has checked, given his behavior. If he had one or more, Trump supporters could use the news to attack Biden’s ability to serve as president. However, if Trump found out before the Democratic convention, he might not release that information, fearing that he could face a stronger alternative candidate chosen by a united convention. 

Regardless of Biden’s specific medical concerns, the public perceives him as unfit to continue as president. The debate helped to bolster that view, according to a national poll taken of registered voters by the NYT/Siena shortly after the debate. 

The public and Democrats are rejecting Biden.

Despite the Biden campaign investing $50 million in advertising the month before the debate, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that three-quarters of all US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better chance of winning the 2024 presidential election with someone other than President Joe Biden. The CNN poll also showed that most Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters (56%) say the party has a better shot at the presidency with someone other than Biden, while 43% say the party stands a better chance with him.

These findings reflect the reality that if Trump won every state where he leads right now, he would receive enough electoral votes to win. This is not a recent trend. Trump has led the national polling averages almost every single day this year. He also beats Biden in the swing states Biden took to win the presidency. 

The bottom line is that other than Biden’s 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in the polls since Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid 44 years ago, in which he was stomped by Ronald Reagan. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

A brokered democratic convention could be fatally divisive.

Carter was smart and levelheaded, like Biden. He also had the Democrats’ last contested nominating convention, which occurs when the convention opens without one candidate having captured a majority of delegates. Although Biden is a hair short of a majority, if his delegates begin to drop away, a fight begins to select the presidential candidate, which is a brokered convention. The last Democratic brokered convention was won by Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and he lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Biden can avoid a brokered convention by shifting his focus from being the presidential candidate to being the ultimate negotiator who successfully brings people together. 

Rep. Jamie Raskin’s comments to MSNBC significantly recognized that Biden’s future role is not tied to being the presidential candidate when he said: “One thing I can tell you is that regardless of what President Biden decides, our party is going to be unified . . . He will be the figure that we rally around to move forward.” 

V.P. Kamala Harris is the most critical player in the Democratic Convention.

Raskin signaled that Biden must initiate the decision not to run again to avoid a brokered convention. Biden needs V.P. Kamala Harris, the only politician with the influence, to work with him in accepting the withdrawal and formulating a smooth succession.

She has been Biden’s chief surrogate on the campaign trail and the co-owner of their two hundred-million-dollar campaign fund. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and no other candidate cannot use it. 

To convince Biden to select another candidate, Harris would have to join Biden in allowing a whole new ticket to be formed. She would not have to reject being on it, but she could enable party leaders to help choose the Vice Presidential and the presidential candidates. 

Her gesture would magnify the fact that Democrats winning the presidency comes before any one individual’s political interests. Senior sources at the Biden campaign, the White House, and the DNC have told Reuters that the vice president was the top alternative to be their presidential candidate.

CNN poll found in a matchup against Trump, Harris received 45% to Trump’s 47%, whereas Biden got 43% and Trump 49%. Harris’s gain was partly due to broader support from women and independents.

However, only two to three percentages behind Harris in a matchup with Trump were California Gov. Gavin Newsom (48% Trump to 43% Newsom), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (47% Trump to 43% Buttigieg), and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (47% Trump to 42% Whitmer). They are all within the error margin. In other words, unless there is a unified agreement on the ticket, divisions among delegates could surface on the convention floor. 

Roughly half of the public has no opinion on Buttigieg and Newsom, with about two-thirds offering no opinion of Whitmer. This is good news because it allows their campaigns to present a new image rather than trying to defend an old one.

The clock is ticking to implement a succession plan.

The DNC moved up its formal nomination process to a “virtual roll call” scheduled for August 7 to meet Ohio’s deadline to get the Democratic nominee on the ballot for November’s election. However, on the day of the DNC’s vote, Ohio Gov. DeWine signed a bill giving the DNC until September 1 to register their candidates’ names, which is after their August 19-22 convention.

This change allows the Democrats an additional three weeks to agree on new candidates to secure the majority of delegates votes on the first balloting. Biden could request that the virtual vote be dropped to allow this additional time to unify the party around a new ticket. 

The biggest hurdle in selecting new candidates is convincing a majority of delegates that their favorite candidate and their community are respected and their interests addressed. That is why Biden and Harris, as the President and Vice President, must take the lead in organizing their party to promote the best ticket possible to defeat Trump. 

Trump can be defeated. Most of the attention on the debate focused on Biden’s poor performance. However, if one reads the debate transcript, one will see that Trump comes across as more rambling than Biden. Also, when registered voters polled by the NYT last spring were asked in electing Biden or Trump for president who is a safe or risky choice for the country, they registered within one percent of each other as being risky.

When asked this July, 56% thought Trump was more risky, and 63% thought Biden was. A new Democratic candidate must convince the majority of voters that they would be less risky to the country than Trump. Convention delegates should ask themselves, which new candidate can meet that threshold? My guess is that any of them could.

NOTE: The information for this piece was gathered from reviewing 31 articles and websites, some of which are linked above. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 


Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Is anti-Zionism same as antisemitism?

Protestors of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza are accused of being anti-Zionist and, therefore, antisemitic. Those defending the protestors argue that they don’t have a grievance against Jews but against Israel’s government for letting its military kill thousands of innocent civilians. 

According to Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, former President of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects compromises with Palestinians because he is beholden to ultra-Orthodox parties and extremist religious settlers in the West Bank.

With their support, Netanyahu got Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to pass the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People bill with a margin of only seven votes. It formally adopts a type of Zionism that treats Jewish citizens differently than other ethnic and religious groups. 

Minister Yariv Levin, a leader in Netanahu’s Likud Party, called it “Zionism‘s flagship bill… it will clarify that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” However, many, if not most, Jewish citizens also see Israel as a democracy, as the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel intended. 

Although the word “Democratic” is absent throughout the Israeli Declaration of Independence, it explicitly states that the State of Israel would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.” 

Nevertheless, a large portion of Israelis, Jews, and non-Jews opposed the law proclaiming Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Several groups in the Jewish diaspora believed it violated Israel’s self-defined legal status as a “Jewish and democratic state” in exchange for adopting an exclusively Jewish identity. 

Arab and Druze Israeli citizens see this new law just as the Likud leader Avi Dichter explained, “We are passing this bill to avoid even a scrap of thought or effort to turn Israel into a state of all its citizens.’’

How Israel defines Zionism will determine its future either as a democracy or a theocracy with democratic trimming.  

The type of Zionism, as promoted by the conservative Likud Party and its allies, moves Israel closer to making it operate within a tribal framework similar to Arab countries. In 23 of them, Islam is the state religion. Although Israel does not formally have Judaism as a state religion, it took the notable step of declaring that it is a “Jewish State.”

The First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 did not use the phrase “Jewish State” when Zionists sought to “establish a home for the Jewish people.” Instead, according to Professor Sari Nusseibeh at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, the Zionist Organization preferred at first to use the description “Jewish homeland.”

When President Joe Biden said, “I’m a Zionist. Where there’s no Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world to be safe,” he was referring to Israel as a safe homeland for Jews, of which  870,000 Jews have left Islamic countries over a period of twenty years. 

Some left due to expulsion or fearing a change in their status after Israel became an independent nation. But Israel also encouraged Jews to immigrate by providing better living conditions than what they had in the Arabian countries.

The result is that the six Arab states adjacent to Israel all have less than one percent Jews. About half of Israel’s population are descendants of those refugees and immigrants. Meanwhile, the Muslim population of Israel is about two million; it had been one million in all of Palestine, current Israel, and the occupied territories before 1947. Arabs represent 18% of all Israeli residents; in 1944, they represented 61% living in that territory.

Roughly the same number of Palestinians left Israel as the number of Jews that departed from Islamic countries, however, over a much shorter period. While Israel did create conditions that pushed some Palestinians to leave, others left at the urging of the Arab leaders.

 In the Memoirs of Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, he wrote that “we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave.” Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said declared as the war began: “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.” 

The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated.”

Middle Eastern countries, regardless of whether they call themselves democracies, have some aspects of a theocratic or tribal-oriented state. The primary one is that the government or their society’s culture treats citizens along religious and ethnic lines. That orientation occurs in both Israel, Arab, and Muslim countries.  

While some Islamic countries guarantee freedom of religion, the practice is often at odds with that promise. For instance, Iran describes itself as an Islamic theocratic democracy. In its legislative body, one seat is reserved for its small Jewish community and three other seats for other minorities. However, they have no adequate power since a higher body, the 12-member Guardian Council, all appointed Islamic jurists, can veto legislation and disqualify candidates for office if they are not true to the Islamic faith. 

Unlike most Muslim countries, which do not have Jews in their legislative bodies, Israel has 15 Arab members in the 120-seat Knesset who were voted into office. Most are Muslim Arabs, with Druze and non-denominational members making up the rest.

However, they do not have the same rights as Jewish citizens in Israel, which critics would describe as a two-class system that has been called apartheid by Human Rights Watch.

An HRW report mentions how Israeli authorities revoke Palestinian residency rights and expropriate privately owned Palestinian land. Unfortunately, HRW did not identify whether these practices were in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. 

Mainstream international and Israel/Palestinian human rights groups consider Israel practices apartheid in the West Bank. Since no Jews live in Gaza, apartheid doesn’t apply there. 

However, Israel has enforced a 17-year siege of Gaza by which Israel effectively controls its airspace and its shorelines. As a result, it exerts strict control of what goes in and what goes out of that territory, making Israel the occupying power in Gaza. In critical ways, Israel has more control over Gaza than Hamas.

As for the treatment of Arabs within Israel, HRW makes no mention of any similar practices by Muslim countries against Jews. Their website does not list countries that practice apartheid, so a comparison of Israel’s practices to Muslim countries is not possible. And while the U.N. has a legal definition of apartheid, there is no list of countries that meet it. 

The form of Zionism that Israel has leaned into since the 1967 war is now the Likud Party’s policy, declaring that “The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.” 

Critics of Likud believe that this wording could be used to justify Israel annexing all of the West Bank. That action would eliminate a two-state solution. Even now, Israel directly controls 60 percent of the West Bank and can send military throughout it at will. 

The Israel-Hamas War has highlighted the connection between anti-Zionist and antisemitic. Israel contends that criticizing Israel’s war against Hamas is equivalent to being antisemitic. 

Jewish American political scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that anti-Zionism and often just criticism of Israeli policies have been conflated with antisemitism. The Jewish-American linguist Noam Chomsky argues: “There have long been efforts to identify anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in an effort to exploit anti-racist sentiment for political ends.”

Nevertheless, Republicans and many Democrats defend Israel’s invasion of Gaza by characterizing an attack on Israel’s government as an existential attack on Israel as a Jewish nation-state. 

Consequently, Republicans pushed through House Resolution 894, which rightly condemns the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States. However, point four of the resolution reads, “The House of Representatives clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

Although the resolution is not a law, it condemns anyone opposing Israel’s war with Hamas as being anti-Zionist and hence antisemitic.  While 95 Democrats voted for it, more either didn’t vote or were absent, leaving only 13 to vote against it. All but five Republicans voted in favor. 

Israel and its supporters must understand that criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza is not an existential threat. It is a reality check on how a government of any country must be held accountable for needlessly contributing to civilian deaths by violence or famine. 

Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman voted against H.R. 894 because it “conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism and ignores one of the greatest threats to the Jewish community, white nationalism.” Due to that vote and his outspoken support for making Israel accountable for its actions, AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel PAC in America, has led a $8 million campaign to unseat Bowman.

Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, came to his defense, saying he was a “leader for decades in fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate, as a principal and in Congress.”

This is just one example of how our Congressional leaders have come under pressure to swing toward equating anti-Zionism to antisemitism. All politicians have felt that tug, including Joe Biden when he served as a Senator. AIPAC donated twice as much to Biden than the next recipient of their funds since 1990.

While polls have shown that most Americans from both parties have supported an independent Israel nation-state, the same is not true for an independent Palestinian state. The last Pew Survey poll, taken in 2011, showed that more than 40% favor (42%) than oppose (26%) the United States recognizing Palestine as an independent nation, while nearly a third (32%) express no opinion.

However, since President Clinton, all presidents have supported the development of an independent Palestinian state. The UN passed a resolution intended that the West Bank, Gaza, and other lands be an independent Palestinian state, which 138 countries currently recognize.

A future for peaceful Israeli–Palestinian relations will be slim if the nation-states of the Middle East treat each other as enemy tribes by emphasizing that the “nation” within each state is the dominant ethnic/religious group.  The US can stand as a model of a democracy where freedom of religion and the protection of ethnic minorities are accepted and protected. 

At its core, Zionism is about sustaining an independent Israel nation-state. To define it as an Israel expanding its boundaries or dividing its citizens along tribal lines will not lead to any peace in the Middle East. 

Being anti-Zionist can be without prejudice against Jews and supportive of Israel serving as a homeland for Jews. And importantly, it allows for the recognition that Palestinians have a right to create a democratic nation-state for their homeland. 

NOTE: The information for this piece was gathered from reviewing 35 articles and websites, some of which are linked above. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 


Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Republicans woo Libertarians, Democrats ignore them – at their peril.

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Former President Donald Trump spoke to the Libertarian Party’s Annual Convention on Saturday, May 25, 2024. Fox News reported that he was met with a crowd of repeated booing during his speech. The Nation’s National Affairs Correspondent John Nichols described Trump’s Outreach to the Libertarians as an Absolute Train Wreck.

But Fox also noted that some Republican supporters wore “Make America Great” hats and T-shirts cheering “USA! USA!” It’s unclear if they were libertarians or just Republicans attending the convention.

In brief, Trump didn’t make any friends with his typical self-aggrandizement. Nevertheless, his instinct that libertarians were voters, which he needed, was correct. In twenty polls spanning thirteen years, Gallup found that 17 to 23% of the American electorate voters see themselves as libertarians. They are a substantial chunk of voters. 

Libertarian voters can tip the presidential election in the swing states.

It’s easy to ignore or even belittle the Libertarian Party’s past election results. Admittedly, the Libertarian presidential candidate’s performance has been minuscule. They’ve been at one or three percent of the popular vote in the last three presidential races. 

Nevertheless, they are the best-organized independent party, having their presidential candidate on every state’s ballot in five of the last eight presidential elections and more times on the ballot than any other third party. 

Libertarian Party members will most likely vote for their candidate in any presidential election. However, if the Democrats and Republicans make a pitch that appeals to their values, some may vote for Biden or Trump. Those voters could make a crucial difference in the swing states that narrowly went to Trump in 2016 when he carried more independent voters than Clinton.  

Trump lost them in 2020 when third-party 2016 voters went 53%-36% for Biden over Trump. On a larger scale, among all independents and those affiliated with other parties, Biden led Trump by 52%-43%, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2024, independents may return to Trump since he leads Biden in the six swing states Biden won in 2020 with the assistance of independent voters, many of whom are libertarians. These tightest contested states are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada (Trump ahead by >4%), and Pennsylvania (Trump ahead by >3%), with Biden behind by less than 1% in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Libertarian votes could provide Biden another win if he can attract more of them again than Trump. 

For instance, in Arizona and Georgia, if 20% of the Libertarian 2020 voters went for Biden, it would equal or exceed the number of votes that was Biden’s margin of victory. 

In Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden has the best chance of winning, the Libertarian vote accounted for about 70% of all independent votes. The votes are there; Biden needs to reach out to them.

Republicans have allies within the Libertarian Party.

The doctrinaire conservative Mises Caucus has held the Libertarian Party leadership positions since being elected at its convention two years ago. Mises retained the presidency and secretary positions this May. The elected vice president is not with Mises.  

The Mises Caucus and the Mises Institution, which preceded it, are little known outside libertarian circles. Their beliefs stem from the economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises. The institute praised von Mises for being uncompromising, radical, and rigorous, and it hopes to capture these qualities by pursuing his principles through the Libertarian Party.

Mises taught that the only viable economic policy was unrestricted laissez-faire, free markets, and the unhampered exercise of private property rights. The government was strictly limited to defending persons and property within its territory.

As of 2022, the Mises Caucus is the largest caucus of the Libertarian Party and controls 37 state affiliates. Its members support Trump’s policies as being closer to their beliefs while downplaying their differences. 

For instance, while the published Libertarian Party platform supports the unrestricted movement of people across national borders, the Mises Caucus aligns with Trump in opposing open borders. The LP platform states: “Individuals own their bodies and have rights over them that other individuals, groups, and governments may not violate.” Mises accuses libertarians of being leftists when they apply this clause to allow women to have abortions.

These Mises positions lead other libertarians to accuse the caucus of acting like a Republican lobby promoting Trump and his policies that violate personal liberties. 

The Mises Caucus on X echoes Trump’s claim that his conviction as a felon is an instance of the U.S. justice system being weaponized against the people. Through their leadership positions, the caucus orchestrated the invitation to Trump to address their convention. Trump libertarian supporters got to the venue early and occupied the front-row seats chanting “USA.” 

Many libertarians still reject Trump, as they did in 2020.  This hostility was on display when he spoke. One member held up a sign reading, “No wannabe dictators!” 

The party’s presidential candidate, Chase Oliver, who beat the Mises candidate at the convention, said of Trump’s appearance, “The truth is, I don’t like having a war criminal on this stage, I don’t feel he deserves a spot on this stage.”

Right-Wing Libertarians are moving away from their Presidential Candidate toward Trump.

Even though Oliver calls for the closure of all overseas military bases and ending of military support to Israel and Ukraine, Mises leaders accuse him of being woke. Mises Caucus advisory board member Dave Smith said he would not vote for Oliver because he is woke by accommodating some immigration and COVID restrictions.

Others outside the party magnify that message. Jim Geraghty, National Review’s senior political correspondent, wrotethat “Oliver wants a path to citizenship for 8 million people who entered the country illegally, which is just another way of rewarding people for breaking the law.”

Oliver takes the mainstream libertarian position that personal rights are just as important as property rights. They include women having control of their bodies, like having abortions or access to contraception. 

Mises downplays protecting personal rights as posted on X: “Federally-mandated access to contraception isn’t even Constitutional, let alone Libertarian. Supporting it under the guise of “women’s right to healthcare & autonomy” is Woke Progressive, not Libertarian. The only real rights are property rights”

As a result of these criticisms of Olive, Smith encourages right-wing libertarians to “abandon this clown show and work on influencing the GOP… and stop trying to win over the leftist social club.” He and similar thinking libertarians are sending a nuanced message for party members to vote for Trump, not Oliver.

Converting the Libertarian Party to a Right-Wing Organization is underway.

The Libertarian Party has been undergoing an effort by the Mises Institute since 2017 to move its beliefs to a more fundamentalist economic perspective. That effort, at times, has become linked to white nationalism.

For instance, Mises Institute president Jeff Deist began the effort when he wrote a blog calling for a “new libertarian” to replace the LP’s establishment leadership. He wrote that libertarians should not ignore “blood and soil … still matter to people.” The term “blood and soil” was a Nazi slogan and was chanted by white nationalists, along with ‘Hail Trump,” ahead of the deadly Charlottesville rally.

According to David Valente, a former alternate member of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) and LP member since 2012, the Mises Caucus has a plan in motion. “The purpose of what is going on with the MC … is to sabotage the LP to sideline it over the next few years for Donald Trump.” 

Last month’s race for a Kentucky state house seat points to a close relationship between Mises and Trump’s far-right base in opposing incumbent Republican politicians. Kentucky Republican T.J. Roberts,  a former libertarian Mises Caucus member, beat an incumbent Republican this past May. Roberts had the support of Congressional Rep. Thomas Massie, who seconded the motion to oust Speaker of the House Republican Mike Johnson.

More importantly, Massie joined 13 Freedom Caucus members voting against a resolution condemning Myanmar’s general who violently overthrew elected leaders. They supported the military coup because the military said that 16% of the ballots had “voter irregularities.” The military rejected the country’s election commission, which called the election fair. In response, the military instituted media and internet blackouts. This is an authoritarian approach to limiting personal freedoms, not a libertarian approach to protecting them. 

The right-wing effort to control LP opens the door for the Democrats to hammer home the point that a second Trump presidency will snuff out LP’s support for personal rights and could destroy the party’s independence.

Democrats protecting personal freedoms will appeal to libertarians.

Democrats must not only understand why attracting libertarian voters is essential but also how to reach them. 

Democrats must take into account that the Mises Caucus is trying to turn the Libertarian Party away from protecting personal freedoms as a core libertarian belief. The MC has labeled stances that appear to be pro-migration, pro-choice, and pro-LGBTQ positions as leftist and anti-libertarian. Since they have not secured the LP candidate for a Mises member, they appear to have moved from capturing the Libertarian Party to siphoning off members to vote for Trump as president. 

Democrats need to wake up to this strategy and respond by appealing to libertarians that their party could be diverted to a narrow right-wing agenda. This is particularly true if Trump is elected and appoints a Mises Caucus member to his administration as promised at the LP convention this May. 

Having a right-wing libertarian in the Trump cabinet will encourage billionaires to fund Mises to make LP more to their liking. Two of those billionaires are registered Libertarian, options trader Jeff Yass and former CEO of Overstock Patrick Byrne.

Since 2017, Yass has been a generous supporter of Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who is more aligned with Libertarian views than any member of Congress. Since 2018, Yass has contributed $18 million to the super PAC Protect Freedom, which is directly linked to Paul. Protect Freedom funds independent advertising campaigns to elect conservative candidates, such as Senators Michael Lee and Ron Johnson, who are staunch supporters of Trump.

Byrne is mentioned in a social media screenshot of private Mises Caucus-linked groups saved by John Hudak, an LP member and former member of the Mises Caucus. Michael Heise, the MC chairman from Pennsylvania, claimed on social media to have received donations and solicited advice from Byrne. He authored a book based on an election fraud that cost Trump the 2020 election. Byrne was also the main financier of the audit of Arizona’s Maricopa County election results, which failed to prove fraudulent voting.

Democrats should realize that most libertarian-oriented voters sympathize with protecting individual liberties, which is closer to Democratic policies than Republican policies concerning the rights of women, ethnic minorities, gays, and trans citizens. Pew Research Polls from 2015 and 2014 showed that 22% of Democratic voters identified themselves as “libertarian,” whereas only 12% of Republicans did.

If Trump is elected, the Libertarian Party’s future independence from either major party may vanish and could become more subservient to the Republican’s right-wing agenda. That should motivate libertarians to consider which presidential candidate presents the more existential threat to their party. The writing is on the wall for all to see who presents that threat.  


 
NOTE: The information for this piece was gathered from reviewing 38 articles and websites, some of which are linked above. 
 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a single contribution to help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 
 
Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Extremism of Student Protests Today and in the ’60s

About 5% of college campuses are experiencing protests. This is not the ’60s again; their size and scope are smaller. However, they follow the same arc of drifting from pursuing their initial objectives to having a few with extreme views and engaging in violence capturing the headlines.

Protestors are motivated by legitimate outrage at the government’s actions. If there is little or no response, over time, impatience sets in, and for a growing number of protestors, a perfect solution overshadows more achievable solutions. 

Experiencing the 60’s Student Protests

I was a 1960s protestor at my conservative public university in Ohio. The anti-war protests were peaceful for a couple of years, and eventually, protestors briefly occupied the administrator’s office. There was no violence on that campus. 

When the WTO (World Trade Organization) held its conference in Seattle, I marched with 50,000 others to protest their policies. It was an organized, peaceful march until a small faction suddenly broke off from the designated route, breaking store windows and damaging cars. The media covered the violence, not the protestors’ organized open forums with knowledgeable speakers discussing how the WTO was trampling local laws.

In addition to my experience, I traveled to other campuses and talked to student activists. Overwhelmingly, they supported our democracy, yet a few attacked it as the enemy, as I describe in Student Power, Democracy & Revolution in the Sixties.

When I compare how student protests are unfolding now to the ’60s, I see that each experience the growth of extremist beliefs and aggressive strategies.  

The Growth of Extremism

Extremism results from a zeitgeist shared by the left and the right, which continues today. It is the spirit of achieving absolute success at any cost. Protests moving in this direction are fueled by the media’s coverage of a savage war that America either is directly engaged in or contributes to. 

Barry Goldwater could be credited with ushering in the spirit that saving the good sometimes demands extreme measures. In his 1964 acceptance speech at the Republican Convention as their Presidential candidate, he released that temperament. 

His speech writer, Karl Hess, a libertarian and self-declared anarchist, included the now famous lines, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Extremism is not limited to one side of the political spectrum in believing that the ends justify the means. 

In the 1960s, the largest American activist student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was born out of the desire to extend the democratic process to multiple facets of life. 

Less than ten years after its founding, SDS was torn apart not by outsiders but by its leaders arguing how best to achieve a perfect solution. Today, if extremist messages are their banners, a similar dynamic could develop among the protestors. 

The loudest and most aggressive protestors against Israel’s invasion of Gaza ignore the advice of Ahmed Fouad Akhatib, a Gaza-born Palestinian Analyst. He criticizes those exercising “maximalist activism” as doing nothing positive. He told CNN News, “Use your Western privilege to actually help Palestinian people and promote a pragmatic path forward by engaging Israeli and Jewish audiences.” 

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A Slow Student Response

All Americans were stunned by Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel on October 7, killing 1,200; almost all civilians, and kidnapping others. Hamas was not capable of conquering Israel. They knew this action invited a retaliation that Israel had long promised if attacked. 

The personal brutality that Israelis suffered was soon overshadowed in the world’s eyes by their retribution. As Israeli bombs and ground troops tried to destroy Hamas in Palestine’s Gaza, the Americans saw collapsed buildings and bodies strewn. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least two-thirds of the dead are children and women.

Although Israeli troops and tanks invaded Gaza two weeks after Hamas violently attacked Israel, it was only after many thousands of Palestinians had been killed during Israel’s six months of occupying and bombarding Gaza that the student protests erupted. 

This slow student response on campuses was probably due to two factors. 

First, within days after the Hamas attack, there was initially universal American sympathy for Israel being attacked first. In the first ten days of the war, the Crowd Counting Consortium, an academic project tracking and sharing data on political crowds in the United States, recorded 180,000 demonstrators across roughly 270 events in solidarity with Israel and 200 in support of Palestine.

Second, the few campus protests before mid-April were limited to demanding a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli occupation. They also criticized US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza, but they were not focused on attacking Israel as a nation-state or supporting Hamas. 

Overall, two months after Israel’s invasion of Gaza, public support dramatically shifted from supporting Israel to protecting Palestinian civilians from being killed. By December, more than 1 million Americans had participated in protesting the war, with the events sympathetic to Palestine outnumbering those that were pro-Israel five to one.

Some of those carrying placards with anti-Israel slogans may be antisemitic. Still, by far, most protestors at rallies or occupying school buildings are just angry at the government for not responding to their pleas to try to end the war.

Deconstructing Student Protests 

I’ve found that the activist students consist of two major clusters regarding political issues that initiate protests. The extremists promote far-reaching demands, reject flexible strategies, and confront authorities through leading direct actions, from destroying property to fighting police.  These folks are most likely to embrace violence.

Another cluster, many times larger than the extremists, are those who sympathize with many of the first cluster’s demands but are strategically more flexible and support non-violent disobedience to avoid violence. 

They may occupy a building or set up a tent camp on the campus quad, usually not leaving until their demands are met. If they follow Martin Luther King’s strategy, they will not resist being arrested since it distracts them from their central message. 

Student protests were few before April 18 when 100 Columbia University students were arrested for tent camping on campus. By April 28, 77 campuses of the nation’s 2,828 4-year colleges were experiencing protests. A quarter of students were arrested for some infraction, most for non-violent illegal activities. 

Four of the ten campuses with the most demonstrators were at prestigious schools, and the other six were large public state universities. Still, the protests were on campuses spread across the nation. States west of the Mississippi had 26, while there were 38 east of the river, minus the old Confederacy states, which saw 13 campus demonstrations.

Over 2,950 protesters, including faculty members and professors, were arrested in less than a month on over 60 campuses. Most arrests have occurred at encampments and sit-ins at the more than 130 universities hosting them.

Antisemitism

The current protests have seen antisemitic views expressed, unlike the anti-Vietnam War protests. Both protest movements blamed our government for the killing of innocent civilians in a foreign land. In the 60’s, the U.S. was officially fighting an ideologically driven enemy, communists. Our ally was, supposedly, a democracy.  But the populations of each side were Vietnamese. It was not a tribal war. 

The current demonstrations are distinctly different from the 60s because they create a tribal-like attitude that could tear open this nation along ethnic-religious lines supporting two different countries. 

The U.S. has always financially and militarily supported Israel. With Palestine, we have provided only humanitarian assistance and vetoed its recognition as a sovereignty eligible for membership in the U.N. 

In the Israel–Hamas war, the Gaza branch of the Ministry of Health reports that more than 35,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by the Israeli invasion. Israel acknowledges that 16,000 civilians have died because of the war.  

Since mid-April, student protestors have introduced demands that universities cut their economic ties with Israel because of their military tactics. Critics see these demands as antisemitic since they could endanger Israel’s existence by hurting its economy.  Advocates see it akin to the same strategy used to in the past to pressure South Africa to abandon apartheid.  

Demonstrators now wave Palestine’s national flag. Critics wrongly accuse them of carrying the Hamas flag, which is different; it has no strips and consists of white Arabic calligraphy on a green background.  

The media, and in particular the conservative outlets, tag demonstrations as pro-Hamas because of this false identification of flags – that represent the Palestinians, not Hamas.

Hamas is the recognized governing party of Gaza, while the PLO rules the West Bank. These two areas comprise the Palestinian state, recognized as a sovereign state by 143 nations in the United Nations.

Nevertheless, since mid-April, extremists have gained prominence for wanting to abolish the Israel state, which is the position of Hamas. This is interpreted as antisemitic since it would deny Jews a democratic homeland. On the other hand, Arab Muslims have multiple state homelands where the laws enforce Islamic practices on all their citizens. 

Some extremist activists verbally abuse or threaten Jewish students. Muslim students have also reported receiving similar treatment from pro-Israel activists. The most publicized threats have been toward Jewish students. This may be due in part because the pro-Palestinian demonstrations far outnumber pro-Israel ones.

Congressional Republicans, pointing to this situation, launched a national investigation into what groups are participating in anti-Israel campus demonstrations. They see a conspiracy afoot because some social justice non-profits fund advocate groups, including Jewish peace groups, with their members engaged in protests. Finding or fabricating a conspiracy that financially supports participants on either side is not helpful for securing a peaceful settlement.   

To achieve peace and protect our democracy, political leaders and protest organizers must condemn all extremism. They need to speak above the chants and accusations by asserting that we are all American citizens with the right to free expression and the responsibility to protect others from danger.  This approach will produce solutions, something that slogans cannot. 

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the SixtiesHe is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Banning TikTok – concerning National Security, Civil Rights & Investments 

In the last week of April, Congress passed, and President Biden signed, a law banning TikTok in the United States if its parent company, ByteDance, did not sell it to an American company within 12 months. 

The New York Times Senior writer David Leonhardt provides a good summary of why this bill was passed. It is a highly unusual step since TikTok is a popular social media platform. About one-third of Americans under 30 regularly get their news from it, and Congress rarely punishes a single company for a suspected or possible behavior.

Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., articulated the main reason for taking this action. He told Congress, “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government,” since under President Xi Jinping’s rule, private companies are treated as extensions of the state.

The argument for banning TikTok seems straightforward – protect national security. 

Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor, argues in the Atlantic that America has a long history of shielding infrastructure and communication platforms from foreign control. Beginning with the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Framers feared that foreign powers would exploit America’s open form of government to serve their interests. 

As recently as 2011, that concern was expressed in our judicial system. As a Circuit Judge, Judge Brett Kavanaughwrote in Bluman vs. FEC that the country has a compelling interest in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in such activities, “thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.”

Those who argue that this law violates constitutional rights have opposed it, relying on past court decisions on Constitutional Rights. In 2020, President Trump tried to force a sale or ban of the TikTok app, but federal judges blocked the effort because it would have shut down a “platform for expressive activity.”

More recently, a federal judge blocked a Montana law banning TikTok from going into effect because it likely violates the First Amendment. 

The A.C.L.U. sent a letter to Congress to vote against the bill, citing that decision and also arguing that the law applied a “prior restraint” preventing access to receiving speech on TikTok. To exercise a prior restraint, a court must determine that the ban is necessary to prevent serious, immediate harm to national security. None was provided for passing the law.

Leonhardt referred to a Network Contagion Research Institute report that said TikTok likely promotes and demotes specific topics based on the Chinese government’s perceived preferences.  He and others have concluded that TikTok is thus a propaganda tool for China. It may be, but does that meet a level of presenting an immediate harm to national security?

The conservative-libertarian CATO Institute labeled that report a misleading study based on flawed methodology. Jeff Yass, a former board member at the Cato Institute and a major Republican campaign donor, is a prominent TikTok defender. He needs to be because, as the founder of Susquehanna, it owns roughly 15 percent of ByteDance, according to an article by an NYT reporter. 

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Although ByteDance is a private Chinese company, American businesses have been investing in it since its formation in 2012, a year before it started TikTok. Susquehanna and investment firms General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital have collectively poured billions into ByteDance.

Three of the company’s five board members are Americans, with the heads of GA and SC having two of those seats. Other U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR, the Carlyle Group, and the hedge fund Coatue Management.

When you think of TikTok as a Chinese company, realize it is run by an American Board of Directors and funded by American investments. It has 600 million users outside the U.S., generating about $10 billion in global ad revenue in 2022. It doesn’t exist in China.

While ByetDance owns 100% of TikTok, it is 60% owned by global institutional investors. Its founder owns 20%, the Chinese Government owns 1%, and the remainder is owned by its 150,000 employees based in nearly 120 cities globally. Byte Dance is a global business network valued at $225 billion as of March 2024. 

TikTok is a creature of global capitalism likely subservient to an authoritarian Communist government because ByteDance is domiciled there. Therefore, U.S. TikTok is subject to its regulatory rules, which serve China’s interests, not America’s.

This condition has caught the attention of politicians, academics, and reporters. Their explanations and resolutions revolve around a dialectical world of two clashing objective truths: nation-states seek to secure their existence, and they also seek the wealth generated by the internet’s social media platforms in the global marketplace. 

As I’ve previously described, the internet heralded a historical increase in the security threat to nations. However, the Internet’s global market also significantly contributes to economic growth in China, America, and other countries.  

The struggle to define and control TikTok’s impact on their national security and wealth is at the core of how China and America’s governments have responded in trying to manage the global internet social media octopus.

And it is a growing giant. As of January 2024, 66.2 percent of the global population were internet users, of which 94% were social media users. China ranks first for the highest number of those users, followed in the following order by India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia. It’s apparent that social media, even if state-controlled, has tremendous participation regardless of the government’s tight management of the internet. 

Access to a nation’s population is a lucrative revenue source for whoever has the resources to build a massive website infrastructure. Investors have pumped billions into social media companies, with the market values of Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta each over $1 trillion. Digital commerce is growing in Communist and Capitalist countries alike. China’s Tencent, which owns WeChat and QQ, is the fourth-largest internet company in the world, with a market capitalization of $351.2 billion, and ByteDance is not far behind. 

China’s approach to TikTok is typical of how it and other governments, like Russia and Iran, deal with social media’s benefits and dangers. All three have banned major foreign-owned internet social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and most other sites on the mainstream Western internet. However, they do allow apps that are controlled domestically or submit to censorship.

For instance, TikTok is not offered in China, but ByteDance does provide its sister app, Douyin, which has no presence outside China. Acquiescing to the government’s censorship has not hurt its sales. The research firm eMarketer estimated that Douyin took in $21 billion in advertising revenue in 2023, or about two-thirds of Alphabet’s ad revenue from YouTube.

That attraction of large profits from China’s huge population has led some major U.S. internet companies to make serious compromises. Apple receives a fifth of its total sales from within China. However, a New York Times investigation found that Apple has risked its Chinese customers’ data and aided the Chinese government’s censorship. As a result, since 2017, roughly 55,000 active apps have disappeared from Apple’s App Store in China, while most of them have remained available in other countries.

China also demands that “golden shares” be acquired to allow government officials to be directly involved in private business decisions, including having a say in the content they provide. Chinese officials acknowledge their existence but have not described how they are used. 

In addition, every website on China’s internet goes through one of three companies, all owned by the state. Hence, all web searches can be subject to substantial restrictions, and the results can be censored.

The U.S., in comparison to China and similar states, provides a wide-open internet for social media apps to exist. Overall, Freedom House ranks the U.S. as the 9th most open to internet freedom, ranked just below the democracies of Canada, the U.K., Japan, and Germany. 

As noted, our courts have used the Constitution’s First Amendment to curtail state interference with accessing information on social media apps. According to the Congressional Research Service report Free Speech and the Regulation of Social Media Content, which reviewed court decisions, social media has been treated “like news editors, who generally receive the full protections of the First Amendment when making editorial decisions.”

This interpretation means that social media apps, like newspapers, have the right to express their opinions but are not obligated to print or post others’ views. Hence, social media can bar statements endangering public health, like hate speech that incites violence toward citizens or disinformation that exposes the public to a killer pandemic.

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Constitutional rights also protect private property. Republican Senator  Paul, writing in Reason, accuses the government of violating the Fifth Amendment right to due process by taking the property of the current American owners of TikTok through its ban or the forced sale of TikTok to an American company. For the courts to uphold these government actions, TikTok would have to be accused and convicted of a crime.

However, there is no obvious protection for companies that lose money by freely choosing the businesses they invest in. Hirsch’s NYT article notes how TikTok investors could lose billions if the courts decide the government can ban TikTok as a security risk. Selling it to an American company may not be an option since China stopped a prior such sale, and its foreign minister condemned the current proposal as unacceptable. China passed a new law denying the export of technology similar to the algorithm that TikTok uses.

The TikTok kerfuffle arises because of the overwhelming domination of the internet’s social media platforms by China and the U.S. However, future conflicts will occur between nations over controlling the internet’s social media. The emergent digital age has exposed existential conflicts between securing a nation’s sovereignty, protecting citizens’ rights, and maximizing the global marketplace’s profits.

Authoritarian and democratic governments are testing the two paths to effectively resolving these conflicts. At the heart of their approach is how they manage domestic decision-making.

 Internet access is denied or censored in countries without independent judiciaries and where the legislative branch is subservient to the executive branch of government. In democratic republics with these three branches not controlled by one party or executive branch, access is open and subject to varied, limited regulations.  

The difference between these two approaches is that one allows for public debates on managing access to the Internet. In this manner, social media apps that challenge the status quo of institutions and the marketplace will enable a society to respond rationally and not have a response decided by a select few. 

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.
 

The Digital Era Will Ignite Revolutions – as Did the Print Era

The breakthrough technologies of the printing press and data digitization allow the masses to access information. That flood of new information crumbled the legitimacy of the established political orders. 

Will great powers fall again due to the greater information flow in the new digital media era?

Over 500 years have separated the invention of the Guttenberg Press and the creation of digital data. Each begat substantial social and political upheavals. Those changes could come sooner since the speed and breadth of the digital era’s impact dwarfs that of the printing press.

The spread of mechanical, printed information, from its inception in 1440, took 70 years to embolden challenges to the power of kings, elites, and the Catholic Church. In 1977, when computers became accessible to the public, digitized information took less than 30 years to create a robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social media on the Internet. Authoritarian governments weaponized it to manipulate democratic governments’ elections, while the Internet’s social media facilitated domestic rebellions against autocratic governments.

Two societal conditions make the digital era more threatening to all governments:  how each era’s culture measures time and their literacy level. 

The Culture of Time

The sense of time was different at the start of each information era. Medieval Europe was an agrarian society, with 80 to 90 percent of the population tied to the seasons for growing crops or raising livestock. Time was measured in months, not days, hours, or minutes, as is the twenty-first century. 

Watches were invented during the Renaissance after the printing press. Nevertheless, they were primarily decorative ornaments that could be wrong by several hours a day, so accurate timekeeping was of very minor importance.

The printing revolution did not speed up time but worked within the Medieval understanding of time. The digital revolution is an essential commodity in the modern sense of time. The importance of news about politics or economics is determined by how timely it is. 

The printing era occurred when there was more time to read and think about what was read. Social movements and politics moved at a slower pace than now. 

The digital era is speeding up the production, distribution, and consumption of information, including news, to meet popular demands. It sets a high expectation that those demands will be met quickly, and nations are under pressure to meet them. As a result, there is a greater urgency to consume information and find solutions in the digital era than in the printing era. 

Social media platforms like X and Facebook do not deliver long tracts explaining the conditions and causes behind what made something newsworthy. That information cannot be summarized in a tweet, which may or may not be accurate.

Readers begin to expect to have information delivered quickly and easily understood. Conclusions are then more straightforward to reach, regardless of scant information. 

Rumors provide misinformation when they innocently pass on incorrect information. They distribute disinformation when they are used with the intent to push the instigator’s agenda through unverifiable facts.

Consider that rumors travel faster than thoughtful analysis. They point to victims and offenders with unreliable anecdotal information. They make for captivating narratives, which then are woven into conspiracies to explain reality. 

This trend negatively impacts democracies because citizens are responsible for appointing their leaders based on being informed voters. Receiving half the truth or a distorted truth leads to poorly informed choices about how a democratic government should function. 

Manipulating digital information allows Russia and China to weaken American democracy to benefit their foreign policies. Their strategy is to spread disinformation to cause confusion and distrust of our institutions, as described in How Russia and China Pursue a Soft Regime Change in America.

Authoritative governments are not as vulnerable as democracies to disinformation campaigns. They feed their citizens a consistent line of censored domestic information and filter foreign-generated internet news.

China, Russia, Iran, and other autocratic governments recognize that information on the internet can quickly foment powerful political movements that threaten their authority. 

They do not want to experience what happened to Iran in 2019, when protests at peaceful gatherings spread to 21 cities within hours, as videos of the protest circulated online. The government forcibly shut them down, only to see 25,000 protestors gather months later, calling for the overthrow of the government and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Iran finally blocked the sharing of information showing the protests and the deaths of hundreds of protesters on social media platforms—their solution: foisting a near-total internet blackout of around six days.

The second condition that separates the printing and digital eras is the extent of a population’s literacy. 

The extent and depth of literacy

Access to information is much greater today than during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 

Minimal literacy never rose above 30% before 1500, and it took 200 years for the printing press to raise Europe’s literacy rate to 48%. Since books were the primary source of information, the audience was severely limited to the social elite of nobility or wealthy gentry who owned them. 

Still, for the 10% of the European population that lived in cities and were literate, the printed word led to the development of pamphlets. Briefer than books and focused on just one issue, they punctured papal infallibility and the divine rule of monarchs. 

Martin Luther, a professor of moral theology, printed his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. These condemned the Roman Catholic Church and ignited the Protestant Reformation against the Pope. In France, so many insurrectionary pamphlets supported the Reformation that government edicts prohibited them.

The printing press overturned the Roman Catholic Church’s thousand-year political domination in Europe, but it took decades and spread over a hundred years.

Long-established political hierarchies also crumbled due to the efforts of print media.

Pamphlets’ influence was potent in the 18th Century. Two contributed to the overthrow of the French monarchy and a successful revolt against Britain, the greatest power in Europe: JeanJacques Rousseau’s pamphlet, On the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right in 1762, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in 1776.

Pamphlets are comparable to social media’s present danger to governments by empowering individuals to proliferate news through the internet that exposes their faults, weaknesses, and corruption.  

Although the Internet became functional in 1983, less than 2% of the world’s population used it before the World Wide Web (WWW) was opened to the public in 1991. Sixteen years later, 65% of the world’s population uses the Internet for instant information, entertainment, news, and social interactions.

Consequently, literacy is no longer confined to just reading material; it extends to learning through observing videos on social media. With citizens of every country on the Internet, Digital information has greater power to inform and influence people’s beliefs than the printed press ever did. 

The digital age is seeing autocracies and democracies globally challenged from outside and inside their boundaries within a fraction of the time the printed press did so on just one continent. 

A democratic government’s role in the digital age is to keep information accessible to everyone. The challenge for democracies is avoiding having the internet become a weapon to destroy democracies that make open access to information possible. 

A path forward is to teach each generation that citizenship should protect individuals’ freedoms and the community’s welfare, as described in Citizenship—Bridging Individualism & Community to Sustain our Democracy. If we act as thoughtful, responsible citizens, the digital age can strengthen democratic governance, not threaten it. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

How Russia and China Pursue a Soft Regime Change in America

Both Russia and China are manipulating our democratic election process to benefit their foreign policies.

Russia has been attempting a soft regime change in America by ushering out the liberal Democratic administrations and replacing them with conservative Republican ones. It is a soft approach because they are not using physical force like in Ukraine. 

However, both Russia and America have physically instigated regime changes in other countries through brute force for over a hundred years, most often on nations in their immediate sphere of interest. 

Russia, whether as a monarchy, communist state, or autocracy, has repeatedly intervened in Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. Likewise, America has done the same in Central and South America. Their efforts are well documented in the context of U.S. and Russian actions.

Since WWII, America’s military presence and financial investments have been more global than any other nation. Consequently, our government has pursued replacing the leadership of countries that obstruct our military and economic interests. That effort often conflicts with China’s and Russia’s ambitions. 

Despite Russia’s more extensive nuclear arsenal, Russia is far weaker economically and militarily than us to have a global impact. While China has a larger army and an economy growing faster than ours, it is also disadvantaged in seeking regime change in other countries. 

Compared to America, they lack our military and financial clout. We have around 750 U.S. military bases in at least 80 countries, and the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, which allows the U.S. to impose unilateral, effective sanctions against other countries.

Although Russia and China eye each other suspiciously over their shared border, they have a common interest: clip the American eagle’s wings. Ideally, they would love to see it in a birdcage rather than soaring above them.

Their shared goal of having America retreat from the world stage dovetails with the Republican party’s support of an America First isolationist foreign policy. 

This is most obvious as Russia opposes the Democrats’ support for military aid to Ukraine and questions America’s participation in NATO. China has not been so partisan in recent years, but it has leaned more toward criticizing Biden than Trump in weighing who would be less obstructive to their foreign policies. 

Thanks to the internet, Russia and China are penetrating our democracy’s open portal of social media to support electing politicians who don’t obstruct their goals.  America cannot reciprocate similarly since these countries tightly control access to their domestic internet and do not hold democratic elections.

Russian electoral interference first came to light in the 2016 presidential election.

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In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bi-partisan report that they had worked for over three years. They reviewed over a million documents from U.S. spy agencies and interviews of Republican and Democratic government officials.

The bi-partisan committee concluded that Russia conducted a sophisticated and aggressive campaign to influence the U.S. election to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. They also identified folks on Team Trump as willing to accept help from the Russians. 

Afterward, former FBI director Robert Mueller led a special counsel investigation and released his Mueller Report. It concluded that Russian interference was “sweeping and systematic” and “violated U.S. criminal law.” 

Mueller then indicted three Russian organizations, which also led to the indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials. 

President Donald Trump had appointed Mueller as deputy attorney general, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him with only 6 Democrats voting against him. After the report was released, Trump called Mueller a “true never-Trumper” and said his report was “horrible.”

Mueller showed that the Russian-controlled Internet Research Agency (IRA) sought to “provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States” to Trump’s advantage. In the 2016 election, sham Facebook groups were created by IRA supporting Trump or attacking Clinton on over 3,500 advertisements. 

The director of Columbia University‘s Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that 470 phony Facebook accounts tied to Russia were active during the 2016 campaign. Six of them were shared at least 340 million times, according to Jonathan Albright, research director for Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism

However, China’s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election, according to the Brookings Institute’s October 2018 report,  found that “there is no public evidence that China has sought to leak private information or access electoral systems to manipulate U.S. elections.” However, they warned that as relations with China deteriorated, they may become as aggressive as Russia.

While Former President Donald Trump accused China of manipulating the 2020 election, the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, concluded that China did not interfere; however, they “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”

Instead, they found that the Russian government meddled in the 2020 election with an influence campaign “denigrating” President Joe Biden and “supporting” Trump.

However, China and Russia are working to influence the 2024 presidential race. They appear to be taking different approaches. China is more focused on weakening the democratic process than Russia, which is more actively pushing for a Biden loss in November. 

China employs one of the oldest and most effective strategies for winning a dominance war: creating chaos in the opposition’s domain. This disrupts domestic social cohesion and, hence, causes government functions to fail. 

For instance, this month, an Institute for Strategic Dialogue report identified a Chinese influence campaign known as SpamouflageIt uses AI and a network of social media accounts to amplify American discontent and division ahead of the U.S. presidential election. 

Meta announced in August it had removed nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to Spamouflage in the second quarter of 2023, while Google, owning YouTube, shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years, 

By describing the U.S. as rife with urban decay, homelessness, fentanyl abuse, and gun violence, China pushes the idea that the November vote could damage and potentially destroy our democracy. Coincidentally, it’s the same message the Republican party’s candidates use against the Democrats.

 Speaking of these problems, Trump claimed in a March 2024 speech to Ohio supporters, “If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country.” 

China’s efforts amplify a traditional distrust of big government’s failure to address widespread concerns. According to a 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of Americans say they are angry with the U.S. political system. 

More disturbing, a recent PRC survey showed that American support for democratic institutions has slipped over the last decade. Thirty-two percent would support an authoritarian government in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts. 

These folks might not object if Trump became a dictator for a lot longer than a day. 

While China and Russia use social media to undermine the tedium of holding democratic elections, they also highlight the benefits of a single strong leader who can make quick and decisive decisions to reflect some popular sentiments.   

Meanwhile, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights report on the November election’s digital risks said the leading cause of authoritarian leadership’s growth was the distribution of false, hateful, and violent material. The report noted that this inflammatory content was more prevalent because “major social media platforms have retreated from some of their past commitments to promote election integrity.”

Russia is more creative than China in pushing false information seamlessly into our tapestry of open media sources. 

New York Times reported that researchers and government officials uncovered a string of Russian-controlled “local” sounding newspapers: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle, and the Miami Chronicle. 

Reviewing the researcher’s findings, Myers wrote that these entities mimic actual news organizations, interspersing false stories about crime, politics, and culture. The goal is to lend an aura of credibility to social media posts that spread disinformation that undermines support for policies like providing Ukraine military assistance. 

According to Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, co-directors of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, Russia has also crafted the art of narrative laundering. These narratives spread false or misleading information by concealing their source. 

Consequently, public perception of an issue or a candidate is swayed by planting fake news stories on domestic and foreign news websites to magnify fake social media accounts and fake news websites using artificial intelligence. For instance, Russians fabricated a story to weaken American support for Ukraine. The news website The Nation picked up their fake posting of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wife spending $1,000,000 on Cartier jewelry. 

The most brazen example of Russian manipulation of our democratic process was their use of an FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, to link President Biden to alleged criminal actions involving the Ukrainian business dealings of his son Hunter. 

Smirnov admitted that “officials associated with Russian intelligence” were involved in passing an unsupported story about Hunter Biden. He told the FBI that the Russian Intelligence Service intercepted several cellphone calls placed at a hotel “by prominent U.S. persons the Russian government may use as ‘kompromat’ in the 2024 election.” No tape recording was provided.

Government prosecutors believe that Smirnov had peddled the Russian lies without question, which could have impacted U.S. elections. Smirnov has been charged with felony false statements and obstruction crimes for providing allegedly false information about President Biden and Hunter Biden. 

Republicans had counted on his upcoming testimony to Congress to provide evidence that Biden must be impeached because of taking a bribe from a corrupt Ukrainian official. Republicans subsequently had to drop Smirnov from being a witness. The Russians lost a lethal effort to defeat Biden’s reelection.

At the end of March, blogger Heather Cox Richardson identified an essay from the Study of War explaining how Russia’s disinformation operation is the key to winning the war against Ukraine: the objective is to get Americans to believe in a false reality.  

November voters will be deluged with an onslaught of disinformation. Such as the fake stories about President Zelenskyy’s wife and Biden’s son, to discredit those in power that obstruct authoritarian aggression.

As Linvill and Warren concluded, it is becoming more difficult for people to discern which news stories are fake because advancing technology distorts the face of reality.

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a one-time donation help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

As previously noted, Russia and China cannot win a global economic or military contest with America. However, they can create social conditions within America that convert legitimate policy concerns into a movement that rejects a democratic process for governing. It is easier for them to sow domestic confusion about the legitimacy of America’s elected leadership than to overpower America’s resources. 

Describing their strategy as promoting a soft regime change may seem exaggerated. Pushing for a particular party to win presidential elections undermines our democratic process, but there has always been another election to adjust our political course. 

America has continuously had a peaceful transfer of executive power, allowing policy changes to occur. However, an authoritarian regime could emerge when a nation’s executive refuses to leave office. 

In March, during a CNN town hall, Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 presidential election.He says that the last election was rigged despite no evidence provided. Unfortunately, more than 40 percent of Republicans believe there is evidence that Biden didn’t legitimately win enough votes to be elected.

Trump has again set the stage to claim the presidency was stolen from him if he loses the November election. How would his supporters react? 

Russia and China would love if Trump were right about a possible bloodbath should he lose again and his supporters take the advice he gave at the end of his January 6 speech asking them to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” And so, the American eagle would no longer be soaring. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Biden vs Trump Administration on creating jobs and better wages for blue-color workers

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While immigration and abortion are the two hottest issues driving voters’ passion, the national economy has remained one of the public’s top three concerns for years. 

More recently, in three 2023 polls the Wall Street Journal conducted from April to December, the economy ranked as the top issue out of twelve.

Those surveyed were asked: What issue is most important to you when thinking about who you will vote for in the 2024 Presidential Election? Republicans have been hammering Biden’s administration for soaring inflation and hurting our economy even while they contributed to it.  

At the end of his first year in 2021, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Biden of causing inflation,saying, “The last thing we need to do is pile on with another massive, reckless tax and spending spree.”

McConnell ignored that both parties were responsible for the consumer price index (CPI) increasing at a 5% annual rate for the first half of 2021. 

Congressional Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly passed over $2 trillion of economic stimulus legislation in response to COVID in Trump’s last term in office. The legislation stopped the economy from collapsing when the pandemic threw millions of workers out of work and halted many business operations.

Trump signed the legislation and took credit for providing $1,200 checks to individuals and $790 billion in low-interest loans to small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) when the program ended in the fifth month of Biden’s first year in office, 96% of those loans had been forgiven. 

These federal funds saved the economy but also triggered inflation, stoked further by the Federal Reserve Board, significantly increasing bank borrowing rates. 

However, the U.S. was not alone in having to deal with inflation. It climbed to the highest level since 2008 in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 38 member countries. It was also due to COVID shrinking the labor force and stimulating consumer demand as the pandemic receded. 

Former President Donald Trump ran a TV campaign ad just before Biden gave his State of the Union address, saying that “Biden refuses to talk about the unfairness of his disastrous, failed ‘Bidenomics’ policies,”

Trump’s hyper-accusation is faulty. Nevertheless, food costs were relatively flat under Trump’s administration before the economic impact of COVID kicked in during the last half of Trump’s final year.

In the first year of Biden’s term, food costs soared to over 6%. That increase was directly due to COVID’s impact on reduced labor and materials supplies, as more dollars were pumped into the economy bidding for fewer goods.

The politics of blaming Biden for many of the economic problems spawned by COVID may have pushed the polls toshow that their economic welfare fell under President Joe Biden’s administration.  

In the eight polls that WSJ conducted from March 2022 to February 2024, just over half of the respondents strongly disapproved of how Biden handled the economy, specifically inflation and rising costs. Those who strongly approved never exceeded 19% until the last poll in February, when they hit 23%. This is good news for Biden, but he still faces a 50% strong disapproval rate.

Trump’s campaign capitalized on these findings. “President Biden, the polls are accurate. Americans just don’t like you for destroying our economy,” said Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser. 

It is essential to note which party the WSJ poll respondents are affiliated with. Until February, Republican-affiliated respondents were 31%, and Democrat-affiliated respondents were 34%. Independents have remained constant at nine and ten percent. The percentages of Republicans and Democrats flipped in the last poll, which showed 31% for Democrats and 34% for Republicans. 

There is some evidence that independent voters might be inclined to support Biden. In a pre-speech poll of Biden’s State of the Union, independents who believed his economic policies would move the US in the right direction jumped from 41% to 61% afterward.

A Biden information campaign could resonate with independent voters if they are swayed more by data than party allegiance. If so, independents might look closely at what both campaigns are saying to see if it aligns with reality.  

The most significant slice of the populace, regardless of party affiliation, are wage workers. They are concerned with having a job and making enough to keep up with inflation. In their State of the Union (SOTU) speeches, both Trump and Biden made a pitch to them.

Job Creation 

In his last SOTU, Trump said seven million new jobs had been created since his election.

When Trump spoke, he was correct. However, the coronavirus was already spreading across the globe, and within weeks, the U.S. economy was shut down, throwing millions of people out of work. As a result, Trump ended up with more than 3.1 million jobs in the hole because of pandemic employment losses. 

In his STU, Biden disputed Trump’s claims by presenting good economic news from the first three years of his administration. He proudly said that during this time, “15 million new jobs in just three years — a record, a record!”

Delivering federal money to aid businesses to continue operating during COVID played a significant role in that expansive number. It may be that up to eleven million of those new jobs were due to workers returning to jobs they had lost. 

Nevertheless, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Biden created more jobs over a shorter period than Trump. 

Trump’s peak of non-farm employment in February 2020 was 152 million; it took him three years to add 6 million workers since he started his presidency. After that February, the pandemic struck the economy, and employment plummeted to 109 million by April 2020. 

Biden’s peak of non-farm employment was 158 million in February 2024; it took him three years to add 15 million workers from when he started his presidency. 

The bottom line is that job creation expansion occurred under both administrations, but it contracted sharply when COVID hit the entire population. 

The emergence of COVID, or any natural disaster, goes beyond any president’s control. 

However, how they respond and how funds are used determines their effectiveness in dealing with these events. Biden responded very well by creating more jobs faster than before the pre-COVID economy under Trump’s administration. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a one-time donation help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Blue Color Wages

Democrats are distressed by their blue color voter base swinging over to the Republicans. 

They lean on Republicans’ cultural war against the “elites,” i.e., liberals and Democrats, for an explanation. 

There is some truth on how the liberal cultural agenda threatens many established conservative values by promoting affirmative actions, more accessible admittance for asylum seekers, and institutional protections for all minorities – including race, gender, and sexual identification. 

However, in the field of economic welfare, Democrats cannot understand how working-class families could support a narcissistic billionaire who gives out-sized tax benefits to corporations and comparatively meager ones to working families. The answer may rest in the fact that under the Trump Administration, paychecks rose.

A president’s chance of winning reelection is often based on how most voters have experienced the economy during the last four years. A good economy is whether paychecks grow faster than prices in “real” (inflation-adjusted) terms.

The average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, in “real” terms, rose 8.7% in Trump’s four years. More germane for Democrats is that the blue-color wages for rank-and-file production and nonsupervisory workers — who make up 81% of all private-sector workers — went up 9.8% under Trump.

Workers probably don’t care that those gains were an extension of a trend that started after the 2007-2009 recession. During the last Democratic term, the Obama years, real weekly earnings rose 4.2% for all workers and 4% for rank-and-file. However, what workers do care about are the last four years under the Biden Administration. 

Unfortunately for Biden, as Matt Bruenig, writing for the socialist magazine Jacobin, explains, real wages have declined under Joe Biden’s Presidency. Bruenig writes, ” It’s clear that most workers saw their real wages decline throughout nearly all of 2021 and 2022.

His chart shows that the median usual weekly real earnings of full-time workers rose from the beginning of 2018 to the spring of 2020 while Trump was in office. Afterward, they fell dramatically for the next 24 months and only then began a modest rise. By December 2023, real wages were only $3 higher than when COVID started four years earlier.

In brief, Bruenig makes it “clear that most workers saw their real wages decline throughout nearly all of 2021 and 2022.” That fact bolsters explains how the cultural war alone does not account for most blue-colored workers supporting Trump. 

Biden’s way forward

It is easy to understand why WSJ’s polls showed many workers felt better off under the Trump administration. The steady rise in their real wages contracted during Biden’s administration when the brunt of COVID’s constraints on business activity landed. 

While economic stimulus funds, supported by both parties, softened COVID’s impact on most workers, they also fed inflation, which the independent Federal Reserve Bank contributed to by increasing interest rates. Rising inflation reduced the margin between stalled wages and rising consumer costs. 

History shows that both Trump and Biden supported government intervention in the marketplace, pouring historically high amounts of federal dollars into it to avert an economic recession. Inflation and job fluctuations resulted in both cases. 

If Biden tries to validate his economic policies by explaining complex data, he will lose his audience to Trump, who has spent his life promoting his successes, real or not. He ignores critical details that compromise their importance because he knows how to captivate an audience through extravagant feats against a common enemy. 

The Democratic message should be that Biden, as the helmsman, steered this country back into calmer waters. He successfully managed the most significant sudden infusion of federal funds and regulations the U.S. had seen since the Great Depression. Biden’s economic policies followed up on the bi-partisan effort to avoid a financial collapse due to COVID. And he did so without blaming others for our condition.

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a one-time donation help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

Haley Could Threaten Trump’s Hold on the Republican Party

Former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will not be the Republican presidential Candidate. But she could still threaten Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. 

The indisputable numbers show why Trump will be the Republican nominee. 

Winning the GOP nomination requires at least 1,215 out of 2,429 delegates to win the convention vote to become the Republican nominee.  After winning the South Carolina and Michigan primaries, Trump has 138 delegates, and Haley has 24. 

The six-to-one ratio of delegates between them will likely be the same after Super Tuesday on March 5. That’s when 15 states hold Republican primaries, which account for nearly half of all delegates to their convention.

Unfortunately for Haley, most state Republican primaries award most or all of their delegates to the winner. That’s why Haley received only 6% of her home state of South Carolina’s delegates but received 40% of the votes.

Nate Cole, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, is betting that Trump could easily win more than 90 percent of the total delegates at stake on Super Tuesday. Before the end of March, Trump could secure the nomination to be the Republican presidential nominee.

The Trump-run Republican Party is not a home for Haley.

Haley’s political future will be over if Trump controls the Republican party. Her prior half-hearted support of Trump as the Republican candidate will not spare her. Trump’s narcissistic modus operandi for revenge will likely lead him to hinder, if not block, Haley from winning any political office in the future.  

Haley has gotten under his skin more than the other primary contenders. Her refusal to abandon the fight until late in the game has driven him to often attack her rather than President Joe Biden. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a one-time donation help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Does Haley attend the Republican convention? 

The Republican convention audience will be overwhelmingly pro-Trump, and Haley will face immense party pressure there to approve Trump as the party’s nominee. The media would hound her about when or whether she would endorse Trump. 

If she offers a luck-warm endorsement speech, it could receive tepid applause from die-hard Trumpers. A demonstratable bearhug may get the crowd’s vocal approval, but Trump could hold back. Would it be worth going through this humiliation? Others have. 

If she attends the convention, her strongest rationale for not endorsing Trump would be if he were convicted of a crime or tied down in a brutal trial during the convention. 

In those instances, even the ultimate Teflon candidate might appear to be damaged goods to the big funders and conservative-leaning independent voters.

But holding off to the last moment to make an endorsement decision only delays acknowledging that she has no future in the Trump world.

A bolder course of action would be to avoid the convention and publicly declare that she remains a reasonable conservative alternative to Trump, noting that she has consistently received support from 20% to 40% of Republican voters. 

She could time her announcement to coincide with the convention, turning the media spotlight from what should be the main event to one that offers an interesting counterpoint.

In the past, this has been Trump’s tactic of scheduling events while he should be attending an affair with his opposition, e.g., the primary campaign debates. 

If Haley can’t be an apologist for Trump, she may be an independent rival for the presidency. Her campaign would shift from winning the Republican nomination to saving the real Republican party from Trump. It would be an arduous effort that would need money and volunteers. Could she get them?

Billionaire Funders made Haley’s primary campaigns possible. 

Haley has lasted this long in the Republican primary for one reason: she has big funders willing to throw money into her campaigns. Madison Fernandez, the author of Politico’s campaigns newsletter, says, “Haley and her allies outspent Trump in the lead-up to both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.” 

Still, she remains a long shot for being the Republican nominee. Look at South Carolina’s race. Trump only spent $900,000 on a media campaign, while Haley and pro-Haley PACs poured in $15 million to garner 3 delegates to Trump’s 47.

But even big funders have a pain limit. Americans for Prosperity, the face of the massive conservative Charles Koch’s fundraising network, said the day following the South Carolina vote that it ceased financial support for the Haley campaign and its associated allied organizations. Before this announcement, the Koch network spent $32 million to boost Haley’s campaign against Trump.

The WMUR PAC, funded by billionaire Frank Laukien, may also drop Haley since his PAC was formed directly after Koch’s Americans for Prosperity endorsed Haley. The dominoes may start to fall. Other PACs may hold out for Super Tuesday results. However, if Haley doesn’t win one state or collect a noticeable number of delegates, their goal of presenting Haley as a viable alternative to Trump would seem quixotic. 

Haley is short on Republican party leaders supporting her.

Of the 12 other primary candidates who competed with Trump, only two have endorsed Haley, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. 

However, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the most outspoken primary candidate critic of Trump, hasn’t endorsed her. On January 10, he ended his nomination campaign and implied that Haley, like the other candidates, failed to say that Trump threatened the nation.

Two other high-profile elected Republicans, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, said they won’t vote for Trump in 2024. But they have not endorsed Haley, nor would they vote for Biden.

Several high-profile elected Republicans have endorsed Haley, including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, and U.S. S.C. Representative Ralph Norman. 

Haley’s key politicians do not represent a unified Republican ideological perspective. Sununu and Hagan are moderates, Ryan and Hutchinson are conservatives but fought with the Freedom Caucus, and Norman is a leading member of the Freedom Caucus. 

Haley relies on Republican politicians who lack a coherent, united base other than their opposition to Trump. She needs to go beyond them by attracting voters who would not vote for Trump or Biden. These voters are conservative independents and anti-Trump Republicans, but is there enough of them to make her a threat to Trump?

Who would be Haley’s voters? 

South Carolina’s race was an open race where voters did not have to be party members to vote. Haley won only a handful of counties in the state that were dominated by more significant numbers of moderate white college-educated independents. 

They are the critical band of voters not profoundly tied to either party and could determine where swing states go in a two-way presidential race. A third national candidate appealing to a constituency of conservative non-Trumpers allows them to avoid voting for a Democrat. Voting for Haley would send a message to the Republican party that their membership goes beyond the MAGA crowd. 

Trump’s voter support may not be as strong as it appears. 

If elected president, Haley would be the only Republican president to have lost her state in the primary. And at 60%, Trump received the second-highest percentage of votes since 1980 in South Carolina’s primary. Only George H.W. Bush, running as an incumbent president in 1992, received a higher percentage, at 67%. 

However, the media has ignored another statistic. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Bill Clinton by over 200 electoral votes despite overwhelmingly winning South Carolina’s primary. 

By competing in over half the state primary fights, Haley has given voice to many Never-Trump voters. While not united on issues, they are repulsed by Trump. They span the spectrum from liberal to traditional conservative Republicans who are not part of the MAGA movement. They are adrift and could dissipate long before November.

Nevertheless, Haley is a threat to Trump. Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House communications director under President Trump, said that Haley  “is underscoring the fundamental weakness of Donald Trump, and it should be a five-alarm fire for the party.”

Griffin argues that Republicans must grapple, saying, “It’s unclear what a path could look like for Nikki Haley. I think we’re all very open-eyed about that.”

Will Haley be a Footnote or a Change Agent?

Once Trump secures the delegates to become the Republican nominee, Haley could take the easy way out. She could remain on the sidelines by formally withdrawing or just be present as a reminder that there is an option should Trump’s court cases drag him down. In either case, her influence on the party will be minor. 

The other option is to announce that she will be an independent candidate for president. However, she would work with the Republican party to advance its agenda. This approach is the same that Bernie Sanders was taking when he toyed with running as an independent for the presidency. 

She would be outside the Republican party’s apparatus but totally in support of the party’s values. And she could accuse Trump of representing the reorganized Republican Party while she was speaking for those Republicans who no longer feel the party represents them.

Realistically, she would not have a chance of becoming president. But she would be more than a spoiler for Trump, although she might also receive some independent voters who might vote for Biden. Her stated goal would be to resurrect the “real” Republican Party. She would support its long-held values of supporting family values, less government, and open-market legislation. 

Above all, she would present a stable leadership that Trump’s temperament obstructs. She would run a government based on loyalty to the Constitution, not personal loyalty. How many conservative voters want to switch horses as the presidential race has begun is unknown. 

By sticking to a solidly conservative Republican platform, she loses Democratic voters. Still, she allows conservatives to feel good about voting for someone other than Trump and not a Democrat or a liberal Republican. That approach will go down better in rural areas than in cities. As such, she cuts into the core of Trump’s base.

Haley doesn’t have to compete in all the states to significantly impact the distribution of electoral votes. 

Haley could be on most State ballots.

Being a write-in candidate is the easiest path to being on a state’s ballot. Of the eight states that allow voters to write in any name as a write-in vote, three, including Iowa, provided Trump 18 electoral votes in 2020. 

Another 33 states will only count votes for write-in candidates who officially registered with the state. A candidate can easily meet those requirements by submitting necessary registration documents by a specific deadline, paying a fee, or collecting signatures.

The other route is to be an independent candidate on the ballot. The deadline for 31 states is in August, a couple of weeks after the Republican Convention ends on July 18. 

Some states bar candidates who sought and failed to secure the nomination of a political party from running as independents in the general election. However, according to Ballotpedia, ballot access expert Richard Winger concluded that “sore loser laws have been construed not to apply to presidential primaries.” According to Winger, 45 states have sore loser laws on the books, but 43 of these states do not seem to apply to presidential candidates.

Haley’s possible narrow path forward.

There is a path forward for Haley to run as an independent conservative Republican in enough states to create a counterbalance to the MAGA wing of the party. She will not become president but could stir enough excitement to entice PACs to fund her effort. 

Volunteers may step forward to work their state for her to demonstrate that they cannot tolerate a party dominated by a single personality. The new group Principles First could be attracted to her effort.  They are focused on advancing a more principled center-right politics in the United States. 

A Haley presidential run could attract the media interested in something to spice up their coverage of two elderly white men slugging it out. The media would hype her campaign as a way of disparaging Trump. But the conservative media, particularly NewsNation and, to an extent, a few of Fox’s commentators, might enjoy poking Trump as they have done in the past.

It all comes down to Haley deciding if she wants to go down peacefully resigned to accepting the new Trumpian Republican Party or if she’s going to open a new page in the history of her party.

 We’ll all know by the beginning of August, if not before. 

If you like this piece, become a Patreon patron or make a one-time donation help me reach others.  – thank you, Nick 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics.

America must force Israel to avoid a “catastrophic” military invasion of Rafah

The U.S. must attempt to deter a possible Israeli military slaughter of Palestinians in the city of Rafah. President Biden needs the support of Congress to adopt past presidents’ actions to accomplish that objective. Without a military invasion of Rafah, an opportunity still exists for Israel to pursue a lasting peace, not continuous war. 

Why Is Israel’s Army invading Rafah?

Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed that his military will engage in a “powerful” assault on Rafah to flush out Hamas militants from hideouts in Rafah and free Israeli hostages being held there.

Consequently, it has begun to hammer Rafah in preparation for a ground assault as Israeli tanks shelled the eastern sector of the city overnight on Feb 13. The city’s residents now live in fear of the Israeli army entering the town and systematically going building to building in search of Hamas militants, whom Israel believes are dug into and under many structures, including apartment buildings and medical centers. 

Israel is revenging the savage invasion by Gaza’s ruling Hamas party into Israel on October 7. The Israeli death toll was 1,139, with over 200 of their civilians kidnapped and taken back to Gaza, where most remain. 

Meanwhile, Gaza health authorities, which collect data primarily from hospitals, police, and the U.N. authority in Gaza, estimate that over 28,000 Gaza residents have been killed to date. That number would also include Hamas fighters, but most are residents. And, unless the dead person is holding a gun, who’s to say if they were a Hamas fighter?

Rafah’s Current Condition  

Rafah had a pre-war population of about 300,000; now, it teems with half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people squeezed into tent camps and makeshift shelters.

Most of them sought safe refuge there because Israel told them to leave northern Gaza as Israel’s military invaded and bombarded northern Gaza four months ago. 

Although Israel says that its military is making plans to evacuate Palestinian civilians, no plan has been made public. Meanwhile, aid agencies say the displaced have nowhere else to go.

United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said in a statement on February 13, “Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza. They could also leave an already fragile humanitarian operation at death’s door.”

A joint statement from our other allies was released, critical of Israel’s threats to invade Rafah. The prime ministers of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand said they are “gravely concerned” about potentially “catastrophic” Israeli military operations in Rafah and called for an immediate ceasefire. 

America should respond by taking the following actions if Israel invades Rafah. 

The US could condition or hold up future military aid except anti-missile technology to Israel. Biden at first said that was a “worthwhile thought,” but days later, his officials ruled that proposal out on the Sunday talk shows. But that was before Israel declared its intention to invade Rafah. 

Biden’s officials may be back this Sunday’s morning talk shows. If they are, they must be questioned on why they couldn’t restrict or deny additional arms to Israel in light of what its military is preparing to do to Rafah. 

Biden should consider how President Truman refused to provide military assistance to Israel during its war of independence, although he conferred recognition on the new State of Israel. He was fair to Israel, but he was tough in setting boundaries. 

Biden has some executive authority over the budget to allow him to hold up military aid to Israel as leverage to cancel the invasion. However, he recognizes that Congress’s sizable bipartisan pro-Israel contingent could pass veto-proof legislation to work around his executive order. 

For example, before Israel invaded Gaza, approximately three-quarters of the House of Representatives — split relatively evenly between Democrats and Republicans — went on record supporting continued security assistance to Israel without conditions that 15 liberal Democrats wanted the House to consider. 

Despite this political constraint, Biden must be a strong voice for achieving long-term peace in the Middle East. If Israel invades Rafah, that voice will likely be ignored since Biden will be seen as an ineffective leader in stopping or even slowing down the humanitarian crisis spinning off of Israel’s ground war in Gaza.  

The U.S. could vote for a U.N. resolution condemning an Israeli attack on Rafah while still recognizing Israel’s right to exist. President Johnson had the U.S. vote for a United Nations Resolution condemning Israel when it invaded the West Bank with the understanding that the U.S. would not be obliged to support all of its military actions.

Taking such a stand will also give the U.S. more credence with Muslim nations that are now questioning their willingness to work with Israel since they have decimated Gaza.  This position would help the U.S. be an effective negotiator to not only bring an end to the war but also build an alliance of Muslim nations who want to see a stable democratic Gaza and West Bank emerge without Hamas. 

For instance, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is being pressured by domestic leaders to not stand idly by if Israel continues its aggression on Rafah. Egypt is a significant player in bringing about a long-term Muslim acceptance of having a Jewish state living peaceably alongside multiple Muslim nations. 

Creating a foolish humanitarian crisis in Rafah would result in over a million refugees trying to cross into Egypt. Suppose that is the Netanyahu Administration’s plan on how to get rid of Gaza residents. In that case, it will lead to the demolition of the 1978 Camp David Accords, which has averted an Israeli war with Egypt since then.  

The Biden administration has conveyed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “under current circumstances,” with no plan to protect civilians crammed into Rafah, an Israeli assault on the southern Gaza City would be a “disaster.”  Biden told Netanyahu that to ensure civilian safety, a ground invasion “should not proceed” without a plan. Israel has not revealed any such plan. 

Now, Biden needs to show that the U.S. is a cooperative ally but not to the extent of contributing to the death and destruction that Netanyahu’s administration is determined to pursue until Hamas is eliminated. That is an unattainable goal. The Israelis could kill every Hamas military leader, and still, a future fanatical group will surface more intent on destroying Israel. 

Indeed, Hamas needs to be removed as an authoritarian power in Gaza, but destroying Gaza will not accomplish that. Israel’s actions will only feed the belief that Jews and Muslims will never live peaceably side by side. 

The U.S. is uniquely positioned to exert leadership in pushing for a rational, long-range solution. President Trump’s Abraham Accords offered a glimpse of how Israel can work peacefully with Muslims in the Middle East. The declaration established bilateral agreements on Arab–Israeli normalization between Israel and three Muslim countries in 2020.

However, that effort will not halt future conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians until the governments of both nations have non-fundamentalist leaders. The U.S. should direct our help to Israel and Palestine to have leaders that choose diplomacy, not perpetual revenge wars.

If you liked this piece, please email it to others who might like to give some thought to this issue. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter , Citizenship Politics.

Biden Can Stop the Middle East War from Losing His Election

Democrats must realize that despite keeping our troops out of Gaza, the longer the Israeli-Hamas War continues, the more the public will see the Israeli-Hamas War as President Joe Biden’s War. Even though the U.S. is only one of ten governments that support Israel in the war against Hamas, we are by far the most significant foreign funder of Israel’s military.

Under President Barack Obama, we established a ten-year commitment to provide $3.8 billion annually for Israel’s military and missile defense systems. Both Democrats and Republicans immediately wanted to send additional billions more to Israel after October 7. 

Biden requested at least $14.3 billion in further military assistance to Israel. House Republicans countered by wanting to provide Israel with $17 billion without any funds allocated to Ukraine. Both bills failed to pass the House.

Not only did both parties quickly jump to support Israel, but an October 11th poll showed two-thirds of Americans also supported Israel. 

Still, support for Israel started splintering. According to data collected by an academic project, the Crowd Counting Consortium, within ten days of October 7, there were 180,000 demonstrators, with roughly 270 events in solidarity with Israel and 200 in support of Palestine. 

As Israel started bombing civilian housing and hospitals in Gaza to flush out Hamas fighters, the United Nations reported that 1.9 million Gazans had been internally displaced, with more than 1 million of them lacking a safe and secure home.

Consequently, the polls saw younger voters between 18 and 34, who are generally Democratic voters, disapproving of Biden’s handling of the war by an estimated 70%.

With Biden still refusing to call for an immediate cease-fire in the war, angry protestors started showing up at his campaign rallies. 

In January, anti-war protestors interrupted more than a dozen times while Biden tried to address democratic voters in Virginia. The next day, he was repeatedly interrupted again at his endorsement rally held by the United Auto Workers

Worse yet for Biden, he began to feel the squeeze from both sides of the political spectrum. The left was attacking Biden for not cutting military aid to Israel as their army was creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. 

The right was demanding that he directly retaliate against Iran’s proxy paramilitary groups. They were attacking U.S. troops in the Middle East to punish America for not calling a halt to Israel’s Gaza invasion. 

Biden’s troubles began when he abandoned his usually cautious diplomatic approach to conducting foreign affairs and gave a pass to Israel to bombard and then invade Gaza. Biden called Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu on October 7,saying his support for Israel is “rock solid” and America stood “ready to offer all appropriate means of support.”   

Previously, he criticized Netanyahu, who leads the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Believing that Netanyahu was trying to gut Israel’s independent judiciary to favor Israel’s fundamentalist factions, Biden had dodged meeting with Netanyahu for months. 

More importantly, Biden’s administration warned Netanyahu that their plans to expand their settlements in the West Bank by 13,000 new housing units undermined the viability of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Then he 

blamed the right-wing members of Netanyahu’s cabinet for justifying Israeli settlers attacking Palestinian citizens in the West Bank. 

Netanyahu ignored these comments and announced that his government opposed any two-state solution that Biden and most past administrations had endorsed.  

With Netanyahu’s right-wing party in complete control of Israel’s war plans, Biden has disappointed many American liberals, youth, and minorities. They see him as enabling Israel’s invasion and subsequent destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the deaths of over 10,000 children.   

Offering Netanyahu’s administration unqualified support has checked his ability or willingness to restrain Israel’s massive military response. Netanyahu ignores any restraint or concerns about civilian casualties voiced by Biden. 

Unable to influence Israel, Biden has appeared as an ineffective and weak leader to his supporters, the American public, and world leaders. And one that he is too old to continue as president.  A characterization that conforms perfectly to Trump’s campaign message. 

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s National Security Minister, Ben Gvir, leader of Jewish Power, a far-right political party, belittles Biden. In a Wall Street Journal interview, Gvir accused the Biden administration of benefitting Hamas more than Israel. 

Gvir said, “Instead of giving us his full backing, [President Joe] Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel, which goes to Hamas; if Trump were in power, the US conduct would be completely different.”

Netanyahu seems to share Gvir’s view when he says, “As a sovereign state fighting for its existence and future, we will make our decisions by ourselves.” Note that Netanyahu’s administration would fall without Jewish Power’s support as a coalition member in the government. 

Netanyahu is counting on Republicans to push Biden to hit Iran and the military groups it funds, referred to as Iran’s Axis of Resistance, which surround Israel. Israel expects that the U.S. attacking these groups should diminish their ability to harm Israel directly.  

Iran claims that they don’t control their proxy militaries, and Middle East analysts acknowledge that Iran does not necessarily have complete control over their actions. However, Iran helped create some, like Hezbollah, and provides arms to all of them. In addition, some are closely linked to Iran ‘s Revolutionary Guards, which have an estimated 125,000-strong military, making it the Middle East’s largest Muslim army.  

What began as Biden supporting Israel’s self-defense is transforming into a regional warfare between the U.S. and Iran-backed hardline fundamentalist armed groups. Looming on the horizon is a direct exchange of firepower between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and its allied para-military groups not only oppose Israel’s existence but, more immediately, the current stationing of our 30,000 troops in this Muslim-controlled region. After October 7, Iran’s proxies moved from scattered confrontations to direct attacks on our troops and warships.

In early January, Yemen’s Houthi militants fired several powerful Russian anti-ship missiles at U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea. Fortunately, they were destroyed before hitting the ships. Given that since Oct. 7, there have been 160 drone attacks against American soldiers and allies in the Middle East, American soldier fatalities would seem to be inevitable.

As a result, a paramilitary group attacked a remote U.S. military outpost on January 28 in northeastern Jordan, killing three army reservists and injuring at least 34 others.

The media widely and wrongly declared that these three deaths marked the first time U.S. soldiers have died as a direct result of an armed attack by an Iran-backed paramilitary group. 

Republican leaders demanded retribution. Senator Lindsey Graham said, “I am calling on the Biden Administration to strike targets of significance inside Iran.” Graham told Fox News that the Biden should blow up their oil fields and Revolutionary Guard headquarters in Iran to deter its future aggression toward our troops.

The most senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, said: “We must respond to these repeated attacks by Iran and its proxies by striking directly against Iranian targets and its leadership.” 

Partisanship made Graham and Wicker forget that during President Ronald Reagan’s Administration, 241 American soldiers were killed in Lebanon in October 1983 by Hezbollah, founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

At that time, Republicans refrained from advising Reagan to take the provocative actions that Senators Graham and Wicker now want Biden to embrace. Nevertheless, Biden is blamed for skirting military reprisals as cuddling Iran, ignoring that a direct attack on Iran would likely lead our current ground troops into combat. 

Trump recognizes that Biden has only a narrow path to exert a peaceful solution. Like Richard Nixon, who campaigned and won against Hubert Humphry in 1968, Trump can present himself as the only candidate who can end the war favorably for the US and Israel. 

Using Nixon as a role model, he also will not present a plan because he doesn’t need one. He need only accuse Biden of making mistakes and boast that he would not make them as a president. 

Biden faces an uphill battle to win a second term. He must get Democrats to accept that he is being fair to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. And convince independents that he can keep our nation out of war. 

To win back fallen-away Democrats to win the presidency, he needs to seriously pressure Netanyahu’s administration to abandon their unrealistic goal of permanently eliminating Hamas. 

Israel’s strategy of eradicating fundamentalist militant groups failed miserably when Israel invaded Lebanon in October 1982 to destroy the PLO. The year after PLO was kicked out of the country, Hezbollah took control over southern Lebanon. 

Israel killing thousands of innocent Gaza residents is only going to lead to future wars with the survivors of this war. And it could drag the U.S. deeper into the Middle East quagmire of fighting on multiple fronts in a guerilla type of warfare. 

Biden can learn from the past presidents who have supported Israel as a nation-state in the Middle East but who had a firm and fair hand in avoiding an unlimited commitment to actions that do not directly serve our interests. 

President Harry S. Truman conferred recognition on the State of Israel after it declared independence in May 1948, but he didn’t provide military assistance to Israel. A situation now that is unthinkable by both Democrats and Republican Parties. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was able to force Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt after Israel captured it in a war between them due to Egypt blockading a key Israel seaport. 

In November 1966, when the Israelis attacked the West Bank, President Lyndon B. Johnson had the U.S. vote for a United Nations Resolution condemning Israel’s action. He then sent an emergency airlift of military equipment to Jordan. The message to Israel was that the U.S. was not going to let Israel determine our foreign policy. 

President Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords after he sequestered Egypt’s President and Israel’s Prime Minister at Camp David for two weeks to reach an agreement ending three decades of intermittent war between them.

President Ronald Reagan approved Israel invading Lebanon in 1982 to destroy the PLO for attacking northern Israel. Reagan’s pyrrhic victory cost between 17,000 and 40,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives. The day after Iran’s proxy group Hezbollah killed over two hundred U.S. Marines, Reagan said that our soldiers “must stay there until the situation is under control.” 

In February 1983, he said, “If we’re to be secure in our homes and in the world, we must stand together against those who threaten us.” Just three days later, Reagan ordered Marines to pull out of Lebanon, with a complete withdrawal achieved in three weeks. Israel continues to exist, along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite Reagan removing all U.S. military from that country.  

Past presidents had to make hard decisions on what was best for the U.S. over that of any ally, including Israel. Successful experiences show they can support a secure Israel rather than an aggressive one. That is a lesson that Biden must learn from former presidents.

Biden belatedly took a small step by sanctioning non-American West Bank Israeli settlers from terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. However, it was a gesture lost in the massive media coverage of thousands of innocent children killed by Israel bombing their homes in search of Hamas. 

Biden can achieve his goal of America defending Israel’s right to exist and working with Palestinians to create a democratic, self-ruled state. To do so, he should take advice from Netanyahu: make decisions that are best for your nation and not just for your allies. 

As a democratic society, we benefit by promoting the welfare of other societies and not contributing to their destruction, which will generate more violent conflicts for future generations. Biden should articulate that principle in his campaign and act on them as president. Thus, he can force Trump to say how he intends to end the Israeli–Hamas war and not perpetuate U.S. involvement in Middle East wars. 

If you liked this piece, please email it to others who might like to give some thought to this issue. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter , Citizenship Politics.

How Trump Would Destroy the Deep State

Jan. 6 footage had been displayed in the background before former president Donald Trump told his campaign rally in Waco, Tex., in March 2023, who to expel from the government.

Former President Donald Trump’s first major rally for the 2024 presidential race was held in Waco, Texas. It was a fitting stage for him to attack the evil deep state. 

Trump, always the shrewd marketer, knew the message he wanted in starting his presidential campaign:  you cannot trust the government because the deep state controls it. Trump told a crowd of his supporters in Waco that “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,”

It probably was not by coincidence that he held his rally on the 30th anniversary of a deadly fight between federal agents and inhabitants of a compound headed by the anti-government cult leader David Koresh.

An attempt to deliver an arrest warrant and conduct a search dragged on for a 51-day siege, ending with a fire that killed 82 occupants, 28 of whom were children. Four federal agents were also shot and killed.

The tragic incident has gone down in right-wing lore as a standoff between freedom-loving Americans and violent deep-state government oppressors. Although, contrary to lore, a jury of Texas citizens absolved the government of wrongdoing in a suit stemming from the siege. An independent counsel also concluded that federal agents were not responsible for the deaths of the inhabitants in the fire. 

So, what is the deep state? The belief that a secret group controls the federal government goes back to the John Birch Society of the fifties. The Birchers knew that insiders were controlling the FBI and CIA to advance the global interests of Wall Street and industrial elites and communists. 

Going forward seventy years, that belief gained popularity through Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the right-wing nationalist Breitbart News. He became Trump’s chief strategist when Trump entered the White House. Bannon’s first public speech was before the Conservative Political Action Conference. He said that the “corporatist globalist media” was “crying and weeping” on election night. And that everything is going according to Trump’s plan: the “deconstruction of the administrative state” has just begun. 

Describing a government as a “deep state” is not a legal term, but defining it as an “administrative state” would be. Academics generally describe an administrative state as government agencies able to write, judge, and enforce their laws.

When Banon spoke of deconstructing the administrative state, he was not entering the field of “conspiracy theories” that gave birth to the deep state. He was articulating a legal effort to strip away the liberal institutions Congress had allowed to develop using administrative law.

For example, administrative law created the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a product of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and administrative law also created the Environmental Protection Agency, which grew out of environmental protection acts. 

Various government agencies, such as the Social Security Administration or the Office of Medicare and Medicaid Services, are exercising power to fulfill social-democratic or social welfare goals. 

Jurists ideologically could oppose these programs by only allowing agencies to create them with prior, direct Congressional approval. Consequently, those judges would be inclined to overturn the Republican-dominated 1984 Supreme Court decision in the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council case, which expanded the powers of federal agencies. 

Chevron allowed agencies to determine how to execute a law to cover a particular problem not explicitly described by Congress. The agency’s decisions must be reasonable and can be challenged in the courts. However, the Chevron-initiated judicial deference principle limits the courts’ authorityJeremy W. Peters of the New York Times notes that it says judges must defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies because agencies have more expertise than judges and are more accountable to voters.

Throughout our republic’s history, the established norm and expectation was that the court system, with the Supreme Court making the final determination, could check an expansion of executive and Congressional powers. However, presidents usually appoint jurists to be confirmed by Congress sympathetic to that president’s political philosophy.

In 2018, Donald F. McGahn II, Trump’s White House counsel and architect of the administration’s judicial selection process, said they were pursuing a different judicial selection process than in past years. They had a “coherent plan” to pair the administration’s deregulation orders with judicial nominees opposed to the federal bureaucracy’s growing power. 

To aid in selecting jurists, the Trump administration followed the guidance of Lee Liberman Otis, a founder of the free-market conservative Federalist Society. That organization was founded on an ideology opposed to government regulation of businesses and public services, such as public schools.  

Although members of the FS were federal judges before Trump, his appointments resulted in a Republican-appointed super majority of Supreme Court justices being members of the Federalist Society. Coming before the Supreme Court this year is the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case, with the potential end of Chevron deference as the only issue to be argued. 

Even if the SCOTUS decision leaves some flexibility for agencies to carry out their lawful mission, if Trump is elected president, he will keep his promise to end or dramatically limit agencies’ ability to administer the law. Their diminished authority will create a power vacuum in determining how American’s freedoms will be protected from abuse by the most influential groups, be they businesses or religions. 

Those with the most political power and financial resources will fill that vacuum. Their interests will not leave much room for the welfare of working Americans to be represented by non-partisan civil servants. 

The loyalty of civil servants is what Trump aims to control. Trump is one of many presidents who has been frustrated with the legions of federal bureaucrats that run the day-to-day operations of providing government services. A president who wants to make dramatic fundamental changes will find resistance because civil servants seek consistency by following set protocols as presidents come and go.

Given that traditional tension, all presidents must compromise to achieve some of their objectives and maintain a functioning government. The question with Trump as president, known for not backing down, is how far he will push this conflict. Could he permanently alter our government institutions’ functions by serving as president and not the public? It’s possible. 

Just before Trump’s first term ended, he signed the order “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” removing employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking. Known as Schedule F, President Biden rescinded it. However, Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it if elected again. 

He is preparing to replace those fired civil servants with new loyal federal employees from a database of willing foot soldiers recruited, trained, and compiled by the Conservative Partnership Institute, in which Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner.

The difference between Biden’s and Trump’s approach is whether a president wants to sustain a non-partisan civil service or turn it into a group personally loyal to him. Hence, Trump’s attack on the federal government repeats a theme he established at his Waco rally. The government is the enemy because it’s not accountable to him as president, while he ignores that accountability should be to the nation’s established rules of law. 

Trump’s supporters argue that Schedule F would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda. However, Trump states on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.” 

Trump would surely want to identify radicals in other departments. Trump told his rally in Michigan, “We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” 

Trump, quick to accuse others of conducting a witch hunt when they seek justice in the court system against his actions, would appear to enjoy conducting one of his own across the entire federal workforce.

But does he have the authority to engage in such a sweeping action, or is this just a nightmare conjured up in the minds of liberals?

His allies are already planning to use legal arguments shared by conservative jurists who would approve his presidential edicts. It is not just subjecting 50,000 civil employees to scrutiny and possible dismissal. More intrusive is his intention that the 24 independent agencies, like the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Reserve System, submit their actions to the White House for review. 

He had previously drafted such an executive order, which his Justice Department approved, but the order was never issued because Trump’s closest staff members expressed concerns. White House staff raising doubts about Trump’s judgment may be missing in the future, given that on his campaign website, he promised to bring those agencies “under presidential authority.”

Trump also said on his campaign website that he had a constitutional right to impound funds and would restore a practice that Richard Nixon attempted but was stopped by Congress. 

Trump’s plan to deconstruct the administrative state, referred to as the deep state at his campaign rallies, will employ a legal strategy, not an insurrection mob, to execute his plans.  His legal cornerstone would be the Unitary Executive theory, a concept conjured by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion in the Chevron case.

This theory extrapolates Article II of the Constitution to mean that everything not designated as legislative or judicial power must be executive power. Since the executive power vests in the President, that person must be able to execute all the laws of the United States outside of everything that’s not explicitly given to Congress or the judiciary in the Constitution. 

Going down this path could lead to something more than being a “dictator for just one day.” Or so it seems since in 2019, he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

If elected, Trump’s effort to destroy the deep state will not be accomplished overnight. Instead, expect a rollercoaster of legal challenges in the courts while Congress and the President circle each other like two Sumo wrestlers trying to push the other out of the nation’s most important circle of power. 

In the meantime, we would experience a long period of dysfunctional governance and declining trust in our democratic republic through our public’s loss of faith in democracy as the best means to address their basic needs. Hence, we will see more citizens yearning for autocratic rule. That’s starting from a current base of 26% of Americans who score high on the scale of right-wing authoritarianism.

It’s time that all citizens begin to think about what kind of society they want to live in after this November’s elections. 

If you liked this piece, please email it to five friends who might like to give some thought to this issue. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter , Citizenship Politics.

CP – Trump’s Personality Will Deliver a Perilous Second Term – for Everyone

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The Atlantic hosted twenty-four liberal writers to comment on a possible second term for former President Donald Trump. Covering autocracy to science, they saw a future reminiscent of the Roman Republic’s decline as it slid into chaos and collapsed.

The essayists touched on three recurring themes: Trump’s personality, objectives, and legacy.  These themes also buttress other commentaries on Trump’s past and future impact on America. I believe that Trump’s personality disrupts our society’s normative behavior more than his political policies.

Mainstream media critics often cite Trump’s personality when describing how he implements policies, such as being heartless by separating children from their parents when they cross the Mexican border seeking asylum. 

Still, the conservatives he chose for the most critical positions in his administration have been some of Trump’s severest critics. David Frum, who leads off the collective of Atlantic’s writers, notes that his first secretary of state called him a “fucking moron” not capable of learning how government works. 

For instance, according to the authors of A Very Stable Genius, “the universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty,” not to the country or its laws but to him personally. For example, he wanted to eliminate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because US companies, like real estate developers, such as himself, were not allowed to bribe foreign governments to secure special services. He asked his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “to get rid of that law.” Tillerson said he’d have to work with Congress. Unsatisfied, Trump turned to his most loyal senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, to draft an Executive Order repealing the law.

In reflecting on his personality, his second chief of staff said he was “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” and his dishonesty was “just astounding.” The above insights seem to be the same as those of his 44 former Cabinet secretaries. McKay Coppins of NBC reported that only four of them endorsed him as a presidential candidate.

The Social & Behavioral Sciences Encyclopedia defines “personality traits as persistent underlying tendencies to behave in particular ways in particular situations.” It is more quirky or flexible than what we think of as character. 

Liberals are blind to ignore that Trump’s “quirky” personality does attract strong support from more than a third of the nation. And his personality has made him the leading presidential candidate for Republicans for the third straight election. 

One of Trump’s longtime friends defended Trump, saying that Trump “has genius characteristics… Like all savants, he has edges… he has a kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare, and captivating, although at times misunderstood.” 

Trump doesn’t leave much room for his attitudes to be misunderstood in how he leads. After he fired his national security adviser, John Bolton, by a tweet an hour before Bolton was to appear in a press conference with the secretary of state, Trump quipped about how he runs his administration. “It’s very easy actually to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions.”

He will make the most important national decisions if elected to a new term. The most important one on his mind is getting revenge for those who blocked his interests. Unlike White House advisors and cabinet officials, he won’t be able to fire citizens who are not his employees or contestants on his former TV show, The Apprentice.

According to Atlantic writer Baron Gellman, Trump has openly talked about taking revenge on his enemies, like President Joe Biden, against whom Trump would deploy federal prosecutors. Previously, Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton be thrown in jail, but he lost interest after she lost the election. With presidential powers back in his hands, limiting his support to right-wing House Republicans to impeach Biden is not enough because, apparently, he’d like to see Biden in jail this time. 

What kind of personality is focused on having the power to exact revenge on anyone who offended you? Psychiatrists describe an affliction that affects around 5.3% percent of the U.S. population; it’s called narcissistic personality disorder NPD. Among the traits that define that behavior are a grandiose sense of self and fantasies of unlimited success. Revenge is narcissistic behavior to achieve unlimited success.

Health professionals urge caution in planting the NPD label on anyone acting narcissistic in certain situations. The difference between narcissism as a personality trait and clinical narcissistic personality is how persistently it shows over time and across all situations. 

In assessing Trump being in office again, people need to consider how he has consistently exhibited narcissistic traits that will reshape or ignore our established public policies and laws. Like election laws. His fantasies of unlimited success align with Atlantic writer David A. Graham’s observation that the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” 

He has repeated for years that the 2020 presidential election was not legitimate, despite the highest elected state official from both parties certifying the ballot counts in every state and confirming that Joe Biden won the election and Donald Trump lost. His attorneys, including his appointed attorney general, had personally informed Trump that there was no evidence that the election outcome would have differed.

In other words, Trump created a fantasy world, and most Republicans have followed him into that world, where he promises to pursue vengeance if elected as president again. 

Atlantic writer Ronald Brownstein writes that during his 2024 campaign, he promised to deliver “retribution” for his supporters. From the beginning of his current run, Graham notes that Trump “has a record of repeatedly threatening and intimidating judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him.” His sense of omnipotence extends to saying that “his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected.”

A grandiose sense of self is another trait that defines NDP behavior. It can be presented as a charming and entertaining personality, as Trump elicits more laughter than any other presidential candidate in his last three races. 

Why is that? Because the crowd, and he consistently attracts large crowds, loves his performance of making fun of others, calling them outrageous names. And then there is his smirky smile with remarks that invite his audience to share in his disbelief of the ideas and facts that science, government, and historians deliver. Those experts speak the language of the elites, those who think they know better than Trump’s audience. 

Atlantic writer Michael Schuman recognizes that “he won’t change his personality” regarding his admiration of authoritarian leaders. China’s Xi may become more hostile to American overseas interests, but Trump knows that he is superior to Xi and can flatter him into being nicer to us. Trump believes he understands them because he knows what powerful leaders want; it is just like what he wants – more power.

And the authoritarian leaders likewise know how to flatter Trump to get what they want.

Schuman believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump by telling him that his ideas were brilliant and warning that he couldn’t trust anyone in his administration to execute them. Trump publicly refuted his own appointed Justice Department for indicting twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails. He said his logic was that Putin told him they didn’t.

Trump also considers himself smarter than his contemporaries and previous American presidents. He said someone told him that “Thomas Jefferson was the smartest one ever. I don’t think so…  frankly I think my IQ — people tell me it is tremendous; doctors can’t believe it.”

No one is excluded from overshadowing Trump’s greatness, including the Republican Party’s iconic founder, President Abraham Lincoln. On January 6, Trump suggested Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War. If Trump had been president, he said he could have avoided an unnecessary bloody war through “negotiation.” I’m sure Trump wasn’t lying. He truly believes that, as he said previously, “Only I can fix it,” whatever the problem.  

Trump’s grandiose sense of self makes it easy for him to reject or seek information that contradicts his beliefs. His insistence that he could have negotiated away our Civil War woefully ignores the fact that Lincoln supported the first proposed 13th Amendment (called the Corwin Amendment) to save the Union before the Civil War began. It would have shielded slavery within the existing slave states from a federal constitutional amendment process and abolition or interference by Congress. Only a handful of states ratified it. And yet, what more could Trump have offered the South? Probably, he’d just let the South leave the Union and call it a victory because he avoided a war. 

Trump’s statement on Lincoln is a prime indicator of a future president who will appoint his advisors and the most powerful government officials based on who is more loyal to him than to the nation or the real world. This time, he will not make the mistake of picking the most intelligent conservatives to serve him but instead will select the most servile conservatives. These are the types of officials that serve kings, tyrants, and dictators. 

Luckily, Trump said he would only be a “dictator for a day” to build a wall and drill. Acting on his belief that he got elected on the public promise to be a dictator to fulfill his stated goals, he could try to ignore budget constraints, congress, and the courts. If blocked, he will attack the people and institutions that deny his public mandate for change. With that attitude, the nation will begin a constitutional crisis during Trump’s first week in the Oval Office. 

The institutional chaos that he provokes will either splinter the Republican Party, or it will continue to transform into the MAGA Party led by Trump. 

Trump could follow Putin’s past political practice and push for a constitutional amendment or another way to allow him to run again for president. It has such a low probability of happening that the two-dozen thoughtful Atlantic writers have not imagined such a Trump move. 

Still, how many predicted that Trump would demand Vice President Mike Pence stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election because it was stolen from him? And that a thousand pro-Trump rioters chanting “Hang Pence” would storm the capitol looking for him? Trump calls the protestors arrested for insurrection “heroes,” and he will pardon them if elected president. Could laws again be flouted when they don’t yield to Trump’s will?

All Americans, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, could find themselves living in a republic subject to the intentional chaos Trump ignites in his second presidency. That is the message voters need to hear.

If you found this essay helpful in understanding what may happen after November 2024, please pass it on to another to begin a conversation with them.

Seattle’s Socialist Alternative: a Marxist’s puzzle of what to do when you win an election?

After being a Seattle Councilmember for a decade, Kshama Sawant will retire from public office at the end of December. In January 2023, Sawant announced she would not run again. This came eight months before the 2023 primary to select a new councilmember from Seattle’s District 3, widely seen as the most liberal district.  

Something was missing from her announcement. No one, not the media, Councilmember Sawant, and her political party, Socialist Alternative, mentioned it. There was no reference to SA running another candidate for her seat or any seat in the next round of council primaries. 

For a decade, Seattle had experienced having a self-declared Marxist on their city council. Not someone accused of being a Marxist, as MAGA folks and like-minded Republicans accuse anyone pursuing a progressive agenda. No, this was someone proudly declaring themself as Marxist. 

In this case, a public official who believed, as did her Socialist Alternative party, that Karl Marx’s theories were correct. The entire world would eventually have a stateless socialist society run by the workers, not the owners. There would be no private property accumulating profits. 

It was an odd omission for Sawant or SA not to announce another SA candidate to be running. That’s because Sawant always emphasized that she was working for SA’s political objectives, not pushing her personal political beliefs. 

In her announcement, she emphasized the importance of her party. She said, “My office and Socialist Alternative have been successful in fighting for renters and the working class.” And, “The reason I am not running for office is because we believe that work needs to be continued in and outside of Seattle.” In other words, SA would still be working in Seattle to make changes, presumably in the same manner that its most successful and visible member had done. 

For the entire period of Sawant’s term and even before as a candidate, she never sought to be a prima donna. Although critical of her, the media still loved her as an object of interest. She received more coverage than any other CM. In the last three decades, she surpassed all past ones but one term, independent populist CM Charlie Chong.

What is the takeaway from SA not engaging in electoral city politics when it successfully won a council seat and helped shape its policies? Is it because of her Marxism or her messaging? 

Marxists’ Record in Winning Elections 

A Marxist public official is even scarcer than a liberal Republican in American politics. But they are present in other democracies. Major democracies such as Spain, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, and France are represented in the European Parliament by Communist Parties that ascribe to some Marxist version of socialism. 

But there is no list of self-declared Marxists in public office in the US. An approximate measurement might be the number of Communist Party members elected to office. Currently, there is one in a small Pennsylvania Borough Council. The last Communist Party member in office was 73 years ago on New York City’s Council. 

However, the fear of Communists in government is a trope that Republicans occasionally drag out. In 2012, Republican Congressman Allen West told an audience in Jensen Beach that “he’s heard” up to 80 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are Communist Party members. Later, his office backtracked, saying he was referring to Democrat’s Congressional Progressive Caucus because the Communist Party publicly referred to it as an ally. This was a one-way assertion from them, perhaps because of their mutual support for raising the minimum wage. 

Socialists, by definition, are not necessarily Marxists; some are, and some are not, likewise with socialist organizations. In the U.S., Socialists in public office are much more common than Marxists, although still minuscule in numbers. While at least 30 organizations identify themselves as socialist in the U.S., only the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has a substantial membership. As of July 2023, they had 78,000 members, down from an all-time high of 95,000. By comparison, 

They have representation in Congress and state governments. Three endorsed DSA members are serving in Congress: Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush. Senator Bernie Sanders is a self-declared Democratic Socialist but not a member of the DSA. And 51 state lawmakers are also DSA members. They comprise 0.9 percent of Congress and 0.7 percent of all state legislators. 

However, considering the number of members in Congress, DSA’s influence is limited, particularly in comparison to the Republican’s hard-right Freedom Caucus, which has, by the most recent estimates, about 70 members. Unlike SA and the Freedom House caucus, DSA is an open membership group with publicly released membership numbers. It’s also far more diverse than either group, having at least five different caucuses, ranging from libertarians to Marxists. 

The World of Socialist Alternative

Socialist Alternative is a closed-membership, dues-paying organization requiring prospective members to pass an interview before being allowed in to ensure that they agree with the organization’s political beliefs. That restricted membership is both a strength and a weakness.

Having screened membership allowed SA to select someone to be a candidate who would stay within their agenda. It also gave them a disciplined organization to execute a better ground game than any other candidate to get the vote out and win an election no one expected. Sawant’s initial election to one of America’s largest cities saw The Times of India, the world’s most widely circulated English-language daily, announce her victory. 

While not all Marxist organizations are the same, most use democratic-centralism to make decisions. Lenin’s Bolsheviks used it to form Russia’s Communist Party. Seattle’s SA is in line with that format, having a Seattle Executive Committee and, just below it, a City Committee electing its members.  

Like in all organizations, communication between their different levels is often fraught with questionable processes for reaching a final decision. A memo from a CC member to the SEC outlines her concerns: “where proposals are often presented either as fully agreed on by the SEC, not at all, or in an ambiguous manner where it’s unclear if the proposal is from an individual or the SEC as a whole.” This memo illustrates that Marxist groups are no better than capitalist corporations in having internal communication problems. At the same time, critics of those organizations assume they operate far more effectively than they do. 

Seattle’s Experience with a Marxist 

The ultimate weakness of an organization’s tightly closed leadership system is that it limits beliefs and information outside its control. Hence, leaders quickly discount input from others as invalid or unworthy of evaluation. This is the system that Kshama Sawant took with her to the Seattle City Council. Those familiar with how Sawant became a candidate insist that she became one out of an obligation and her desire to further SA’s mission to create a mass working-class party. 

She articulated that position in SA’s February 2021 magazine, explaining why she and other members were joining the non-Marxist Democratic Socialists of America, and, by extension, it could be used for why she joined the city council. She wrote the goal of SA’s members was “to advance the Marxist ideas that will be necessary to win both immediate gains in the present crisis and a final victory over capitalism’s exploitation and oppression.” That’s a heavy lift, mainly if one’s day job is to mend the fences in her seven-square-mile city council district. 

It is also a task made more difficult since she considered her fellow city council members to be part of “the corporate Democratic Party” and would not “hesitate to ramp up its attacks on socialists and working-class movements.” Of course, the same would be true of Republicans if Seattle had any on its council. 

Here is the conundrum that Marxists faced who got voted into local public positions. Their goal of dismantling the market economy and its political benefits to those with the most significant wealth and power is not a daily concern to constituents concerned with their city’s living conditions. They want their community to be safe and pleasant, their transportation system to operate efficiently, and their utilities and housing to be affordable and available. A string of other more seemingly mundane services would follow.

Seattle’s Socialist Alternative party was able to help push the city council to pursue and pass some efficient progressive legislation. However, the council had already gone down that road by passing one of the nation’s few Paid Sick Leave ordinances for all workers in the city without Sawant on the council. 

Once on the council, Sawant’s Socialist Alternative put an initiative forward to adopt a $15 minimum wage immediately and not have it adopted incrementally over some years. The mayor’s office and the business community feared that the initiative could pass, so they were much inclined to work for a quick solution.

That threat provided leverage for the progressives on the council to get the minimum wage increased to $15 in three years for all big businesses and longer for smaller ones. Seattle’s legislation did have a national impact. In a few years, dozens of other cities began increasing minimum wages, and states followed. 

Socialist Alternative, with Sawant’s office at their disposal, was also able to push the council to pass pro-renter legislation and ban police use of tear gas and rubber bullets as “crowd control weapons.” Sawant and SA labeled a payroll expense tax bill as the Amazon Tax since Amazon would pick up about a quarter of the tax because of its vast number of employees working in Seattle. The bill passed the council, but they repealed it a month later due to heavy opposition from businesses and some construction unions. Sawant voted against the repeal.

Two years later, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda sponsored a new employer tax on companies with annual payrolls above $7 million. Named JumpStart Seattle, it was based on the number of highly paid employees rather than total employees. Sawant would not join the other five council members in cosponsoring it.  However, despite the new legislation falling short of the revenue that the Amazon Tax would have provided, Sawant voted for it.

That reluctance to compromise is at the heart of why SA and other Marxist parties that engage in electoral politics have a difficult philosophical belief to overcome. Half-measure victories are not considered so much as victories as sustaining a corrupt political and economic system and hence forestalling the rise of a revolutionary mass working-class movement. For Marxists, according to SA, “socialism builds toward building a classless society based on solidarity and equality, with an economy run and democratically planned, where there is no capitalist class.” 

It’s a goal that has yet to be achieved anywhere. Trying to get there through local elections seems too tiny a brick to lay down. This may explain why even the most successful Marxist party in recent decades has only run two other candidates for city councils, one each in Minneapolis and Boston. Both lost.  Others may have run, but there is little leftist coverage of their efforts. Even vanilla socialists, derisively referred to as reformers by Marxists, have difficulty getting elected to public office. 

But when you have an organization that uses democratic-centralism, which either the left or the right can use, winning a public office means that office serves a party’s political agenda.

In an internal SA discussion paper, this approach was made clear. Citing resolutions​ ​from past​ ​ ​Congresses​ ​of the​​Communist​​ International,​​ SA members in any public legislative body must subordinate all council action to the activity of their outside party. The organization of the council SA faction must also be in the hands of their party’s central committee.

The most disastrous measure for SA was to carry the “defund the police” banner. However, the council ended up only slightly trimming the police’s massive budget, not cutting it anywhere near the slogan’s 50 percent. Nevertheless, SA convinced the public that the council would axe the police department. That resulted in a well-funded conservative backlash to toss out incumbent council members.

A Legislator is Not a Revolutionary 

To the chagrin of Marxists, having one or two elected legislators at any level of government will not result in any significant institutional change, let alone a revolutionary workers’ movement.

As in Seattle, it may result in legislation broadening services and redistributing the tax burden of providing those services to those who can best afford to pay for them. That is how democracies work. Marxists label existing democracies as bourgeois because they do not upend the market economy and oust those most benefiting from it. 

However, the democratic legislative process is slow and meandering. Quick decisions are rare. Those seeking swift, radical changes can be worn down. Sawant cited being one council member of nine as one reason to retire. Socialist Alternative will likely not run other candidates in the future, just like their national party hasn’t run candidates in other major cities since Sawant won in 2015. 

Socialist Alternative Marxists appear to be more comfortable focusing on national issues, not sitting on city councils where they are expected to respond to constituent issues that lack sharp class conflicts. With Sawant’s departure from the council, SA created a new program called “Workers Strike Back,” which Sawant was tapped to lead. It will focus on national political battles, directly organizing workers into a mass socialist movement. The dream lives on.  

Two Final Notes

I worked with Sawant as a fellow council member for the last two years of my eighteen years on the council. Despite her public persona as a rabble-rouser and a constant critic of the council, I found her warm and honest in a one-on-one setting. She was open about her beliefs and intentions without pursuing personal gain. Win or lose; we jointly supported progressive bills. And, while my direct contact with other members of SA was minimal, I didn’t see how they would financially or socially benefit from the positions they took. Their motivation was to promote the greater good. 

Five years ago, independent journalist Kevin Schofield dove into Socialist Alternative’s internal documents. The information was published in his newsletter, SCC Insight. I found it helpful in understanding SA’s workings and contributing to this piece. 

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

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Surging Immigration has led to right-wing governments

In the last five years, populist right-wing parties have been elected to rule or effectively control major legislatures in these six stable European democracies: Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden. In every instance, the ruling liberal and conservative party coalitions lost seats and the control of their legislative bodies. 

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Opposition to what was characterized as “excessive” immigration was a consistent theme in the rise of right-wing governments. Other issues, varying by country, also contributed to their victories, but all parties trumpeted a strong anti-immigration message.

European right-wing parties win by running anti-immigrant messages.

Spain’s Vox Party has just become its third-biggest party. After 42 years of government controlled by the center-right Popular Party and the center-left Socialist Workers’ Party coalitions, support from the far-right wing Vox Party is now necessary to pass national policies. Vox strongly opposes Muslim immigration, even though the number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low. Nevertheless, Vox ran a video of an imaginary news report on the imposition of sharia law in southern Spain and the conversion of the cathedral of Cordoba into a mosque.

Italy’s recent elections saw the Brothers of Italy emerge this fall and have their leader, Giorgia Meloni, become the Prime Minister. She is militantly anti-migrant, calling for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and saying the battle against immigration is “an epochal battle for Italy and Europe.”

Holland’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) won the most seats of any party this November. All four parties of the incumbent coalition government suffered substantial losses. Geert Wilders, leader of PVV, says Holland should “stop the immigration to our societies – because we have had more than enough Islam in our societies.” He called for “a total halt to accepting asylum-seekers.”

Sweden’s far-right party, Sweden Democrats (SD), became the second largest party in their legislature after the 2022 general election. The country’s ruling center-right coalition needs SD to stay in power. In return, SD wants to exclude Sweden from the European Union’s process of relocating asylum refugees. Their party leader, Jimmie Akesson, says that Sweden’s “extreme immigration policies” have “shattered” Swedish society.

Slovakia’s right-wing populist SMER party won the largest vote in their October general elections, making its leader, Robert Fico, the country’s Prime Minister. He calls the EU’s migration policies a failure and says that the majority of EU citizens fully disagree with them.

An anti-immigrant message facilitates a broader political agenda.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign attacked migration as mostly illegal or unnecessary, and his subsequent victory was seen as a model for other right-wing leaders to emulate. Spain’s Vox leader even ran under the banner of “Make Spain Great Again.” 

This recent round of right-wing victories seems to have energized Trump to rev up his attack on immigration. Will it drive enough conservative populist votes for him to win in 2024? He told the Republican Jewish Coalition that on day one of his new administration, he would revive the ban on seven Arab nations to stop terrorists from entering the U.S.  

However, Trump did not include Saudi Arabia, which provided 15 of the 19 men affiliated with the Islamist jihadist organization al-Qaeda that executed the September 11 attacks on America. None of the other terrorists from that attack came from the seven countries being banned. 

Just like Trump’s banning of Muslim immigrants misses the mark in providing effective security, so too is his attacking South American immigrants as conveyors of Fentanyl. The Libertarian-conservative Cato Institute notes that the Mexican Border Patrol found only 0.02 percent of migrants illegally crossing possessed fentanyl. That would be 279 out of 1.8 million migrants.

Given the above facts, it’s evident that banning Mexican or Arab immigrants to make America safe does not work. Which begs the question: What are these demands supposed to accomplish?  The answer can be found in every country where citizens vote right-wing parties into power. Such demands focus on a visible enemy to blame for the public’s discontent with their political and social conditions. 

Trump and the European right-wing parties have generated popular support by championing easy solutions and a clearly defined group responsible for their problems. 

Within a democratic republic, this has been a winning strategy for winning votes regardless of the lack of proof in identifying the enemy’s guilt. 

Stopping the surge of immigrants has been at the forefront of this strategy in these countries.  There are accompanying messages highlighting that families are being ignored or threatened. All the right-wing electoral victories in Europe and the U.S. blame the established parties for endangering families. Protecting family values means passing laws that strip away the individual’s right to abort births, change their sexual identity, marry a person of the same gender, or practice a non-Christian religion. 

There are ample quotes from the leaders of these parties and politicians who lament the growth of liberal policies threatening family values.  In the past, these liberal policies were often accepted by conservatives as necessary changes to protect individual rights. However, the opposition to these policies has grown among conservatives and independents.  This is due to media campaigns buttressing radical actions to guarantee that a nation’s traditional Christian family values are not displaced. 

For example, liberals are blamed for permitting school libraries to carry books and teachers to teach topics concerning sex, gender, and racial issues. Extracts from new and classical schoolbooks are used to show how the youth are being corrupted by writing about these issues in a secular manner without referencing moral values.

The most recent example is Florida Governor DeSantis’s growing list of books banned in public schools. According to a new report by the national free speech group PEN America, Florida has more than double the bans of No. 2 Texas. DeSantis defends these bans as protecting students from “woke indoctrination in schools.”

The right-wing populist movements begin with opposing migration but also imbed the protection of Christian values, and the third element is identifying the protection of personal freedoms being dependent on protecting a free-market capitalist economy from government intervention. Every one of these movements attacks government interference that hinders the freedom of businesses to prosper.

In the case of Italy, Georgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, suggests that the government colludes with corporations and financial speculators to initiate “wokeism.” She believes big businesses make money from wokeism while the government expands its control over its citizens.  

Each of the right-wing political movements identifies three evils that are ruining their wholesome, tradition-bound societies. First, migration reduces the services and security of the current residents. Second, Christian family values are being weakened by emphasizing individual rights that often conflict with those values. Third, the expansion of government leads to families, communities, and businesses losing their freedom to exercise their traditional rights and advantages. 

These right-wing populist concerns are not undemocratic in themselves. However, frustration in resolving these concerns tips the public toward a more authoritarian solution, such as concentrating power in the government’s executive office. Popular support builds for wanting a leader who halts societal changes and returns the country to a prior time when these evils did not exist.

We are seeing in the rise of right-wing populist movements demanding political power a conflict between their demands to reverse societal changes and the nature of democratic institutions. Democracies move slowly in making radical adjustments, whether to the left or the right.  These movements seek to halt the government from carrying out its function to deliberate and compromise objectives from competing social groups and institutional organizations. That is a slow and tedious exercise. 

Manipulating cultural conflicts benefits those who want fewer government regulations.

Lastly, one group takes advantage of the far-right populist movements to achieve their own agenda: those with the greatest wealth concentration. On one hand, they do not seek radical changes because it could disrupt the marketplace and endanger their investments. On the other hand, they can use the leverage of this large voting constituency to trim government regulations that restrict their profits.

The wealthiest sector has no practical affinity for Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians; in fact, they may personally be secularists. But they are willing to fund them to the extent that they help shrink the government’s oversight over businesses or wealthy investors.  Case in point, we see Christian Fundamentalist politicians, like House Speaker Johnson, striping funds from the IRS to collect tax evasion from the most affluent, as I have previously described in Eliminate some Tax Laws.

Dismissing discussions and rushing to unsupported judgments will curtail citizens’ constitutional rights. The problem of immigration must be resolved. That will necessitate some dramatic compromises from both sides of the political spectrum. Unless Democrats remove this issue from the clutches of right-wing Republicans, they will lose elections in the fall of this coming year. 

I have written about the challenges the Democrats face in Biden Must Resolve the Immigration Crisis But, a further exploration of what Congress can do is necessary. 

Liberals cannot dismiss the rise of the right-wing populist movements in Europe and the U.S. as a conspiracy of the wealthy few, although they often fund them. Nevertheless, these movements magnify concerns that are already present.  And they must be addressed within the existing democratic laws and institutions. 

Failing that task, the right wing will continue to push for overturning the democratic norms of tolerating diversity in thought, ethnicity, and personal practices. It will take pragmatic and bold leadership to halt this slide into a society that will not be seen as a land of the free. 

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Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.
 
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Eliminate some tax laws, not IRS funding, to avoid shutdowns

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Republicans lean on government shutdowns as a strategic tool.

This month, the federal government was once again threatened with another shutdown. From November 1995 until today, there have been five shutdowns, with Republicans controlling the House and the Senate for four. This time is no different; the Republicans control the House, and we face another shutdown.

While two of the past shutdowns were explicitly focused on either dismantling Obama Care or halting the construction of a massive wall on the Mexican border, the underlying discussion concerned how we can best spend public funds to avoid a deeper debt burden. 

Although the Republican Party mantra is to shrink government spending, NewsMax columnist Paul deLespinasse wrote, “Republican enthusiasm for reducing the deficit disappears when Republicans occupy the White House. They happily voted to increase the debt limit three times during the Trump administration while increasing the national debt by enacting large tax cuts.” 

Trump’s administration increased the national debt by almost $7.8 trillion. According to Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Trump set a new record. He managed to have his annual deficit become the third-biggest increase of any U.S. presidential administration relative to the size of the economy.

Cutting IRS funding increases government debt.

That Republican approach continued in the first week of November when House Speaker Johnson and the House GOP cut $14.3 billion from IRS funding to pay for an aid package to Israel. It passed the House with all but two Republicans supporting it. Five years ago, Republicans demanded $5.7 billion for Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. With Trump’s approval, the government shutdown in 2018 for 34 days — the nation’s most extended shutdown — to get those funds. In the end, Trump got about a third of that amount.  

House Democrat Brendan Boyle (Penn.) argued that Speaker Johnson prioritized “deficit-busting tax giveaways for the wealth over helping Israel.” Boyle then claimed that the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, which reports to Congress, not the President, found that the IRS cut would “hamstring the IRS’s ability to take on wealthy tax cheats.” The report provided data showing that the IRS cut would increase the deficit by almost $12.5 billion over the next ten years.

The funds being cut were part of the IRS budget increase provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (PL 117-169), which a bipartisan vote of Congress approved. Republicans claim that the supposed 87,000 influx of new agents over ten years would spur an uptick of audits against working-class taxpayers. 

That number of new IRS employees conducting tax audits is suspect, according to Kelley R. Taylor., Kiplinger’s Senior Tax Editor. She wrote that it appeared “to have come from a Treasury Department estimate of the level of hiring needed to maintain IRS efficiency and keep up with retirements and other staff declines.”  The number of new IRS agents to be hired over a decade is unknown. 

In response to the Republican’s attacks on its funding, IRS announced that it was shifting its enforcement efforts to high-income earners, partnerships, and big corporations. Consequently, the agency announced that audit rates would not increase for those earning less than $400,000 annually

The IRS commissioner said they would “hold our wealthiest filers accountable to pay the full amount of what they owe.” He noted that the years of the IRS being underfunded has “led to the lowest audit rate of well-off filers in the agency’s history.”

His statement is backed by the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2022 annual report to Congress, which detailed how years of cutting the I.R.S.’s budget has crippled its capacity to enforce the tax code. Cracking down on tax cheaters among the wealthiest sends a message that all citizens should follow the tax laws.

However, the tax laws are a major cause of our government debt. 

Congress needs to revoke laws that primarily benefit top-income citizens. ProPublica provides a detailed reviewof how the wealthy avoid taxes on billions in revenue by skirting a century-old law dealing with stock swaps. 

Even though “wash sales” have been forbidden since the 2021 legislation passed, the IRS has not kept up with new accountant strategies. Consequently, the one percent of citizens with more than $10 million get to manipulate outdated stock tax laws that do not apply to wages to shield their income from taxation.

Eliminating inefficient and unfair tax laws is not just a left-wing cause. Conservatives argue against tax laws that distort an open market economy.

The Hoover Institute “promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.” In their 1999 essay Welfare for the Well-Off: How Business Subsidies Fleece Taxpayers, they argue that laws providing business subsidies cost American taxpayers nearly $100 billion a year. 

The report noted that “in 1997, the Fortune 500 corporations recorded best-ever earnings of $325 billion, yet incredibly Uncle Sam doled out nearly $100 billion in taxpayer subsidies.” The Institute blames both Republican and Democratic administrations for subsidy programs that undermine the free enterprise system and corrupt the political system.

The Republican’s 2017 tax cut legislation contributed to our national debt growth.

Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed solely by Republicans. The Senate passed the bill by a party-line vote of 51 to 49. The House passed the bill by a vote of 224 to 201. No House Democrats supported the bill, and 12 Republicans voted no. The law is forecast to raise the federal deficit by hundreds of billions—the Congressional Budget Office estimating $1.9 trillion—over the coming decade.

The new tax law dramatically reduced the corporate tax rate from 40% to 21%, roughly equivalent to the rate paid by US companies’ significant competitors, the European-based multinationals. This argument seemed fair. However, a University of Michigan Law School study on the largest 100 companies based in the US and the European Union in the decade ending in 2010 reveals a severe flaw in this logic. 

The authors note that even though the U.S. rate was ten percentage points higher than the average corporate rate in the European Union, the effective U.S. corporate tax rate was the same or lower in comparing these two groups during that period. 

Two tax laws have significantly increased US corporate profits since 2010. First, the percentage of income paid after tax breaks—among profitable large corporations fell from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2018 due to paying less taxes. Second, Trump’s tax law did not significantly close major tax breaks. As a result, their effective tax rate is far below what their European competitors are paying in taxes. 

Now corporations and their owners and investors see their incomes rise ever higher, as does the nation’s debt due to less tax revenue. 

Expect another threatened government shutdown at the end of January. 

Speaker Michael Johnson avoided a government shutdown by adopting a proposal that the Republican right-wing Freedom Caucus offered. A two-step continuing resolution (CR) was passed by Congress that continued funding for the 12 appropriation bills but only for a limited period. The bills were divided into two sets. 

Four less controversial appropriations, like covering veterans’ programs, transportation, and agriculture, would come up for a second vote on January 19 to continue their funding. It was a smart move to first vote for the ones that are most likely to get enough Republicans to fund them again. The other eight spending bills containing the most contentious issues of financing the IRS and border security will come for a vote by February 2, when their CR expires.

The Republican hard right has refused to fund the IRS at Biden’s proposed level and is determined to halt the flow of refugees across our southern border. They have not been willing to compromise with the Democrats and prefer a government shutdown if Johnson relies on them to pass a budget. 

The nation will again face the possibility of federal services stopping and the financial markets downgrading our credit. This past shadow of a possible shutdown resulted in Moody’s credit rating agency lowering the U.S. government’s debt to “negative” from “stable,” citing political polarization in Congress. 

Even if we get through the first quarter of next year without a shutdown, the threat will return as our national debt of $33 trillion grows. It will only cease growing when Congress decides that its candy store shelves of tax subsidies for the wealthiest citizens and businesses are finally barren. 

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Israel Could Adopt an Immediate Ceasefire to Achieve Its War Objective 

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It is counter-intuitive that any country winning a military struggle would initiate a call for an immediate ceasefire. But that is precisely what Israel needs to do to achieve their primary objective, preserving the nation-state of Israel. By pursuing its current war with Hamas, Israel is working against that goal.

Hamas may be prepared to have all its combatants killed in this Holy War against Israel because their ultimate victory is the elimination of Israel. That will only occur if the Muslim, Arab, and Persian world is united in that goal. The humanitarian tragedy resulting from Israel bombarding and invading Gaza invites and reinforces that unity.  

The war with Israel meets Hamas’s goal of derailing the budding positive relationship developing between Israel and Palestine’s largest Arab donors.

Weeks before Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly observing that a “historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia” seemed within reach. That would devastate Hamas’s plans for driving Jews out of the Middle East. 

Under President Trump, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all signed on to normalization agreements with Israel. The top Arab donor from 1994 to 2020 was Saudi Arabia at $4 billion, followed by the UAE ($2.1 billion). But in 2020, Saudi Arabia cut its aid to Palestine by 81.4%. Other Arab countries had also begun cutting back their financial aid at the urging of President Donald Trump to push Palestine to be less critical of Arabs reaching agreements with Israel. 

Hamas could see that its role as the liberator of Palestine from Israel’s domination was slipping away. Within the past two years, Arab funding for Palestine has dramatically shrunk. They had to do something dramatic and quick to stop Saudi Arabia from signing an agreement with Israel — they brutally attacked Israel. 

The 6,000-plus missiles slamming into Israel was a horrific experience for Israel. However, having terrorists get past Israel’s “iron wall,” breaking into your home and killing your family members is a personal traumatic defilement of one’s life. It was sure to arouse Israel’s new far-right government to launch a counterattack against Gaza, Hama’s base of operations. 

Did Hamas intend to provoke Israel to invade Gaza?  The first rule for winning a fight is to choose the battleground. Hamas was prepared to fight the war on its ground. Israel was surprised by the brutality of the Hamas attack, but Hamas was not surprised by Israel’s response. 

If so, as in past conflicts, Israel’s military intervention was expected to awaken furious support for the Palestinians within the Arab countries. Those countries’ leaders were forced to stall establishing better relations with Israel.

It may seem inconceivable that Hamas is winning the war, with its top leaders being picked off, their central city falling into rubble, and hundreds of their children dying. But consider this. Hamas built an infrastructure just for an Israeli attack. According to military analysts, Hamas’s costly, extensive, sophisticated network of tunnels would have required at least two years of planning and construction. Tunnels are not needed for diplomacy. But they are necessary for an all-out war with Israel. But how could a poor country afford to build such an extensive underground fort?

There is little verifiable accounting of the billions of aid Palestine has received from the West and Arab countries. Israel monitors that aid to ensure it bypasses Hamas’s manipulation. However, the autocratic Hamas-run Gaza government benefits from foreign countries footing the bill for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. That aid frees Hamas to use taxes collected from their impoverished citizens to do other things – like building tunnels and purchasing weapons.

As of 2020, less than half of Palestinian households were food secure. Meanwhile, unemployment in the West Bank is at 14 percent, and it is nearly 50 percent in Gaza. These are conditions that brew discontentment toward Israel since it controls Gaza’s contact with the outside world, restricting its ability to be economically independent. This allows Hamas to point to Israel as the cause of their sorrows. The current war ignites that anger and supports Hamas’s attacks on Israel. 

Hamas can tolerate the destruction that is leveling their country because Israel’s massive military response is reinforcing their more significant objective. It is difficult to imagine that Hamas was unaware that thousands of Palestinian civilians would die once Israel started firing missiles back at the dug-in missile launchers located under Gaza’s densely populated country.  

It is possible that some Palestinians approved of Hamas’s attack on Israel in retaliation for what they see as occupiers of their homeland. But there is no way to know what most of the Palestinians in Gaza freely think. That’s because Hamas controls Gaza’s internal communications to the extent that they do not tolerate any open opposition to their rule. 

Hamas has snuffed out elections, public polling, and open forums in Gaza. They are a classic theocratic government, like Iran, in determining internal and foreign affairs within a religious prism, dividing the world into good and evil. 

Israel is a functioning democracy, albeit some rights groups argue that dozens of laws indirectly or directly discriminate against Arabs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative government is deeply committed to following scriptures from the Hebrew Bible. The Prime Minister said in an October 30 speech that Israelites should remember from their Bible what happened to the ‘Amalek,’ a nation. They destroyed it as an act of revenge. 

In line with that position, Netanyahu rejected calls for a cease-fire in the war and would continue to destroy Hamas’ underground network of tunnels. But it’s unclear if he cares to discriminate killing Hamas from the many civilian Gaza residents who may consider Hamas combatants as their freedom fighters.

Consequently, Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza is creating a humanitarian crisis, with estimates that hundreds of children are dying each day that it continues. The demands for a ceasefire are often being made by non-partisan agencies who witness the plight of Palestinians who have had 30% of their housing demolished and their hospital and care facilities severely damaged or operate with minuscule medical supplies. 

Israel’s government believes that accepting a complete ceasefire will happen after it eliminates Hamas. As articulated by Netanyahu, Israel’s main objective is to destroy Hamas. 

However, journalist Jay Michaelson sees another long-term objective that Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party have pursued. They believe that an independent Palestine is the greatest threat facing Israel. Their effort has been to tolerate Hamas to keep them as a counterbalance to the other Palestine party, the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank.

Celebrating when some Hamas leader who was responsible for organizing the attack on Israel is killed is not going to eliminate Hamas. More importantly, the larger story is often the large numbers of civilian deaths and injuries that are explained away as unintended collateral damage. 

Israel is stubbornly blind to how their massive military incursion into Gaza’s air and ground space is affecting a new generation of Palestinians. For every Hamas combatant killed, a future fundamentalist combatant will arise from the thousands of homeless or orphaned children in Gaza grieving for their killed parents. Why wouldn’t their traumatic experience create a future army of children nourishing hatred, not love, towards Israel and Jews? 

Journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote that Israel’s experience when it invaded Lebanon in 1982 should encourage restrain its current invasion of Gaza. Their objective then was to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of parts of Lebanon bordering Israel. For years, the PLO fought skirmishes with Israel’s army and killed Israeli civilians. Israel used 80,000 troops and 1,200 tanks to drive the PLO out of power. In that victory, more than 17,000 people in Lebanon were killed and more than 30,000 injured.

Forty years later, another, more powerful and dangerous advisory, Hezbollah, has emerged with an estimated 60,000 fighters and 150,000 rockets and missiles. In comparison, Hamas is estimated to have about half the number of fighters and less than a quarter of the missiles. 

Israel must now address this deadlier threat to its existence, along with trying to eliminate Hamas.  This should make Netanyahu and his government acknowledge that it is a dead-end solution to continue killing more Palestinians, Muslim, or Arab civilians in search of the terrorists. There are 8 million Jews in Israel, and there are over 360 million Muslims in the Middle East. The Hamas party and its government may be destroyed, but the Arab movement that wishes to destroy Israel will now have more recruits. 

Rightly or wrongly, Israel, not Hamas, is blamed for creating a humanitarian tragedy. Many, if not the majority, of media outlets outside the U.S. and Western European countries repeat that theme. Meanwhile, except for retrieving hostage Israelis, Hamas’s initial terrorist acts are becoming old news.

Israel must grapple with its image as a ruthless aggressor that has gone way beyond defending its territory. It must act decisively and boldly in a manner that will alter the conditions that will lead to a more dangerous, not safer, future for it to survive. 

Israel can do something that Hamas is unprepared for and cannot stop. Israel can declare a unilateral ceasefire. Hamas could not tolerate that move. It wrecks their narrative. It allows the Arab nations to withdraw support from Hamas. 

Yes, Hamas, for a limited time, may well continue to fire missiles into Israel, and some Israelis may die.  But with each missile fired, Gaza, as the continuous victim of Israeli aggression, will crumble. The world will be reminded that Hamas started this war. And they will lose their standing as a legitimate government.

Israel has amply demonstrated that it could inflict much greater pain upon the people of Gaza, but it could also prefer to withdraw as an honorable nation. If it did, the Arab nations would be stunned into acting to free Gaza citizens from Hamas authority. With their assistance, a new non-Hamas government could emerge. 

A unilateral ceasefire is a bold strategy that aligns with the winning tactic of dividing your enemies. Not only will the more moderate Arab nations withdraw support from Hamas, but Palestinians may follow along if Israel can change its current overall approach to Palestinians living in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Only Israel can stop the war. Even if the U.S. ceased all aid to Israel, Netanyahu’s government would continue the war. The movement for a peaceful settlement and a stabilized Israeli–Arab Middle East relationship must come from within Israel. 

This moment in history requires an Israeli political leader to be fiercely pragmatic in hammering out a new relationship with the surrounding Arab states. Netanyahu’s recent speech framing this conflict and future conflicts with Palestinians as a Holy War does not allow for that approach. 

From Netanyahu’s past words and actions, he never endorsed an independent Palestine state alongside Israel as a two-state solution. It is a position that Iran’s leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, wholly supports since he considers Israel an occupier regime that does not deserve to exist in Palestine. Both leaders’ attitudes can lead to eradicating Palestine or Israel as nation-states.

If Israel can abandon the hard-right fundamentalism that grips Netanyahu’s party, a pragmatic Arab leader would be able to emerge to work for a peaceful, long-term solution. By continuing Netanyahu’s uncompromising warfare strategy, Israel is sowing the seeds of never-ending wars, no matter how many Hamas leaders are eliminated.  

The Hamas-Israel War Could Go Nuclear with Gaza Invasion

Hamas initiated the deadliest Middle Eastern war for Israel since its Independence War of 1948.

The Muslim Hamas Party executed a massive missile attack and subsequent invasion of Israel on Oct 7. Israel responded with missiles bombarding Gaza, which, combined with the West Bank, is recognized as the country of Palestine by 138 countries. 

Competing political parties rule Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas has ruled Gaza since winning an election there in 2006. Hamas ended elections and now rules autocratically with no Palestinian civilian restraint on them within Gaza.

Hamas launched over 6,000 missiles at Israel, and an estimated 2,000 Hamas soldiers invaded it, killing 1,400 Israeli civilians and kidnapping about 200. Israel returned missile fire and intends to invade Gaza to destroy Hamas.  Over three times the number of civilian Palestinians have died from Israel bombardments, with half of the population being children.  An estimated 30% of northern Gaza’s homes have been destroyed. A similar dynamic between the Austrians and the Serbs sparked World War One in the Balkans.

Could a local war slip into a regional and then world war?

The start of the first WW is often traced to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. A Bosnian Serb nationalist killed the soon-to-be ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The killer was from a secret terrorist society, Union or Death, that wanted Bosnian Serbs living outside of Serbia to be free of Austro-Hungarian domination. The Austrians held Serbia responsible, just as Israel held Gaza responsible for harboring Hamas. 

In both instances, an ethnic/religious movement was committed to terrorism. In the massacre of innocent Israeli citizens, it’s becoming more evident that the Hamas leadership was aware of the terror it would inject into Israel, not the result of uncontrolled fighters or an extreme faction within Hamas. The United States and the European Union have previously designated Hamas as a terrorist organization for repeatedly attacking Israel with rocket attacks and suicide bombings.

Serbia was part of the larger Slavic population that shared a common history and religion with Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. Similarly, Palestinians share those elements with the larger Arab population in the Middle East. 

Serbia was not able to free Bosnian Serbs. However, they relied on Russia to aid them should the Austro-Hungarian Empire attack Serbia. Russia did go to war with the Austrians, and in response, Germany supported the Austrians. Meanwhile, France and Britain jumped in to stop Germany from gaining a victory. Other countries like the U.S. joined in, and four years later, 20 million soldiers and civilians lay dead.

Israelites and Palestinians rely on allies just as Serbia and Austria-Hungary did in 1914.

Hamas is playing the same role as Serbia did. It relies on Iran as a solid ally to deter Israel from attacking it but also to aid it in eliminating the state of Israel. Like the Austrian-Hungry Empire, Israel relies on foreign military assistance from America to save it from extermination. Significant armed allies have stepped forward to back up Palestine and Hamas in the Middle East.

For instance, Iran gave unrestrained support to Hamas’s attack. Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, said in a statement: “This victorious operation will certainly expedite the collapse of the Zionist regime and promises its imminent annihilation,” the semi-official news agency Fars reported. Iran is considered the primary supplier of arms to Hamas and other Arabs who oppose Israel’s existence.

The U.S. is Israel’s primary supplier of weapons to defend itself from Muslim attacks. President Biden gave the most pro-Israel speech heard in memory from a president. He described Hamas’s attack on Israel as “pure, unadulterated evil” and defended Israel’s need to exist. 

The Serbian and Palestinian conflicts differ in where and how the boundaries for the newly arranged countries could be drawn. But as in each conflict, alliances have more to do with expanding a war than containing it. This was the objective of the Bosnian Serbs, and it appears that Hamas’s objective was to bring Iran into the struggle.

It’s about who gets to live on the land.

The world is again observing a struggle between ethnic groups to create an independent nation-state from land that another ethnic group occupies. Palestinians currently residing in two detached lands, the West Bank and Gaza, want total independence from Israel. And some, like the fundamentalist Islamist organization Hamas, demand that the state of Israel should be eliminated and that Palestinians should control all the Middle East.

As Israel was bombing Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ attack, Biden met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

Zionism is a nationalist movement allowing the Jewish people to return to their biblical homeland and resumption of Jewish sovereignty after being exiled for 2,000 years. But it has also come to include the movement for developing the State of Israel and protecting the Jewish nation in Israel.

In practical political terms, a Zionist believes that the nation-state of Israel should and must exist. Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s Special Envoy for Antisemitism, speaking on CNN, describes Israelites as “an indigenous people who returned after millennia of exile and persecution.” Going one step further, she said that not supporting Israel’s existence is anti-Zionism, which is a modern form of antisemitism. 

Meanwhile, there are 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza and another 3 million in the West Bank. They are mainly resentful that Israel exists on land they believe they should live on and control.  At the end of the 1800s, this region was part of the Ottoman Empire. Their census of 1878 indicated the following demographics for the area historically considered Palestine (Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre districts): 86% Muslims, 9% Christians, and 5% Jews. Today, Israel according to its Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), Israel has 18% Muslims, 2% Christians, and 74% Jews.

Israel declared its independence in 1948 as a new nation, which the United Nations quickly recognized, with the support of the U.S. and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The U.N. planned on creating Palestine and Israel as independent states. Nevertheless, Palestinians remained in the territories of Gaza and the West Bank as a non-nation, not represented in the UN as Israel. Most inhabitants in these two territories are the offspring of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled and not allowed to return to the land that became Israel. 

About the same number of Jews immigrated to the new nation of Israel. Nearly half of all Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants from the European Jewish diaspora. And Jewish immigrants are still arriving, with the foreign-born accounting for 26% of the total population.

Palestinian hostility toward Israel goes beyond what they see as the loss of their land. It is stoked by Israel’s control over the internal life of citizens in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 after the Six-Day War as a buffer zone to limit the ability of Muslims to try to attack and eliminate Israel. The Palestinian Authority represents the Palestinians and administers some 39% of the West Bank, while 61% is under direct Israeli military and civilian control. A further restriction on Palestinians is that Israel controls 80% of West Bank’s water supply. Gaza has more significant restrictions with air and maritime space, and six of its seven land crossings are controlled by Israel, which reserves the right to enter Gaza at will with its military. 

The Arab-Jewish Conflict in the Middle East is an existential war.

Cotler-Wunsh describes the current and past wars that Israel has fought as an existential war against the State of Israel and the Jewish people. One of the reasons given by observers why Palestine failed to become a separate nation is that the Arab nations in the Middle East did not want to give up some of their land to create the nation. And the Palestinians themselves, for various causes, have clung for seventy-five years to the belief that they will take back their land. 

That is not going to happen without a severe war that could quickly escalate to involve the allied powers supporting the two sides in the Arab-Israel struggle. The Hamas attack on Israel was the first step in that direction, and the second would be Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

The scenes of Hamas brutally killing Israeli civilians galvanized support for Israel in the US and Europe. The deaths of many more civilians in Gaza have not had the same impact. 

While the Arab world has protested against Israel, the deaths in Gaza appear less personal. That will dramatically change once images of dead children lying beside Israeli soldiers are shown. 

Hamas had no realistic chance of defeating Israel’s army, but they did prompt Israel to attack Gaza. Hamas is dug into Gaza’s physical infrastructure so that it cannot be targeted without civilian casualties. Gaza residents are dying, and the expected treaty between Saudi Arabia and Israel is now dead.  That agreement could have normalized relations between Israelis and Arabs.  

Professor Yuval Noah Harari at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote that Hamas launched this war with the specific political aim of preventing peace. From its founding, it rejected Israel’s right to exist and had previously disrupted the Oslo peace process and all subsequent peace efforts, seeing them as deadly threats to its existence. Ironically, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Peace Accords, was assassinated by an Israeli who opposed them on religious grounds.

The resulting Arab furry at Israel invading Gaza could push Lebanon’s Hezbollah to magnify its minimal attacks to disrupt Israel’s counter-offensive against Hamas. Hezbollah can launch accurate and powerful missiles that can reach all of Israel. Once those missiles hit residential areas, Israel will be forced to respond with even greater retaliation against Hezbollah. That will bring Lebanon into the war.

What Could Ignite WWIII?

The dynamics for a regional Arab war against Israel will reflect the reality that Israel’s boundary is adjacent to six Arab nations, with four having 90% of their citizens being Muslim and all having less than one percent Jews or none. Their combined population is over twenty times greater than Israel’s. With that alignment, Israel will have to rely on missiles and air strikes to gain some leverage, which they began with airstrikes on Syrian soil last week.

Iran is prepared for a regional war against Israel and U.S. presence in the Middle East. It provides weapons to Iranian-backed militants in Lebanon and Syria abutting Israel, and further away, there are other Iranian-backed militants in Iraq and Yemen. 

The whiffs of U.S. engagement in a regional war can be detected. An American aircraft carrier group was sent to the eastern Mediterranean, destroying cruise missiles and drones that appeared to have targeted Israel. Drones have attacked our military positions in Iraq and a garrison in Syria. 

Since nation-states provide easy targets, they are less likely to initiate using aircraft or direct arterial bombardment of Israel or Iran.  However, some U.S. politicians seem to be willing to extend the conflict. Senator Lindsey Graham on NewsMax accused Iran of involvement in the Oct 7 Hamas attack and said, “We’re here today to tell Iran: ‘We’re watching you. If this war grows, it’s coming to your backyard.” That response will make the U.S. a more tempting target.

According to the Arms Control Organization, Israel has not publicly conducted a nuclear test but is universally believed to possess nuclear arms. According to Iran Watch, There is ample evidence in the public domain that Iran has tried to achieve the Weaponization of its nuclear material but no conclusive evidence that it has succeeded. Iran is estimated to be at least a year away from having a deliverable nuclear bomb. 

It is highly doubtful that either country would use a nuclear weapon since it would likely destroy their nation.

However, as Iran’s control over its stand-in terrorist groups becomes looser, the chance for more significant attacks on Israel and U.S. forces from them becomes more likely. The greatest threat to a real war would be if a renegade of Iran’s stand-ins exploded even one small nuclear bomb in Israel, even if not delivered by air. 

Would Iran or another Arab country be so foolish to provide them access to one? But what if it was stolen?  Perhaps due to a lack of security in Iran’s stockpile?

Using nuclear weapons will open the door for escalating a series of retaliatory atomic bombings. The smallest ones continue to get bigger as more civilians are killed. You cannot employ nuclear bombs just to kill the enemy soldiers. They kill all within the radius of its impact.

To avoid this extreme scenario, but still a fearfully potential one, Israel must realize that it cannot eliminate Hamas by invading Gaza. It’s a movement, not a nation-state. The son of a Hamas founder said, “Hamas is a raging religious movement. They want to annihilate the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” They appear to be using Gaza citizens as front-line unarmed conscripted “soldiers” in their determination to destroy Israel.

According to Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Hamas is as much a network, a movement, and an ideology as an organization. Its leadership can be killed, but the entity or something like it will survive. 

The US, Russia, and Britain have all tried to crush terrorist fundamentalist religious movements. They all failed.  Israel must learn to live with Arab nations that can be rational and open to diplomacy. Jordan may provide a workable model. But all nations in the Middle East must reject absolute solutions to negotiate a lasting peace. 

For a two-state solution to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel to succeed,  

the Palestinian Authority and its allies must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Jews probably run a less theocratic-oriented government than their neighboring Muslim countries. Many Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, claim to be a democracy. But the fine details reveal that they are often not providing a level playing field for all citizens. 

The ongoing Middle Eastern wars between Israel and Arabs will continue until all actors realize they have more to gain from peace than war. If they continue to ignore that fact, they will never achieve peace. Instead, they will eventually invite mutual destruction to themselves and their allies. The question then is when?

Can the Ukrainian War be Won?

The answer to the question Can the Ukrainian War be Won? No ­— unless both sides settle for exercising less sway over the future of their country. The Ukraine and Russia war, at its core, is about nationalism. Each is defending their motherland against outside control.

Put simply, the nationalist view of the conflict is clear. Ukrainians are fighting on their home turf and defending the land against Russians invading it. However, as articulated by their leader, V. Putin, the Russians are defending their historic dominance over Ukraine that the Western countries wish to break away. 

Nationalism is more than just adjusting boundaries; it’s about sustaining a culture and often recognizing that it should be the dominant culture of a land. Culture defines a “people” by language, customs, history, and myths. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin applied that belief in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following year. Branko Marcetic, with the self-avowed socialist Jacobin magazine, describes Putin’s essay as presenting a vision of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” with the Ukrainians being manipulated by unspecified “Western powers” as part of an “anti-Russia project” to make the country a “springboard against Russia.”

Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine is a classic nationalist objective of protecting a motherland from foreign powers occupying its territory while Ukraine is fighting to remain independent. Marcetic recognizes that Moscow’s invasion is self-evidently criminal and appalling. Nevertheless, he believes, as some do on the U.S. left and right political wings, that the West has contributed to the Ukrainian war by encouraging the addition of NATO nations on Russia’s border. That expansion eliminates Russia’s historic dominance over Eastern Europe. Does Putin have a legitimate grievance?

In a news conference in December 2021, Putin said, “You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly,” However, that promise was vague.  Secretary of State James Baker suggested to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, during an informal meeting, that if the Soviets peacefully withdrew from East Germany, NATO would not expand into the Eastern countries. 

According to the post-Cold War historian Mary Sarotte, President George H.W. Bush rejected the idea. When formal negotiations began later in 1990, a ban on NATO expansion was never offered. And Gorbachev agreed to a treaty that did not limit the future expansion of NATO. 

Putin reinterpreted the treaty as an infringement on his nation when NATO expanded its membership into Eastern Europe. NATO’s expansion has an element of globalism in that its members belong to a larger body attempting to determine the future of a region. Russia saw that attempt after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. NATO added 12 countries that had been subservient to Russia by controlling their fellow communist governments behind what the West referred to as the “Iron Curtain.” 

Another treaty was specifically written dealing with Ukraine. Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer writesthat in 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed by Russia and the U.S. and the U.K. committing all of them “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” in exchange for Ukraine giving up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. 

The U.S. provided “assurances,” not “guarantees,” to protect Ukraine from Russia. Guarantees would have implied a commitment of American military force. However, the NATO members and the U.S. would not provide it. Consequently, U.S. assistance has been limited to providing military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. 

Putin’s Russia invaded and then illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Russia then waged a simmering war for control of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region until it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As a result, there are 8 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe. 

According to UNHCR figures, over half (4.8 million) are in the countries bordering Ukraine. Poland alone is hosting nearly 1 million. In comparison, the U.S. has admitted 271,000 Ukrainian refugees. 

A flood of additional Ukrainian refugees is of significant national concern for many European countries should Russia take over Ukraine. The larger liberal democratic governments realized that this influx could destabilize the Eastern European countries with weaker democratic institutions, leading to more strident nationalist governments. These governments would upend Europe’s liberal democracies’ agenda of a larger European Union, with an independent judiciary supporting civil rights for all its citizens.  

That danger has been underway. This month, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won the most seats in Slovakia’s parliament. It is a pro-Russian party and likely to form a ruling coalition with Slovakia’s most right-wing party. Fico has pledged an immediate end to military support for Ukraine. Until his election, Slovakia had pushed for tough European Union sanctions against Russia and donated much military equipment to Ukraine.

This past September, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán threatened to withdraw support for Ukraine in protest of a 2017 Ukraine law that limits ethnic Hungarians from speaking their language, particularly in schools. Hungary has also blocked a $526 million EU military aid package to Kyiv since May because Ukraine listed Hungary’s largest bank as an indirect financial backer of Russia’s invasion.

Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, threatened to no longer supply weapons to it because of a diplomatic dispute over Kyiv’s grain exports. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki initially said Poland would focus on defending itself, but his administration has backpedaled from that statement. 

Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland are moving to defend their national concerns before that of Ukraine. However, the latter two governments are finding that their national policies are also being trumped by the EU’s demand that they change. 

This past July, the EU’s European Commission withheld funds from Poland and Hungary as punishment for breaching the binding effect of the EU Court of Justice rulings. Their national sovereignty is being compromised, and thus, they may feel less willing to pursue a more global approach to helping Ukraine. Popular support within all three countries has diminished since the start of the war for arming Ukraine. 

Other European countries are witnessing less interest from their citizens in Ukraine winning the war. According to a survey by GlobSec, a Bratislava-based security think tank in Slovakia, only 40% of Slovaks believed Russia was responsible for the war in Ukraine. 

Italy could also go that way despite Italy’s new right-wing populist party’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni continuing Italy’s support for Ukraine. However, Italy has accepted two-thirds of the Ukrainian refugees as the U.S., and Italians’interest in that support is trailing down. A February poll by the daily Corriere Della Sera showed some 45% of Italians were against sending weapons to Ukraine versus 34% in favor. 

Most telling is the decline in European support from March 2022 to February 2023 for measures backing Ukraine. During that period, polling within Ukraine’s five strongest allies, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Poland, showed a drop in approval of economic/financial sanctions and sending arms as high as 16%. Still, except for Italy, the populations of the other four countries are just above 50% for sending arms. 

If Ukraine’s summer offensive to retake significant territory fails, the approval rates will continue to fall for supporting Ukraine. This is in keeping with the trend of national needs overriding a more globalist approach to enforcing a regional authority to halt the war. 

This nationalist attitude is becoming a significant force within the U.S. Republican Party, with the reactionary 50-member Republican Freedom House Caucus in the lead to curb, if not halt, funding to Ukraine.  Rep. Matt Gaetz, who led the vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, played an instrumental role in forcing the short-term budget measure to exclude any aid to Ukraine. Previously, he had introduced a bill to prohibit all security assistance for Ukraine, which failed 70-358 on the House floor, with 149 Republicans opposing it. 

Despite a sizeable portion of the House Republicans supporting aid to Ukraine, the nationalist sentiment for the U.S.  to withdraw from a globalist role is gaining support within their party. Opposition to Ukrainian aid often demands that President Biden present a clear strategy for achieving a U.S. objective in the war. A prime example is Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who initially strongly supported the defense of Ukraine but has since said no further aid absent a clear strategy.

America’s attitude toward the war follows the same pattern as in Europe during the war.  A survey conducted for CNN by SSRS, an independent research company, found that between February 2022 and July 2023, there was a 14% drop in thinking that the United States should do more to stop Russian military actions in Ukraine. Doing more now stands at 48%, with 51% believing the U.S. has already done enough. The decline in U.S. support for Ukraine is about the same as in Germany and Poland. However, it is greater than the other three major European countries. 

The changing attitudes of the leaders and populace of Europe and those within the U.S. are all anchored in nationalism: the belief that each nation must first be concerned with its own needs before being involved with the needs of other countries. Russia is counting on the slow and steady growth of nationalism as its most significant leverage for winning the war with Ukraine. 

The one place where nationalism is not working for Russia is in Ukraine. An August 2023 Gallup poll showed that even though support for winning the war has slipped from 70% to 60% from the prior year’s September, Ukrainians want to keep fighting until they win. Regaining Crimea is considered a necessary objective, but in the province closest to Crimea, support drops below 50%. 

Nevertheless, with such staunch resistance, Russia might consider a treaty allowing it to limit Ukraine’s control over the Russian-occupied territory. But can they be trusted? Putin had previously broken two ceasefire agreements with Ukraine, Minsk I and Minsk II, in 2014 and 2015.  He may find an excuse to break another deal if it were just between the two countries. To be an effective treaty, it would have to be backed by an outside party, i.e., an example of globalism at work. 

A workable treaty with Russia would not negate any continuing attempt to manipulate Ukraine’s internal politics. Before Zelensky’s election, Russia operated through Ukraine’s oligarchs to wield extensive political influence. Unless Ukraine obtains sufficient military and economic strength and stronger democratic institutions, Russia will have Ukraine as a client state, similar in status to Belarus.

The emergence of nationalism among Ukraine’s current allies allows Russia to win the war slowly. Some argue that Russia cannot sustain a long war. However, its armed forces are four times larger than Ukraine’s. Its paramilitary forces are five times larger. Its population is over three times larger. All give Putin almost unlimited cannon fodder. 

Since Russia’s government is a one-person operation, dependent on the image of strong authoritarian rule, dissent from the highest to the lowest levels is not tolerated. Unless Putin were replaced, there are no brakes available to halt Putin’s war. A new leader would face immense opposition to ending the war without showing some tangible victory, given the considerable human and economic cost it has levied on Russia. 

A feasible but unpopular path forward for Ukrainians to avoid a devastating defeat would be to have its Eastern provinces and the Crimean Peninsula neutralized as Italy’s Trieste Province had been after WWII. For that survival victory, an outside power must intercede and mandate an end to the war. That is globalism. But globalism is the devil to conservatives in Europe and the U.S. because conservatives have embraced nationalism. 

Globalism is seen by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, as cosmopolitanism. It is a positive application of globalism on a personal scale. Appiah describes a cosmopolitan as someone who sees human beings as shaping their lives within nesting memberships: a family, a neighborhood, a plurality of overlapping identity groups, spiraling out to encompass all humanity. It’s a grandiose vision that expands one’s moral imagination. But it may demand too much acceptance from citizens from any country born into a culture defined primarily by national identity. 

However, a global approach allows America to stay engaged with other European countries and not reward Russia for its aggression. If we back away, other countries will also. Ukraine will most likely only be able to remain independent with foreign help. Ukraine losing the war could unleash an even larger refugee stream into Europe. Unpredictable hardships in Europe would result and be felt in the U.S. as well. By embracing an America First nationalism, we will be willfully blind to this impending repercussion. 

Americans must continue to value a democracy that embraces ethnic diversity, an independent judiciary, civil rights for all, and our common welfare.  If not, the U.S. could be overwhelmed by citizens abandoning those values for an uncompromising “ism,” be it nationalism, fascism, or communism. Creating a physical or mental wall around the U.S. will not protect us from that peril. A global approach would lessen that risk.

The attitude of America before WWII until the Pearl Harbor attack was not to get involved in Europe’s conflict. We need only to protect ourselves and ignore what happens in other countries. 

If we had not gone to war in Europe, nationalized fascism could have toppled other democratic countries, including the US. People aren’t attracted to losers, as Trump said in referring to Senator McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. If Nazi Germany had won, perhaps many American citizens would have accepted fascism as a better alternative to living under a liberal democracy. History does not repeat itself but provides lessons to be learned. 

Do Radio Stations & Newspapers Push a Liberal Or Conservative Agenda?

Conservative commentators and politicians attack the reliability of the “media” since they believe the liberals control it. They often point to television and some social media like Facebook. Except for the New York Times and Washington Post, they have avoided attacking other printed media and radio. 

While the liberals do not dismiss all media as being too conservative, they argue that big corporations’ concentration of media ownership limits the breadth of opinion and promotes conservative views, such as promoting a smaller federal government.

Liberals don’t campaign for big government. Still, they support government intervention in regulating the marketplace and social behavior. The first is for maintaining a fair marketplace, and the latter protects citizens from being denied exercising their constitutional rights. Those efforts result in a larger central government, which big businesses usually oppose.  

Support for smaller government was measured during and after President George H.W. Bush’s term. Gallup polling since 1992 asked respondents to respond to: “The Government should do more to solve our country’s problems.” And “The government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.”

Only twice in the 29 years from ’92 to ’21 has the response reached 50 percent or higher that the government “Should do more.” Meanwhile, in 24 of those years, half or more responded that the government “was doing too much.”

What drives the belief that less government is better than more government? 

Media significantly shapes cultural values and promotes politics that help determine how the public perceives the government’s usefulness.  Since conservative commentaries and Republican politicians champion small government as a core talking point, tracking their appearance and support in the media indicates how much their message may influence public opinion.

We can consider national media as being divided into four conduits. Television and social media are solely digital, which receive the most attention from the political parties. The primarily non-digital ones are radio and print media, which have not received the attention or the wrath from either party for being biased. However, both mediums have experienced an increase in the concentration of ownership. Has that development moved public opinion to support “small government?” 

Radios 

There are over 15,000 radio stations in the US, with a weekly reach of around 82 percent among adults. About a hundred stations are political/talk radio stations. Other stations may have a single political talk show or host a syndicated talk radio commentator. Overall, only a small percentage of all talk shows are political commentary shows. Preaching conservative values that embrace less government is more apparent on radio than conservative columnists dominating the editorial pages of newspapers. 

According to The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, a 2007 report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), 91 percent of the political and talk radio broadcast each day is conservative. The top five largest radio companies host 257 news/talk stations; only 21 broadcast any liberal programming, leaving 91 percent of their total weekday talk programming being conservative.

The CAP report explained that the conservative dominance was not due to popular demand. Instead, structural imbalances by government actions favored the growth of conservative messaging on the radio spectrum by allowing those with the most significant resources, i.e., wealth, to shape that medium. 

When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, there were Republican majorities in both houses for the first time since the 83rd Congress in 1953. They removed the national limit on the number of radio stations that one company could own. 

Bill Clinton was the Democratic President that year and consistently led his opponent by 15 to 20 percent. But he refused to ask the electorate for a Democratic Congress in the 1996 elections.  In signing the Act into law, Clinton said, that consumers will receive the benefits of better quality and greater choices in their cable services and profit from diverse voices and viewpoints in radio, television, and the print media. 

The opposite resulted from the Act allowing for the consolidation of radio ownership to those businesses that could pick off smaller, less financially stable stations. Two large conservative radio ownership groups emerged. 

The most prominent provider of conservative talk radio is iHeartMedia (formally Clear Channel), the largest radio station owner in the United States, both by number of stations and revenue. Their talk radio stations regularly have carried or still carry one or more of the following conservative commentators: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and George Noory – plus other conservative hosts. 

The second largest distributor of conservative commentary is Salem Radio Network (SRN), which identifies itself as the #1 Christian Radio with full-time correspondents broadcasting from facilities at the US House, Senate, and White House. Over 100 stations are in the SRN network, with millions listening to their commentators. Mike Gallagher alone is estimated to have 7 million, and he is joined on SRN stations by other well-known conservative hosts such as Hugh Hewitt, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, and Charlie Kirk.

All the radio conservative talk shows on iHeartMedia and SRN preach limited government regulations. These two corporations directly resulted from the revocation of restrictions on wealthier owners buying up vast swaths of the public airwaves. In this instance, smaller government resulted in bigger businesses benefiting at the cost of smaller firms losing access to the public airwaves.

Newspapers

Over the last two decades, social media has overshadowed newspapers as a critical news source. As of 2020, only 3% of US adults read newspapers as their primary source of information. Consequently, the loss of their readership has led to the number of newspapers from 8,500 in 2004 to 7,100 in 2018. 

As expected, newspaper journalists’ employment dropped by 50% between 2008 and 2020. And as the number of owners has decreased, consolidation has swelled to the point that large media corporations now own 80% of all daily newspapers and almost a fourth of all weeklies.

But newspapers still sway older people since 25% of US adults aged 65+ still rely on print publications as their primary news source.  Remember that close 4 out of 5 of that age group turn out to vote. In the 2020 election, 51% went for Trump and 48% for Biden. 

Has consolidation in print media resulted in a wave of conservative views washing over their readers? That would be difficult to determine. 

The Boston University Library labeled a sampling of newspapers from around the country.  They determined 16 were liberal and 23 were conservative based on editorial endorsements from the 2012 presidential race. However, they cautioned that where newspapers place an event (front page or buried on a back page) and which opinion columns they choose to run are more important than just relying on presidential endorsements for their philosophical leanings. 

That insight helps to explain why, in the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump received endorsements from only 20 daily newspapers and six weekly newspapers nationwide, of which only two, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, had circulations of above 100,000.[4] Many dailies and weeklies that either did no endorsement or endorsed Hillary Clinton would be considered conservative given their placement of news rather than from a single endorsement. They were rejecting Trump, not conservatism. 

The six highest circulation newspapers are roughly evenly divided between liberal and conservative orientations when considering their total circulation. The Wall Street Journal has the highest annual print circulation in the US, more than double the size of the next largest, The New York Times. The third highest in circulation is USA Today; nonpartisan sources consistently rate it as not biased in either direction. The next three in order of circulation size are the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Post. 

Two conditions reveal that neither the liberals nor the conservatives control the “media.”

First, the four largest circulation papers are national newspapers because they have nationwide subscribers. As an aggregate, conservative messaging has a slightly greater outreach. 

Second, concentrated paper ownership accounts for about 40 percent of all newspaper circulation. That leaves 60 percent of the papers locally controlled and determine their content and bias without distant ownership guidance. 

Consequently, these two conditions alone belie accusations that the media is controlled by the “establishment,” the “communists/socialists,” or a capitalist cabal. Nevertheless, unless the concentration of ownership is reversed or at least halted, the number of independent newspapers will continue to decrease. Without a vibrant independent print media, even more of the remaining publications will be purchased by those with the most money. And the new owners will push stories and opinions that reflect their interests, not their readers.

Since the newspaper and radio media have thousands of outlets, no political philosophy dominates them. Conservative commentators have ten times more outlets than liberals on the radio, while the largest newspapers’ circulations are about equal in their philosophical leanings. 

Conservatives have described the “Media” as elitist or the “enemy” in distributing fake news. That trope is based on not tolerating a slice of media that leans liberal, which, among radio stations and newspapers, is less than the conservative portion. 

Endlessly repeating this fabricated narrative helps explain why a 2017 Gallup poll showed 64 percent of Americans believe the media favors the Democratic Party (compared to 22 percent who thought it favored the Republican Party.)

The bottom line is that attacking the “media” as phony undercuts public trust in receiving factual information from all medium conduits. Democratic institutions can only survive with an informed citizenry. If the owners of the mediums distributing this corrupting message care more for their profit margin than providing valid information, then the institutions that guarantee their existence will collapse.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

If you like this piece, email it to others. And if you really like it, become a Patreon patron to help me reach others. – Thanks, Nick

Why did the Parties Switch as Conservative & Liberal?

Graffiti in Licata, Sicily, by N. Licata

The Democratic and Republican parties have flipped their basic philosophies since being founded. Currently, we strongly associate each with being conservative or liberal. We often assume that conservatives are Republicans and Democrats are liberals. But it was the opposite for approximately the first 80 years of our nation’s founding. 

Each party’s orientation was and still is primarily determined by two elements of our society: the economic structure and the social values. The economics of a market economy concentrates wealth to allow the few to magnify their interests, and the social values of a society galvanize the majority to vote in a democracy to protect those values. 

Understanding why the two dominant political parties traded roles helps us understand how the economic and social forces shaped our history and will determine our future. 

The intensity of the parties’ conflicting positions reached their summit just before the Civil War when the energized Northern liberals formed the Republican Party to address the social issue of ending Black slavery. The Democratic voter base was securely grounded in the conservative values of the South, which clung to each state’s freedom to own Black slaves. 

The South’s dependence on slavery was an unrecognized anchor weighing down their economy’s growth potential. Although on paper, white households in the South were wealthier than their counterparts in the North at all levels of family wealth. However, 90 percent of the nation’s manufacturing output came from northern states. The North far outproduced the South in textiles, pig iron, and firearms. 

After the war, the parties drifted away from their pre-Civil War position on government powers. Advocating for a social policy of racial equality was not part of either party’s political agenda. 

As the social liberalism of the Northern Republicans declined, the abolitionists’ commitment to advocate for Black citizens was replaced by a weariness for doing anything more to secure a bearable future for them. Efforts to reform the Southern dwindled as the party took on new members representing Northern business interests. They didn’t need enslaved Black people. Also, due to supplying goods to the war effort, Northern businesses had grown rich. Their attention shifted to making profits, not making social change.

Consequently, they supported Republican Rutherford B. Hayes becoming president since he agreed to a compromise in 1877 that southern states could deal with African American citizens without Northern interference. When that understanding was coupled with the withdrawal of all remaining military forces from the former Confederate states, white supremacists took control of most governments.  Laws and policies were then adopted, halting Black citizens’ civil rights.

Both parties began to develop membership with a balance of fiscal conservatives and moderate liberals until FDR became president. His efforts to bring the economy out of the Great Depression moved most Democrats into a liberalism that accepted a central government protecting the welfare of the general public. His creation of public work projects set a new threshold for government involvement in the marketplace. Meanwhile, the Republicans fortified their long-time but modest conservative orientation by championing a society that promoted a market economy without government intervention.

FDR’s liberal policies did not propose any social changes that specifically addressed discrimination against Blacks or all other minorities, including women. He did knock down discriminatory barriers, which allowed them to obtain better work and lift the U.S. economy out of the depression. He issued executive orders that forbade job discrimination against African Americans, women, and ethnic groups, using the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).

Despite the creation of the FEPC, FDR’s administration tolerated and continued restrictions on Black citizens. As a result, racial segregation was the rule, not the exception, in operating New Deal programs throughout the country. Racial segregation was most apparent in the South; of the 10,000 WPA supervisors working there, only 11 were black. In comparison, Blacks were hired in the North during the first month of WPA’s operation.

New Deal programs were primarily economic policies designed to improve the living standards for poor and middle-income families. The most significant one was the creation of the Social Security Administration (SSA), now America’s largest government program. In fiscal year (FY) 2022, the agency expected to pay out $1.2 trillion in Social Security benefits to 66 million individuals.

Both the right and the left criticized FDR’s liberal economic policies. Senator Robert A. Taft, the leader of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, consistently denounced the New Deal as “socialism,” claiming it harmed America’s businesses by giving ever-greater control to the federal government and being the enemy of individual liberty.

Meanwhile, Senator and former Louisiana Governor Huey Long outflanked FDR on the left. Long’s proposals included a 100% tax on personal fortunes exceeding a million dollars, older people receiving pensions, and providing a $2500 yearly guaranteed minimum income for the poorest Americans.

However, these criticisms were primarily confined to the economics of balancing government and private business roles within the marketplace. They were not about cultural policy issues, although the two parties started drifting apart in protecting Black citizens’ civil rights. 

The first significant opening of that gap was in the Spring of 1963, when Democratic President John F. Kennedy proposed legislation barring racial discrimination in public accommodations, according to Princeton Professors Ilyana Kuziemko and Yale’s Ebonyi. It was a transitional moment demarcating the expansion of the Democrats’ liberal philosophy from economic policies into the cultural arena of initiating social changes. 

The following year, when Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, a clean break from the past was made. It was the first shot in what the public now knows as the “cultural war.” It was the most remarkable social change legislation since Congress passed the Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments of 13, 14, and 15.

The Civil Rights Act vote took place during the presidential election when the Republican Presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater, opposed the new law. He condemned it for dangerously expanding federal government power, a message that resonated in the South.

With the election of FDR most Black voters supported Democratic Presidential candidates. Democrats still held onto the Southern states with very conservative candidates who did not challenge laws discriminating against Blacks. But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act the Democratic Party was seen as too liberal because it supported the federal government to protect the civil rights of Blacks.

After 1964, Black voter support for Democratic Presidential candidates always exceeded 70 percent. And at the same time, liberal Democrats lost the South. In 1960, all 22 U.S. Senators in the South were conservatives affiliated with the Democratic Party. By 2016, there were only three Democrats as Senators. 

Kuziemko and Ebonya wrote a paper providing data that showed nearly all of the Democratic Party’s losses in the South from 1958-1980 were due to white voters’ racially conservative views. In effect, liberal Democrats were closing the Southern whites’ comfortable cultural divide between them and Black citizens. 

Thus, white hostility to social policies that increased racial tensions extended beyond the South. Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress notes thatnational exit polls have shown that since 1976, the Republican presidential nominee has received, on average, 54.8 percent of the white vote, while the Democratic nominee has garnered an average of just 40.6 percent. Others have estimated that Lyndon Johnson may have been the last Democrat to win the majority vote of white males. 

The trend of Democrats becoming more liberal occurred by adopting policies reshaping the American economy and culture. The Democrats lost conservative Democrat voters. But their switch to not voting or voting for Republicans does not explain why the Republican Party became so opposed to altering social policies, particularly around race and homosexuality. 

Republicans, up to the time of President Ronald Reagan, were still a mixture of conservatives and liberals open to gradually changing cultural values if that acceptance didn’t directly endanger their beliefs. There were working relationships between Republicans and Democrats around some common concerns. 

The most consequential single incident was when Johnson persuaded more than one Republican, and most importantly Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, to allow the Civil Rights Act to pass out of the Senate with Republican support. The final vote was 77–19 (Democrats 47–16, Republicans 30–2). More Democrats opposed the bill than Republicans; only senators representing Southern states voted against it.

This vote and others to follow led the Republican Party to become more conservative on social issues due to the critical support from white conservative Southern Democratic voters who would not vote for liberals of either party. Republican candidates became more conservative to win in the South. In that process, they dislodged the conservative Democratic officeholders. And the leadership in the Republican Party followed Ronald Reagan’s winning 1980 election campaign strategy of tying together religion and economics. 

On the religious front, Reagan won over the white Protestant evangelicals who had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter’s politics, while in office, reflected the growing influence of liberals by supporting the Equal Rights Amendment while opposing the tax exemptions for White religious schools. The Democrats were firmly committed to the fundamental liberal belief in separating the church and the state. 

Meanwhile, Reagan doubled down at the 1984 Republican Convention, saying that religion needed to defend itself from state interests and that “morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” Reagan’s Republican platform called for a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions and rejected equal pay for women. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, called Reagan’s ticket “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.”

On the economic front, Reagan convinced millions of traditionally Democratic voters to vote for him, who became ‘Reagan Democrats.’ He won a fifth of Democratic voters in 1980, 54% of the white working class and 47% of union members (Carter got 43% of them). 

White workers represented more than one-third of the nation’s voters. Two years before the 1980 election, they lost close to 5% of their income and saw 700,000 of their industrial jobs lost – especially in the steel and car industries. 

In this harsh economic climate, the federal government and the courts demanded that industrial companies abandon racist practices and set up preferential programs for Black workers. White blue-collar workers were asked to share a shrinking job market with Blacks, while white professionals did not feel a similar burden.  

The lower-income white ethnic neighborhoods close to black ghettos had already experienced the unintended consequence of being targeted for bussing their children away from their neighborhood schools to achieve racial integration in public schools. 

The Democrats’ social justice policies were greatly appreciated by the growing minority population and appreciated by liberal and college-educated white voters. These changes were seen as necessary to sustain the democratic functioning of the republic. The two political parties started to clearly pursue either a liberal or a conservative agenda that changed or preserved past social relationships.

The philosophical division between them was well set before the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement emerged from Donald Trump’s campaign. It was merely the open articulation of that conflict, telling the “truth.” The truth is that the government was interfering with established conservative white cultural values centered around family and church. Conservatives felt that their freedom to act and speak freely was restricted; no matter how they discriminated against or economically impacted others. These were Woke liberal issues, not theirs. 

The answer to why the parties switched philosophies is apparent in the above history. The political philosophy of each party reflects the shifting power of wealth and culture on the populace to vote for a party that they think best protects their interests. 

Those dynamics continue, with conservatives highlighting and presenting popular political slogans promoting “small government” as David slaying Goliath, i.e. Big Government. Liberals avoid promoting “big government.” So, the next question begs, who is best served through small government? 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

If you like this piece, email it to others. And if you really like it, become a Patreon patron to help me reach others. – Thanks, Nick

Civil War – MAGA & the Abolitionists

Republican MAGA movement folks have been predicting another civil war. The federal government’s deep state is trampling upon their freedoms and those of former President Donald Trump. 

Two days after Election Day in 2020, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, told his high-ranking members: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” Twitter posts mentioning “civil war” soared nearly 3,000 percent, denouncing the F.B.I. for searching Donald J. Trump’s Florida home for missing classified documents. 

The last time a civil war was threatened occurred was when the Abolitionists, the core group creating the emerging new liberal Republican Party, pushed the Southern states to abandon slavery. 

Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were fiercely divided on whether enslaved Black people should be freed, but it took place within the context of individual states defining citizenship. Did the federal government have the right to declare new states free from slavery? Or should the new states have the freedom to have Black slaves? 

The threat of civil war then and now is about defining citizenship. In the past, the struggle was to allow Black slaves to achieve citizenship. Today it is to secure functional citizenship for ethnic and cultural minorities. 

History does not repeat itself as a carbon copy. Instead, it replicates patterns. By identifying them, we can better comprehend how our current social movements sustain or destroy our democratic society. 

The abolitionist movement became the most significant disruptive political movement of the late 1850s; the biggest today is MAGA. Each achieved a national presence by displacing the leadership of one of the existing two political parties that form a duopoly of controlling national political power. The Whig Party floundered and then folded as the abolitionists made the Republican Party the second-largest party in the nation.  Since the election of Donald J. Trump as President, the establishment Republican political leaders have succumbed to the MAGA wing of their party because of its grip on the primary system.

Although abolitionists did not initially push for expanding citizenship, once Black slaves were to be freed, they did not actively oppose it. However, they were joined by many citizens in the North who feared that the South was threatening their citizenship.  

The growth of the abolitionist movement can be directly attributed to a response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act that the Southern-dominated Congress and President Pierce sponsored. As described by Glenn Young in The Winning Words“a wide range of local and ordinary people were taken into custody for failing to support the professional slave catchers who came to their communities.” And in response, “there were public demonstrations and even riots in support of Blacks, instead of the traditional riots attacking Blacks and white supporters of abolition.” Protests and the explosion of the underground railway, which ran through the North to Canada and freed an estimated 30,000 slaves, led to the revival of the dormant push for the abolition of slavery.

The threat of an aggressive South was highlighted when Massachusetts, Republican Senator Charles Sumner, was physically beaten on the Senate floor by pro-slave South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks. The South defended Brooks’ actions. The Richmond Enquirer denounced Sumner, editorializing that “these vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate … have been suffered to run too long without collars.”

Today those in the MAGA movement fear that their citizenship is being diluted through immigration, particularly by the wave of asylum seekers that appear to be overwhelming our border facilities. And the primary thrust of MAGA (Making America Great Again) harkens back to when Black citizens were discriminated against in public schools, private businesses, and facilities serving the public. Citizenship was then more narrowly defined. Looking back to that era, it was seen as a period of security from an influx of strange new inhabitants. 

When President Trump pushed for building “the wall” to keep unregistered immigrants from crossing our Mexican border, he voiced the fear many MAGA folks felt about having their citizenship replaced by the newcomers; America wasn’t their home anymore. 
 
And when Trump was impeached and indicted for possible criminal actions, he was treated like a hero speaking the truth, much as Brooks was when he beat down Sumner. The MAGA folks are as passionate about drastic change as the Abolitionists were a hundred years ago. But unlike MAGA supporters, they recognized the presidential elections as legitimate when their first candidate John C. Frémont lost. 

The Abolitionists didn’t ask for the Civil War. They even tried to avoid one to preserve the Union.  In 1856 they conceded to allowing slavery in the existing slave states but nowhere else. The Republicans did not win the 1856 presidential race. However, when Lincoln ran in 1860, the abolitionist movement was steering the Republican Party, and he was their candidate, although not their first choice. 

The South declared that if Lincoln were elected president, they would secede from the United States. They knew that by only adding new non-slave states, they would be outvoted in Congress and have their South Slavocracy threatened. They were willing to fight for their beliefs, as were the Abolitionists who would not tolerate creating new slave states. So, the Abolitionists did spark the Civil War by refusing to accept the growth of slavery in America. 

The Abolitionist and MAGA movements gained significant weight within one of the dominant parties to determine national policies. Their passion for pursuing an agenda to the brink of a civil war, according to Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counter-terrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Trump, raises “The question [of] what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean?” She is concerned because she had not anticipated “how rapidly the violence would escalate” about the January 6 insurrection and the following violence. 

In comparing these two movements, there are two primary reasons why there is little to support the contention that we will see another civil war fought between the states.

First, civil wars need a geographical base for the opposing sides to operate from, as happened in our Civil War, North against South. The MAGA base is dispersed across the country, but principally in rural areas; they need a secure territory to command—the alternative for radical MAGA members would be to carry on long-term guerilla warfare, which rarely finds victory. Without sustained shelter and heavy outside funding, rebellions usually dissipate and fail to replace the existing regime. 

Second, a civil war requires a fight over controlling an identifiable and tangible objective. The North wanted slavery eliminated. The South wanted it to continue. MAGA aims to eradicate the deep state, but where? Who’s in it? For MAGA, the deep state is present in all 50 states that approved the “stolen election.” Any former Republican Party member who is anti-Trump, or not loyal to him is also in it. The organizational problem for MAGA is that the enemy is too amorphous to target since it is seen everywhere and could include anyone at any time, even former allies. 

Although America will avoid a classic civil war, it already is in a “cold” civil war of heightened polarization and mistrust between the MAGA base and liberals. That condition has morphed into violence and threatened violence against individuals doing their civic duty. Extreme cases involved making death threats to volunteers overseeing the 2020 presidential election results, and such threats continue three years later. 

On August 16, 2023, NBC News learned that the purported names and addresses of members of the Georgia grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on state racketeering charges were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric. A post on a pro-Trump forum responded to the exposure of the jurors’ personal information: “These jurors have signed their death warrant by falsely indicting President Trump.”

These potentially deadly actions replay the political and philosophical conflicts that have historically divided our nation into opposing interest groups for asserting citizenship rights and privileges. Those divisions center around racial, ethnic, economic, religious, and geographical clashes. 

Examples go back over 150 years. In 1860 the American Party was close to becoming the second party, not the Republican Party, based on its hostility to immigrants and Catholics. Hostility to Catholics was finally snuffed out when John F. Kennedy became president. Malicious opposition to immigration has ebbed and flowed, with it peaking again. Racial and ethnic discrimination has remained an institutional legacy, and while churchgoing has decreased, religion remains a rallying force in the MAGA movement. The rural, urban political divide is greater now than ever before. One constant feature in America’s past, and every other nation, is the conflict between the haves and the have-nots. 

Some commentators recommend that opposing sides listen to each other, as Monica Guzman writes in Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Listening to the other side is the first step toward rational discussions. But our history shows the odds of that happening on a grand scale to eliminate intense fights are slim. 

However, there is traction among some Democrats and Republicans, which are the political bases for MAGA and liberals, to recognize and respect the democratic functions of government regardless of who is in public office. That is a heavy lift for these outliers, whose friends are deeply suspicious about the reliability of the government to be fair to their side of the divide. 

However, through the effort of some leaders, no matter how scorned, to emphasize the need to operate within a democratic republic’s institutions, citizens can ignore the siren’s songs of despair and anger. And thus, avoid crashing our society upon the ragged shores of a civil war, whether that war is violent or illegally subversive.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials. Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Republicans Diminishing the Cruelty of Black Slavery is a Loser’s Play

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Florida Governor DeSantis is downplaying Black Slavery by orchestrating a new educational instructions plan, Florida’s State Academic Standards – Social Studies, 2023prompted by a new law he pushed.

DeSantis had the Republican-controlled legislature pass the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” the acronym stands for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees.” It was designed to stop “wokeness,” which Republicans define as focusing on historical injustices that may create a false sense of responsibility among those who were not responsible. All public schools are required to use the new instructional plan.

Specifically, teachers could not make students feel “guilty for past actions committed by their race, and they could not imply that meritocracy is racist or that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin.” In other words, teachers could not raise the issue that institutional racism exists. 

The first seventeen pages of the plan set guidelines for teaching African American Studies in public schools beginning in the 5th grade. Read this section in the new academic standards. You will be surprised by what initially appears to be a comprehensive identification of essential issues around Black slavery and culture. However, it had some critical gaffs. And it included a misleading statement, reprinted below, that ignited a national controversy about the new plan. 

The wording is found on page 6 of the plan. 

            Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).  

Benchmark Clarifications:
            Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit. 

A takeaway can easily assume that enslaved Blacks picked up trade skills they could use once freed for personal benefit. That is, once they escaped slavery or the Confederacy lost the civil war. The plan carefully avoids implying that the South losing the war was a good thing that allowed the slaves to employ those skills. 

By showing how slavery helped Blacks obtain employment skills, conservatives like DeSantis hoped to expose liberal programs, such as providing reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black people, as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Diminishing human suffering under slavery served that purpose for him. And unfortunately, states like Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Ohio have pushed bills that would stop or change how teachers instruct on race along similar guidelines.

Resistance to this trend is often missing, allowing a few to set the course. For instance, several members from DeSantis’s workgroup told NBC News that only two members advocated for the criticized language: William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, both conservative Black Republicans. DeSantis would not approve of two liberal Black Democrats since they are tagged as the instigators of Wokism. 

Allen explained his position to NPR and then joined Rice in posting a statement on Twitter strongly defending their findings. They wrote that it was important to clarify that “some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted. This is factual and well documented.” They made no mention that over 98% of the Black slaves were field workers, not semi-skilled workers.

Fay Wylde, writing in Medium, checked the documentation on the 16 examples Allen and Rice provided of Black slaves who developed marketable skills. Three of the four that they said were blacksmiths were never slaves. Although DeSantis highlighted them as examples of how slaves could succeed in life because of learning that skill. Two of the three identified as shoemakers were born freemen, and the third was a white woman. In his piece Two Black History “Experts” in Florida Display Spectacular Ignorance, Wylde systematically exposes Allen and Rice’s evidence as shoddy at best, if not just providing misinformation.

A cultural battle to excuse Black slavery is a loser for DeSantis and Republicans. Not only because this is a merciless message but also because he ineptly initiated his plan. In his hubris to lead this issue, he failed to get any reasonable signoff from the most impacted community. He also skipped a public discussion to release a far-reaching public policy. 

His first error was ignoring Florida’s African American History Task Force, which consists of Black educators and community leaders. It has provided advice on teaching Black history for the last 29 years. And the state law required that it have input on the instruction standards for African American history classes. 

Reporters from the Daily Beast and Raw Story wrote how members of this established task force said Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t inform them of his new mission to restructure how Black history was taught. Instead, he created his own task force, the African American History Workgroup. NBC could find no written criteria for selecting the members. 

DeSantis’s group said the plan would “detail African American contributions in art and civic service, patriotism, the livelihood of people who were enslaved, and abolitionist movements.” However, state Sen. Geraldine Thomas pointed out, “Florida statute requires that instruction be provided on African civilization before colonization and slavery.” 

She added, “This focus was totally missing from the newly adopted standards.” Without the story of how African Blacks had been torn away from their established society, they became individual bodies treated as a piece of property, a commodity to be sold and traded. 

The new instructional plan also makes no mention of two critical efforts to keep Blacks subjugated to the dominant white population in the South. The first was Anti-literacy state laws that made it illegal for enslaved and free people of color to read or write. Southern slave states enacted anti-literacy laws between 1740 and 1834, prohibiting anyone from teaching enslaved and free people of color to read or write.

The second effort was a set of state Black codes that limited African Americans’ freedom and ensured their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished. Many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined, and forced into unpaid labor.

The problem that DeSantis and his supporters face is how to justify bending over backward to describe slavery as bearable. They attempt to weave a few threads of facts into a grand tapestry. That is impossible unless you begin to use lies to present a whole picture to your liking. While many white Republican leaders look away from DeSantis’s effort, some Black Republican congressional members fight back.  

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Tim Scott, told reporters from central Indiana’s FOX affiliate that “There is no silver lining in slavery.” While campaigning in Iowa, he told a Politico reporter that “every person in our country, and certainly running for president, would appreciate that” slavery had no benefits to enslaved people.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation and a Trump supporter, meekly criticized DeSantis’s new educational standards. While he called them “good, robust & accurate,” he added that the “attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong & needs to be adjusted.” DeSantis, like Trump, doesn’t tolerate disloyal Republicans. He promptly accused Donalds of siding with Vice President Kamala Harris and liberal media who condemned his efforts. 

Black Republican Congressman Republican Rep. John James complained about DeSantis attacking fellow congressional members, Sen. Scott and Rep. Donalds. He tweeted #1: slavery was not CTE! Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a “net benefit” to my ancestors,” “#2: there are only five Black Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them.” 

A bigger electoral problem for the Republican party than having angry Black Republican congressional members is the toll that excusing slavery will have on turning off independent voters. A Gallup poll this spring showed that three-quarters of independents are not strong partisans; they tend to vote against the party they don’t like instead of voting for a party they agree with.

About a third of independents lean toward Democrats, but more importantly, many who leaned toward Republicans voted for Biden in 2020 and rejected Trump. That shift tipped the electoral votes in the swing states to make Biden president. This critical slice of independent voters could rebuff an insensitive Republican Party that believes slavery was a tolerable experience, not a horrid one. That message shows a cold, uncaring party that is easy to reject.

The bottom line, Republicans trying to polish the image of Black slavery will expand cracks in their party and siphon off independents come election day – opening the door to a Democratic victory come 2024. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Republicans Fear America Will Become Communist – Really?

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The two Republican front runners for their party’s Presidential Candidate fear that communists could take over America if the Republicans don’t win in 2024. 

In a speech after his indictment for mishandling classified documents, Donald Trump said, “At the end of the day, either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.” Adding that “we will cast out the communists.” Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law designating November 7 as “Victims of Communism Day.” DeSantis said this was “to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

Democratic campaign strategists recommend ignoring these statements; do “not take the bait.” Don’t get into a dialogue about communism. If you dignify them with a response – their message will only resonate with the MAGA base. However, even if true, it will likely be repeated as election campaigns roll out. Ignorance is not bliss.  We cannot have a vibrant democracy if one side concedes the debate floor to the other side. 

To ignore confronting this doomsday prophecy is, in effect, elitist. It betrays an attitude that only uneducated people would follow this thinking. By remaining silent, the perceived threat, but not the reality, of a communist takeover will increase. It shows that the Democrats lack the stamina to refute the Republican’s narrative logically. 

Jon Schwarz of The Intercept wrote of the revival of this red-scare tactic. The author concluded that people, since 1945, have been the same, so beware. People are the same in many ways, but that recognition does not provide a pathway for countering disinformation. Going forward demands a rational response to counter the fantasy that our nation is under a communist attack from within our boundaries.

Let’s begin by identifying what action would bring about communists ruling America. It could result from a violent revolution, an election victory, or a secret cabal within the federal bureaucracy.  

Communists Controlling America Through Revolution

The world’s first communist party was formed when V. I. Lenin created the Bolsheviks. It was previously a faction of a revolutionary Marxist-oriented Russian social democratic party. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, became the lead spokesmen demanding that a true communist state could only exist after a bourgeois democratic government was eliminated. 

Their resulting new ruling government would eradicate capitalism and establish a dictatorship of the workers. In time the state could also be eliminated. Lenin refined Marx’s evolutionary theory of economic and political change to enable Russia to survive as a lone communist state within a capitalist world. Later revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties were formed worldwide to achieve a communist future in their countries. 

America has had and continues to allow Marxist-Leninist communist parties to exist. They began shortly after the Russian Revolution. The main party, the Communist Party USA, has gone from espousing a rigid Marxist-Leninist philosophy to adopting a tamer version. The party had never sanctioned violent activities. 

During the sixties, when revolutionary rhetoric was at its apex on college campuses, the Communist Party was shunted aside as ineffective and irrelevant. More radical and youth-dominated parties emerged with revolutionary rhetoric. By the end of the seventies, small groups like the Weathermen had either disbanded or remained as endless talking circles defining Marxist theory. 

The reality of a Marxist communist revolution in America is a delusion. After a hundred years of organizing, communists accomplished less than President Donald Trump almost accomplished in only four years: toppling the Federal Government. The January 6 insurrection (described by some Republicans as a harmless unguided tour of Congressional offices) came the closest of any past action from any leftist party to stop the orderly transition of presidential power.  If you expect a revolution to overthrow the government, look to the diehard MAGA adherents. Meanwhile, orthodox Marxists are in the libraries reading incomprehensible tomes on why a revolution to eliminate the bourgeois democracy is inevitable sometime in the future.

Communists Controlling America Through Elections

So, let’s turn to the election route for a communist takeover of America. It’s difficult to believe people voting for candidates who don’t think our democracy has legitimate elections. Then again, since Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, forty percent of Republicans believe our democratic presidential election was corrupt.  Those thinking that democracy doesn’t work for them are often attracted to parties and political leaders who promise a new political order that will deliver what they want, which is seen as achieving true democracy. 

Since America’s Communist Party was created in 1919, its political perspective and subsequent policies have drifted from strictly adhering to ML’s revolutionary dogma to actively supporting liberal reformist policies. In the tradition of Marxist movements fragmenting, America’s communist party began as two competing factions. Nevertheless, they shared a common objection. While one proclaimed that it had “only one demand: the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” the other announced that it did “not propose to ‘capture’ the bourgeoisie parliamentary state, but to conquer and destroy it.”

Communist Party candidates reached their high-water mark while the capitalist economy was failing during the Great Depression. They received about 100,000 votes in several elections during the 1930s. William Foster, the communist presidential candidate in 1932, promised that when they came to power, “all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated.…”

Not waiting for that to happen, most of those suffering during the Great Depression favored FDR’s tangible reforms over the vision of a future communist society. Foster received less than 1 percent of the vote, and the communists subsequently denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “social fascist.”

Over time, America’s communist party dropped its revolutionary rhetoric and began promoting progressive policy legislation. It supported the civil rights and anti-war movements, organized against police abuse and mass incarceration. It resisted climate change by most recently endorsing the Green New Deal legislation by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In other words, the communists in the US started to participate as just another political party in the democratic legislative arena. This is a similar practice to what communist parties were doing in seven other functioning democratic countries (including Spain and Brazil), where they have been or are part of the ruling party. Most had about 2 percent communist representatives in their parliaments, where the ruling party needed small parties to cobble together a majority to govern. 

Support for communism occasionally peaks in some opinion polls. According to a 2019 poll conducted by YouGov, communism received a 36 percent approval rating compared to 50 percent for capitalism. Professor of political theory at San Jose University, Lawrence Quill, said that these theories are so broad they lend themselves to endorsement by very different sorts of people looking for very different things. 

The poll measured attitudes, not election preferences. Just two decades ago, membership in the Communist Party was below 2,000. The chance of any communist party’s path to controlling our government through elections is zero.

Communists Controlling America through the Federal Bureaucracy 

Republicans know that the communists will not initiate a revolution or win elections. But they do fear the federal government intruding on their lives, such as using public money to provide social security to everyone, forbidding their children from working in factories, or providing public health care to women who seek abortions. 

These can be big-budget public policies they do not need or want. On the cultural front, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation reported that “cultural Marxism today presents a far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” What are they referring to?  Is big government, like communism, attacking their Christian beliefs? Is it doing that by eliminating the freedom to discriminate with whom where one wishes to work, live with, and serve? 

Government employment has expanded to provide both services and regulation of the marketplace. The upside is that more acceptable conditions exist for safe working, sustainable environments, healthy living, and affordable housing. However, more government workers translate into a bigger, more distant, and deeper bureaucracy, which can breed alienation. Unfortunately, that condition afflicts every type of sizeable secular organization serving multiple purposes. And it provides a feeding ground for sprouting conspiracies when government policies do not align with a sector of the population. 

In 1950, it generated McCarthyism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA  working in the State Department. The late fifties saw the explosive growth of the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, who believed that American liberals acted as “secret Communist traitors.” Fear of an internal communist takeover had Congress publicly questioning citizens if they were communists in this grand scheme. 

Today, that search has morphed into Republicans trying to find those in the “deep state” who unfairly helped impeach and indict Donald Trump. Republican candidates, like Trump and DeSantis, need a boogeyman to scare voters. Communists had been ideal because of their revolutionary fervor and association with the Soviet Union. Being a member of the Communist Party has been dropped as a meaningful charge, mainly because the party is no longer linked to a foreign county.

But what does the gradual growth of a state’s bureaucracy have to do with fearing communism? Nothing. The five proclaimed communist countries that exist (ironically, Russia is not one) resulted from internal revolutions, not elections or the gradual growth of bureaucracy. 

The real threat to our democracy is the acquiescence to authoritarian actions. Democrats must show that authoritarian regimes have emerged from socialistic, theocratic, or democratic governments. That happens when the executive, legislative, and judicial government branches are under absolute control by one person or political party. 

The first step in protecting our democracy is to have a public campaign to advocate retaining laws that uphold election procedures that have ensured fair elections for all political parties. Democratic governing is not achieved by storming the Capital to overturn an election after it was certified by all fifty states and confirmed by over 50 court cases. 

When Republicans claim that socialists, Democrats, and federal employees belong to some manipulative communist-like cabal hidden within government, they undermine our democracy. They should look in the mirror and see that it’s not communists tearing apart the democratic norms that keep our institutions functional; it is them. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The Parties want the Constitution to Balance our Budget

Released July 1, 2023

Both parties provoked Federal debt crises for decades, yet they willfully deny the possibility of the US defaulting on future loan payments. 

While all media focuses on former President Donald Trump’s indictments, they have lost interest in any future economic catastrophe from not raising a debt ceiling. Nevertheless, liberals and conservatives propose looking at our Constitution to avoid a repeat. 

They offer two competing solutions that depend on interpreting or amending the Constitution. If either solution were successful, the next battle between any Administration and Congress to balance the budget by raising a debt ceiling would be eliminated. 

Although the parties’ plans of being implemented are slight, they could surface big time before the debt limit returns on January 1, 2025. Consequently, it’s not too early to examine them. Are they realistic or impracticable?

The Democrat Plan – Reinterpret the Constitution

The Democratic Party has not pursued limiting federal debt with the same fortitude as the Republican Party. In this last standoff between them on needing to raise the debt limit, the Democrat’s progressive wing floated the idea of applying the 14th Amendment to eliminate the debt ceiling by declaring it unconstitutional. Some progressives argue that the Amendment says that the federal government’s debts must be paid once Congress has appropriated money to pay debts. 

The Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, wanted President Biden to make that case to the courts. She didn’t make a legal argument so much as a political one. She stated that what the debt created is “essentially preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest and making poor people pay for that.” 

Progressives could produce data to substantiate her point. However, none of it would be germane to the majority of the Supreme Court Justices who would decide whether to invoke the 14th Amendment as the progressives would like. 

Biden took a nimble step to acknowledge Jayapal’s political assessment but bought time in pursuing an appeal to the courts. He was open to taking a test case to the Supreme Court with the argument that the debt ceiling is incompatible with the Constitution. He didn’t want to make that effort when the nation might be on the precipice of default. So, after he reached a settlement on increasing the debt ceiling, he considered going to the courts “a year or two from now” to test using the 14th Amendment. And, he added, “But that’s another day.”

Biden probably reflected the attitude of most Ds in Congress in not rushing to the court before an agreement was reached. Rep. Adam Smith, a fellow Democrat of Jayapal’s from Washington State, summed up a general opinion that invoking the 14th Amendment would have invited an immediate lawsuit. The nation could have defaulted simultaneously while the issue played out in the courts. 

Aside from the politics, the legal framework depending on the wording of the 14th Amendment, is a Hail Mary pass without a receiver. The 14th Amendment states that “the validity of the public debt, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned.”  However, the conservative justices will put that wording into the context of the Amendment’s purpose. 

Congress passed the amendment in response to the South losing the Civil War. Congress was focused on not paying any obligation associated with the South’s expenses. Their intention was clear. 

“the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligation, and claims shall be held illegal and void.”

The six Federalist Society members on SCOTUS will not ignore that context to consider allowing the 14th Amendment to be used by liberals to fund more extensive government programs resulting from raising the debt ceiling. 

The most likely response is that the conservative justices would refuse to declare a statute unconstitutional when the solution to a disagreement between the executive and the legislative branches can be resolved through legislation. This is the argument that Kavanaugh made in siding with the liberals in the Allen vs. Shelby decision.

The Republican Plan – Amend the Constitution

The Republicans, since 1936, have pursued a balanced budget constitutional amendment, unlike the Democrats, who haven’t tried to connect the Constitution to resolving the debt crises until recently. Consequently, the Republicans have repeatedly introduced legislation to move their amendment forward. 

Their first close effort to passing a vote for the amendment was in 1982. With President Reagan’s support, the Republican-controlled Senate passed Joint Resolution 58 to Amend the United States Constitution. It required every annual budget that its “total outlays are no greater than total receipts” without a three-fifths majority vote of both houses. It failed to pass in the House, falling 46 votes short of the 2/3 majority needed.

This year Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment to the Constitution requiring the federal government to balance its budget each year. It would limit spending to no more than 18% of GDP and require a supermajority vote in both the House and Senate before raising taxes or increasing the nation’s debt ceiling. It has 23 co-sponsors. Meanwhile, House Republicans introduced Resolution 12, with 19 sponsors, with the same objective. Congress also came closer to passing the Balanced Budget Amendment in 1995, when Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, got the House to pass it, and the Senate came within one vote of also passing it.

A two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress must propose a Constitutional amendment. If one party has at least 26% of the votes in either house, they can stop an amendment. This explains why passing amendments through Congress is rare and why this particular one has been around for decades without passing. 

However, some Republicans focus on Article V, which says that an amendment can be adopted through State Conventions. It would need to be ratified in three-fourths of the states. This is precisely what the founders did to bypass the state legislatures, who were reluctant to form a central federal government. The founders succeeded in having 9 of the 13 states ratify the Constitution and create the United States of America. State Conventions have never been used since.  

In the last decade, another effort is moving forward to invoke Article V of the Constitution and convene State Conventions to change the Constitution. In 2013, the Convention of States group, consisting of Republicans and conservatives, began working in all fifty states to pass a Convention of States Resolution. Although the initial focus was limited to adopting a balanced budget, the group has expanded the definition to include “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place term limits on federal officials.”

It takes 34 states to hold a convention and 38 to ratify any proposed amendments. To date, 19 states have passed a COS Resolution. The Republican Party has not formally endorsed the effort. The Democrat Party has ignored it entirely.  Its success seems unlikely, even though a recent poll by Trafalgar Polling shows that 81.3% of Republicans, 63.3% of independents, and 50.2% of Democrats support calling a Convention of States. 

Congress Must Make Decisions, Not the Supreme Court

Putting aside the economic impacts and political risks of adopting a balanced budget amendment by either method, relying on the Constitution’s guarantee to have a balanced budget is more of a rallying cry than a successful strategy. The reality is that for the foreseeable future, our federal budget deficit will continue to be a product of multiple appropriation bills that are voted on separately. 

The debt ceiling must go to avoid future threats of collapsing our economy when one party objects to one specific policy. A restricted range of future costs must accompany each appropriation bill. Once approved, the costs are fixed and cannot be increased beyond that range. This approach will focus congressional debates on specific policies rather than broad-brush accusations of spending too much money and the government going into debt. 

Congressional debates and delaying strategies will continue, but the damage they engender will be confined to the program being funded. Consequently, each party will be forced to take public positions on how much they will spend on a project. The parties must schedule the appropriation bills by priority. And then track their accumulative costs to allow for a realistic projection of the total federal debt load to be incurred. A program must be funded at a lower level if it exceeds that amount. 

Unless we incorporate fiscal discipline within the appropriations process, we will continue to cycle through the fear of defaulting on our debts.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Conservative Justices Save The Voters Rights Act by Describing Systemic Racism Conditions

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberal Justices in Allen v. Milligan to reject Alabama’s Congressional district mapping. Their verdict upheld the District Court’s decision ordering the Alabama legislature to create a second Black voting opportunity district. 

Black-led community and civil rights organizations had filed two lawsuits alleging that Alabama’s new congressional map perpetuated a long history of discrimination against Black voters by diluting their voting power. They could elect a candidate of their choice in only one of seven districts despite making up around 27 percent of the state’s voting-age population.

The Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 vote not to severely limit the Voting Rights Act’s surprised many court watchers. Congressmember Terri Sewell of Alabama told the progressive group Democracy Now, “Wow! What an amazing victory!” ACLU Voting Rights Project’s Senior staff attorney Davin Rosborough also told Democracy Now that there was “some surprise in the media and in the general public because of the direction the court has been going.” Separately, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a voting rights expert at Harvard Law School, called the decision “an absolutely stunning development.” 

Past SCOTUS votes pointed to conservative justices eliminating the Voting Rights Act.

Past votes by Roberts and Kavanaugh had shrunk the reach of VRA in protecting voting rights. Consequently, they were expected to join the other conservative justices to follow past SCOTUS decisions, eviscerating VRA’s usefulness. In the Allen v. Milligan case before them, the last remaining effective tool, Section 2, which protected minorities’ voting access, could have been eliminated. However, the Act’s federal intervention powers required prior approval before a state adopted new voting rules applied to only nine States (including some additional counties) and was set to expire in 2031.

Kavanaugh’s only vote on a significant VRA case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), showed he was critical of the VRA. He and the other five conservative justices voted to overrule a Ninth Circuit Court decision that Arizona’s laws outlawing ballot collection and banning out-of-precinct voting violated Section 2 of the VRA.

Kavanaugh and the other four justices believed those laws did not discriminate against Native American, Latino, and Black voters. The Brenan Center argued that their finding would make it more difficult for voting rights advocates to challenge discriminatory voting laws, saying it  “did significant damage to this vital civil rights law.”

Roberts joined Kavanaugh in the Brnovich case and wrote the far more intrusive Shelby County v. Holder (2013) decision before Kavanaugh joined the court. Roberts and the other conservative Supreme Court justices held that VRA’s coverage formula in Section 4(b) was unconstitutional. The formula was a list of voter burdens and voting trends from 1965 that still triggered VRA’s intervention powers, as spelled out in section 5.  

Without Section 4, there was no way to trigger Section 5, allowing the feds to require a state to receive permission to make voting changes that could be discriminatory. However, the Act’s federal intervention powers to require such prior approval applied to only nine States (including some additional counties) and was set to expire in 2031.

Roberts concluded that Section 4 was outdated and no longer relevant. The coverage formula in section 4 had not changed over five decades.  Coverage still turned on whether a jurisdiction had a voting test in the 1960s or 1970s, which had a lower voter registration or turnout then. Since VRA’s passage, “[v]oter turnout and registration rates” in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” 

Ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion for the liberals using data to challenge Robert’s assumptions. She referred to a Congressional record showing more DOJ objections to prevent discriminatory changes in voting laws as time went on. For instance, the total objections from 1982 to 2004 compared to those from 1965 to 1882 showed a 27.6% increase. This was evidence of the continued need to retain Section 4 to determine if voting changes resulted in discrimination. In the most recent period, DOJ blocked over 700 such changes using Section 4. 

Why Roberts and Kavanaugh supported the Shelby County decision.

Robert’s Allen position was foreshadowed in his Shelby County decision when he acknowledged that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting. He quoted South Carolina v. Katzenbach, which ruled to retain VRA the year after it became law. Roberts lifted the line from their decision which said, “an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.” 

Roberts strongly rejected Alabama’s effort to convince SCOTUS to rewrite its longstanding interpretation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts referenced US Code 42 from 1973 in writing the Shelby County decision. He noted that Section 2 of the Act, which bans any “standard, practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen . . . to vote on account of race or color,” 42 U.S.C. §1973(a), applies nationwide, is permanent, and is not at issue in this case.” 

Kavanaugh concurred with Robert’s opinion that Alabama’s redistricting plan violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He also wrote a separate opinion to emphasize that the prior case Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), applies to deciding Allen v. Milligan

Gingles recognized Section 2 as a statutory procedure, not a constitutional issue. Therefore, Alabama’s request to declare Section 2 unconstitutional was irrelevant. Kavanaugh believed that Alabama needed to have Congress change VRA and not rely on SCOTUS to do so. His opinion stated, “In the past 37 years, however, Congress and the President have not disturbed Gingles, even as they have made other changes to the Voting Rights Act.” 

Both Roberts and Kavanaugh are on the same page agreeing that VRA outlaws voting practices that discriminate based on race. Kavanaugh narrowed his defense of VRA by requiring a legal effort from Congress to change it rather than the courts. Nevertheless, he did sign off on Robert’s overall argument. In doing so, he indicated that he would continue to support VRA. He may even sway some of his conservative justices to take other narrow legal paths to recognize that America must treat all its citizens alike. However, his approach to making it a political decision leads to one of the significant issues looming nationally.

Does recognizing systemic racism in the Shelby County decision, tendered by the conservative justices, require Congressional and Presidential candidates to address this condition affecting our democracy?

The conservative justices’ reasoning for retaining Section 2 in the VRA lends credence to acknowledging that systemic racism exists in America. It’s a concept not in the public discourse when the earlier SCOTUS decisions were written.

In an interview on NPR, Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want To Talk About Race, said that framing racism has to be viewed as “systems that rely on subtle and not-so-subtle biases against people of color to disempower us and put us at risk.” Cambridge Dictionary defines system racism as policies and practices throughout a whole society that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race.”

The cases that Roberts and Kavanaugh cite to protect VRA from further cuts provide the descriptive language of a biased political system that propagates discriminative voting procedures based on race. The link between the definitions of systemic racism as a condition and the conditions these two justices cite are reflections of each other.

Coming down the road, both Congress and the federal courts will debate the existence of systemic racism. They will determine how legislation and SCOTUS decisions accept or reject proposals for adjusting laws in our democracy that harbor such built-in biases toward some of our citizens. 

When Republican Presidential candidate Tim Scott, the only black US Senator, was asked in a Fox News interview if he believed there was systemic racism, he replied that it didn’t exist in America. That will not be the last time presidential and congressional candidates will be asked that question. They could refer to the Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan opinion for an answer.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The Debt Ceiling Settlement Dismantled Republican Demands

The leadership of both the Democrat progressive wing and the Republican reactionary wing voted against passing the legislation to allow the debt ceiling to be raised. However, most of the progressive D’s held back their votes until it was clear that the deal would pass. Their vote was a symbolic protest vote. That was not true for the Rs opposing the settlement. They were prepared to hold another vote past Yellen’s claimed deadline. 

In the end, the pragmatic legislators from both parties carried the victory of passing the settlement to allow the debt ceiling to be lifted. They may have studied history more than their right and left-wing caucuses. Polls from the Republican-driven shutdowns in 2011 and 2013 showed that over three-quarters of the population opposed a government shutdown, and certainly a default, over accepting something less than perfect in the budget. 

Democrats rightly argued that when Congress passed all the appropriation bills in 2022, any negotiation would be a retreat from prior commitments. 

However, those bills were passed with the Ds controlling the Senate and the House. If they had the votes, the Rs would have blocked appropriation bills until they were seriously compromised. It was inevitable that a vote to raise the debt ceiling would be contested after the November elections, considering that the Rs were expected to control at least one of the chambers. 

So, who can out on top in this negotiation? First and foremost, the nation’s economy. Even though the Feds could have continued paying interest on their loans, they would have had to take drastic actions to shift cash from services to pay them. For instance, the Feds could close the national parks as people headed into them as summer begins. That would have been a black eye for the Rs if they were the lead party voting against raising the ceiling. But, McCarthy and mainline Rs did not want that hanging around their neck come the next election day.

More importantly, even if the Feds continued to pay interest on their loans, the capital market would dive, and future interest costs would jump since the US could not provide a dependable rate of return on their loans. 

If the R’s House Freedom Caucus and the Progressives had gotten enough votes to kill the negotiated treatment, even without a default, the disruption would have been a repeat of the budget crisis in 2011. That is when just the threat of a government shutdown raised federal borrowing costs by $1.3 billion in 2011, according to the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office (GAO).  That figure would have wiped out about 90% of what the negotiated settlement would have cut from Biden’s budget over the next ten years. However, this approach would have no budget cuts that the Rs could point to as a victory – it left them in a no-win situation. 

Consequently, the Republicans did not have a winning strategy.  But the Democrats had only a thin advantage because Biden’s Presidency would be seen as failing to negotiate a timely settlement. Speaker Keven McCarthy and President Joe Biden had to convince their respective parties that their agreement achieved their most critical priorities. Biden had to sway the Democrats that he was protecting their ambitious environmental, tax, and social benefits from massive cuts.  Meanwhile, McCarthy had the heaver lift, since his right flank, under the leadership of the House Freedom Caucus, had set specific objectives that could only be met with massive cuts to Biden’s budget.

When comparing the two parties’ key objectives, the Democrats blunted the Republican’s fiscal attack with only minor cuts. The R’s right wing in the house clearly understood that they had failed to eviscerate Biden’s budget since 88 percent of the House Freedom Caucus voted against the negotiated deal. And while the Ds’ Progressive Caucus leadership opposed the agreement, only 34 percent of their membership voted against it. And in the Senate, only 17 of the 48 Republicans voted for the deal, while only five of the Democrats voted against it.

House Freedom Caucus member Representative Chip Roy tweeted a comparison of what the Rs wanted and what they got from the final settlement. He listed the Republicans’ demands passed in the House that McCarthy presented to Biden in their meetings. 

Despite his inflammatory descriptions, Roy’s assessment of the settlement provides a candid appraisal of how far the Rs were from achieving their goals. The following were the Republican objectives that Biden parried. 

R – Cut $131 billion to annual spending next year and shrink the Feds bureaucracy to pre-Covid growth for ten years. 

Instead, they got a 2-year freeze in spending. But $22 billion of the supposed cuts affecting the IRS and social programs would be diminished by shifting unspent COVID reserve funds and additional revenues generated by an expanded IRS that received 80% of the increased funds Biden initially requested.

R -Require strong work requirements for social programs SNAP, TANF & Medicaid.     

None were made to Medicaid. And the requirements for the other two programs were mitigated through exemptions, and the provision could be phased out. To the Rs’ surprise, their insertion in the agreement to impose work requirements on older Americans receiving food stamps was unlikely to save money.  That’s because people experiencing homelessness, veterans, and some former foster youth were exempted. Thus, the food stamp rolls expanded by 78,000 people monthly and increased federal spending by $2.1 billion, according to CBO.

R – Rescind the $80 billion for allowing IRS to hire enough agents to make up for past reductions and focus on collecting past due money owed to the Feds from the wealthiest taxpayers. 

The agreement reduced the IRS increase in funds to $60 billion. As a result, IRS retains 98% of its funding for expansion and future IRS spending. In addition, the Biden Administration can shift much of that $20 billion IRS cut to next year to discretionary spending, which funds many social programs, making them receive the same amount they get now. 

R – Reclaim $50 billion in unobligated, unspent COVID funding

Only $22 billion is reclaimed.

R – Reduce energy permitting requirements

Permitting will be fast-tracked for IRA-subsidized energy and batteries. There has been bipartisan support for comprehensive permitting reform, including clean energy advocates wanting to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission more authority to site transmission lines to access renewables.

R – Cut Biden’s entire student loan bailout 

Student loan forgiveness is retained, but loan repayments will no longer be suspended, requiring payments to be paid in two months.

Bottom Line

Biden did not get the budget that Congress had previously approved. But he did manage to avoid a government shutdown and defaulting on government loans. The cuts to his budget will impact lower-income residents, worsen environmental conditions like air and water quality and continue a tax system that contributes wealth accumulation to a smaller portion of the population in the future.

Democrats are undoubtedly disappointed, but that is slight in comparison to the Republicans’ dissatisfaction with what they were hoping to achieve. The Ds will have concrete benefits to show voters in the coming elections. The Rs will have to lean again on framing an increased debt load as a burden on future generations. That will be a more challenging task, not providing visible, tangible advantages to voters today.

Yellen’s June 1 Deadline May Not be Real

There is a Strategy for Not Defaulting on Federal Loans

Unfortunately, the media and both parties have tended to conflate a shutdown with defaulting. That has never happened with past shutdowns. Not even during the longest ones.

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The US budget is again teetering on running out of money because the Republicans and Democrats are playing a game of chicken on whether to raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling caps how much the US can borrow through issuing bonds. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that failure to pay US bondholders will cut revenue to foreign countries, corporations worldwide, US IRA accounts, and personal holdings, which “would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy.”

That assessment was backed by Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, who predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”

Yellen conditioned this catastrophe from occurring when she said at the beginning of the year, “Once all available measures and cash on hand are fully exhausted, the United States of America would be unable to meet its obligations.” 

But those conditions can be met within a government shutdown. Unfortunately, the media and both parties have tended to conflate a shutdown with defaulting. That has never happened with past shutdowns. Not even during the longest ones of 22 days in 1995 under Pres. Clinton, 17 days in 2013 under Pres. Obama, and 35 days in 2018-19 under Pres. Trump. 

Not defaulting on loans was accomplished since the “cash on hand” was not exhausted. That’s because income and payroll taxes are the federal government’s primary revenue sources. As a result, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that net interest payments on the debt will be a little less than $400 billion this fiscal year, or 6.8% of all federal expenses. 

Consequently, without borrowing additional funds to continue operating, the government in the past and currently takes “extraordinary measures” to avoid defaulting on loans.  In short, some government ‘obligations” to continue services and functions are trimmed or halted. The most extreme measure is not paying federal employees to work or furloughing them. Yet, this is precisely what happened during the past three most extended shutdowns and has yet to occur. 

Under the shutdowns listed, Clinton’s shutdown saw 420,000 federal working without pay, and another 380,000 were furloughed without payment; Obama’s shutdown brought about 850,000 workers (40 percent of the federal workforce) being furloughed; the most recent shutdown under Trump again saw about 800,000 furloughed workers, based on data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).  

Laying off federal employees will not hurt the Republicans. These are union members whose organizations reliably endorse Democrats. In addition, reducing the number of federal employees fits into the larger conservative paradigm of shrinking government. Republicans, led by the reactionary House Freedom Caucus, can continue to stall on reaching an agreement with the Biden Administration to raise the debt ceiling as long as they know that the Administration could lay off employees. 

Taking this “extraordinary measure” can buy Republicans time for pressing concessions from Biden. Their risk is triggering an economic depression if the Administration goes nuclear and doesn’t pay interest on loans – something past Democratic and Republican Administrations have refused to do – and wisely so.

However, this strategy has a downside and one that the Biden Administration has yet to draw notice of it. Even if a loan default does not happen, the threat of one and a dramatic slowdown in public services and employment can hit the economy hard. 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the last shutdown during Trump’s administration delayed $18 billion in federal spending, thus lowering the projected level of real GDP in the first quarter of 2019 by $8 billion. 

Obama’s budget crisis in 2011, initiated by the Republicans threatening not to lift the debt ceiling, resulted in the Dow Jones average falling 2,000 points. According to the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office (GAO), federal borrowing costs increased by $1.3 billion that year.

During the Clinton Administration shutdown, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped disease surveillance, toxic waste cleanup at 609 sites was halted, and more than 20% of federal contracts, representing $3.7 billion in spending, were affected adversely.

These consequences may not concern the Freedom Caucus members as the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump, MAGA leader, spoke bluntly in a CNN interview. Advising his Republicans in Washington, “If they don’t give you massive cuts,” he said, “you’re going to have to do a default.” 

Trump has a certain charm in exposing his desires, like when he said, “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” he said at one of his rallies. He got his wish with the longest government shutdown in our history, but not the $5 billion he demanded.

In line with this attitude, the MAGA Republicans, who fought against McCarthy becoming the Speaker, had extracted a commitment not to increase the debt ceiling without significant cuts. As a result, four Republicans, three of them HFC members, voted against McCarthy’s bill, the Limit, Save, Grow Act. It would have increased the debt ceiling by a smaller amount than Biden requested. It also required more stringent work requirements to receive federal benefits. If one more Republican had voted against the Act, it would have failed. However, the more moderate conservative Republicans voted favorably and stayed loyal to McCarthy. 

The close vote demonstrates that the most conservative Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless there are significant cuts to Biden’s programs. Given this attitude among the core House MAGA supporters, the only way for the debt ceiling to be raised, even slightly, will depend on some Republicans voting for it. Biden administration’s most relevant pitch to get their votes is to zero in on the fear they and the Democrats share. A prolonged government shutdown or defaulting on its bonds will kill our economic recovery.

If the Republicans reject a modified Biden proposal, their party and candidates will be blamed for a failing economy come election day, not the Democrats. In addition, Biden will have shown that he presented a more acceptable budget, which the Republicans still rejected. The opinion polls will likely replay how Bill Clinton’s popularity increased after the Republicans dragged on the government shutdown during his first term. Clinton then went on to win a second term.

The critical swing voters, who are not entrenched in either party’s camp, will only remember that Biden offered something. And no matter what, they will recognize that Biden tried to avoid damaging the economy while the Republicans were not as concerned. Trump and his MAGA supporters’ hubris in beating Biden and not appearing weak will once again steer the Republican Armada into the shallow shoals of defeat. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

What is the Federalist Society and what does it want from our courts?

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The Federalist Society (FS) is the most successful activist group to shape, if not make, federal court decisions. How has that come about? Where did they come from? And what do they want? Before answering those questions, one must appreciate their immense presence in the federal court system.

Federalist Society judges could determine many, if not the majority, of decisions from the federal courts.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse says that nearly 90% of President Donald Trump’s appellate judges appointed to the Circuit Courts were members of the Federalist Society. That’s easy to believe, given that as a presidential candidate in 2016, he promised that his judicial nominees would “all [be] picked by the Federalist Society if he were elected president.”

 Consequently, Trump appointed 53 judges to comprise just under a third of the federal appellate judges. Previously about half of Bush’s appointments to those courts went to society members. That’s no surprise because the George H.W. Bush administration gave responsibility for judicial selection in the White House Counsel’s office to Lee Liberman Otis, a founder of FS.

At the entry-level of federal courts, Trump has appointed about a quarter of district court judges. However, he delivered for the Federalist Society by selecting three members to the Supreme Court to join the three members already on it.Then you must add the Federal Society judges that remain on the SCOTUS appointed by George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, giving FS effective control over that court’s decisions. The six SF Justices, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett, now represent all the Republican appointees on SCOTUS. 

Having vertical consistency of very conservative decisions rising from a district court to the circuit court and then to the Supreme Court could allow society members to reject prior court decisions that have been accepted for decades. I describe how an SF district judge, backed up by an SF-dominated circuit court, recently rejected the FDA’s twenty-year prior approval of an abortion pill used as a safe drug across five presidential administrations.

What is the Federalist Society?

So, what is this society that is altering our society in a legal manner and not through rioting in the streets? Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society focused on spreading conservative ideas in law schools, hoping their members would someday deconstruct the liberal-dominated legal system.

The Society was not the first university-based organization to help law students understand and promote a political philosophy. As a former Mother Jones political blogger, Kevin Drum, wrote, hundreds of groups coalesced around the concept and practice of public interest law before the Society was formed.

That liberal movement started in the 50s when groups began aggressively fighting for civil rights causes in the Supreme Court. According to Drum, “New Deal liberals took over law schools, professionalized them, and started churning out thousands of young lawyers steeped in a liberal understanding of the law.” Then, in the 60s, public interest law exploded. In 1971 Ralph Nader started Public Citizen, and hundreds of similar groups were formed.  

However, while they focused on issues like fighting for the constitutional rights of women, minorities, workers, unions, and consumers, they did not have a singular organization that worked to get their members appointed to the courts. Instead, they were going to the courts to win cases. Meanwhile, some of their members became law professors, politicians, and judges with similar liberal views. 

But unlike the Society, they did not have a game plan or the funds available for taking control of the courts. The furthest right-wing Republicans were disappointed in Republican-appointed judges who approved laws like desegregating public schools and allowing abortions. Two professors analyzed how Republicans, in line with the beliefs of the Federalist Society, led to the rise of a conservative legal network of judges steeped in what could be labeled a reactionary philosophy

Comparing the Federalist Society to its closest liberal twin organization

Thirty years after the Federalist Society was founded, the American Constitution Society (ACS) was created in 2001. Perhaps due to their head start, Drum notes that the Federalist Society “has more student chapters, more than twice as many lawyer chapters, and a huge fundraising edge.” However, comparing their membership size, revenues, and donors is like a fight between a tiger and a lone wolf over a bit of meat. 

Membership in ACS amounts to over 200 student and lawyer chapters in almost every state and on most law school campuses. Meanwhile, FS has chapters at each of the 196 ABA-accredited law schools across the country and 24 chapters at international law schools. In addition, ABA-accredited satellite campuses, non-accredited law schools, and undergraduate campuses harbor SF chapters. Finally, separate from the school chapters, there are over 100 metropolitan lawyer chapters and 15 nationwide practice groups. 

Unfortunately, while ACS lists chapters, its website does not provide membership numbers. For example, the Federalist Society claims 60,000 professional legal members, and Sen. Whitehouse believes they have an additional 10,000 law student members. 

The annual revenue for FS in 2020 was $20 million, with assets of $32 million. From 2015 through 2020, the ACS’s yearly revenue fluctuated between $4.5 million and $8.2 million. There is no separate accounting for their assets, but if the ratio of revenue to assets holds for both organizations, ACSs would be about a third of FS’s.

But these metrics don’t begin to tap the underlying explanation of why FS has significantly influenced the federal court system to its liking. As the adage goes, follow the money.

Federal judgeships have become a valuable commodity on the political market.

Sen Whitehouse has given over nine speeches on the Senate floor accusing FS of being funded by right-wing anonymous donors’ intent to capture federal courts for their interests. His accusation rests on recognizing that the Federal Society pursues three different complimentary strategies through three separate functions. However, they share the same ideological goals, financial resources, and membership. 

At its membership base, FS Whitehouse sees “a debating society, made up of like-minded aspiring lawyers drawn to conservative ideas and judicial doctrine. They organize seminars and invite academics, judges, and attorneys to speak.”

The next level of activity is a think tank entity that issues newsletters produces podcasts, and policy recommendations. They hope to “reorder priorities within the legal system” and create a network of members that “extends to all levels of the legal community.” They equate less central government and an open market economy with having more freedom.

Both functions operate within the spirit of maintaining a democratic dialogue. Of course, one may strongly disagree with their conservative ideas and fear they would destroy democracy. But someone could also fear a liberal organization doing the same activities.  

However, Whitehouse sees a third Federalist Society that understands how much political power the federal judiciary wields. And it could be wielding legal rulings to benefit the financial interests of their donors. Whitehouse refers to the special interests as FS’s donor interests. Since there are many donors, their interests must be coordinated to be effective. 

Whitehouse and a host of journalists identify Leonard Leo, the FS’s past executive vice president and currently its co-chair, as the most influential person shaping our federal judiciary by coordinating those donors’ interests. According to Whitehouse, “it was Leo who delivered the list of potential nominees to fill the vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia and the blocking of Merrick Garland” to be appointed to SCOTUS. Neil Gorsuch was one of his FS picks for Trump to nominate to the Supreme Court.

Whitehouse points out that the Federalist Society is funded by massive, secret contributions from corporate right-wing groups with big agendas before the courts. Their contributions pushed for the appointment of judges who, before being appointed to a court, had publicly argued for the need to trim or eliminate much of government regulation of the marketplace. This approach ignores the effect of accumulating and concentrating wealth on people and businesses that dominate the marketplace. 

Just accumulating wealth is not destructive to a democratic society. However, when court decisions denigrate the quality of life for most citizens, then our democratic society begins to fracture between the haves and not-haves. It led to the rise of conflicts and, as some would say, “class conflict” or populist insurrections. 

The creation of the Federalist Society grew from a recognition that it was necessary to educate new lawyers on the need to overturn the established rationale of liberal judges to protect the welfare of all citizens at the expense of businesses. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell sparked that recognition.

Before he sat on the Supreme Court, Powell sent a memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in the early 70s, framing corporate America’s concerns as the concerns of individual freedom. In Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean writes how Powell’s memo argued that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” pointing to environmentalism and the rise of pro-consumer litigation. But, most importantly, he urged businesses to aggressively protect their interests in the courts since they are “the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.”

The Federal Society became the instrument for the business interests to promote that political change. In addition, it fostered an anti-government regulation philosophy among new attorneys, encouraging them to seek judgeships. Federalist Society’s activism works through a network of conservative donor organizations that Leonard Leo helped create. According to Politico, in 2022, Leo obtained a historic $1.6 billion gift for his traditional legal network of non-profits, made possible by his leading role in the Federalist Society.

Leo’s network funds political media campaigns that indirectly help politicians support FS candidates for federal court positions, including SCOTUS. According to the New York Times, between mid-2015 and 2022, Leo’s network spent nearly $504 million on policy and political fights, including grants to about 150 allied groups. 

Federal Society’s financial and political success in shaping federal court decisions rests has resulted from harnessing conservative ideals to promote the monetary interests of businesses which in turn fund expanding the influence of FS. The counterweight to this effort must be to preserve the liberal basis of our legal system that has protected public welfare economically and socially from being sacrificed on the open market. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Banning Abortion Pills – Choosing between secularism and moralism

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How a single federal judge could upend twenty years of science.

Texas Federal District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk recently banned prescribing and distributing the abortion pill mifepristone as unsafe. However, after a four-year review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certified the pill safe in 2000. Its status as a safe drug was maintained across five presidential administrations until this one Judge wouldn’t accept that decision. 

Judge Kacsmaryk’s heart rather than science seems to lead him to ban mifepristone. In his ruling, he refers to the fetus as an “unborn human” or “unborn child.” These are not medical terms but moral statements.

Language reinforces our beliefs into reality. Kacsmaryk used terms to define abortion as a violation of a moral code. However, he and similar moralist judges are careful not to morally condemn aborting a fetus. If they did so, they would pierce their veil of claiming that they pursue secular justice. 

Six years before his ruling banned the abortion pill, we could see him as an advocate for a Christian morality code. Washington Post reported that Kacsmaryk had submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for those seeking abortions. 

He argued that the Obama administration had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.” In other words, the doctors’ religious freedom would be violated if a woman asked them not to give birth, even if they were raped. The doctors were the victims, not the pregnant woman.

Kacsmaryk must have realized that his logic might not fly at his Congressional confirmation hearings. So, although he had initially been listed as the article’s sole author, he removed his name and replaced it with two other attorneys from the First Liberty Institute, where he was the deputy general counsel. 

First Liberty claims to be the nation’s largest legal organization focused exclusively on defending the religious freedom of individuals and businesses. Their attorneys sue the government to stop regulations that force their doctor clients to violate their religious beliefs, like allowing women control over their bodies. However, Kacsmaryk, ignoring his years working to overthrow abortion procedures, said before his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, “As a judge, I’m no longer in the advocate role.”

He is seen as fair by conservative moralist groups because his decisions have been against sustaining liberal civil rights laws. That reputation attracted the Christian legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to have their client, The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), file a lawsuit against the FDA in Texas’s North District Court. They did so because Kacsmaryk was the only judge in that sector to try their case. Like any federal judge, his rulings could have nationwide implications. However, Defending Freedom would not say whether they filed their suit against FDA in Amarillo, TX, because Kacsmaryk was the judge.

It appears that way since (AHM), was a Tennessee-based organization until it moved to Amarillo three months after the Dobbs decision. Shortly after relocating, AHM filed its lawsuit against FDA.

Since Kacsmaryk’s ruling lacked a verified scientific justification, FDA appealed his decision to a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

The Defending Freedom law firm also understood that an appeal to Kacsmaryk’s ruling would go to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has Trump-appointed judges. Two of them were on the circuit courts’ three-judge panel that heard FDA’s appeal. They backed Kacsmaryk’s decision that mifepristone is unsafe to use.

Although the Circuit Court’s decision was unsigned, the record indicates that only two of the three judges favored a total ban on mifepristone. However, their unanimous decision reintroduced three medically unnecessary measures: 1) requiring in-person visits with doctors, 2) rolling back the availability of the pills from the first ten weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks, and 3) barring dispensing them by mail. 

The DOJ accused the Circuit Court’s ruling of ignoring the large body of research showing that mifepristone is safe and effective. For example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists analyzed hundreds of published studies and found that “serious side effects occur in less than 1% of patients, and major adverse events — significant infection, blood loss, or hospitalization — occur in less than 0.3%.”

Consequently, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an emergency request to preserve the F.D.A.’s prior approved use of mifepristone with the Supreme Court. Their appeal to SCOTUS notes that to “the government’s knowledge, this is the first time any court has abrogated FDA’s conditions on a drug’s approval based on a disagreement with the agency’s judgment about safety.” 

Without dismissing this case, by banning or restricting a prior FDA-approved drug, future challenges could be made to any FDA-approved drug in court. For example, businesses could easily sue to delay the distribution or deny a competitor’s medication based on minimal data. In addition, the development time for releasing new drugs would likely be significantly extended to gather additional clinical trials to reply to pending lawsuits. 

Since the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision to legalize abortion, one of the largest groups in our nation, devout Christians, has worked toward establishing their moral code of opposing abortion as the nation’s moral code, regardless of religious affiliation. 

The tension between justifying our laws within a secular or moralistic framework is at the core of determining how our legal system shapes our culture. The temporal and moral worlds see reality differently, but they do overlap. Secularism is not amoral, nor is morality irrational. Although both could go down those roads if not constrained by the norms of a democratic society seeking to establish rational decisions.

The Supreme Court punts but remains in the game.

The Supreme Court, in replying to DOJ’s motion to toss out the lower courts’ rulings, choose to reject the lower-court restrictions to suspend mifepristone from the market and impose significant accessibility barriers to allow the lawsuit to continue.

Their decision came in a one-paragraph order, with two dissenting justices: Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. However, up to two other judges could have disagreed with the order without public disclosure since the order was unsigned.  Thomas did not explain his dissent, but Alito provided a detailed three-page analysis that attacks FDA strictly on procedural grounds. 

Alito’s dissent is required reading to understand how morality will never be discussed in any decision to support eliminating access to this abortion pill. He also avoids attacking the validity of FDA’s science and settles for merely noting that there is no real threat of harm from an expected short appeal period.

If Alito’s dissent foreshadows the arguments that the Circuit Court will apply to sustain Kacsmaryk’s decision, the final decision comes down to who will be on their panel to hear the FDA’s case. It may not be the same judges that heard FDA’s initial motion. However, if the panel has a majority of Trump appointees, they would be expected to reach a similar conclusion. If they overreach and base their decision on FDA’s science, they could be on shakier ground for winning a Superior Court ruling if it decides to hear an appeal.

Circuit panels generally consist of three judges, supposedly selected at random. A Cornell Law Review article by a professor found that rarely are the judges chosen randomly. Since the Fifth Circuit Court has four Democrat-appointed to twelve Republican-appointed judges, it is the most conservative appeals court. It turned even further right with Trump appointing six of the judges. If a three-judge panel is used to hear the FDA case, two of the three will likely be Trump appointees, having the same makeup as the original panel that heard FDA’s appeal.

If the Circuit Court denies FDA’s appeal or overrules Kacsmaryk’s decision, one of the parties will undoubtedly appeal to the Supreme Court. But, again, Trump-appointed judges may hold sway; half of the six Republican-appointed justices are moralists selected by Trump. 

The Supreme Court conservative Justices’ would be headed toward a strict moralistic application of the law. Following Alioto’s logic, they would prefer to define their ruling around procedural issues, not morality. If the Circuit Court’s decision questions the science used as a basis for their ruling, the SCOTUS justices could be split on how they rule on the appeal of that court’s finding. 

Whatever the outcome, the conservative Supreme Court Justices’ decision to deny this pill to women would reflect their unwavering Christian beliefs. Acknowledging that the US can harbor a mixture of religious thoughts and practices without one faith being morally superior will not be present in their decision. 

No government cannot decree that a democratic society must make a perfect moral world; it can only make a world that regulates harmful behavior toward other citizens. That is why Congress must remove this issue from the judicial system and codify women’s rights to control their bodies. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

How the Legal and Political Worlds Shape Trump’s Criminal Trial

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Understanding the strategies at play

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg inherited a yearslong grand jury investigating whether former President Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate in 2016, paid to cover up an alleged 2006 affair that could have damaged his campaign. 

Should the criminal charges not be dismissed, Trump’s pending trial for breaking the law will be determined by the court’s legal framework and the public’s attitude. The legal procedures are demarcated and should be independent of public opinion. 

The prosecution will lean heavily on facts based on the witnesses’ knowledge. He will appeal to the jurists based on weighing evidence to enforce the principle that all citizens, even a former president, are equal before the law.

The defense will attack the witnesses’ reliability to provide unbiased, verifiable evidence. That effort began outside the courtroom and before the trial started. Citizens on the jury will be influenced by what they learn from the media. Despite the prosecutor and defense rejections of prejudiced potential jurists, all jurors will have some image of the accused to guide their decisions. 

Trump has begun establishing his image as a victim of a political conspiracy by Democrats to stop him from being the Republican presidential candidate. While that accusation cannot be proven in court, it could undermine the legitimacy of the prosecution’s witnesses and even the prosecutor and the judge in the minds of the jurists.

The defense just needs one jurist to have a reasonable doubt as to whether Trump intended to hide criminal behavior. The jury is hung if that individual disagrees with the other jurors on guilt. No decision is reached, and although Trump is not found innocent, neither was he found guilty. The case could be retried, but that isn’t certain. 

To get a complete picture of the legal and political elements of Trump’s current court case, it is best to do a Q&A on them.

What is an indictment?

            An indictment is a formal accusation from a grand jury of residents, not a conviction.  The indictment means that a grand jury has found enough evidence to formally charge them with the said crime. 

Are grand jurors chosen through politics?

            They are chosen randomly from the same list of jurors for a trial jury. They should represent a cross-section of the resident population from the jurisdiction where a trial will take place. There were 23 grand jurors in this case, with a majority of 12 required to agree on indicting Trump. 

            Trump suggested that the grand jury be held in Staten Island, not the financially centered Manhattan, which has many more Democrats than the primarily residential Staten Island. However, while each New York City burrow has a District Attorney (DA), most financial cases are tried in Manhattan. 

Does the accused have a representative at the grand jury proceedings? 

            No, the only people present are the jurors, a prosecutor, and a court reporter. All are sworn to secrecy. No judges are present. Primarily the prosecutor questions the witnesses, who are under oath, as if in a trial. The jurors may ask questions as well. Republicans argue that the grand jury hears only one side and, therefore, was easily swayed by the prosecutor to indict Trump.

What does charging Trump on 34 counts mean?

            The indictment listed 34 felony counts under a New York statute. While each count represents a separate instance of alleged misconduct, they are all part of one crime for being indicted.

Is D.A. Bragg politically motivated to have Trump jailed?

            Trump trumpets that message on social media, saying that Bragg “campaigned on the fact that he would get President Trump. ‘I gotta get him. I’m going to get him.’ South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham said, “This is political persecution. This is a combination of political hatred and selective prosecution on steroids.”

             Bragg said during his campaign to become the new D.A. for Manhattan, “I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation. I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.” 

            As PBS reported, Bragg folded the Trump investigation after getting into office because he felt there was insufficient evidence to pursue a conviction. He changed his mind after he won his case against the Trump Foundation. Its top official Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony charges.

            He did sentence Trump’s close confidant Allen Weisselberg to prison and presided over the Trump Organization tax fraud trial. However, Nicholas Gravante, the attorney who represented Weisselberg in his plea, said, “Judge Merchan was efficient, practical, and listened carefully to what I had to say.” 

            Earl Ward, a trial attorney, and chair of a public defender nonprofit, has watched Merchan preside over cases. Ward says, “He’s fair, and his rulings are consistent with the law.” But, if it’s a close call, he lands on the prosecutor’s side.

            As a citizen, Merchan donated $35 to Democratic causes in 2020, which included $15 to President Biden’s campaign and $10 to a group dedicated to “resisting … Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.”

            Consequently, in his post-arraignment speech, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Trump said, “I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.”  Donald Trump Jr. shared a link on social media that included a photo of Merchan’s daughter. In the 24 hours after Trump’s arraignment, Merchan and his family received multiple threats.

What does the D.A. have to prove to the trial jury?

            One word provides the answer: intent. Bragg must prove that Trump knowingly intended to conceal criminal conduct. For example, he is accused of falsifying internal business records at his private company to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. The payment stopped her from publicly claiming they had a 2006 affair. The payments were given to her a couple of weeks before the November 2016 election to avoid the incident from going public and harming his chances of winning the election. 

            Bragg also said that Trump “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects.” This was in regard to another alleged affair he had. 

            Under New York law, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor charge. Still, if there is an “intent to defraud” that includes an intent to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal” a crime, it becomes a felony. The other crime could be violating the federal campaign finance law or failing to pay taxes on the payments involved

            John Edwards, a former Democratic presidential candidate, was also charged with this crime in 2012 for paying for a scheme to cover up an affair. Like Trump, Edwards concealed a payment that amounted to an undisclosed campaign contribution to benefit his presidential campaign.

He was acquitted on one count, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other counts. The jurors afterward said there was confusion over the exact requirements of campaign finance law, discomfort with unusually using the law to punish a candidate’s personal misdeeds, and concerns with the credibility of a critical witness.

Could the court dismiss the charges without a trial?

            Yes, if the defense can convince the judge that Bragg linking a state misdemeanor charge to violating federal law is not allowable. Some legal experts question Bragg’s legal strategy. If the judge allows that link to be made, the defense could appeal his decision, delaying the trial’s start date. They might try to push it past November of 2024.

If Trump is found guilty, will he go to jail?

            First, a conviction would not legally prevent Trump from continuing to run for president. While Trump could face up to four years in prison for each count, legal experts say he would not receive jail time as a first-time offender with no criminal record.

Will the trial’s date influence who is the Republican Presidential Candidate?

            You bet! Trump’s attorney asked that the start of the trial be in spring. If the judge accepts that request, the trial begins in May. The expectation is that it will take a couple of months. The Republican Convention is scheduled for July 15-18, and their primaries and state caucuses to select presidential candidates to begin in March. By asking for a spring date, Trump expects to make his trial the centerpiece issue of the Republican Primaries and its Nominating Convention. Just try to push him off the front pages.

Has the indictment hurt Trump?

            A CNN poll from April first shows that Trump’s indictment has not hurt him. He started with a favorability rating of 32% in January 2023 and had 34% in the poll. It appears to have ticked up slightly, with Republicans moving from 68% to 72%. The poll’s margin of sampling error is +/- 4.0%. This implies that Trump, at this stage in the court process, is solidifying his base and on the way to winning his party’s primaries. 

            However, 60% of Americans approved his indictment, and while the Ds and Rs were firmly in favor or opposed, independent voters, 62% to 32% supported the indictment. That trend points to a repeat of 2020, when Biden won most independent voters in the swing states to beat Trump. 

            Whatever the verdict in this trial, Trump has hammered home the message that his legal problems are all about politics. That spin may resonate with the public since, according to the CNN poll, “about three-quarters of Americans say politics played at least some role in the decision to indict Trump, including 52% who said it played a major role.”

That attitude may not push independents to vote for Trump, but they might sit out the election and not vote, hurting the Democratic candidate more than Trump. 

Bottom Line: Does it matter whether Trump is found guilty or innocent?

            No polls have been taken to measure how this trial’s verdict would impact Trump’s electability. But given what we know, his base will hold, and they account for over 50% of the Republican primary voters. So, if Trump is found guilty, he could still become the Republican Presidential nominee. 

            The more significant stumbling block to a Trump victory in the primaries and the general election is how the other prominent potential indictments, which tie him to election interference in Georgia and the January 6 insurrection, play out. 

            It is highly likely that if there are other indictments, they will come before the March 2024 Republican Primaries begin. However, it is also likely that the resulting trials, if not dismissed, may begin after November 2024. 

            Like the leaders of other nations who have been indicted for criminal activity, Trump may be able to delay his trials for a long time. Typically, high-profile court cases of former or current leaders of other democratic countries (e.g., Israel, Brazil, France) take longer than a year. 

            The path forward for Trump is to continue fighting all the pending indictments and declare innocence in all potential trials. In winning, he’ll declare unmitigated victory; in losing, he’ll claim that our democracy is dead and predict an uprising to save it. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Our Cultural Assumptions stop us from achieving National Health Care Coverage

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This piece is part 2 of looking at Health Care in the US. Part 1 was issued two weeks ago and can be read here.

American attitudes dissuade citizens from having a universal health care system (UHC). Those beliefs have outweighed considering the health benefits gained from providing affordable health coverage to every citizen. 

However, since the Affordable Care Act was passed, there has been greater acceptance of moving our nation’s health standards to what citizens enjoy in other economically developed democracies.  Still, two beliefs continue to resist universal health care.

The first belief is that America is the greatest nation in the world, and hence our health care is better than anywhere else. Second, collecting taxes makes for a big government to interfere in people’s private lives.

Those beliefs are not evil but are stopping our healthcare system from being universally accessible to all Americans.  Consequently, let’s examine how each assumption is challenged by how our healthcare compares to other nations’ healthcare plans.

Being the Greatest Nation has limits.

The belief that one’s country is a unique great nation is a sentiment other nations have also possessed. Britain, Russia, Germany, China, etc., sometimes believed they were the greatest. And each declined as they limited what they were willing to learn from other countries. We need not make that mistake.

We are the wealthiest nation in the world, measured by both GDP and per capita GDP. Moreover, our federal military and health budgets are roughly equal. However, compared to other developed democracies, our military’s performance is unmatched, while our health care is dismal. 

Our politicians, for the most part, have shunned investigating how other nations have surpassed us in delivering health care. As a result, Americans are only aware of the difference from other countries once they experience receiving health care elsewhere. Of course, each person will have a different experience, but they will all be starkly different from how they are treated in the US. For example, you can read about the experience of two of my readers with universal health care (UHC) in Italy and Germany here. I invite others to submit their stories to me, and I’ll post them on my website under the tab Resources. 

Measuring the Quality of a Nation’s Health Care

A nation’s cultural assumptions are dynamic in that political power energizes them to achieve objectives that benefit those who wield power. Nevertheless, despite this condition in other democracies, their societies have adopted UHC despite resistance from their established health industry. The results are evident when their health systems are compared to the US as measured by three indexes: Medical drug expenditures per capita, health expenditure per capita, and life expectancy. The detail for each index follows. 

Cost of medical drugs – A study on Retail Rx spending per capita (1980–2015) showed that the US spent more than nine other high-income nations of similar population sizes. For example, Americans spent $1,011 annually, while Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom spent considerably less. Germany came the closest to the US, spending $686 a year. 

Findings concluded that Americans consume similar amounts of drugs as people in other countries, so the high US cost was not due to our greater demand. 

Health expenditure per capita – The data is expressed in Purchasing power parities (PPPs) which equalize the purchasing power of different currencies. In 2021, the US had the highest expenditure at $12.3 thousand. This amount includes both public and private expenditures.

Of the nine other comparable developed democracies, seven in Europe and two in Asia, Germany, at $7.4 thousand, had the next highest per capita ranking. All the other countries had per capita amounts that ranged from six to four thousand dollars per capita.  

Life expectancy – In the US, the average life expectancy is 79.11 years, which ranks at #46 out of 149 countries based on the latest United Nations Population Division estimates. We rank last among economically developed democracies. On average, citizens in the three nations with our closest cultural heritage, Canada, England, and Australia, live five years longer than Americans. 

Although the public may need to become more familiar with these metrics, a 2019 survey by Statista revealed that only 33% of Americans were satisfied with our national health system. Compared to other economically developeddemocracies, the UK ranked highest with 53% satisfied, followed by Australia, France, Canada, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Italy, and the US. The Statista survey also showed that 43% of Americans were dissatisfied with our health system. 

The Fear of Big Government is hurting us.

Republican President Ronald Reagan gets credit for the best quote about fearing Big Government when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help. “

Since 1980, Republicans have opposed tax increases for expanding Medicare and Medicaid and enacting ACA. Providing more health care is a precursor to producing a big government with more bureaucracy and poorer service. Most countries with effective and affordable UHC heavily fund it through taxes. Tax-financed expenditures as a percentage of US national health expenditures were 65.7 % in 2020. That is in the high range for comparable nations but not unusual.  

However, our private per capita health expenditure is the highest of all of them. It is 17% higher than what citizens spend in Australia, Canada, and South Korea, which spend the following highest amounts per capita. US tax dollars do not offset out-of-pocket costs that individuals must pay for health coverage, while citizens in nations providing UHC pay less out-of-pocket expenses. This discrepancy is not a problem of a big government; it is a problem of how our tax dollars are spent. 

Nevertheless, a note of caution is necessary. First, of course, a national government must be involved in the planning or delivery of health services. However, a government declaring total coverage does not guarantee good health care. For instance, Brazil is the only country where any individual is eligible to receive free healthcare with no previous application. Consequently, one would expect them to have a health care system with the most satisfied citizens. But that’s not so. 

Brazil is ranked 63 among nations in providing a sound quality health system. Meanwhile, the US is ranked 30 by the CEOWorld Magazine‘s Health Care Index. Also, 63% of Brazilians are dissatisfied with their health care system, a far higher percentage than Americans are dissatisfied with ours. Therefore, government involvement is critical for achieving an efficient UHC, but only if it is one of many other participating organizations. Comparable countries to the US with UHC involve private companies, hospitals, physicians, and non-profit organizations in some capacity of service delivery, cost sharing, and planning. 

How UHC functions in other nations

All nations implementing universal health care (UCF) do so through regulation and taxation. The legislation directs what kind of care must be provided, subject to the ability to make a co-payment for a minimum amount for service or medications. 

The following is a brief sampling of how comparable nations to the US have consistently rated among the top dozen nations providing the best health care to their citizens (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom’s England).  

In looking across multiple nations, UHC can be described by how they address four common elements: Funding source, health costs, coverage provided, and how services are delivered. Remember that the health plans described reflect conditions over the past few years. Countries continuously adjust their plans as political and economic conditions impact the health of their citizens. 

Funding Source 

All the comparable countries have some national healthcare insurance that receives substantial tax revenue. That revenue comes from central and local governments through income, sales, and corporate taxes. Some have specific levies for national health insurance, like Australia, which has a 2% levy and a surcharge for people over 35 that don’t have private health insurance. Exemptions and reductions are available for low-income Australian earners. 

Businesses in most of this sampling also pick up a significant portion of healthcare costs for their employees. For instance, German employers pay for half of their employees’ health insurance contributions, while self-employed workers pay the entire contribution themselves with some exceptions.

Health Costs

One of the critical tools employed is the government regulating health costs for medical procedures and prescription medicines and not leaving the profit-oriented marketplace to determine prices. 

Japan has used a national uniform fee schedule for reimbursing health providers for decades. Canada determines physician fees through periodic negotiations between the ministry and provincial medical associations (the Canadian version of the American Medical Association). France sets the insurance premium levels to be charged related to income and determines the prices of goods and services refunded.

By the government influencing the costs, it can insert community social goals, such as access to health care based on need. For example, Germany calculates individual health insurance premiums based on income and not age or the number of dependents. Australia made hospitalization free for permanent residents; in France, only 3.7% of hospital treatment costs are reimbursed through private insurance.

Coverage Provided

Although these nations commit to providing affordable healthcare, it is not free of requiring copayments. For instance, the national insurance plans in Canada and Japan cover 70 percent of the costs. However, in the case of Canada, the 30 percent typically relates to services not covered or only partially covered by their national insurance, such as prescription drugs, eye care, and dentistry.

 In Japan, the individual contribution percentage could drop to 10 or 20 percent, depending on the family’s income and the insured’s age. Seniors who are covered by Japan’s national Senior Insurance plan only pay 10% out of pocket.

While some of these eight nations have no-cost emergency medicine and general doctor visits, individual co-pays are common in all the countries. Often it does not apply to public health needs; instead, it applies to specialties like dental and eye work. Italy has a small parallel private healthcare system specializing in dentistry and optometry health needs. 

Even with universal health coverage, some items still need to be covered. For instance, Australia does not cover the cost of ambulance services, most dental care, glasses, contact lenses, or hearing aids. However, most of these are covered by state and territory governments or under private health insurance.

How Services Are Delivered

Surprisingly nations adopting UHC have not created large central bureaucracies. As a result, the decision-making and delivery of services are more decentralized than expected.

In the UK, which has one of the most extensive UHCs, responsibility is divided among geographical areas through strategic health authorities. And within each of the UK’s states (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), their legislatures make changes that address their citizens’ concerns. 

Italy permits considerable variation in the quality and outcomes of care by region. For example, when measured at their Local Health Authority level, the results varied between 5% and more than 60%. And Australia’s state and territory governments regulate and administer the significant elements of healthcare, such as doctors, public hospitals, and ambulance services.

Germany has a unique arrangement where the Federal Joint Committee executes its healthcare system, making binding regulations and routine decisions. The Committee consists of representatives of public health insurance, hospitals, doctors, and dentists and three impartial members. In addition, on a local level, regional groups of sickness funds negotiate with regional doctors’ and dentists’ associations for payment for ambulatory and dental care.

Canada has a single payer system operated by a third-party payer responsible for paying health care providers for medical services. The government generally doesn’t own hospitals or employ doctors directly, and health services are delivered through provincial and territorial systems.

Each nation has a different way of planning and delivering health services. But they all manage to provide health coverage more cost-effectively and equitably than what the US is accomplishing.

To Move Forward, We Must Question our Assumptions.

President Biden said, in a New York Times guest editorial, that “he will make Medicare “solvent beyond 2050 without cutting a penny in benefits.” Biden knows that adults 65 and older with Medicare coverage (94%) report being very satisfied or satisfied with the quality of their medical care and the availability of specialists. 

Conservatives and portions of the health industry are attacking his suggestion to raise funds through fees and taxes. They are tapping into two cultural assumptions hindering America from moving forward: taxes produce a big ineffective government, and America has nothing essential to learn from other nations. 

Opponents of Biden’s plan fear a more significant trend, support for a public health insurance option now winning over 80% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans. Having the opportunity to choose public or private insurance is one of the critical elements of the comparable nations’ universal health care plans.

Biden needs to use his executive authority to begin a year-long process to evaluate how other developed democracies serve their citizens’ health needs compared to what we are providing to ours. He should invite both houses to pursue this effort with him. He should also reach out to health medical professionals and providers. 

This discussion must be debated openly, not with ominous predictions or utopian promises, but with facts gathered from the leaders and users of UHC in other nations. Let them explain how it works to our citizens. Let them talk not just in DC but in forums around the US. 

Those forums should be held in at least the seven states that approved Medicaid expansion by ballot measure, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. They should also appear in Florida and Wyoming, the only remaining states that have rejected expanding Medicaid but can expand it by ballot initiative. All these states except Maine voted for Donald Trump in 2020, who campaigned to eliminate ACA.  

The US will never adopt UCF, Medicare for All plan, or a public insurance option until Senators and Congressional Representatives from those and similar red states are pushed to support it by their residents. Until then, Congressional Republicans will block the creation of any national health insurance plan.

If you want to start a discussion on how to get better health care for Americans, pass this on to your friends who live in other states!

Stop Playing Politics – Provide Americans Universal Health Care – Part 1

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Although Republicans in Congress push to cut President Biden’s proposed budget significantly, they will not touch the military, but they threatened to cut the health budget. The nation’s health system is too expensive and impacts our federal budget, but it also doesn’t serve the public’s health needs.

The military and Medicare budgets combined evenly account for about 40% of the federal budget. The health budget includes Medicare for all seniors and CHIP and Medicaid programs that pay health care costs for those who meet low-income guidelines.

President Biden, in his recent State of the Union address, warned Americans that the Republicans were coming for their Medicare.  Overnight, Republican Minority Senate Leader Mitch McConnell publicly rejected Sen. Rick Scott’s (R) campaign manifesto to sunset all federal programs, including Medicare. 

McConnell must have read the recent survey by AP Votecast showing that the only group voting Republican by a majority in November’s national elections were those 65 and older.

Despite the recent Republican retreat from a conversation about cutting Medicare, maintaining Biden’s proposed healthcare budget will neither balance the budget nor fix our healthcare apparatus.  

Providing everyone with decent, affordable health care will be unattainable unless we adopt Universal Health Care (UHC). The alternative will be to leave almost 30 million Americans uninsured, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Universal Health Care does not necessarily cover all ailments for all people. But it does mean that all people have access to healthcare when and where needed, without financial hardship.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the first step toward achieving that goal in 1965 when he persuaded Congress to enact government health insurance for senior citizens. Unfortunately, it took 20 years to accomplish this after President Harry Truman proposed UHC.

President Barak Obama took the next significant historic step 45 years later when he got Congress to pass the comprehensive healthcare reform law Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. Up to then, the total number of uninsured averaged 15 percent. 

Since 2014, when the ACA was amended, 39 states have chosen to expand Medicaid eligibility and establish health insurance marketplaces through ACA. As a result, the uninsured rate has fallen to around 10 percent. Still, in 2021 64% of uninsured adults said they were uninsured because the cost of coverage was too high.

And uninsured rates are not spread evenly across demographic groups. For example, the uninsured rate is 5.7% for White, while the largest minority group, Hispanic or Latino, has an uninsured rate of 17.7%. In addition, youth, those under 35 years old, which make up 59% of our population, have the highest rate of being uninsured. 

Because of not having insurance, or inadequate insurance, a 2019 Gallup poll found that 25% of U.S. adults said they or a family member had delayed treatment for a severe medical condition because of cost. Sixty percent of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, with most of those people being underinsured.  

Most significantly, the lack of health insurance is associated with about 45,000 excess preventable deaths per year, according to a study conducted by the American Journal of Public Health in 2009.

Conservatives argue that making our economy even more free market can provide the best health coverage due to competition and keep our budget balanced.

However, the conservative Fraser Institute’s Freedom Economic ranked countries New Zealand, Australia, and Denmark as having a friendlier capitalist economy than the US, and they provide better health care according to the 2021 CEOWorld Magazine‘s Health Care Index. They also spend half of the $12,318 we spend per capita on health care. Our per capita cost is by far the highest in the world. And that cost is a burden to both individuals and the government. 

The non-partisan CEOWorld Magazine’s 2021 Health Care Index provides one of the most respected rankings of nations by how well they provide health care to their citizens.

They use “a statistical analysis of the overall quality of the health care system, including health care infrastructure; health care professionals competencies; cost (USD per capita); quality medicine availability, and government readiness.” The US placed 30, right behind Mexico but one notch above Lithuania. We should at least be in the top ten. 

Despite Medicare and ACA, the US is still the only developed nation without a functioning universal healthcare network. As a result, millions of Americans go without health coverage in the wealthiest nation in the world as measured by our GDP.

Our economy is larger than the combined total of the next eight largest national economies, exempting China. It is not for the lack of money that we have a poor health system. The reason is that politicians from both the left and the right have resisted a universal health system that shares health care costs between government and private entities. 

Democrats and liberals have pushed for universal health care, with government funding going back to FDR. Except for Teddy Roosevelt, all subsequent Republican presidents have adhered to a free-market health system as a better alternative.

However, the Republican position since Ronald Reagan has turned beyond debating the merits of how to provide a national health plan to actively overturning any programs deemed “socialist” that provide broader health care facilitated through governments. Instead, a free-market ideology and a private-profit-driven health delivery system shape that position.

President Donald Trump was the latest example of this trend when he tweeted that Republicans would seek to replace the ACA after the 2020 election. When that attempt failed, they passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 which eliminated the ACA requirement that people maintain health insurance or pay the penalty. 

Requiring everyone to have health insurance is often used by countries to sustain an efficient risk distribution among participating public and private insurance providers. Without everyone being insured, healthier people will be picked up by private companies leaving the sick to be covered by the public health care plans. 

Republicans and other critics of ACA expected the change to cause the ACA insurance network to collapse financially. American University Professor Aparna Soni analyzed the impact of this change with that possibility in mind.

Soni Used data from the 2015–19 Census Annual Population Survey to compare pre-and post-repeal insurance levels in states that did and did not impose a state mandate in 2019. She found a 24% increase in the likelihood of becoming newly uninsured in states with no federal or state mandate. In other words, the free market did not meet the health needs of those unable to afford insurance through private providers. 

Conservatives argued that ACA would hurt the economy and, by extension, contribute to budget deficits. However, ACA reduced payments to hospitals under Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, which lowered the expected growth of Medicare expenditures by 20 percent.

Overall, Medicare spending fell from 2010 to 2018. Meanwhile, the annual increase in national per capita healthcare cost was modest by historical standards creating no attributable spike in the nation’s budget deficit.  

America has the least effective and most costly health system of any economically developed nation because our politics are driven by a culture where citizens fear losing the freedom to select a health care provider of their choice. That belief reflects our country’s legacy of being founded on the principle of protecting personal freedoms. It is sustained by a profit-oriented market that promotes the acquisition of certain commodities and services as safeguarding personal freedoms. 

Consequently, the health industry relies on keeping government regulation of health care to a minimum so that their products and services do not have to compete with cheaper and possibly better options. Republicans fanned the fear of big government controlling our health choices by describing ACA as an attack on our freedom.

Since ACA was signed into law in 2010, Newsweek found at least 70 Republican-led attempts to repeal, modify, or curb the Affordable Care Act. Immediately preceding the 2014 midterm elections, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s found that 84% of Republican-affiliated healthcare ads attacked the ACA. The Democrats, meanwhile, barely mentioned it, with only 11 percent of Democrat-affiliated ads promoting it. 

The barrage of Republican attacks resulted in unfavorable polling toward ACA, reaching its historic high of 53% for one month in 2014. Overall, polling has shown that the country has been evenly divided over accepting ACA, with the unfavorable opinion slightly in the majority until Donald Trump’s first year in office. Once he took office with his MAGA agenda, polls never showed opposition greater than support. Support for ACA reached a historic high of 58% in 2022.

Republicans noted that significant change in public attitude, and they started walking back their previous criticisms. In the new House Republican one-page “Commitment to America” blueprint for their policy objectives, there is no mention of ACA. It is no longer portrayed as the cause of our budget deficit. 

Republicans failed to eliminate ACA and never revealed the health plan they promised to have as an alternative. However, progressive Democrats failed to secure a single-payer system for health care to replace ACA. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the progressives’ primary advocates, refused to support expanding ACA. Instead, he pushed for the government being the “single payer” for virtually all health care services.

Public opinion did not embrace either path toward establishing a national plan for health care. Americans may adopt a system that citizens in other developed democratic republics have chosen, one that mixes public and private financial and delivery systems to achieve universal health care. 

What has been missing from the debate between liberals and conservatives is an understanding that universal health coverage is not what either side describes. Citizens living in countries with UHC are neither in prison nor in a utopia. There are wide varieties of it, but all result in a healthier population than ours.

Viewing the differences among the countries with universal health coverage reveals that private insurance may not disappear. Often government works with private companies.

Whether the delivery is through the government or private companies, the bottom line is that no one is left without the affordable health coverage needed to live a healthy life.

Without understanding how comparable countries implement Universal Health Coverage, we will continue to blame the other political party for a health system ranked below a score of far less wealthy nations. 

Citizen Politics will explore how implementing the UHC practices from other countries can provide more equitable, affordable health coverage for Americans.

Nick Licata is the author ofBecoming A Citizen ActivistandStudent Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

A Bloated Military Budget enables waste, corruption, and world-wide intervention

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While the Republicans and Democrats do a slow tangle to lift the debt ceiling to avoid crippling our economy, they agree on taking one step together. They are lockstep in supporting the military budget.

A few politicians from both parties raise a tepid voice of caution to avoid excessive and loosely supervised spending. Nevertheless, for over a hundred years, the military budget has been sacrosanct to Republicans and Democrats.

The Biden Administration and Congress carry on that tradition in the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Strategy Budget.It is an increase of $69.2 billion over the FY 2022 budget and $25 billion above President Biden’s budget request

Nevertheless, Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks’ proudly defended the military budget at the Reagan Institute. It is fitting that Hicks spoke in praise of President Reagan, whose military budget was above 6% of the nation’s GDP(gross domestic product) in each of his budgets. It has never been that high since he left office. 

The military is the golden goose that lays the golden eggs for arms suppliers. According to the non-partisan SIPRI(Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), five American companies (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics) accounted for 35 percent of the top 100 arms sales in 2018. The total arms sales of US companies represented 59 percent. For the last two decades, the American military-industrial sector accounted for more than 30% of the world’s military spending.

However, for most citizens, funding the military is like having a knight protect your castle from being attacked. President Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme American knight from WW II, was one the few who voiced concerns about unrestrained support for military funding. 

During his Farewell Address in January 1961, he said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex,” adding that it could lead to the disastrous rise of misplaced power. During that same speech, he linked it to the dangers of massive spending, especially deficit spending. Eisenhower should have been concerned about military costs because they gobbled up 9 percent in his last two budgets. 

Since Reagan left office, the military budget has not exceeded 5% of our GDP, and it has been under 4% for most years. So Biden has a way of catching up with Reagan’s appetite even though his Fiscal Year 23 request was an 8 % increase over the ’22 request.

Raising money to defend our nation is far easier than fighting someone else’s war. Perhaps that’s why Harry Truman got rid of the War Department, which had been a cabinet post since George Washington. Instead, he created the Department of Defense, using the excuse that he wanted to include the Navy and the Army under one administrative roof. 

They could have saved a lot of stationary and kept the old name. But Depart of Defense has a better image than the Department of War. 

President Reagan justified his defense budget, saying it would “preserve a free way of life in a sometimes-dangerous world.” President Biden’s State of the Union address tapped into that feeling of keeping America safe in a dangerous world when he said, “Modernizing our military to safeguard stability and deter aggression. Today, we’re in the strongest position in decades to compete with China or anyone else in the world.”

Still, some members from both parties question if the spigot of money flowing to the military should be turned down a bit. 

From the Democratic side of the aisle, Bernie Sanders is the most vociferous critic of a wasteful military budget. Sanders refused to vote for Biden’s fiscal year 2023 National Defense Strategy Act (NDSA).

He explained why he voted no on his Senate website: “the Department of Defense continues to have massive fraud and cost overruns year after year and is the only major government agency not to complete an independent audit.” ThePentagon failed their last audit in 2022, unable to account for more than 60% of its assets.

Echoing Eisenhower’s warning, Sanders added, “Our nation’s history concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) joined Sanders to be one of just six Senate Democrats voting against Biden’s NDSA. The other Senate Democrats voting no were Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Markey highlighted their objection to the billions more that Congress has invested in the military than it has in “addressing many of the biggest security concerns facing the American people–such as climate change, the opioid epidemic, poverty, hunger, and disease.”

Five Senate Republicans joined the Democrats in voting no, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

In the House, NDSA passed overwhelmingly, with only 39 Democrats and 62 Republicans voting against it. The core of opposition within each party sprung from the Democrats’ Progressive Caucus and the Republican’s Freedom Caucus. 

Although more Republicans than Democrats voted against providing additional money for the military, their opposition stemmed from their cultural war against liberal social changes. Kevin McCarthy told Fox News his priority was to “Eliminate all the money spent on ‘wokeism.’ Eliminate all the money that they’re trying to find different fuels, and they’re worried about the environment.”

His remarks accurately reflect those of the Freedom House Caucus members and reactionary Republicans. For example, Rep.  Jim Banks, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he supported defunding programs like diversity and inclusion training. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of that committee, told the Hill, “We’re going to cut money that’s being spent on wokeism, we’re going to cut legacy programs.”

Nevertheless, there are Republicans and conservatives who are more concerned about fiscal policy than defunding environmental and racial justice programs. Justin Logan, a director at the libertarian Cato Institute, said talk around slashing “woke” programs are more about scoring political points than enacting real budget change. Eliminating those woke programs would be a drop in the bucket.

Logan put his finger on the fundamental problem, “the Pentagon has had extremely ambitious goals for the United States, and pursuing those goals is extremely expensive.” Moreover, the goals go way beyond the Constitution’s Preamble, which limited the use of the military “…to provide for the common defense.”  

America, since WWII, has come to define our “common” interest in defense to apply worldwide – to any nation presenting a threat to us. That threat may be a government, even a democracy, deemed anticapitalistic or a country threatening our foreign investments. 

We often do not send in the American military but encourage others to toss out a government using our equipment. However, America has become the single most significant global military footprint. We have roughly 750 US foreign military bases spread across 80 nations. Russia has about three dozen bases, and China has just five bases. In addition, we had around 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries as of 2020.

Examples abound of American intervention to install governments to our liking. The two that stand out are the overthrow of Chile’s elected President Salvador Allende, a self-declared Marxist, in favor of a military junta in 1973, and the 1953 Iranian coup d’état which ended the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of restoring monarchical rule. In addition, an academic study showed that America participated in at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000.

Domestically, influencing Congress’s budget is critical to preserving our military supply business. The military industry spent over $101 million lobbying Congress in the three months before the NDSA was passed. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, the industry contributed an additional $17.5 million directly to the campaigns of Congress members. 

As a result, defense contractors should receive the same portion of the money allocated to the Department of Defense that contractors received from 2001 to 2020. According to the Brown University Costs of War Project, anywhere from one-third to half of the $816 billion that Congress approved and President Biden signed off on will go to military contractors; that’s a minimum of $244 billion.  

Between the influence of these contractors on Congress and the widespread fear of having our freedom taken from us by Russia, China, Iran, and others, trimming the Defense Budget is more of a dream than a reality. To make that dream a reality, one of the parties needs to focus on the actual costs of maintaining a military industry that is neither affordable nor practical.

Dan Caldwell, a vice president at the conservative Koch-funded organization Stand Together, said the “seemingly unstoppable growth in the defense budget is not tied to a realistic strategy,”  Caldwell further told a Vox journalist that “The only way that you can realistically reduce defense spending is by effectively changing America’s grand strategy.”

Congress asked the Congressional Budget Office in 2021 to provide its members with ways of trimming that grand strategy by lowering the Department of Defense while maintaining a solid defense. The CBO provided a report with three broad options for reconfiguring the military. They proposed that the Department of Defense funding could be reduced by $1 trillion (in 2022 dollars), or 14 percent, over the next ten years. Unfortunately, there has not been a push by Congress to hold public hearings on its suggestions. And the CBO just released a new budget projection of a 

Until Congressional members work together to alter the military’s use, we will continue to allocate money to build more expensive equipment not to defend our nation’s boundaries but to shape politics worldwide. At some point, the US must decide where its commitments must be limited in amount and time. Failing to do so will draw us into protracted conflicts that have limited importance for protecting our democracy or those elsewhere. 

We need bold leaders to stop ignoring the investments required to maintain our domestic infrastructure and essential citizen services in order to sustain a wasteful military budget.

A Debt Ceiling Holds Our Economy Hostage

If Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling, one of the political parties threatens to bring our economy to a halt. That is not a sensible way to run a government. That’s why only the US and Denmark have a debt ceiling set at an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP like other developed countries.

Once the federal budget is not balanced and runs a deficit, the government must borrow more money, go deeper into debt to pay its bills, and not default on paying its loans. Although the U.S. has run a deficit in 77 out of the past 90 years, it has never defaulted on its debt payments because Congress raised the debt limit. However, that threshold may be crossed this year under pressure from the House Freedom Caucus, which demands a cut to the 2023 budget that Congress already approved.

Limiting debt or balancing the budget is not mentioned in the constitution. However, paying off a national debt and setting a debt limit began with the American Revolution.

The next big crisis was when the Civil War brought a tremendous 4,000 percent increase in debt. Then, finally, the First World War debts led to the first law to limit debt from federal bonds. 

Those initial concerns addressed a specific debt that arose from a specific need, such as fighting a war. However, since the Great Recession, Congress has passed laws that have grown to the point that now a debt ceiling applies to 95.5% of all federal debt. So how did we get here?

We can thank the Democrats for the debt ceiling law we have today, which was substantially established by Public Debt Acts in 1939 and 1940 when they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. However, just having a debt ceiling has not been a problem in the past. Since 1960, Congress has raised the debt limit 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents to avoid the US defaulting on its debt payments.

Congress raised the debt ceiling regularly until 1995 despite some party politics threatening to vote against a budget to fund the government. This stability was due to the parties adopting a parliamentary rule (named the “Gephardt Rule”)in 1979 that automatically raised the debt ceiling when Congress passed a budget.

However, a Republican-controlled House repealed the rule in 1995. Ironically, Republican Ronald Reagan benefitted from the Gephardt Rule by raising the debt ceiling 18 times in his eight-year administration in the 80s. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were the successive highest administrations with the number of raised ceilings, Bush at 11 and Clinton at 8.  

After the Gephardt Rule was repealed, Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling in 1995. They demanded President Bill Clinton cut budget programs in Education, Environment, and Health Care. Consequently, the government was shut down for a total of 26 days. 

The Republicans initiated a budget crisis in 2011 by refusing to raise the ceiling until President Obama cut his budget. They waited to approve it until two days before the Treasury borrowing authority would be exhausted. The government did not shut down, but the Dow Jones average fell 2,000 points. The threat alone raised federal borrowing costs by $1.3 billion in 2011, according to the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office (GAO). 

The Republicans rejected Obama’s budget by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in 2013. They would not raise it this time unless President Obama defunded the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Their opposition resulted in a 16-day shutdown until the day arrived when the Treasury estimated that their “extraordinary measures” would end. If the shutdown had continued, all government payments would have stopped, possibly including loan payments. 

Democrats have also used the debt limit to their advantage. Like the Republicans, the threat of not raising the limit is often waved around. For instance, Senator Joe Biden in 2006 joined other senators in opposing a ceiling increase to protest the cost of tax cuts and the Iraq war, but no shutdown resulted.

Democrat-initiated shutdowns occurred twice in 2018. In January, they refused to fund Trump’s budget, and the government had to shut down for three days. They objected to Trump’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) immigration policy which was tucked in the budget that would have subjected unregistered minors to deportation. 

In December 2018, Trump got his wish when he said in May 2017 that “our country needs a ‘good shutdown.” That month the Democrats prompted a government shutdown for 35 days, the most prolonged shutdown in history. It intended to stop Trump from funding a wall along our Mexican border.

Initially, both parties in the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without funding a wall. However, outrage from right-wing media and Republicans got Trump to say he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. Ultimately, Trump declared a national emergency on the border with Mexico to access billions of dollars to build the wall.

A government shutdown is not just an inconvenience of closing national parks and laying off government employees; it damages the entire American economy. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the December 2018 shutdown cost to be at least $11 billion. The current budget crisis, which began when the debt ceiling was hit on January 19, 2023, could be much worse. 

Until now, the US has never defaulted on any bonds. However, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has begun implementing “extraordinary measures” to keep the government open and from defaulting on loans. Deploying extraordinary measures to avoid defaulting is a well-worn path, with the Treasury using them at least seven times since 2011.

The current measures are expected to expire as early as the end of summer. Consequently, the country’s financial markets will be under stress for more than half a year before they go over the cliff. According to Yellen, “Once all available measures and cash on hand are fully exhausted, the United States of America would be unable to meet its obligations for the first time in our history.”

If that happens, she believes that, at a minimum, our debt rating will be downgraded, resulting in higher government and individual borrowing costs. In addition, failing to make payments to US bondholders will cut revenue to foreign countries, corporations worldwide, US IRA accounts, and personal holdings. Yellen says this action “would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.”

That crisis could permanently damage America because the dollar serves as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. In effect, the US is the world’s Savings Bank. And while we are the largest reserve fund in the world, our share has been shrinking. Our share of central banks reserves fell in 2020 to 59 percent, its lowest level in 25 years, according to the IMF.

Because most foreign central banks hold dollar-backed securities like U.S. Treasury bonds, the United States can borrow at lower interest rates than other countries. If we skip payments, our securities become less safe, pushing up the interest America must pay to borrow funds in the future. Increasing our interest costs results in a more significant portion of our federal budget for interest payments reducing revenue for domestic social services, structural investments, and employment. In addition, a prolonged government shutdown invites a recession and further budget deficits.

The past cycle of reckless brinkmanship will continue if the right-wing guides House Republicans over the next two budget cycles. However, history shows that both parties use the threat of not increasing the debt ceiling to advance their policy issues. Just exercising the threat creates massive problems in running a functioning government and guaranteeing safe and secure bonds to purchase. 

If the Republicans strongly threaten to allow the government to default on its debt obligations, they will lose voters. The Democrats must also be wary of how President Biden handles a shutdown. The party that refuses to abandon an unpopular policy, whether they control Congress or the Presidency, loses. Polls from the Republican-driven shutdowns in 2011 and 2013 show that over three-quarters of the population opposed a shutdown over accepting something less than perfect in the budget. 

But a President can also be blamed for a shutdown initiated by the opposition party in Congress. In the Democrat-initiated 2018 shutdown, 53% of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 34% who blamed Democrats. That’s because the Republicans focused on a very unpopular issue, building a border wall. A CBS News poll found that 71% of Americans considered the border wall “not worth the shutdown.”

Unfortunately, each party has used the debt ceiling to gut a President’s budget of unacceptable policies. However, to execute that threat is to ignite the collapse of our capitalist financial system. This is a strategy for burning the house down, not building new ones.

If we want to stabilize our budget process and not endanger our economic security, we should adopt what most countries do. The government takes on more debt at the end of accepting the spending or appropriations process. Operationally the quickest and cleanest path for doing that is to resurrect the Gephardt Rule.

Otherwise, we will continue to see a decline in using America’s dollar as the world’s safest investment. That fall we will trigger greater borrowing costs, shrinking government revenue and eliminating construction projects and social services.

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Creating Chaos is not an accident but a strategy

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The Republicans’ chaotic process for selecting the House Speaker was the first open skirmish in the war to take down the establishment. Kevin McCarthy won the battle, but the fight for power to control the future of the Republican Party, as well as our current form of government, is far from over. 

McCarthy gained only a Pyrrhic victory. On Monday, January 9, the Republican rebels, as the liberal media have described them, secured a new set of rules. Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin says the right-wing created chaos is destroying Lincoln’s party. The rebels are out to overthrow the established leadership of both parties, accusing them of stifling House representatives from passing much-needed legislation.

Two questions need to be asked. First, who is promoting this chaos? And what do they want besides tearing down the House?  

Democrats have described McCarthy’s opponents as the far-right, Jake Tapper of CNN and other liberal media journalists describe them as rebels, and Republicans have labeled them everything from anarchists to freedom fighters. 

When you look closely at the composition of the core 20 Republicans, who fought against McCarthy becoming the House Speaker, they share one measurable status: they are all members of the House Freedom Caucus (FC), which is the reactionary faction of the Republican Party. I previously wrote about how The Far-Right Freedom Caucus will steer Congress’s agenda for the next two years.

The media has ignored that picking the new House Speaker and setting the new House rules has been orchestrated by the Freedom Caucus. Surprisingly, from both the left and right media, there is an absence of articles recognizing the Freedom Caucus’s leadership. The closest a journalist came to identifying them was by the Public Broadcasting System, Who are the House Republicans voting against Kevin McCarthy for speaker? The article identified three “Early Leaders” and three “Trump Allies,” saying most of McCarthy’s no votes were probably from members of the House Freedom Caucus. However, they cautioned that most of that caucus supported McCarthy.

I compared those voting against McCarthy to the list of acknowledged members of the Freedom Caucus. Every one of the 15 incumbents, in the group of 20 opponents to McCarthy, is a caucus member. Five of the fifteen were the most right-wing faction within FC, referring to themselves as the MAGA Squad, who believe that Trump won the election. 

Additionally, the caucus runs the House Freedom Fund, which endorsed and gave donations to all five newly elected House members who were part of the 20 No McCarthy group. Each new member ran and won against establishment Republicans in their primaries. 

Andy Ogles won by claiming that the GOP primary was a battle between the “establishment versus the conservative wing of the party.” Keith Self ousted an incumbent Republican representative who voted to certify the 2020 presidential election and for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. 

Those caucus members who eventually switched to support McCarthy did so because he agreed to their new House rules. And those who initially supported McCarthy from the caucus made side deals with McCarthy to obtain positions of power. The prime examples are former Jim Jordan, the founding Chair of FC, who was promised to head the Judiciary Committee, and Marjorie Taylor Green, who was promised a seat on the Rules Committee. They didn’t leave the Freedom Caucus; they became caucus implants on two of the most powerful House Committees. 

Now that the Freedom Caucus has set the new rules for the House, how will the Republicans use them?

The person who knows first-hand is former House Speaker John Boehner, who the Freedom Caucus pushed out in 2015. Boehner gained the speakership and held that position in 2011 thanks to the Tea Party, the forerunner of the Freedom Caucus. However, when the Freedom Caucus was formed from many of its veterans, Tea Party was functionally dead, and by 2018, nearly half had left the House .

As the House Speaker, Boehner described Tea Party members as “great patriots,” “It’s not enough, however, for Republicans to simply voice respect for what the Tea Partiers are doing, (and) praise their efforts,” he said. He added, “Republicans must stand with them.” After being dismissed by the Freedom Caucus, he described them as “anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over.”

His successor, Paul Ryan, served as House Speaker from 2015 to 2019. He was the Freedom Caucus’ compromise candidate but spent four years trying to get legislation passed over their objections. Finally, after he failed to get a Republican bill replacing Obama’s Affordable Care Act due to the caucus’s opposition, realizing that he could no longer be Speaker, he resigned from Congress. 

Kevin McCarthy’s future will replay Boehner and Ryan’s experience. Like them, he has continually adjusted his traditional conservative principles to align with the most far-right Republican base. Most importantly, McCarthy agreed to an arrangement that Boehner and Ryan rejected.  He has apparently agreed to the anti-establishment caucus strategy of blocking legislation and disrupting government protocols that do not conform to their ideology. 

McCarthy shares many of the same values as the Freedom Caucus; however, he comes out of a tradition of respecting institutions that they do not. Chaos was not the unintended fallout of electing McCarthy as Speaker. It was intended to hold McCarthy, hostage until he agreed to accept their agenda and strategies. They released him after he adopted their House rules. 

The Freedom Caucus leaders are not stupid. They are clever. They promoted some rule changes that had been sought for years by many representatives who felt ignored, if not suppressed, by the leadership of both parties. Caucus member Chip Roy said the House floor is nearly empty for most debates, and members haven’t been able to offer amendments there for years.

One progressive improvement was to adhere to the requirement that the Democrats had introduced years ago. It said there had to be 72 hours available for members to read legislation before House members must vote on it. This is a mild change since past critical legislation took about this time.  

Republicans attack Democrats for not giving them enough time to read the 4,000 pages of the Democrat’s recent $1.7-trillion fiscal 2023 omnibus spending package. However, that legislation had a tight deadline to keep the government operating or could not pay its bills. Republicans and Democrats had been negotiating to agree on what would be in the bill since September. 

Republicans have also rushed bills through Congress. In December 2017, the Republican 1,100-page tax-reform measure was distributed on Friday evening to the House, and the vote was the following Tuesday. Passing it was not critical to the government funding itself. 

But the new 72-hour rule comes without any enforcement mechanism. So will the Republicans apply it to all legislation?

Another change was secured by a verbal promise, not a written rule. It would allow amendments to be considered on the floor. This change could be interpreted as a return to the “open rule,” allowing any lawmaker to offer an amendment to be voted upon by the entire chamber. Under Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in the 1990s, more than half the bills reached the House floor through the open rule. It ended in 2016 when Ryan dropped it, trying to hamper right-wing members from sabotaging his legislation. 

When the Democrats won the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not resurrect the open rule, realizing she needed it to maintain discipline within her party. Consequently, no legislation has been introduced on the floor through that rule in the last seven years.

A far more critical change is not in the written rules but by installing a block of Freedom Caucus members on the Rules Committee. From that perch, they should be able to veto any legislation from reaching a vote on the House floor. Generally, no amendments are allowed on most bills once out of committee, and the only amendments that can be put to a vote must be pre-approved by the Rules Committee. In other words, all House legislation brought to a floor vote could be subject to the caucus’s approval or face possible defeat.

Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chair, described the goals of the Freedom Caucus approach to MSNBC, “It’s not about good govt or draining the swamp, it’s about deconstructing the administrative state.” The liberal NYT reflected that belief in their front-page news analysis, saying, “Their agenda is mostly to defund, disrupt and dismantle government, not to participate in it.”

The Freedom Caucus touts freedom and democracy. Freedom is a marketplace economy free of most government restraints. Democracy is for citizens who abide by the laws framed by dominant Christian cultural values. A liberal state that restricts or punishes investments and tolerates deviant social behavior should be disrupted by a little chaos to dismantle it by shrinking its revenue to the level that it cannot continue those activities. 

The first piece of House Republican legislation that the Freedom Caucus insisted that Speaker McCarthy pass was to deprive revenue to the government by dismantling the IRS. The Democrat-led government hired IRS employees who could check the taxes of the wealthiest top 1 percent of individuals and companies. 

The Treasury Department’s 1921 notice said the “tax gap”—the difference between taxes owed and collected—totals around $600 billion annually and will mean approximately $7 trillion in lost tax revenue over the next decade. Charles Rettig, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, said, most of the unpaid taxes are the result of evasion by the wealthy and large corporations. 

This gap in collecting taxes would certainly contribute to our federal budget deficit?  Tax revenue is not flowing into public services but accumulating as private wealth. The Center for American Progress reported that the most recent Federal Reserve Board figures on U.S. inequality released this past March put the top 1 percent’s share of American personal wealth at 32 percent, expanding from 23 percent in 1989. 

This type of bill is just the beginning of the waterfall of bills that the right-wing of the Republicans will push in the next two years. If McCarthy attempts to pass bi-partisan legislation without Freedom Caucus approval, he’ll be shown the exit door. That’s because he consented to allow a single member to make a “motion to vacate the chair,” i.e., a vote that could oust him as Speaker.

Consequently, the House’s bills will find a graveyard in the Senate, and the nation will be treated to a Congressional stalemate. The bright side for the Democrats and traditional conservative Republicans is that the Republican reactionary faction will be visibly responsible for getting nothing done. They will also severely damage the Republican Party’s chance for electoral victories in 2024, but those defeats may embolden conservatives to save their party from the sway of this faction. 

The biggest looming legislative battle will be the right-wing Republicans holding their party to a no-compromise position on raising the nation’s statutory debt limit. They are demanding extraordinary budget cuts affecting every program but the military. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned on Friday that if the borrowing cap is not raised the nation will likely default by early June.

In response to this challenge and similar ones, Democrats need to do more than stir up anger from their constituency base. Instead, they must reach beyond their core constituencies to expose how the ideologically driven Republican legislation limits social freedoms for all Americans. And on the economic level, how it harms all those on incomes primarily limited to their jobs and not investments. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

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President Biden can and must Resolve America’s Immigration Crisis

President Biden is the only person in government who can break Congress’s record of failure. 

No pundit can predict what heated issue will dominate the presidential and congressional elections in 2024. However, aside from the Supreme Court making a historic decision to eradicate another established freedom, like marrying who you wish, regardless of gender or race, migration will remain a national issue.

Public opinion polls have consistently ranked controlling immigration as a significant concern for Americans. For example, a Gallup opinion poll taken in July 2022 showed that 38% of Americans wanted a decrease in immigration, the highest percentage since July 2016, when Donald Trump was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate.

But that concern is concentrated among the Republicans. A Pew Research poll showed that “around three-quarters of Republican voters say immigration (76%) is very important to their vote.” For Democratic backers, it was only 36%. 

Independent voters, who played a critical role in Joe Biden becoming president, could tip the scales to either party on this issue. They clearly see Democrats and Republicans having opposite positions on migration. The non-partisan company Morning Consult surveyed registered independent voters in July 2018. It found that independents deem Democrats more supportive of immigrants coming into the country by a 62-point margin than the Republicans. In effect, they see Democrats as owning the migration flow into America. 

If the Republicans continue attacking Democrats for having an open, unsecured border, more independents could support Republicans. That’s because 52 percent of independent voters singled out border security as their most crucial voting topic. The survey also discovered that when it comes to national security issues, independents heavily favor Republicans over Democrats, 45 percent to 22 percent.

Another constituency that Republicans have been trying to sway away from the Democrats is the Latinos. By hammering on the need for border security, Mike Madrid told NPR News that the Republicans are gaining Latino votes in communities along the southern border. 

In the two border swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Latino voters make up 24% and 20% of their state’s eligible share of voters. Across the nation, 66% of them chose Biden.  In Arizona, it was a little less, at 63%. Their Nevada turnout was 70%, although it was significantly lower than Hillary Clinton’s 81% in 2016. These are slight shifts toward the Republican party. Even a couple of percentage points lower from Latino voters could tip these states to a Republican presidential candidate in 2024. 

In 2024 the political game will again see the two parties repeating their past themes. One plays on fear, and the other on hope.

Republicans are for stopping the growing flow of asylum seekers and restricting the number of all immigrants. They tag those crossing from Mexico as potential criminals or drug dealers. According to America’s Voice, a pro-immigration advocacy group, more than 400 political ads tying illegal immigration to drugs were run in the 2022 election cycle. Often, they connect fatal overdoses of fentanyl and methamphetamines to a spike in migration at the southwestern border.

Republican strategist Madrid believes that the immigration border policy war between the two parties will continue until significant migration policy reform is achieved. However, the Republicans “want the issue to remain because it serves them politically. It appeals to their base.” Their use of visuals like caravans of immigrants trekking across Central America to pile up at our border is used as theater on TV to illustrate the border crises. Madrid sees this approach as wanting to “force the Democrats to increase border security which is unlikely without a comprehensive deal.”

Meanwhile, Republican potential presidential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, are pursuing theatrics instead of bipartisan solutions. They bus immigrants to Democratic strongholds like NYC and Wash DC., including Vice President Kamala Harris’s home. Those performances keep their names in the national headlines and in the minds of Republican primary voters as doing anything.  

Democrats highlight the human suffering that drives immigrants into our country, not the need for greater security. They appeal to our nation’s tradition of being a safe sanctuary for those seeking a better life. Nevertheless, the Democrats reluctantly recognize that the huge increase of immigrants seeking asylum is overwhelming our southern border staff for validating asylum requests and providing humane shelter facilities. 

Consequently, Biden administration officials have asked Congress for more than $3 billion to process the backlog of asylum claims and to move migrants off the streets or from packed warehouses into livable facilities. However, he will not get those funds from a Republican-controlled House unless he supports higher security measures that drastically reduce the number of immigrants. 

Biden is trying to show that he supports more security on the border. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced that the president had “23,000 agents working to secure the southern border.” That was an increase from just under 17,000 agents in 2022. 

However, that is not good enough for conservative Republicans who have suggested that the military secure our southern border with Mexico. However, even when President Trump ordered 800 Army troops to do that, a good portion included engineers to help construct tents and fencing and doctors for medical support. 

Governor Abbott deployed more than 500 National Guard troops along the Rio Grande in El Paso, blocking migrants with spools of concertina wire. But those troops did not stop migrants from entering the county. It was basically an exercise in “just redirecting the migrants to the only legal port of entry” as Maj. Sean Storrud, Task Force West Commander for the Texas National Guard, explained. 

The problem of securing the border is not simply deploying armed soldiers. It’s a much deeper and more complicated problem that the Republicans and Democrats must work to resolve. Both parties have spoken about the need for immigration reform as a long-term solution. But their solutions, to date, have been almost mutually exclusive. 

Republicans have only proposed increasing security measures, like completing the wall or hiring more border patrols. The Democrats will oppose those measures unless they are coupled with providing a fair system for vetting the needs of immigrants seeking asylum. Thus, the stage is set for nothing to pass Congress in the next two years.  

Gridlock on migration policy is the failure to even vote on major bi-partisan legislation. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R – NC), Kyrsten Sinema (D – AZ) of Arizona, and Maggie Hassan (D – NH) introduced the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act in 2021. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) introduced a companion bill in the House.

The National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy non-profit group, analyzed the bill, characterizing it as a “positive step” that “furthers the conversation around much-needed reforms.” Democrat Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick also supported the bill’s framework, but the bill never got to a floor vote in 2021. 

In 2022, the bill was in play again, outlining an immigration proposal providing a path to legalization for 2 million undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, known as “dreamers.” In addition, the proposal, to garner Republican support, would provide at least $25 billion in increased funding for the Border Patrol and border security. And it would also extend Title 42 for at least a year. 

The more liberal and conservative wings in both parties killed it. The ACLU director of border strategies said that the billincluded “some positive provisions” but was “a step in the wrong direction.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who co-authored the 2021 immigration bill, said he “doesn’t think there’s any way we can pass immigration legislation without addressing the crisis at the border.” President Biden had publicly ignored the bill and kept his distance from influencing the meager negotiations to build support for its passage 

Another bi-partisan immigration bill was shelved and never came to a vote in 2022. Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the sponsor of the Eagle Act, wrote to Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressing “great disappointment” that her legislation to revise green card caps was yanked from consideration on the House floor despite having been debated there. An earlier version passed both houses in 2019, but the chambers couldn’t resolve their different versions before the year ended. As a result, this year, fewer Republicans supported it, and there was a drop off in support from some Democrats and immigrant advocates. However, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, blamed opposition to the legislation on a “misunderstanding that somehow this is negative for certain communities.”

Given the failures to have even a floor vote for bi-partisan bills these last two years, it is doubtful that if it were just left for Congress to lead, no bipartisan bill would pass before the presidential 2024 election. Remember that Congress has remained gridlocked on immigration policy going back to 2001 when the first bill to legalize Dreamers was introduced. Since then, bipartisan efforts to change U.S. immigration laws have failed in 2018, 2013, and 2007. 

President Biden is the only person in government who can break that record of failure. But it would take more than negotiating skills. It demands the ability to hammer together sixty votes in the Senate forcibly and a majority of votes in the Republican-controlled House. Moreover, that effort would require him to appeal to the public. 

Multiple grassroots organizations could support him in a robust and vigorous campaign to push for an imperfect but doable solution. One that would visibly mitigate the immigration calamity that is only growing, not receding.

Suppose Biden fails to pressure Congress to pass a bi-partisan immigration policy. In that case, there will likely be a reactionary movement drawn to a “strong man” (or woman) presidential candidate in 2024 who will promise to stop the “flood” of immigrants crossing our southern border. And if that happens, more will be at risk than losing the presidency. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s free newsletterCitizenship Politics

SCOTUS could let state legislatures decide presidential election counts

Republicans are arguing about resurrecting an Independent State Legislature Theory (ISLT) derived from language within the dysfunctional Articles of Confederation Constitution. This is the Constitution that stopped the colonies from forming a functional central government until our current Constitution replaced it. 

Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman labels this theory as a “hyper-literal interpretation” of Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” North Carolina Republican State Legislators initiated the Moore v. Harper case before the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to argue that a state legislature can violate its state’s Constitution in congressional elections. 

If SCOTUS were to uphold ISLT, a state legislature could overturn any federal election’s popular vote if they believed it was critically unfair. They could ignore their state’s supreme court order to adhere to the recorded vote. In a close electoral count, Feldman points out that “a rogue state legislature could determine the outcome of a presidential election” by reassigning electors to the losing presidential candidate.

In the Florida State University Law Review, Hayward H. Smith detailed how some Justices constructed ISLT from Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, which says state legislatures direct the manner of appointing presidential electors under Article II, Section 1.

He argues that using a textualist interpretation, “the founding fathers’ original understanding of Article II did not identify independent powers to state legislatures. Ironically the lead promoter of ISLT is Justice Clarence Thomas, who embraces a textual interpretation of the Constitution. Smith’s paper shows that textualism reveals strong indications that the founding generation conceived Article II legislatures in the normal sense “as creatures born of, and constrained by, their state constitutions.”

 I’ve previously explained how this obscure theory was floated as a strategy to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential election. However, because SCOTUS has never rejected the theory, it appeared earlier in the two 2000 Bush vs. Gore cases that resulted in sanctioning Bush’s total vote without a recount.

Of which Justice Thomas is the only one remaining on the bench, three justices opined that state legislatures “must remain free from incorrect state court statutory interpretations.” Consequently, SCOTUS rejected the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling for recounting the votes in certain counties to arrive at an accurate outcome of the 2000 presidential election. And the votes went to Bush, not Gore, allowing George W. Bush to become president. 

In the Moore v. Harper case, Thomas will try to get the SCOTUS to adopt his prior opinion from the Bush case. He wrote that state legislatures, in directing the appointment “of presidential electors under Article II, Section 1, they must remain free from state constitutional limitations.”

Other than refuting the Independent State Legislature theory, which will not happen with the reactionary justices in the majority, the court will most likely rule on two critical conditions that limit a legislature’s ability to wield ISLT. 

The first is whether Governors are included in the definition of “legislature.” If they are, a Governor could stop the transfer of electoral votes to the losing candidates, assuming the legislature does not overrule their veto. The second critical feature is that a state legislature’s decisions are subject to their state’s interpretation as being legal. Suppose SCOTUS decides, in the Moore v. Harper case, that legislatures can ignore their supreme court’s decisions. In that case, legislatures dominated by one party could overturn the popular vote to allow their losing presidential candidate to receive the electoral votes. 

Moving from legal theory to practical politics, a comparative assessment of the eight swing states with the closest presidential races in 2020 shows what the impact of a SCOTUS decision would be if they eliminate either of the above conditions.

 Table showing how ISLT could influence the presidential election results in the Swing States where Biden has less than a 3 percent margin. 

  1. State
  2. Electoral Votes for 2024
  3. The margin of Democratic Pres Vote in 2020
  4. Trump’s legal team Challenged the Election Results 
  5. Governor – R or D
  6. Does the legislature have the votes to override a Governor’s veto
  7. Does one party have the majority in both state chambers
  8. Are the Supreme Court Justices elected Y P -= Partisan; Y NP = Non-Partisan; N – GC – Not Elected but Governor Controlled
12345678
Arizona110.3%YESD – Katie HobbsNO YES – RN – GC
Florida30-3.4%NOR – Ron DeSantisYESYES – RN – GC
Georgia160.2%YESR – Brian KempNO YES – RY NP
Michigan152.8%YESD – Gretchen WhitmerNOYES – RY P
Nevada52.4%YESR – Joe Lombardo NOYES – DY NP
North Carolina16-1.3%NOD – Roy CooperNO YES – RY P
Pennsylvania191.2%YESD – Josh ShapiroNONO Y P
Wisconsin100.6%YESD – Tony EversNO YES – RY NP

There are several takeaways from this table. What is initially apparent is that only in the six states where Biden won were the results considered invalid by former president Donald Trump who lost those states. These are the most likely states which will have close elections again in 2024. 

In four of these six states, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, the Republicans control both state chambers, and the governor is a Democrat. Suppose SCOTUS decided that a Governor could not stop the legislature from determining who should receive the electoral votes. In that case, the ISLT could transfer the state’s electoral votes to the candidate who lost the popular vote.  

It is most likely that SCOTUS’s main decision is whether state legislatures can ignore their supreme court’s ruling to stop any transfer of elector votes. It is possible that SCOTUS could decide in favor of a robust ISLT and deny a supreme court’s authority to intervene. In a close national presidential electoral vote count, having just one state switch its electoral votes could alter who becomes president when Congress confirms which candidate becomes president. It would be legal, and there would be no need to have a mob attack the Capital. 

There is one last scenario that, at first glance, may appear to be a victory for the Democrats. However, it would leave the door open to the ISLT being used. The more “liberal” justices could succeed in preserving a state supreme court’s power to stop their state legislature from negating the results of a popular vote. Nevertheless, if the state supreme court concurs with the state legislature, the ISLT would be in effect. 

Relying on a non-partisan state supreme court ruling is not a sure thing. In Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, the justices are voted into office through partisan elections. Just as important, even in non-partisan elections, which Georgia and Wisconsin have, independent expenditure committees, from either the left or right, can greatly influence the vote. The conservatives have significantly outspent and out-organized liberals in having their candidates win judicial seats at the state level. Consequently, judicial elections in these five states during the next two years will see immense outside-state contributions flowing into those states.    

A system representing the people’s will within each state only occurs when an election is conducted fairly and certified as such, which is what happened in 2020. However, a very partisan legislature could reject a fair and certified election if SCOTUS approves the ILST.

The only way to prevent legislatures from using the ILST to overturn elections is for citizen activists to be involved in their state judicial races. They must question the candidates on where they stand on the ISLT. Any waffling from a candidate would be a sign that they could support transferring the results of a popular vote to the loser due to an unsubstantiated accusation that the vote count was corrupt. 

Citizens must demand that any move to disqualify election results must be backed with verifiable data, not imaginable villains who are interfering. Unfortunately, that approach has been used in this past November’s election by a few Republican politicians who have borrowed a page from former president Donald Trump’s playbook. 

The Supreme Court, in deciding the Moore v. Harper case, must not feed into a zeitgeist of conspiracy theories. If they embolden ISLT, they will perpetuate a theory that serves only to disrupt the institutional norms that sustain a democracy. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The 2022 Senate elections exposed the MAGA movement’s weakness

Their performance foreshadows the 2024 elections.

Dr. Mehmet Oz at Service Nation Summit (photo: Jim Gillooly/PEI/Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons)

Two core beliefs define the MAGA movement. The first and most prominent is loyalty to the founder of the MAGA movement, Former President Donald Trump. They are the bedrock loyalists promoting the big lie that he won the 2020 presidential election due to his victory being stolen. 

In the House of Representatives, his most adherent loyalists are the self-proclaimed MAGA Squad in the Republican Freedom Caucus. The Washington Post described them as the “Trump loyalists within the Freedom Caucus known as the ‘MAGA Squad,’ including Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Madison CawthornLouie GohmertMo BrooksAndy BiggsScott Perry, and  Lauren Boebert.”

The emphasis on personal loyalty to any US President skids off a democratic government’s rails. Allegiance to a leader is the core belief that has sustained authoritarian rule in other countries. I’ve noted before that Trump Disrupts the Distinction Between Personal Loyalty & Constitutional Allegiance.

As Trump runs for President and other Republican presidential candidates emerge, that loyalty may be tested against adherence to the second major characteristic of the MAGA movement: embracing a reactionary vision for America

Trump, like other prominent reactionary politicians before him, promoted such a vision. However, he has been the most successful since WWII, and conservatives admire his achievement. Nevertheless, many Trump supporters share his affinity for engaging in transactional politics, such as watching the bottom line between the costs and benefits of supporting someone. 

If Trump makes his 2024 presidential race too much about his grievances and not enough about pursuing a reactionary utopia, others, like Florida Governor Ron Santis, are preparing to lead the MAGA movement as the Republican presidential candidate.

Trump’s endorsements kept the Senate in Democratic control

Assuming that a Trump endorsement is the most visible, if not the most important, measurement of a MAGA candidate, we should look at who he endorsed in the 2022 Senate and House races. But just counting the number of Trump endorsements is not a measure of the strength or breadth of the movement. 

Trump made 495 endorsements for the primary and general elections, but most were for candidates who were safe bets to win. However, Trump did endorse some candidates who challenged non-loyal Trump Republicans and incumbent Democrats. 

I used the Cook Political Report to divide states into three significant categories: Toss-up States, Solid and leaning Democratic States, and Solid and Leaning Republican States. Then, according to Ballotpedia, each state shows by what percentage spread they voted for Trump or Biden. The results show that if the establishment Republicans had blocked Trump’s candidates from the general election, they might have gained control of the Senate.

Contested Toss-Up States

Trump endorsed candidates lost in these four high profiles contested Toss-up States. Their independent-oriented voters are like weathervanes pointing to where they swung this November and where they may swing in 2024. Of the four states, only Nevada’s senate incumbent fell below Biden’s win percentage, possibly due to her high unpopularity.

Arizona – Pres 2020 D +0.3%  –  Sen 2022 D + 4.9%

Blake Masters LOST the general election challenging incumbent Sen Mark Kelly, a former Republican and considered a moderate Democrat.

Georgia – Pres 2020 D + 0.2%    –  Sen 2022 D +2.8%

Herschel Walker LOST the general election challenging incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who filled a seat two years ago previously occupied by a Republican. 

Nevada – Pres 2020 D + 2.4%   –  Sen 2022 D + 0.9%

Adam Laxalt LOST the general election challenging incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto. Laxalt called the 2020 presidential election rigged and, as state attorney general, filed a lawsuit against the Republican Secretary of State challenging the state’s list of registered voters.

Pennsylvania – D 1.2%   –  Sen 2022 D + 40.0%

Mehmet Oz LOST the general election for an open seat against Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Oz beat other Republicans in the primary who were not sufficiently loyal to Trump. A Republican previously held the seat.

Solid or Leaning Republican States

In these states, Trump’s candidates beat out establishment-supported Republicans in the primaries and went on to win the general election, except for failing to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski who defeated Trump’s Republican challenger to her. 

Alaska – Pres 2020 R +10.0%   –  Sen 2022 (Anti-Trump) R + 7.4%

Kelly Tshibaka LOST the general election challenging incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Trump publicly condemned Murkowski as one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump over the January 6 Capitol riot.

Missouri – Pres 2020 R +10.0%    –  Sen 2022 R + 13.4%

Eric Schmitt WON the general election for an open seat defeating Democrat candidate Trudy Busch Valentine after he won a crowded Republican primary. A Republican previously held the seat.

Ohio – Pres 2020 R + 8.1%   –  Sen 2022 R + 6.6%

J.D. Vance WON the general election for an open seat beating Democratic US Representative Tim Ryan. Vance won the Republican primary without solid support from the Republican establishment; after the primary, they heavily contributed to his campaign.

Wisconsin – Pres 2020 D +0.7%  –  Sen 2022 R + 1.0%

Ron Johnson WON the general election to retain his seat in the Senate against Democratic Mandela Barnes, who would have been Wisconsin’s first Black senator. Johnson objected to counting the Electoral College votes from Arizona, which would have delayed or stopped Biden from being certified as winning the presidency. 

Solid and leaning Democratic States

In states that went for Biden in 2020, Trump pushed candidates into the primaries that Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel considered to lack quality. By August, McConnel saw that Trump’s selection of candidates had hindered his plans to win back the Senate and said they might fail. However, in two of these states, the Democratic candidate outperformed Biden’s percentage win. And in the one that didn’t, the candidate did significantly better than expected. 

Connecticut – Pres 2020 D + 20.0% –   Sen 2022 D + 15.0%

Leora Levy LOST the general election challenging incumbent Democratic Senator Dick Blumenthal who began the race with polling approval below 50%.

Vermont – Pres 2020 D + D 35.0%.  –   Sen 2022 D + 40.4%

Gerald Malloy LOST the general election for an open seat against a Democrat, US Rep. Peter Welch. Malloy, early in his campaign, said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and “wished” he had attended the Washington, DC,] January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally. A Democrat previously held the seat.

New Hampshire – Pres 2020 D + D + 7.3%    Sen 2022 D + 9.2%

Don Bolduc LOST the general election challenging the incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan after he won the Republican primary against seven contenders. He entered the general election race with a two-point lead but lost the election by nine points. Initially, he was a strong election denier but walked that back as Hassan closed the gap. 

The bottom line of this review is that only three of the eleven Trump candidates running in contested races won the general election. They lost all the toss-up and Democratic-dominated states. His candidates only won in the Republican-dominated states. His endorsed candidate lost in Alaska, and the Republican general election winner was an avowed Trump critic.

Independent voters most likely decided the election results in these races. According to Mitch McConnell, that was the “problem” in losing the Senate. Reuters reported him saying that the independents and moderate Republicans “looked at us and concluded: too much chaos, too much negativity. And we turned off a lot of these centrist voters.”

There’s a lesson here both for the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republican Party will have to decide if Trump is the solution or a hindrance to the Republicans winning the presidency and congress in 2024. His grip on the party apparatus remains strong, particularly since his supporters are now running to control the RNC (Republican National Committee). 

The Democrats do not face the same problem as Biden. He’s not toxic to members of his party, like Trump. But he has other shortcomings that the Democrats will need to assess. Trump’s endorsed Senate candidates losing within Republican-leaning Republican states suggests that Democrats need to retain independent voters in 2024.

Democrats cannot assume that independents are now liberals. Instead, polling shows that they prefer orderly change, which the far-right Republicans did not provide. The challenge for Democrats to win in 2024 is to approach independent voters by advancing orderly change that adheres to liberal values.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The Far-Right Freedom Caucus will steer Congress’s agenda for the next two years

The Red Wave was a ripple; nevertheless, reactionary Republicans will be crashing down on Congress’s House. 

Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy is bargaining his way into becoming the next Speaker of the House. He is promising prominent leaders of the Freedom Caucus that they can have seats in the next Congress’s most powerful committees. However, only if they could deliver enough of their reactionary comrades to vote for McCarthy. He needs to receive 218 to win that position. McCarthy wants to avoid 2015 when the Freedom Caucus derailed his last leadership bid.

If the Republicans end up with 222 seats in the House, the caucus will comprise only 20 percent of its membership. Best estimates are based on self-declarations; since membership is not published, the caucus has 44 members. It’s most likely that the 31 Republicans who voted in their private conference against McCarthy as the new House Speaker meeting were from the Freedom Caucus. The challenge to McCarthy was led by Freedom Caucus members led the challenge to McCarthy, and afterward several would still not support him. 

The Freedom Caucus has a track record of deep-sixing any Republican Speaker who presents a problem for them. Two prior Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan were pushed out as Speakers by the Freedom Caucus. Ryan failed to get a critical Republican bill replacing Obama’s Affordable Care Act due mainly to the caucus’s opposition. In a Vanity Fair published interview, Boehner described the caucus as “anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over.” 

McCarthy is dependent, as is any House Republican, on receiving almost all the Freedom Caucus members’ votes when the full House votes on selecting a new House Speaker on January 3. Since all Democrats and Republicans in the House vote for the next Speaker. It is conceivable that the Democrats could put up a candidate who might attract some crossover Republican support. But who? 

That scenario has Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) supporting McCarthy as House speaker. She criticizes other right-wing Republicans opposing McCarthy as having a “bad strategy” that could lead the Ds to push Liz Cheney as the next Speaker. This scenario sounds far-fetched, given that Cheney would not be in Congress next year. However, the Constitution does not require the Speaker to be an incumbent member of the House of Representatives. 

Green is critical to McCarthy because she has an outsized influence among House Republicans. In addition, she is a media star voicing the most radical conspiracy theories, beginning with the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election. And she brought in nearly $10 million in contributions to the Republican Conference, making her one of their top fundraisers. 

Green was stripped of her committee assignments after some of her old comments advocating political violence surfaced. She got her revenge on the entire House membership by objecting to voice votes, typically done instantly on dozens of uncontroversial bills – if no member objects. Sitting on the House floor, Green objected to every bill proposed for a voice vote, forcing all 435 House members to show up for a recorded vote.

She explained to Molly Ball of Time magazine, “Everyone had to stop what they’re doing, and it slowed everything down.” By her count, she and her allies forced more than 500 recorded votes. It was clear that unless McCarthy had her support, she could hold up any legislation that he wished to move by a voice vote. 

As a result, McCarthy has indicated that Green is likely to be rewarded with a position on the House Oversight Committee. This committee can inspect, examine, review, and check the executive branch and all its agencies’ programs and policy implementations. She clearly intends to use this committee’s powers to focus on investigating and exposing Democratic malfeasance rather than, as she says, passing partisan bills that will never become law.

The other critical supporter for McCarthy to get Freedom Caucus members’ votes is Jim Jordan, its 2015 founding chairman. Trump described him in 2018 as an “absolute warrior” for defending him during his investigation by the Special Counsel. Ironically, another such warrior he mentioned was Ron DeSantis while he served in Congress. 

Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye says that Jordan is looking forward to chairing the Judiciary Committee. Jordan is well prepared to use the Republican-controlled committee to begin a sweeping investigation of Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the Depart of Justice. Jordan said pointedly that he already knows that the DOJ is being political since they are trying to determine if former President Donald Trump is guilty of anything. 

Jordan produced a report (HJC staff – FBI – Report) questioning the Justice Department’s investigations of Trump’s 2016 campaign, the current probe into documents found at Mar-a-Lago, and a plot to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism. As chair of the Judiciary Committee, he could promote his report to the media to dominate the evening news cycle. 

Jordan says there are whistleblowers who claim that FBI employees were pressured to reclassify crimes as domestic terrorism, presumably to exaggerate domestic danger coming from the far right. However, it’s unclear whether any of these employees filed whistleblower reports. The report is just over a thousand-page document, with ninety-five percent of it consisting of old letters Republicans already sent to the Biden administration, according to Steve Benen of MSNBC. 

Nevertheless, expect the Freedom Caucus members on various committees to produce similar reports to justify investigating Democratic behavior. In particular, they are pressuring McCarthy for more of their members on the Rules Committee, which determines how legislation is introduced in the chamber. 

Up first will the caucus will be investigating and publicly interviewing Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and President Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The caucus also wants to see Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci prosecuted and the Department of Education abolished. But, most importantly, their members have called for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and President Biden. 

The caucus has given McCarthy his marching orders, and he appears to be in step with them. In retaliation for Green and Paul Gosar being removed from their committee posts for invoking political violence (which was taken by a bi-partisan vote), he will remove Democrats Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff from the House Intelligence Committee. In addition, he will remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, accusing her of making antisemitic comments in the past by her criticizing Israel for its “atrocities” in the occupied Palestinian territories,

With McCarthy adopting the Freedom Caucuses agenda, he doesn’t leave much room for passing any important legislation out of the House, including the federal budget. Failing to do so would shut down the federal government. The last time the Republican Party took that path, they lost far more seats than the Democrats in the following cycle of congressional elections

How Freedom Caucus promotes a radical agenda without strong pushback from mainstream conservative Republicans.

The first thing to understand is that each party has multiple ideological caucuses. The largest of all is Republican Study Committee. With 158 members, it dominates the other three Republican caucuses in size and power. The second, third, and fourth largest House caucuses are all in the Democratic Party: Labor Caucus with 114 members, the Congressional Progressive Caucus with 99 members, and New Democrat Coalition with 97 members. The Republican Freedom Caucus,with 44 members, is the furthest right, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus is the furthest left within each party. But the Freedom Caucus wields more influence than any other caucus of either party. 

In the past, the caucus, along with allied Republicans, have tried to block any temporary measure to fund the government that didn’t also defund Planned Parenthood. This proposal was counter to popular will. A 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 75% of Americans, including most Republican women and men, support federal Medicaid reimbursements continue for Planned Parenthood. They will again be trying to defund Planned Parenthood, which will most likely happen with the caucus holding the vote on approving the federal budget.

From my readings, one apparent characteristic sets the caucus apart from others. While all caucuses publish and promote policies, unlike the others, the Freedom Caucus uses disciplined block voting. Once 80 percent of their membership agrees on how to vote on a piece of legislation, each member is obligated to vote that way. 

Another distinguishing feature is that they do not publish their membership list. Membership is by invitation only, and meetings are not public. The chair is publicly acknowledged, and any member is free to disclose if they are a member. However, there could be members who are not identified as members voting on legislation or motions without the opposition knowing how they are obligated to vote. This practice provides a tremendous advantage in outflanking the opposition.

Another characteristic of the Freedom Caucus is their open criticism, if not hostility, to the Republican Party establishment. Within the Caucus, a small subgroup, dubbed the MAGA Squad, is dedicated to Donald Trump. Washington Post detailed their efforts supporting primary challenges against incumbent Republicans during the 2022 United States House of Representatives elections. 

The Freedom Caucus also financially contributes to the most reactionary candidates for open seats, often competing against other Republicans supported by the larger Republican Study Committee. There is no equivalent subgroup in the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, and that caucus as a single body did not run candidates challenging Democratic incumbents.

The Freedom Caucus also has financial muscle by funding Republican candidates through its PAC, the House Freedom Fund. They choose candidates that are election deniers and hardcore Trump, supporters. The Democrat Progressive Caucus also has a PAC, but it made minuscule contributions in the 2022 elections compared to the Freedom Caucus’ PAC. Open Secrets reports the House Freedom Fund distributed $11 million among the 17 candidates it endorsed. Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC contributed under a quarter of a million among its ten endorsed candidates. 

Through a combination of intimidation and brute politics in challenging Republican leaders like McCarthy, the Freedom Caucus will be dominating the headlines and the agenda of the House of Representatives. McCarthy will only be able to keep his post as Speaker of the House if the most reactionary Republicans allow him to remain as Speaker. At some point, the other House Republicans may challenge the caucus to halt their party’s continual support of unsubstantiated conspiracies. However, they do not appear up to that challenge.

For instance, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Rep. Jim Banks, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, if he believed it was a “lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

This is a fair question since Banks had joined a Texas lawsuit challenging Biden’s electoral victory in several states and objecting to Congress’ certification of Biden’s election win. 

Although Banks did say that “Joe Biden was elected, he was inaugurated on January 20.” He followed up that question with concern about “how the election in November was carried out.” But, more importantly, he added, “That is where most Republicans in the GOP conference are unified around that single mission and goal” He and other leaders do not want to be distracted from that objective.

Banks’ statement represents what most House Republicans believe. They cannot accept that Joe Biden won a fair election. He may have won, but something went wrong. For them, it was not the number of votes counted but how they were counted. In taking that stance, they capitulate to the Freedom Caucus, promoting the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Perhaps they fear being outflanked on the right by the caucus and losing core supporters who accept the Big Lie. But it also weakens the Republican Party as a party that adheres to democratic norms and procedures.

Over the next two years, there will be a battle within the Republican Party to determine which agenda to pursue, one of revenge based on unproven conspiracies or passing conservative legislation that is not dependent on conspiracy theories.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Ranked Choice Voting – The sleeper issue on the 8th

Flying under the radar this Election Day are cities, counties, and one state voting to accept rankedchoice voting (RCV). This isn’t the first time there has been a wave of support for RCV. From 1912 and 1930, some forms of RCV were used, but most were repealed by the mid-thirties. There was another burst of support for them in 2009-2010, that petered out as well.

pixbay photo

However, in the last ten years, RCV has emerged again as an alternative to voting candidates into office. For example, in June of 2021, New York City used RCV for the largest election in RCV’s history. This year, 32 cities in seven states used the voting procedure to determine winners. 

Nationwide, 50 jurisdictions employ some form of ranked choice voting. The number of states using RCV could go from two to three if Nevada voters approve it on November 8. At the same time, Seattle voters could add their city to the list of bigger cities, New York, San Francisco, and Austin, using RCV. 

The list could further expand on Election Day when eight other cities and counties vote on whether to convert to ranked-choice voting. Based on an April 2022 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, these measures are expected to pass. It showed that more than 60 percent of Americans favor using RCV for federal elections. 

A statewide initiative placed RCV on Nevada’s ballot. The top five candidates from an open primary would advance to the general election, which would select a winner using ranked-choice voting. If the proposal passes, voters must approve it a second time in November 2024 before it goes into effect.

Seattle voters will choose between RCV and an alternative “approval voting” system introduced by a citizen initiative. The latter approach allows voters to support as many candidates as they wish, with the person receiving the most votes winning. By a seven to two vote, the city council decided to place both proposals on the ballot. While the approval voting proposal is limited to Seattle, Washington for Equitable Representation, a coalition of organizations is pushing for RCV across the state, including for federal elections. A victory in Seattle could bolster that effort in the state legislature. 

So how does rankedchoice voting work?

Voters rankedall the candidates on the ballot by preference. If no candidate wins more than 50% of the first preference vote, then the candidate in that race who received the fewest votes is eliminated.

Here’s where it becomes a bit challenging to understand. The eliminated candidate’s votes are then distributed to other candidates that the dropped candidate’s voters chose as their second favorite on the ballot. Further candidates will be eliminated with the same procedure followed until a final winner receives a majority of votes. It may also end when a select number of candidates pass a threshold of votes needed to move on to the general election. 

Critics of RCV say it is confusing and will decrease voter participation.

Critics of RCV complain that it is too difficult for voters to understand and that there will be a significant vote dropoff in elections. However, exit polls from Common Cause New York and Rankedthe Vote NYC showed 3 in 4 voters are eager to use the method in future elections.

Alaskans for Better Elections, which advocated for the new election system, commissioned an exit poll in conjunction with their state’s special election for congress. It found that 85 percent of voters found the ranked ballot to be “simple” or “very simple.” And 95 percent said they had received instructions on how to fill out the ballot.

RCV trims out candidates with a narrow voter base.

Advocates of RCV point out that it forces candidates to win in crowded races by securing the majority of voters. However, in doing so, they must attract voters outside their party’s core voter base. In short, RCV diminishes voter attraction to proposals considered too radical from candidates, whether perceived as from the left or right. Consequently, some of the Democrat and Republican Party leaders have not embraced RCV for fear that some of their candidates will lose elections. 

Before Maine residents converted to RCV by initiative in 2018 for federal and statewide elections, Republican Governor Paul LePage and some of the state’s senior Democrats fought the initiative. Presumably, he could see RCV giving him a problem since he was elected twice to the governorship without receiving a majority vote. After the initiative passed, the state ­supreme court struck down the law by issuing an advisory opinion. Six of the seven court’s justices were appointed by the Republican Governor. A second initiative passed again, approving RCV over the politician’s objections, and was implemented.

An Alaskan congressional special election held this summer was a headline example of how a dominant party’s candidate could lose due to RCV. Due to two recent changes, Mary Peltola became the first Democrat to be elected to the House of Representatives from that state in 50 years. The party primaries became nonpartisan blanket primaries, and RCV was adopted. Only the top 4 candidates would advance to a general election

In a June primary Democrat Peltola came in fourth behind Republicans former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and businessman Nick Begich. Independent Al Gross came in fourth but withdrew and endorsed “two outstanding Alaska Native women,” Peltola being one of them.  

With Gross out of the election, just three candidates ran in the August general election. Peltola led with 40 percent of the total after the initial ballot, which was not enough to be declared the winner. Begich was eliminated since he was the lowest-scoring candidate. His second-choice votes mostly went to Palin; however, over 40% of his voters did not choose a second preference. As a result, Palin failed to overcome Peltola’s vote total, and Peltola won the election.

The Republican Party leaders protested the result. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asserted that Palin should have won because “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican.” He accused CRV of disenfranchising voters. However, he didn’t acknowledge that the 60% was divided between two Republican candidates. Palin captured only 31% of the votes, while Republican Nick Begich received 28%. Palin lost a substantial amount of Begich’s voters in the next round of counting votes because Begich’s supporters didn’t choose Palin as a second preference. They understood what they were doing. They would not vote to send Palin to congress. 

Does RCV favor Democrats or Republicans?

University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation did show a partisan divide over RCV, with 73 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of independents, and only 49 percent of Republicans in favor of its use. Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation, said in describing the public’s reception to RCV the more they know about it, the greater “they seem to like it. Resistance is rooted in unfamiliarity. This is particularly shown among Republicans.”

The most uncompromising Republican opposition to RCV came from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. When he signed a bill that creates a police force dedicated to pursuing voter fraud and other election crimes, he also banned ranked choice voting for all elections in Florida. However, Republicans do not seem averse to using rankedchoice voting. Half of the former Confederate States, and all red states now, use RCV for military and overseas voters. Utah, a red state which hasn’t voted for a Democrat President since 1964, has far more cities using RCV than any other state. 

Of the only two states that currently use RCV statewide, one is solid red, Alaska, and the other is solid blue, Maine. Each state has voted in the last four presidential elections strictly for either Republican or Democrat presidents. Nevertheless, both states adopted RCV through a citizen’s initiative. 

What can RCV accomplish?
 

RankedChoice Voting can contribute to greater accountability of politicians to the majority of voters. Although, it doesn’t assure that the majority promotes democratic values. Other conditions contribute more to that end, like fair and comprehensive civic education among our citizens, particularly our youth. 
 
RCV can become cumbersome if not executed with the support of state governments. Without that support, gaps between adopting this new approach and laws not meant to facilitate it could confuse the administration. If frustrations result, then opposition to it will follow. Nonpartisan commissions must oversee the administration of RCV elections to avoid future problems in electoral procedures.
 
We are witnessing probable victories of election deniers in 2022 to offices responsible for accurate and reliable vote counts. Unfortunately, this trend demonstrates that all oversight mechanisms can be corrupted by ideologues committed to a cause that discounts the reliability of an election if its results are unacceptable to them. Nevertheless, RCV may be able to filter out enough election deniers to retain an election process overseen by more citizens committed to a democratic process. This accomplishment alone would be a critical reason for using RCV.
 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The unspoken label for a growing political movement is “Reactionary”

Lots of labels are thrown around to define or tag political opponents. Proponents embrace other labels as a badge of honor. And a few labels are so controversial, like Christian Nationalist or Communist, that even those in sympathy with those beliefs shy away from them. 

However, the label reactionary is missing in the current political vocabulary. Whether politicians, media outlets, journalists, or political activists, both from the left and right. Conservative and Liberal are the two leading and enduring labels. Depending on your orientation, adjectives are used to acclaim or shackle them. Advocates self-identify as progressive liberals or very conservative. For critics, liberals turn into radical liberals or far-left radicals, while conservatives become far-right or radical-right. 

The easiest way to note the relative absence of using “reactionary” would be to watch liberal or conservative-oriented media. Think about how often you hear the word “reactionary” from news analysts and commentators on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News describe politicians, policies, or organizations. It would fall into the range of seldom to almost never.

In literature, this shortage can be measured by looking at the titles of best-selling books. The New York Times Best Sellers list would be the best single source, however, finding a comprehensive list outside of NYT’s closed offices is a daunting challenge.

Amazon Best Sellers ranking provides a quicker, although not as accurate, measurement of book sales. Nevertheless, since Amazon has 65 percent of the online book market share, it’s a decent sampling. Even better, it ranks non-fiction books within categories of interest, such as Political Conservatism & Liberalism. 

I reviewed that category’s top twelve sellers from October 21, 2022. The top-ranking list changes daily. Consequently, this list is just a snapshot. Checking three days later, only four of the books surveyed remained in the top 12. On both dates, no book contained the word reactionary in the title. However, the political orientation of almost all the books on both dates reflected a conservative or reactionary point of view, except for either one progressive professor or one liberal journalist

The October 21 book titles contained these words: 

  • Four books with communism, communist, socialism, or Marxism 
  • Three books with Liberals, liberalism, or Democrat 
  • Two books with conservatism 
  • One book with Radical Right  
  • One book with fascism  

What would make a book have a reactionary perspective? As an adjective, according to the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo ante. For example, Mark Lilla’s s The Shipwrecked Mind sees reactionary as attempting to change the existing socio-economic structure and political order with the intent to oppose liberal policies promoting the social transformation of society. In contrast, Conservatives oppose those same liberal policies but are willing to work within the existing political, economic, and social (PES) infrastructure to change those policies.

            All philosophies drift from erudite definitions to widespread usage over time. In that journey, a gap grows between them in how to achieve objectives. However, the core reactionary belief has remained constant, believing that the existing society has become unstable or corrupted through liberal changes over time. The only solution to that dangerous condition is to return to a prior order. That order will provide more security, freedoms, community, or whatever is seen as lacking in the current order. 

            By applying that definition to reactionary thought, the one-day sampling of Amazon’s listed books reveals considerable popularity in accepting that view. The writers may be deemed dreadfully wrong in their reasoning and their books full of misinformation, but the attractiveness of their vision cannot be denied. 

            Look at most of the top-selling books listed on Amazon from October 21.  

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin, a prominent Fox News Commentator, is typical of others who are very conservative or perhaps reactionary. While not proclaiming themselves reactionary, they emphasize protecting an individual’s freedom to use and accumulate personal property without interference from a larger community impacted by that freedom. 

The government is seen as more than a nuisance but a potentially destructive force to individual rights. Levin, like other authors, sees core elements of Marxist ideology cloaked in deceptive labels like “progressivism,” “democratic socialism,” and “social activism.” These movements lead to a Big Government that extinguishes the free market, economic motivation, and individual freedoms.

The UnCommunist Manifesto by Aleksandar Svetski and Mark Moss also identifies liberal changes with Marxism. The authors want to change the debate from a class struggle to “individual autonomy, sovereignty, and responsibility versus the collectivist tendency toward group identity politics, rights, entitlements, and co-dependencies.” It’s not clear how far back they would go in time to get to the right balance, but they don’t fear what they see happening now.

Five other authors noted below were from Amazon’s biggest sellers list on October 21. They blame liberals and the Democrats for ruining our nation’s social fabric and ushering in the loss of liberties; one even sees liberals bringing about a new emergent Fascism. However, none of them embrace or reference the word reactionary. 

Candace Owens, in Blackout, says it’s time for a major black exodus from the shackles of the Democratic Party, which has promoted their dependency and miseducation. The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism by Glenn Beck and Justin Trask Haskins argues that there is an international conspiracy between powerful 

bankers, business leaders, and government officials to give them more money and power

               In Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future, Newt Gingrich sees big government socialists entrenched “throughout our systems of government, society, culture, and business, resulting in vaccine mandates, tax increases, rising inflation,” and just about every ill he could think of. In Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, James Lindsay calls CRT Race Marxism, using race “as the central construct for understanding inequality” rather than relying on class conflict arising from capitalism. 

Lastly, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen criticizes American liberalism, whether it be “libertarianism” or “progressive/modern liberalism,” AKA “liberal,” as allowing the growth of the “most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.” In other words, converting America’s democratic republic into a statist country. 

Are these authors promoting reactionary beliefs? None of the authors identify what era they would like the nation to return to. Nor are they insurrectionists. They are not tearing down the republic and do not go beyond exposing the liberal menace and promoting policies that would stop its growth.

Underlying all their books, however, is a concept that Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto studied in their book,Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. It was published a couple of years before Trump started the reactionary MAGA movement. 

Parker and Barreto show how the Tea Party was a reemergence of a reactionary movement in American politics that was like the right-wing reactionary movements of the past, including the Know Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the John Birch Society. They all fueled a fear that America had changed for the worse. Its members are “reactionary conservatives: people who fear change of any kind—especially if it threatens to undermine their way of life.” 

These two authors do “make clear, reactionary conservatives differ in a number of ways from more conventional conservatives.” The latter “realize incremental, evolutionary change is sometimes necessary as a means of preventing revolutionary change. The reactionary conservative doesn’t want to stop at the prevention of change: he prefers to reverse whatever progress has been made to that point.” 

That definition is a dividing line between conservative and reactionary. In American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, Andrew J. Bacevich seems to agree with Parker and Barreto in seeing a distinction between conservativism and reactionary thought. He writes that conservativism is not a “reactionary yearning for an irremediably lost past” – it “is not antirational.” Instead, it operates “upon the foundation of the tradition of civilization,” which is “the basis of the accumulated reason, experience, and wisdom of past generations.” In other words, returning to the distant past is not critical to conservativism. However, this view is a core element of reactionary beliefs that energies the MAGA movement to eliminate the last hundred years of unacceptable liberal laws. The MAGA adherents openly advocate that objective. They are not part of a secret movement, so they should openly and honestly identify as reactionaries.  

Examples abound of reactionary policies being pushed by conservative Republican candidates this fall. They want to turn back the clock to a time untouched by liberal reforms. They would retreat to a time when there was less fear of being displaced by immigrants or having to live with people who didn’t conform to their moral code or when religion-based laws didn’t have to rely on scientific evidence to justify imposing them on others. 

Kari Lake, the Republican Candidate for Arizona Governor, accuses immigrants crossing the Mexican border of bringing drugs and crime into the US, plus they are rapists. Once becoming governor, she would legally declare their increased presence as an invasion. That would allow her to have state law enforcement and military detain, arrest, and return illegal migrants to Mexico. In effect, her orientation leans into reviving the federal quota system that was dropped in 1965. From 1924 to then, immigration quotas severely immigrants from outside Western Europe.

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance advocates eliminating no-fault divorce laws, which allow people to end a marriage without proving wrongdoing by their partner, including abuse or desertion. Vance equates this policy, enacted in California more than fifty years ago, as abandoning the morality of keeping families whole. Laws should not allow marriages to be dissolved if one spouse is beaten without proving it. The burden is on the victim. This approach returns to a time when women were morally bound to their husbands regardless of their treatment. 

North Carolina’s Republican Candidate for the Senate race is Ted Budd, who has expressed support for Texas’ six-week abortion ban. The law makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest and forbids abortion when a “heartbeat” can be heard, which is where the six-week ban comes from. Budd’s position will play well with 35% of the state’s population, who are very religious Protestant Evangelicals. But his stance is not based on reason or science. The medical profession disputes that the heart is beating after about six weeks of pregnancy. Instead, a developed heart forms later in pregnancy. But when laws must conform to religious beliefs, science is the enemy. And that is a long step back in time to take. 

None of the above actions are in the conservative tradition of basing decisions on past generations’ reason, experience, and wisdom. Instead, they represent a yearning for an irremediably lost past. Moreover, they result from politics, augmented by immense wealth, influencing the public to turn the clock back.  

Liberals should not naively describe these policies and their proponents as just conservative or even very conservative. They are not. They are reactionary. And the proponents of these measures should proudly declare their political agenda as reactionary. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

How Much a Threat to the Republic are Christian Nationalists?

If Cancer cells grow unchecked, they take over the vital organs of a body, and the host dies. Some people can live with cancers that may never kill them, like slow-growing prostate cancer. However, other types of cancer can explode and kill someone within months. 

            Christian Nationalism is a cancer that can attack our republic’s body of democratic institutions. Unfortunately, it has been part of our American culture for hundreds of years. However, America’s democracy has not died. Since the Civil War, Christian Nationalism has been relatively nonthreatening, but could it become malignant and spread? 

Republican leaders are energizing their voter base by espousing a Christian Nationalist philosophy.

Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told the CPAC in August 2022, “I’m a Christian nationalist, I have nothing to be ashamed of. Because that’s what most Americans are.” Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, in June 2022, said “the church is supposed to direct the government” and that she’s “tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Most Republican Congressional members have not expressed these views. However, Greene and Boebert are tapping into their party’s most reliable voter base: white Evangelical Protestants; 56 % of Evangelical Protestants identify as Republicans or lean to that party, 77% are conservative, and 88% of them are white, according to Pew Research. In addition, in 2020, the Brookings Institute did an extensive study showing why the Republicans depended on white Evangelical Protestants to win the presidency.

As would be expected, the majority of Evangelical Protestants voted for Donald Trump in 2020. A survey conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in January 2021 found that 81% say some or a lot of their family members voted for Trump. And Evangelical Christians are the largest religious group in America, with a 2016 National Election Pool exit poll finding that 26% of voters self-identified as white Evangelical Christians. 

Christian Nationalism finds strong support among the Republican Evangelical Christian voter base.

Although there have been no widely published polls showing what percent of white Evangelical Christians support Christian Nationalism, there is strong evidence that it is significant. The author of Taking America Back for GodAndrew Whitehead, notes that national surveys of Americans collected over the last decade show that about 20 percent strongly embrace Christian nationalism. There is a strong relationship between the overlap of Christian nationalist views and white Evangelical Christians’ beliefs.

Their shared conservative beliefs in the supremacy of church, family, and authority also extend to accepting more radical and unsubstantiated conspiracies which can physically enforce those beliefs. The AEI survey found that most Republicans agreed with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Daniel Cox, director of the AEI Survey Center on American Life, summarized their findings: “As with a lot of questions in the survey, white evangelicals stand out in terms of their belief in conspiracy theories and the idea that violence can be necessary.”

The popularity of the QAnon movement’s conspiracy theories among white Evangelical Christians is perhaps the most outstanding example. According to the AEI survey, 27% subscribe to the QAnon theory that it was “mostly” or “completely” accurate to say Trump is trying to save America from a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Photos of Christian flags, crosses on t-shirts, and “Jesus Saves” signs were conspicuous among those trying to stop Congress from confirming that Joe Biden won the election.

The FBI identified QAnon in 2019 as a potential domestic terror threat. Three years later, 34 QAnon followers who took part in the January 6 Capitol insurrection represented more than 8% of the roughly 400 rioters arrested as of March 2022. 

Some Republicans and Evangelists deny the existence of Christian Nationalism.

 “Christian nationalism doesn’t exist,” Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, told Eliza Griswold of the New Yorker. He added that the term was “just another name to throw at Christians. The left is very good at calling people names.”  

Doug Mastriano, a former Penn State legislator and now Trump-backed Republican candidate for Governor, rejected the phrase, asking Griswold, “Is this a term you fabricated?” He indicated he didn’t know the term and hadn’t said he was a Christian Nationalist. Nevertheless, he did suggest that the Bible be distributed in public schools without offering the Torah, Bhagavad Gita, or the Quran. 

As Griswold noted, historians and sociologists have found the term useful to describe an undercurrent of nativist religion that runs through American history.  The author Whitehead makes the case that “Christian nationalism was part of our cultural framework since the arrival of the colonists, who located what they were doing in the sacred, as part of God’s plan.”

Christianity and Nationalism fueled America’s creation 

The role of Christianity 

According to Amanda Tyler, the executive director of BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty), Christian Nationalists believe the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” To an extent, it was, in that North America’s 13 colonies were founded by Christian settlers seeking a place to practice their brand of Christianity, with no less than 12 distinct ones. And after 1654, Judaism was practiced in small communities.

Tyler points out that Christian Nationalism takes that nugget of reality and converts it into an ideological belief that America was singled out “for God’s providence in order to fulfill God’s purposes on earth” The result is that “Christian nationalism demands a privileged place for Christianity in public life, buttressed by the active support of government at all levels” Therefore, Congresswoman Boebert believes that “the church is supposed to direct the government.”

That happened in eight of the thirteen colonies, with only one official church, like England.  While each of those colony’s churches promoted a sense of community, the settlers who worshiped outside of its established church, or didn’t worship any, were discriminated against and sometimes persecuted. This is where Christian Nationalism could lead if it didn’t tolerate more than one interpretation of Christianity or the practice of other religions, like Islam.

 Historians argue that Rhode Island, being the first colony to admit all to practice a religion of their choice, was the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separated. This was the liberal attitude of the founders of the United States when they adopted the First Amendment saying Congress can neither establish nor prohibit the practice of a religion. By 1833, all states had disestablished religion from government, providing protections for religious liberty in state constitutions.

Nevertheless, a national poll found that 78% of Republicans who identify themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians favored officially declaring the United States be a Christian Nation. The level favoring this declaration among other Republicans was only 48%. The statistics among Democrats showed that 52% of Evangelical Christians and only 8% supported this move.  The pull of religion is strong on many voters wanting a confluence of Christianity and government in America. That same dynamic is underway in European countries with the rise of right-wing parties in recent years.

The role of Nationalism 

The republics founders converted the 13 North American colonies into a nation. But they had a liberal definition of nationalism. It was not limited to any ethnic group, unlike the European nationalist revolutions that erupted in the nineteenth century. America didn’t define itself as an ethnic group since the non-slave population was homogeneous.

Since the 1800s, nationalism has been broadly interpreted in Europe as a group of people sharing common ancestors with similar language and physical traits. Italy was for Italians, Prussians became Germans founding Germany, and Greeks created a new nation, Greece. And so on.

America was exceptional. Because of the vast land available, once the native population was either pushed out or eliminated, all Europeans were welcomed to farm the newly acquired land. Allowing America to tolerate a multi-ethnic nation provided an affordable labor force to grow. There was no need to emphasize nationality, although a pecking order among the nationalities did emerge, with the English on top. But unlike in most European countries, there was no king to anoint one ethnic group above the others.

Of course, black Africans forcibly shipped to the North and South American Continents were not seen as just another ethnic group. Instead, they were determined to be a “race” apart from all others. They were not only different but seen as less human than the “white” race; they were not even eligible to become an American. 

As enslaved servants, Blacks were the property of white American citizens. The context for a national identity grew out of this bifurcation along racial lines. American nationalism easily aligned with white racial dominance. And today, we see the majority of white Evangelical Christians tolerating or feeling comfortable with white Christian Nationalism. 

            Civic education is the antidote to Christian Nationalism. 

Christian Nationalism unites two powerful forces that don’t need democracy to survive. However, religion and nationalism may feel constrained by government regulations that give rights to individuals who are not members of a nation’s dominant religion or ethnic group. For example, the United States of America was founded as a democratic republic by Christians who adopted secular humanitarian principles to avoid religious wars among themselves.  Nevertheless, most citizens were and have remained deeply steeped in Christian beliefs which promote love and community, but often with limits on who is included in that community. 

The purpose of civic education is to educate students and future citizens as to how government can adhere to the principles espoused by our constitution so that we remain a democratic republic. Charles Quigley, the Executive Director of the Center for Civic Education, summarized that need: “Democracy requires more than the writing of constitutions and the establishment of democratic institutions. Ultimately, for a democracy to work, it must lie in the hearts and minds of its citizens. Democracy needs a political culture that supports it.”

Damian Ruck’s December 2019 Nature research article, “The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies,” revealed that stable democracies tend to rest upon two cultural foundations: openness to diversity and civic confidence.” In other words, to survive, democracies must be “tolerant towards minority groups” and “civic institutions, including government and the media, [must] command the confidence of the people.”

The word “education” appears nowhere in our constitution. Meanwhile, Congress has determined that only states can mandate a civics curriculum. Teaching civics that promote democratic cultural values in public schools, such as tolerance and inclusivity, would have to be approved by state legislatures, many of which are currently limiting access to the ballot box. 

Stopping Christian Nationalism growing from a tolerated belief to one that becomes malignant by physically attacking America’s democratic culture and institutions must begin at the local and state levels. That effort must provide non-partisan, non-ideological civic classes. If our major political parties cannot agree on how to proceed cooperatively and thoughtfully, then citizens within each state must provide that leadership. Existing non-profit, non-partisan organizations have begun that effort.

The most ambitious effort to bring a reasoned approach to teaching civics is the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education sponsor it. The roadmap is not a national curriculum nor a set of instructional standards. Instead, it is a plan that recommends approaches to learning civics. It’s a place to begin and build upon. Manifesting that plan is the challenge our citizens face in protecting a way of life that protects life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

How could citizens reject a perfectly progressive constitution?

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General Pinochet in 1976 from Library of the Chilean National Congress

In September 2022, through a public vote, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected a new left-leaning constitution. Reuters described it as being one of the world’s most progressive charters. The vote to approve it wasn’t organized by some elite group managing a phony election under an authoritarian government. It was a fair election, with both the left- and right-wing parties accepting the results.

The vote was particularly perplexing for progressives because public opinion had adamantly supported replacing their current constitution. A 2020 referendum that a new constitution be written passed with over 78% of the votes, with 13 million voting of its 15 million eligible voters.

The new constitution would replace one created by the previous 17-year authoritarian military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The elected President Salvador Allende was violently overthrown by a military coup led by Pinochet in 1973, who remained Chile’s dictator until 1990.

Despite being amended over the last two decades, Nancy MacLean, in Democracy in Chains, writes that it was formulated to “forever insulate the interests of the propertied class they represented from the reach of a classic democratic majority.”

Its emphasis on granting “freedom of choice to workers” by banning industry-wide unions and privatizing the social security system may explain why the Bicentennial Poll found that “since 2010, 77% of Chileans believe there is a “big conflict” between rich and poor.” That conflict spilled out into the streets in October 2019. Throughout the country, massive protests and riots forced the conservative President Sebastián Piñera to submit to a referendum on rewriting the constitution

Even the conservative leaders recognized that they needed a valve to release the built-up anger over the existing income inequality. Research from the World Inequity Lab showed the top 10% of Chileans receiving 60% of the average national income. Trust in government by 2020 had plummeted to only 10% of Chileans.

The need for new and even radical changes was manifested in the election of the young leftist Gabriel Boric to the Presidency in December 2021. He received 56% of the vote. His right-wing opponent Jose Antonio Kast, not taking a cue from Donald Trump, congratulated Boric. Although Kast’s platform shared the same elements as Republicans, like cutting taxes for companies, building barriers to prevent illegal immigration, and abolishing abortion, he tweeted, “From today he is the elected President of Chile and deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration.”

Chile’s Attempt to Jump Start an Egalitarian Society

Although Boric inherited the results of the 2020 referendum, he wholeheartedly promoted its egalitarian theme and the diverse composition of a Constituent Assembly, which was to propose a new constitution to the public. As a result, a public vote in 2021 selected 155 members of a Constituent Assembly.

Since the Pinochet regime ended in 1990, two groups have ruled the government by sharing power, the center-left, and right-wing coalitions. However, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, they only obtained 16% and 24% of the assembly seats, respectively. Assembly members from left-wing political parties and social movements

received 60% of the votes. 

The assembly’s membership averaged 44 years old, with equal gender representation and 10% of the seats designated for Indigenous representatives to reflect its population proportion. Boric and other progressives described it as the most representative elected body in Chile, if not South America. 

Polling from the start of March 2022 showed public opinion moving against ratification. Jon Schwarz of the Interceptreported a “recent survey showed that 37 percent of Chileans approved of it and 46 percent did not.” It was overwhelmingly rejected by 62% of the voters on election day. John Bartlett, a journalist for New York Times, tweeted that “only 6 of Chile’s 346 electoral districts voted in favor of the new constitution.”

What did the new constitution do?

Supportive media, like CNN, Guardian, and Reuters described the constitution as providing a more inclusive public health system, canceling student debt, raising taxes for the super-wealthy, revising the state’s private pension system, recognizing the “rights of nature,” and making Chile’ plurinational’ by creating autonomous territories for indigenous groups.

Schwarz listed a few of the new constitution’s amendments:

  • A requirement that membership of all “collegiate bodies of the State” be at least half women, as well as the boards of all companies owned or partially owned by the government.
  • A new, lower voting age of 16. Moreover, voting “constitutes a right and a civic duty,” and so voting would become compulsory for everyone 18 and over. (Voting was previously compulsory in Chile until 2012. Voting in regular elections is no longer compulsory, but the current constitutional referendum is a special case.) Also, foreigners can vote in all Chilean elections once they’ve lived there for five years.
  • Everyone has the right “to make free, autonomous and informed decisions about one’s own body, [including] reproduction” — i.e., the right to abortion. Until 2017, abortion was illegal in Chile under all circumstances, and it is still only permitted in rare cases.
  • New power and representation for Chile’s Indigenous population, who make up about 10 percent of the country’s citizenry.

The conservative Free Beacon noted that the constitution also mandated socialized medicine and a right to free housing.

Too Many Amendments and topics

The American Constitution has had 27 amendments, including the 10 Bill of Rights made two years after the constitution was adopted. The new Chilean constitution had 388, presented in a document of roughly 54,000 words, including the preamble and transitory rules. The US Constitution has about 4,500 words. In other words, millions of Chilean citizens were asked to approve a 178-page document that would introduce revolutionary changes. Faced with that task, it’s likely that Americans would have rejected it as well.

Many, if not most, Chileans may have agreed with all or most of the proposed amendments. However, by presenting such a sweeping and detailed plan for Chile’s future, they failed to consider the natural human response of avoiding risk by not accepting uncertain dangers. As Andrea Peroni, a historian and public-policy researcher at the University of Chile in Santiago, noted: “Any of the 388 articles you didn’t like were 388 opportunities to reject” the new constitution.

The long list of articles emerged after the Guardian described it as “an arduous year of negotiations” among the assembly members. However, the Guardian did not note that rightist members failed to secure one-third of the seats necessary to block articles. Consequently, the debate and subsequent compromising among the members were confined mainly to the left side of the political spectrum. 

The new constitution addressed the inequalities under the prior constitution that disenfranchised women, the LGBT community, and Indigenous People. It also swept away past economic and social barriers that financially hurt many Chileans. 

But critics said the proposals would cripple Chile’s finances. Moreover, it abandoned a constitution that based the country’s growth on unencumbered free-market principles. For instance, it dramatically restricted mining and exploiting other natural resources. Elated by the vote, the Chilean peso and stock market skyrocketed the next day.

The Guardian reported that many criticized the document’s guarantees for Indigenous People, which they said would divide Chile. For instance, there would be a parallel justice system for indigenous communities. Although before the election, Boric pledged to modify some of the document’s most contentious points like this one. 

Elaborate plans to restructure government and society, fed disinformation campaigns

As the surveys showed support declining for the new constitution, advocates began to promise to alter them if the constitution was approved. That could have contributed to the public losing confidence that things would go smoothly. Pushing great leaps instead of steady steps enthralls a minority but not most people, even those that want change. 

That was true even within the assembly. Thirty-four members formed a group Voice of the People that refused to abide by the rules of the convention, which all parties of the political spectrum had agreed upon for the assembly’s procedures. They demanded the release of political prisoners and other similar policies. While their membership grew, they never achieved a majority within the assembly.

There was enough confusion and discussion of policies coming out of the assembly to feed the spread of misinformation, which the Guardian reported abounded just before the vote on the new constitution. The Intercept attributed widespread disinformation helping to defeat the referendum. 

 CNN interviewed an Indigenous Mapuche assembly member who said that some members of her community believed disinformation that circulated online—such as the false claim that expanded housing rights meant the government would confiscate private property. Even the conservative National Review wrote widespread uncertainty about the constitution’s implications being “fueled by misleading information, including claims that it would have banned homeownership.”

It’s not evident how much disinformation was generated or who promoted it. However, it clearly contributed to the outcome by promoting doubt and opposition to adopting a new constitution.

Chile’s Lesson for America – A constitution is not a policy manual 

The character of Pinochet’s constitution was shaped by the philosophy of prescribing a free-market economy with few government restraints. Economic freedom for an individual’s use of their property replaced concern for the negative impact on a community’s broader welfare from that use. As a result, property rights edged out civil rights. 

Most importantly, that philosophy would not just sway justices to rule a certain way; embedded in the constitution were prescribed policies that could only be overturned by amending the constitution. Moreover, no constitutional amendment could be added without endorsement by supermajorities in two successive sessions of the National Congress, a skewed body to overrepresent the wealthy. 

Pinochet’s constitution could exile anyone deemed “antifamily” or “Marxist” without an appeal process. Pinochet brought his tightly crafted constitution to a vote a month after its release. Voting was held during a prolonged “state of emergency” when all political parties were outlawed. Election rules forbade any electioneering by activists opposing his constitution, consequently it passed. 

Aside from its political agenda, Chile’s constitution was distinctly different from the American Constitution. It directed institutions on how they should operate to pursue that agenda. That converted the judiciary’s role from interpreting broad civil rights to maintaining tightly defined economic and social activity. 

For instance, in America, the “right to carry a gun” by an individual citizen is not explicitly guaranteed in the constitution’s Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has interpreted that Amendment differently over time, reflecting the makeup of the Court’s justices. 
 
Another example is abortion. There is no “right” to an abortion in the US Constitution. However, it has evolved in how the Supreme Court interprets the Articles and Amendments affecting the individual’s “right” to have an abortion.

 In Chile, under the Pinochet constitution, all abortions were banned. In the proposed new progressive constitution, there was no ban. Both Chilean constitutions explicitly addressed the practice of abortion. 

Enumerating explicit activities in a constitution leads to more articles and the need for more future amendments. The result is that a constitution becomes more of a legislative tool than an umpire deciding if the legislation conforms to the constitution’s principles. 

Civic classes in public schools referred to the US Constitution as a “living” document. This is because it was guided by how citizens wanted to live by the principles espoused in the constitution. In other words, the constitution evolves and adapts to new circumstances even if the document is not formally amended.

Both Pinochet’s constitution and the progressives were prescriptive constitutions. They enumerated not principles so much as directives. Although the new constitution intended to allay fears, its unintended consequence was to fan them. It is easier to get a consensus around principles than programmatic policies. The former is a generalized understanding that allows for different interpretations, but institutionalized programs and policies are like brick and mortar. They are sturdy, long-lasting, and not easy to demolish.

The progressive journalist Schwarz reasoned that even with the new constitution being rejected, it illustrated how regular people “can generate an explosion of political imagination.” However, that is not a sustainable basis for governing. 

President Boric recognized the defeat graciously, saying that the Chilean people had spoken: “loudly and clearly.” He promised to work harder to propose another constitution “with more dialogue, with more respect and care, until we arrive at a proposal that interprets us all, that is trustworthy, that unites us as a country.” If the next version does not take that approach, any future effort will be far closer to Pinochet’s constitution.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

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Democracies have prosecuted corrupt leaders – America can too

According to Axis Research, since 2000, at least 76 countries have jailed or prosecuted their former leaders. Many were democracies, including established functioning ones such as Brazil, Israel, France, and South Korea have done so. America is the exception; no former president has been indicted for a crime.

Has our image of exceptionalism, seeing ourselves as the most democratic and free republic, enthralled us from applying the law to our former leaders? Prosecuting former President Donald Trump may break that spell.

            In a democratic republic, after their term in office ends, the person who was the executive returns to the same status as everyone else; being a citizen of that nation—a nation where all citizens have the same legal rights and responsibilities. Consequently, a former executive must obey the laws, no matter how long they served as the executive or how popular they were while in office. This is the second important characteristic of a democratic republic. 

            This adherence to the laws is not true of countries that label themselves as “republics” where the executive obtains or remains in office without being freely elected. As a result, the law never applies to the executive, e.g., the Republic of Cuba, Republic of China, Republic of Belarus, etc., Or a “banana republic,” which some Republicans accuse our government of becoming when the FBI began investigating Trump for violating the law. 

            A test measuring a democratic republic’s durability is when a former executive must submit to the law. It not only stresses that nation’s institutions but also that society’s culture of accepting the democratic process. 

            If former President Donald Trump is indicted for a crime that the FBI is investigating, we will face that test. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon accused former Vice President Mike Pence of being “Just a disgusting coward” when Pence asked Republicans to stop attacking the FBI over searching Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence, and private clubhouse. In describing the search, Bannon said, “We’re talking about a police state.”

Senator Lindsay Graham followed up with a similar attitude, cautioning that there could be “rioting in the streets” if Trump were indicted. Who was Graham warning? The entire nation? The courts? Anyone who would testify that Trump had broken the law? 

            MAGA Republicans have said our nation would have violence on the streets if Trump if charged and prosecuted on corruption charges. However, that has not been the case in other democracies where the former executive has either been indicted, tried in court, or found guilty and sentenced to prison.

In Brazil, former President Lula da Silva spent a year and a half in prison

            Brazil offers an example where a popular president from the largest political party was arrested and convicted after leaving office. However, there was no rioting in the streets by his supporters. 

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (aka Lula) was arrested and convicted years after he left office. However, after his Presidency in 2010, BBC reported that he left “as the most popular president in Brazilian history, boasting approval ratings of about 80%.” 

            In April 2015, the Public Ministry of Brazil opened an investigation into allegations of influence peddling by Lula. A police report stated he had taken illegal bribes from an oil company to benefit his political party and a new presidential campaign. 

In July 2017, Lula was convicted on money laundering and corruption charges. A federal judge sentenced him to nine-and-a-half years in prison. However, he only served a year and a half because the sentencing judge was found to be politically biased.

            When Lula was arrested, indicted, or sentenced, there was no rioting in the nation’s streets. Sao Paulo did see several street demonstrations in 2017 when Lula was sentenced. But that was it. As the leader of Brazil’s largest party, the social democratic Workers Party, and a popular figure, Lula did not call on his followers to storm the capital or attack the credibility of the court system. 

Lula is now running again for president and has a good chance of beating the current far-right president and friend of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro. Trump’s son, Trump Jr., traveled to Brazilia to support Bolsonaro’s reelection. But, without providing evidence, Trump Jr. played the family tune of casting doubt that the electoral process would allow Bolsonaro to win. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted for bribery and fraud

Benjamin Netanyahu served twice as Israel’s Prime Minister, most recently ending in 2021. During his last two terms, there had been an ongoing investigation into alleged bribery, fraud, and breach of trust by him and his close political allies. The police began investigating him at the end of 2016. Netanyahu, like his closest ally Donald Trump, claims to be a victim of a “witch hunt.” 

Nevertheless, the police recommended indictments against him, which were officially made in November 2019. Netanyahu remains as Prime Minister but has been on trial at the Jerusalem District Court since May 2020.

His strategy outside the courtroom is to accuse the media of being part of a left-wing coalition and plotting against him and the entire right wing. Although, he appointed the Chief of the Israeli Police and the Attorney General in charge of the investigation. He is pursuing a plea deal within the court system that would put him under house arrest but not in prison. 

His attempts to denigrate the court system, the police, and the media, have followed the same pattern as Trump’s, with the exception that he has not questioned the legitimacy of the government to hold elections. Moreover, while there have been demonstrations in his favor and against him, Netanyahu has not called upon his supporters to invade parliament. Consequently, the Israeli Republic is not facing an existential crisis even though Netanyahu is facing criminal charges and possible prison time.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to prison

            Donald Trump is not the first former president to have his home searched by the police. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s got that home visit after he completed his term in 2012. Since then, he has been in court for several charges. 

In March of last year, Sarkozy received a three-year prison sentence on the specific charge of corruption and influence peddling for trying to obtain information illegally from a judge on a legal case against him. 

Then in October of last year, he was found guilty of illegally financing his 2012 presidential bid by exceeding France’s strict electoral rules and sentenced to a year of house arrest. Prosecutors found that his campaign had spent almost twice the legal limit.

He is appealing both convictions. However, even if found guilty in both cases, his punishment may be limited to house arrest and for a limited time. 

As expected, his attorney and supporters have dismissed the entire legal process as political. His attorneys initially declared that searching his home would prove “futile” and told reporters that the court’s ruling was “totally baseless and unjustified.” Then, Christian Jacob, the head of Sarkozy’s party, gave his “unfailing support” to Mr. Sarkozy and tweeted, “The severity of the sentence is absolutely disproportionate.” 

However, there were no noticeable demonstrations in support of Sarkozy. The only democratic crisis that could be brewing was suggested by Pascal Perrineau, a political science professor at the Sciences Po university. He opined that the convictions of high-level politicians “heighten the mistrust, the impression that they are all corrupt.”

South Korean President Park Geun-hye served five years in prison for corruption 

South Korea’s first female President Park Geun-hye ruled from 2013 to 2017 until she was impeached and convicted on related corruption charges. As the conservative party leader that had ruled South Korea for a decade, Park became president, winning 51.6 percent of the votes. 

Unlike the leaders in the three other countries mentioned, she was unpopular while in office. In November 2016, more than one million citizens demonstrated and demanded that she resign or be impeached. She was impeached the following March for leaking government secrets to her confidante, bribery, abuse of power, and coercion.

Interestingly she lost the support of her party. The impeachment easily exceeded the required a two-thirds threshold in their National Assembly. Although it was a secret ballot vote, Washington Post concluded that nearly half of the 128 lawmakers in Park’s party Saenuri had supported the impeachment to remove her from office. They apparently recognized that supporting their accused party’s leader in a public manner would discredit their candidates in elections. 

No longer holding office, she lost her immunity, and the court found her guilty on 16 of 18 charges. She was sentenced to 24 years. Her successor pardoned her after serving five years in prison. Korea’s democracy functioned through the entire investigation, impeachment, court trial, and sentencing without accusations of Korea becoming a police state or threatened with street riots. 

The Issue of Immunity

            Rick Noack of the Washington Post points out that “democratic governments around the world have various safeguards to prevent politically motivated investigations into their elected leadership.” However, they are not an “absolute immunity” that Trump has claimed in his legal battles. 

In two cases, Nixon v. Fitzgerald and Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court has defined absolute immunity for a president as being confined to his official responsibilities. SCOTUS declared in the Clinton case that absolute immunity does not apply “for unofficial acts grounded purely in the identity of his office.” Consequently, it allowed a civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton to proceed while he was president. 

Donald Trump claiming absolute immunity for his unofficial removal of government files from the White House would not be covered. His actions on January 6 may not be as well. In both situations, his plea for absolute immunitycould likely end up being decided by SCOTUS. Since the current six reactionary justices have overturned decisions of prior Supreme Courts, Trump may be granted immunity. 

Democracies can handle prosecuting former leaders 

            America was not the first nation to allow women to vote or ban slavery, but it is still an exceptional republic. It has maintained an orderly transition of governance for over 230 years. America is both a representative democracy and a constitutional republic, i.e., a democratic republic. Based on the date of the constitution, it is the oldest democracy in the world.

It is crucial to treat Donald Trump not as a hero, a villain, or a victim but as a fellow citizen. And he, like the rest of us, must acknowledge that, despite the faults in our governance, laws alone do not keep America stable. Like all societies, ours is held together through norms, the perceived informal rules defining acceptable and appropriate actions that apply to all citizens. If they are abandoned, so will our institutions, as brute power will decide our nation’s fate.

A final footnote: 

MAGA was coined by Donald Trump as Make America Great Again. Some folks see the movement enabling a more nefarious outcome. Two young people, Joe and Whitney, rechristened MAGA as Make American Government Authoritarian. Their view reflects a growing division in seeing where our country’s future could be headed. 

One dire warning of where America could be came from the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy. Their 2021 report said, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

Nick Licata is the author of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition

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Could Liz Cheney Initiate a new Conservative Party?

The future of the Republican Party is often framed as either continuing as a traditionally conservative party based on policy issues or becoming a personality cult around Donald Trump

At the beginning of the year, Liz Cheney told Robert Costa of CBS that she believes there is a “cult of personality” around Trump, representing a moral test that the Republican Party is “failing.” 

While the growth of a Trump cult is evident, there is another more significant movement that Trump reignited. And one that Cheney must take into consideration. That would be the underlying feeling of grief among the majority white population. They see their prominence slipping away as new immigrants and minorities obtain more government control. 

Elie Mystal of the Nation points out that Republicans rejected Cheney because “white conservative voters trash everything to keep themselves in power.” In other words, the core Republican base will not support any candidate who fails to address their fears of being replaced by others. 

The Republican Party landscape sees an ebbing Trumper and a waning conservative tide.

Trump, or some Trump-like presidential candidate, makes a show of appeasing the fears of the white majority through harsh anti-immigration measures and guaranteeing a pro-Christian religion constitution. But their most explosive belief is that a government conspiracy, be it federal or local, is run by radical liberals’ intent on taking away the constitutional freedoms of average Americans. 

Most traditional conservatives are comfortable with restricting immigration and emphasizing Christian values, but they do not endorse a conspiracy that undermines America’s democratic institutions. Leaders like Mitch McConnel were once the leaders of this traditional conservative Republican faction. Still, to retain their power, he and others believe they must tolerate Trump and even defend him.

By speaking without moderation, Trump successfully triggered resentment among Republicans and many non-Republicans against the disdainful “elites.” These are the people ­- all of them labeled liberals – to blame for government policies that are more concerned about gay rights, minority rights, labor rights, migrant rights, and human rights than about the rights of Americans who are white and have lived here for a long time. 

Although pre-Trump Republicans were traditional conservatives, most have been swept into the Trump tide. Participants are in an existential war between good and evil, i.e., Trump followers versus liberal Democrats and RINOs.  

Cheney refused to float along in the Trump tide  

Cheney abandoned the Trump movement despite voting for Trump’s legislation 93 percent of the time while in Congress. Perhaps she thought she could reach Trump’s voter base by explaining how corrupting Trump was to the party and the nation. Nevertheless, she voted to impeach Trump for encouraging a mob to invade the Capital to overturn a fair election. As the co-chair of the House Committee to investigate January 6, she has been the sharpest Republican critic of Trump and his allies.

Cheney won her previous primary with 73 percent of the vote. This year she garnered only 29 percent, running against a Trump-endorsed candidate who considered the 2020 election “rigged.” On election night, with her defeat inevitable, she told the audience that she could not “go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would’ve required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic.” Instead, she said, “I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”

So where can Liz Cheney go in her quest to stop Trump, or a Trump mini-me like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, from becoming our next President? There are only two paths to challenge Trump from becoming President. Either beat him in the Republican primary or run as an independent. 

Cheney has only one realistic option 

Cheney understands that running in the Republican Primary is a guaranteed loss if Trump enters the race. Trump’s favorability dropped among Republicans in the wake of the January 6 riot, But it’s still above 80 percent in YouGov’s polling this summer. 

However, even if he doesn’t run, his messaging has so resonated with Republicans that a Trump acolyte will be their presidential candidate. Republicans hinting at running in their presidential primary have moved further to the right by supporting Trump’s cultural war on the liberals and preparing to challenge the legality of any Democratic victory in 2024.

 In an analysis by Washington Post, Philip Bump noticed that many Republicans who are not Trump supporters took his side in criticizing the FBI on the search of Mar-a-Lago. He saw this attack on the FBI more as possible allegiance to a belief in an evil deep state rather than to Trump personally. However, this trend among Republican candidates is more insidious than just opposing policies open to diversity. 

Unlike in the McCarthy era of exposing communists in government, the deep state is now seen as liberals leaving our gates wide open for people who do not deserve to be new Americans. Instead, they are invaders, many with criminal ties or tendencies and unwilling to assimilate into our culture. 

For most Republicans, as repeatedly measured by polls, the Democrats cannot win the next presidential election. But that belief is not based on verifiable fraud; it’s based on the necessity that they cannot win – period. If they do, this country will be lost.  Our liberties will be narrowed, our conservative values will be outlawed, and our right to defend ourselves will be stripped away. So, they repeatedly deny that Biden won the election. Cheney says, “No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility.”

By confronting the election deniers and not being silent, even die-hard conservative Liz Cheney could not win the Republican primary. Yet, she and a significant minority of Republicans are willing to campaign within our republic’s democratic framework. They believe even if the liberals win an election, a democratic republic will survive.

The message that elections should not be discounted or overthrown could propel Cheney into a formidable independent candidate. In effect, she would be turning the Trumper view on its head. Instead of our country being lost if the Democrats win, Cheney’s message would be that if a Trumper wins, our country will be lost. In effect, she says that Republicans should have a strong and viable conservative party to protect our electoral process; otherwise, the liberals will win against Trump reactionaries. Even worse, if the Trumpers win, our country will drift toward minority rule and violent conflicts.  

She should argue that Trump has hijacked the term” conservative.” He has redefined it within a Christian Nationalist framework. Although that trend goes back to Ronald Reagan’s Presidential 1980 campaign, forty years later, Trump converted that belief into the dominant Republican zeitgeist and required adhesion to it for a Republican to win a primary.

Liz Cheney is no Abraham Lincoln, but …

There are some historical parallels between Cheney and Lincoln. The idea of there being any similarity between the two may strike liberals and conservatives as a crazy notion. But they have the same path from losing a prominent Congressional race to being a national icon for a principled position in a divisive political environment.  

Cheney lost her Congressional seat to a fellow Republican because she was an outcast in her party. However, she gained national prominence for being the highest-ranking Republican member in Congress to publicly recognize the 2020 election as being fairly won by Joe Biden. 

Unlike Cheney, Lincoln was not an outcast in his party. In 1858 he was a former one-term Whig Congressman who ran for the US Senate as a Republican. He was expected to lose his Senate race and did to Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas because that state was solidly Democratic. Nevertheless, that campaign attracted national attention because he spoke bluntly about his opposition to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. 

In effect, the Dred Scott decision said that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories or the nation. It opened the door for slavery to be introduced into all states and at the expense of the free poor white male farmer class. Lincoln appealed to this constituency through his campaign slogan, “vote yourself a farm.” The slogan’s strong implication was that the Dred Scott decision would promote Democratic state legislatures to allow slaves to replace white farmers. It is akin to the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision to enable every state to ban abortion. The specter of nationwide abortion bans is prompting voters to reject Republicans and, like Lincoln, question the validity of the Supreme Court’s decision. 

Lincoln’s presidential race in 1860 was critically different from what Cheney will face as an independent in 2024. Then, he was in a four-way race, which greatly fragmented the total vote. However, Cheney is not expected to face three strong presidential candidates in 2024. Since 1860, there have been only two other elections (1912 and 1948) with four nationally visible contenders. In each case, one of the major party candidates won the election. 

The newly created Republican Party in the 1850s was not even a national party. It was mainly a party of the North and the West comprised of members left from the disintegrated Whig party and the much smaller Free Soil and Liberty Parties. While the Democrat party was the only national party in 1860, it had split in two. 

Cheney’s Republican Party is not disintegrating, although deep fissures exist among its middle-class and college-educated voters. As an independent candidate, she would most likely be in a three-way race, which no independent candidate has ever won. To make a good showing, she must have a solid message to attract non-Trump Republicans and conservative independents. And she needs to articulate it as clearly as she has done on the House Committee investigating January 6.

Cheney could initiate a New Conservative Party

Lincoln had a clear position on slavery: no more expansion of it. This was anathema to the Democrats and the South. His prior debates with Douglass allowed him to explain it to the nation. Just as Cheney’s comments from the Congressional hearings have given her a national platform to present why we must save our democratic institutions from authoritarian leaders. She continues to force Republican leaders to justify why they do not condemn the January 6 attack on the Capital Building to halt the electoral vote count.  

Cheney’s conservative politics will not appeal to liberals or even moderate independents. Still, she could find support among non-Trump Republicans and conservative-leaning independents who believe our democratic process is under attack when election results are dismissed as fraudulent. These voters would most likely be conservative middle-class professionals and influencers who think Trump has ruined the Republican party by emphasizing ethnic divisions and aligning religious orthodoxy with the Constitution. They are a minority within the Republican party but have a significant presence in the media market. 

Cheney would not win the popular vote as an independent. History suggests that she may not win any electoral votes as well. In the 100 years preceding the 2024 election, only three third-party candidates have received more than one electoral vote: Robert La Follette, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace. All of them received less than 50 votes. Popular candidates like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace, John B. Anderson, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader received none. Nevertheless, as an independent, she could attract enough votes to deny Trump or a Trump-like Republican a win in a swing state.

Running as a die-hard conservative, not a reactionary or a liberal republican, she could be the “real” conservative presidential candidate in 2024. Will Cheney exceed the highwater mark established by the presidential elections in the last hundred years for the popular vote (Ross Perot at 19%) and the electoral vote (George Wallace at 46 votes)? If she did, she could spark a counter-Trump movement of traditional conservatives to retake the Republican party or create a new Conservative Party. 

Cheney could reach out to a national audience if she took a page from Lincoln’s playbook before he became the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. In February 1860, Lincoln bolstered his growing national recognition coming off the Lincoln – Douglas debates when he gave his Cooper Union address in New York. 

Lincoln argued that he and his liberal Republicans had the true “conservative” policies and not the self-proclaimed “conservative” Democrats. For example, he said his views on slavery were the same as most American founding fathers. In contrast, the Democrats rejected the founding fathers and substituted something new. Substitute slavery for the electoral process and Trumpers for Democrats, and you have Cheney making the same argument. 

            Journalist Robert J. McNamara (with the Libertarian Justice Institute) wrote that Lincoln’s Cooper Union speechpresented careful research and a forceful argument, and “it was stunningly effective.” Lincoln ended his speech by saying, “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.” 

            Cheney might tap into Lincoln’s spirit of patriotic defiance in the face of a Trumper Republican attempting to dismantle our democratic electoral process.

Nick Licata is the author of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition

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Don’t expect another attempted coup– it may not be necessary

President of the Russian Federation and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Was there really an attempted coup?

Bennie Thompson, chair of the House of Representative’s select committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol, said, “January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup.” This conclusion was also from numerous journalists in mainstream media and on the left. Conservatives and Republicans deny any such tag. 

Sally Denton wrote in the Guardian about a 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR; there had been a former such attempt. The retired US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Butler testified before Congress that a group of Wall Street financiers recruited him to lead a fascist coupagainst FDR. None of the financiers appeared before Congress, and the Roosevelt Administration took no action on the General’s claim. It has slipped into a footnote in history. 

The mob of a thousand trying to stop Congress from functioning on January 6th could squeeze into a definition of a coup. Still, it was not a military takeover of a democratic government which is a classic definition of one. Those coups happen regularly across the globe, as in Spain (1936), Chile (1973), Burma (1988), and Egypt (2013). 

Focusing on a “coup,” a single violent action to overthrow an existing government, ignores the more significant practices that endanger our republic. Democracies have collapsed without being toppled by the military or even a rioting mob.

The Concentration of Political Power sets the stage

The most insidious threat is an elected leader and a single political party bending the rules to alter the balance of power between the executive, the legislature, and the courts. An executive can apply newly gained power to direct those institutions and the national bureaucracy to muzzle government critics by restraining a free press and tilting the electoral process.

Becoming an authoritarian ruler is not a solo act. Dependency on an elite of wealthy benefactors is necessary but not sufficient. A populist uprising against the status quo is also an essential ingredient. Most citizens need not revolt, but the dissatisfied must be the loudest, best organized, and plurality of the voting population.

A Young Democracy Fails

Last month, Tunisia became the most recent example of a democracy slipping into authoritarian rule when political power is consolidated at the top.  

A referendum handed over ultimate authority to its President Kais Saied, passing with over 94 percent approval. Although the referendum retained the Tunisian Constitution’s clauses concerning rights and liberties, they could be effectively ignored because the president alone would now appoint government ministers and judges and reduces parliament’s authority.            

The election followed with Saied consolidating his powers over the previous year as he mainly ruled by decree. He suspended parliament and fired his prime minister. As a result, he slanted the election process to favor the referendum. In response, there were mass boycotts, and many citizens were resigned to not voting on a predetermined result. Then, Tunisia was seen as the only democracy to survive the revolts that swept the region in the Arab Spring uprisings a decade ago. That is now only a memory. 

An International Hero for Strongman Governing

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC. He received repeated enthusiastic applause, notably when he told them they were “in a battle to protect Western civilization against the forces of liberalism and mass migration.” 

On the other hand, mainstream media tags him as the poster child for how a democracy can be converted into an authoritarian government. Of course, CPAC didn’t advertise his appearance that way, but they liked his message and admired his ability to win elections. CPAC spokesman Alex Pfeiffer told NBC News, explaining why they invited him, “The press might despise Prime Minister Orbán, but he is a popular leader.” And there is some truth to that.

Two years before becoming Prime Minister, more than 80 percent of the electorate approved a referendum to abolish fees for doctor and hospital visits and university tuition enacted by the government. Orbán’s Fidesz partyinitiated it. Providing benefits in a down economy can rally reactionary populists to push for a strongman to lead a nation. As a result, Orbán’s party solidly beat the ruling Socialist Party in 2010. 

Since then, his Fidesz party has controlled their parliament. While Orbán has gained both national support and international attention with his anti-immigrant policies, his political success in winning reelections is due to him undermining democratic institutions.  Over the past 12 years, Orbán has converted a republic into a top-down government that effectively silenced the critics and stopped their legal and political challenges to its authority. As a result, Orbán’s goes down a well-worn road toward authoritarian rule. Nevertheless, his accomplishments have brought cheers from other autocrats and those attending the CPAC conference.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson describes Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” Are those lessons on how to pass laws that discriminate against non-European immigrants, non-Christian religions, and non-traditional families under the banner of preserving Western Culture? Is Tucker also including how to obtain and retain political power by hollowing out obstructive democratic institutions?

By crippling the independent media, the judiciary, and the legislature, Orbán doesn’t have to call in the military to eliminate them. However, by significantly narrowing the powers of these institutions but keeping them still around, an authoritarian government arises while maintaining the illusion of a functioning republic outside Hungary.  This allows world leaders like President Trump to welcome him into Oval Office, saying, “Viktor Orbán has done a tremendous job in so many different ways. Highly respected.” And he met with him again this year, proudly shaking his hand for the cameras. 

Carlson was right; Orbán has some lessons that “the rest of us” could learn to obtain permanent and dominant political power.  In Hungary, those lessons were methodically put into practice. Is that happening in America? 

Strangle Media outlets

In Hungary, a team of European Union NGOs specializing in Press and Media Freedom investigated Orbán’s government’s treatment of the media in 2019. They found that Orban had created a pro-government media empire, financed by allies, to allow the Fidesz party to hold on to power. The report concluded that “The Hungarian system of media control was deliberately designed to deter scrutiny and provide its rulers with superficial deniability.” Hungarian journalist Paul Lendvai said that “80% of the news is in the hands of the government.”

 A year after the report was released, in 2020, the Fidesz-controlled Parliament overcame objections from opposition to granting Orbán emergency power to rule by decree, suspending elections, and providing no end to Orbán’s expanded capabilities. It  mandated harsh penalties for disseminating false news, such as jail for up to five years, “anyone who intentionally spreads what the government classifies as misinformation.”

The few remaining left- and right-wing independent media are labeled as “Hungary-haters,” foreign agents, or traitors, and their private advertisers are harassed.

In America, there has been a dramatic decline in independent newspapers. According to a report by AdWeek, in June 2022, there was a loss of an average of two newspapers per week between late 2019 and May 2022, leaving an estimated 70 million people in news deserts. If the trend continues, a third of newspapers will be lost by 2025, according to the 2022 study published by Northwestern University. 

Accompanying the loss of independent newspapers is the concentration of ownership among a few businesses with similar objectives. Thom Hartman in American Oligarchy argues that “roughly 90 percent of American media (by viewership, readership, and listenership) is owned by only six companies.” Title Max reports that about 15 billionaires and six corporations own most of the US media outlets. They own 77 percent of the 100 largest online news sources. Pew Research found that about four in ten Americans often get news online, which goes to half for those younger than 50. 

What needs to happen?

The concentration of media outlets does not mean they are all playing the same tune. There are some clear distinctions in their politics. But, as a whole, they reflect the political orientation of their owners. Steps can be taken to stop a further drift toward a national media market having even fewer owners who could share a common political agenda, such as promoting particular businesses, religious values, or a political party’s beliefs. 

The Fairness Doctrine, which was dropped by the Reagan administration and then eliminated under the Obama administration, should be revived. The Telecommunications Act signed by Clinton, which allowed media concentration, should be repealed. Legislation already introduced to provide tax incentives for locally owned media could be pursued. 

Appoint the Court Justices & Change the Constitution

In Hungary, according to Human Rights Watch, “In its eight years in power, the Orbán government has packed the Constitutional Court with its preferred justices and forced 400 judges into retirement.” In 2018, the Hungarian Parliament brought the courts further under his control by creating a parallel court system controlled by the Orbán.

His justice minister will control the hiring and promotion of its judges. All politically sensitive cases concerning electoral law, corruption, and the right to protest will have to come before it as a “public administration” matter. The existing judiciary will have a reduced mandate with no oversight of these new Administrative Courts. 

            A Hungarian government spokesman defended the new Administrative Courts saying that many European countries have them. However, Cas Mudde, a University of Georgia professor who is an expert on populism, said that they would put the Orbán government in complete control of the elections. With no independent judiciary oversight, Hungarian elections will no longer be free and fair. 

            In the US, after the first 100 days in office, President Trump blamed the constitutional checks and balances built into US governance for his legislation stalling. “It’s a very rough system,” he said. “It’s an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.” Consequently, his appointments to the federal courts were checked for conformity to the Federalist Society’s reactionary beliefs. 

The result has become more laws that Democrats have passed being trimmed or nullified by federal courts. Challenges to those decisions appealed to the Supreme Court are then in the hands of a majority of justices aligned with the Federalist philosophy. 

Senate Republicans manipulated the process for appointing a Supreme Court Justice to tilt SCOTUS to endorse a reactionary policy agenda. Without breaking any laws but ignoring Senate norms going back hundreds of years, they refused even to hold a hearing for Obama’s nominee because they said the next presidential election was only eight months away. However, it took only 30 days from when President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court for the Republican-controlled Senate to approve her. They ignored that the next presidential election was less than two months away.

What needs to happen?

            Republican appointments have dominated the Supreme Court for over a half-century. Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970. Trump did not change the party makeup of SCOTUS, but he did enlarge the reactionary wing of conservative justices on it. They set about to reverse previous court decisions, which the majority of its justices now consider liberal aberrations of the constitution. These activist justices see their mission as protecting values that reflect the beliefs of the nation’s founders. However, they overlook how those beliefs harbored and protected inequalities among citizens based on race, gender, and economic status.

The Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision provoked societal outrage among non-slave-owning Americans. We see similar discontent from both the left and the right, as SCOTUS interprets the constitution in a context that preserves the biases and prejudices that were part of the nation’s original beliefs. The last time that approach was taken, the Supreme Court was expanded to counter that effort. And there are suggestions by members of Congress they should do it again. 

Congress decides the size of the Supreme Court. That changed six times since the court was formed in 1790. It has had nine justices since 1869, after the Civil War. However, increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to balance philosophical views could invite a never-ending intervention. More immediately, the Supreme Court would be seen as a partisan body to be dominated by the political party in power, carrying on the practice of the Trump presidency. 

            By Executive Order, President Biden in 2021 established a 36-member Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court to provide an “analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals.” The final report was issued at the end of 2021. It did not endorse any specific changes, but it reviewed, analyzed, and recommended further steps to consider if the expansion or alteration of the current structure of the Supreme Court were pursued.

            Proponents and opponents of Congress changing the Supreme Courts’ design and scope of work should use the commission’s report as a shared baseline to discuss seriously if any such changes are needed and effective in protecting our democracy.

Suppose America is to avoid a collapse of our democracy. In that case, there must be Presidential and bi-partisan congressional leadership guiding an open and fair discussion of how to protect the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and our federal courts’ independence from political manipulation. If political leaders continue to inflame the national debate by accusing each other of being the enemy, our nation will tear apart. 

Where does America go from here?

            Democratic governments, which are democratic republics more in name than in practice, have drifted into authoritarian rule because their government’s executive office weakened their legislatures and media outlets. Our culture must believe that democracy can work to halt that trend. That belief is shaken by political leaders who attack the reliability of election results. Their messaging leads to a society that will tolerate the rise of authoritarian power. Because they believe their democracy has already been lost. 

            To effectively resist the social and political forces that promise a peaceful society under a one-man rule, or some variation of that, there must be a coordinated national effort to pursue a rational and thoughtful discussion on how democracies are not utopias; they are messy and chaotic at times. But they are accountable to the many, not the few. That message must be shared for all to hear. Remaining silent will only encourage those yelling the loudest that the end has come.  

Nick Licata is the author of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

Could ethnic minorities save the Senate for the Democrats?

Two different approaches to shaping America’s future

The Republican Party, through Donald Trump and their primary system, has repeatedly fanned fears among white Americans of crime coming from urban gangs of minority ethnic youths and drug cartels run by South Americans. They describe the steady increase of immigrants as an uncontrolled illegal invasion that only a wall can stop.

Democrats since WWII moved toward accepting a more ethnically diverse democratic society. And while they often fall short in pursuing one, they have rhetorically embraced a multicultural society. As a result, regardless of who controls Congress or the presidency in the next two elections, immigration and birth rates over the past half-century will soon result in an America with a population of less than half from European descendants.

The clash of these two views is at the heart of the debate between the Democrat and Republican parties. Candidate Donald Trump’s message was and still is wanting to Make America Great Again. It looks back to when European ethnic groups were shaping America’s future. 

In contrast, President Joe Biden’s theme, like other Democrats, is focused on an all-inclusive future. They saw ethnic minority groups as citizens who should have the same opportunities as most Americans to achieve social, political, and economic power. 

There is a visual and real stark difference between President Trump’s appointments to his White House Cabinet and the courts to Biden’s appointments. Trump was overwhelmingly staffed with whites, while Biden made minority appoints to these positions more than ever before, except for former President Barak Obama.

Democrats are heading into troubled waters

It is largely acknowledged, although not certain, that the House will flip over to Republican control. Control of the Senate is also likely to change. With inflation at a historic high, shooting over 9 percent at the end of June, the party controlling Congress will be blamed. Polls have repeatedly shown inflation to be the number one concern among likely voters. The last time inflation was a major campaign issue was in President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980. Ronald Reagan won every state but one. 

Aside from runaway inflation, a historical trend would slim the Democrat’s chances of maintaining control of Congress this November. The number of voters going to the polls in midterm elections drops from the previous presidential election, regardless of what party controls the presidency. To counter that drift, each party works to have fewer supporters sitting out the election than the other party. 

Republicans have been playing the long game by strategically targeting state legislature races. As a result, they now control both state legislative chambers in 30 states, while Democrats control both in 18 states. Consequently, Republicans have passed more gerrymandering measures than the Democrats. 

While gerrymandering will not impact the statewide votes for Senators, suppression measures can. To reduce the Democratic vote, Republicans have zeroed in on issues like eliminating or restricting the number of voting boxes and voting stations that urban voters use more than rural voters.

Both gerrymandering and voter suppression measures passed by white-dominated legislatures are designed to beat down voter turnout from Democrats’ most reliable voting base, urban-based ethnic minorities. The Brennan Center found ample evid­ence that the sorts of barri­ers being intro­duced this year by Republicans  dispro­por­tion­ately reduce turnout for voters of color.

Nevertheless, Democrats have also had a measurable loss of support from this constituency. In the last three presidential elections, Hispanic voters went from 70 percent to 61 percent and Black voters dropped from 97 percent to 90 percent. Asian support has consistently remained slightly above 50 percent.

A combination of more restricted access to voting and lower motivation may account for voter turnout from minority ethnic groups being less than that from white voters. For example, in 2020, the turnout of white voters ranged from 8 percent higher than Black voters to 17 percent higher than that of Hispanic voters. 

Nevertheless, organized efforts to get out the vote among key supporters is how any political party wins elections. It just becomes more challenging with laws that make voting a chore that competes with working hours or transportation limitations of lower-income voters. In addition, a disproportionate number of them are ethnic minorities. 

Ethnic minorities in three key swing states could keep a Democratic Senate

Republicans are focusing their organizing and money on defeating the Democrat incumbent senators in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. 

Arizona incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Kelly is a former astronaut and has just served two years in the Senate. He defeated incumbent Sen. Martha McSally (R) in a special election after the Republican Governor appointed her to a vacant seat. McSally was a white, retired Air Force colonel. The Republican Senate candidate has yet to be chosen for November, but all Republican contenders are white, very conservative males. The three top support banning abortions and deny that Trump lost his election.  

Donald Trump won Arizona in 2016 with a 3.6 percent margin; Biden skimmed by to win the 2020 race by 0.3 percent, while Kelly’s margin was 2.4 percent that same year. So, Kelly would seem to have a good shot at being reelected. However, he will have to maintain or expand the 2020 voter turnout, which was very high. Hispanic voters provided the largest minority voters at 18 percent of the electorate. However, according to Pew research, the turnout still has room to grow since the percentage of the eligible share of Hispanic voters in Arizona is 24 percent.

At least maintaining, if not expanding, the Hispanic and other minority ethnic vote is critical in securing Kelly’s Senate seat. His campaign must work outside the Democratic Party to mobilize voters. Kelly would benefit from the work of community organizations Living United for Change in Arizona, LUCHA, and the MiAZ coalition, which are aiming to mobilize one million voters of color and young voters.  The campaign organizer for LUCHA says they have registered more than half a million people to vote this year alone, knocking on 1.5 million doors across Arizona.

Although Arizona’s total Black and Asian populations are much smaller, consisting of 5 percent and 4 percent, they too are being organized. Collectively community-based organizations, including Our Voice, Our Vote Arizona, and Progress Arizona, say that 60% of Arizona’s Black registered voters cast ballots in 2020. They also have room to expand voter participation in 2022. And future expansion will happen since the current minority population in Arizona is 47 percent, with a more significant percentage of ineligible young voters than the white population. 

Nevada Incumbent Democrat Sen. Cortez Masto is challenged by Trump-endorsed former state Attorney General Republican Adam Laxalt. He caught Trump’s attention by leading legal challenges to overturn the presidential election results. Laxalt has been endorsed by two prominent anti-abortion groups Nevada Right to Life and National Right to Life.

Although Nevada voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in the last two elections, they were by slim margins. Joe Biden won the state by just over 2 percent, as did Hillary Clinton in 2016. Consequently, Trump and the Republican Party are aiming at Masto as beatable. 

Like other November Democratic candidates, Masto is burdened by President Biden’s low approval ratings dragging down her vote. His disapproval rating was 52 percent in Nevada at the beginning of the year. So, Masto is avoiding a debate about Biden and focusing on state issues she has supported, like delivering Justice Department grants to local police departments and promoting funding to combat wildfires and drought in the infrastructure law. While those issues cut across all ethnic groups, minority groups will play a significant role in getting her reelected. 

About a third of Nevada’s total population consists of minority ethnic groups, with Hispanics being about twice the combined size of Black and Asian populations. At 20 percent, Nevada has the second highest percentage of eligible Hispanic voters of any state. And it’s expected to increase by 5.8 percent in 2022 compared to the most recent 2018 midterm election, which saw a record national turnout of Hispanic voters. About 36 percent of this expanded total of eligible Hispanic voters are expected to turn out in 2022. This level of participation would provide nearly 17 percent of the state’s total vote, just a point behind the Hispanic slice of voters in Arizona’s 2020 election.

Like Arizona, Nevada Democrats can benefit from working with broad-based community organizations to educate voters on the issues and encourage them to vote. The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) is a significant one, with a membership of nearly 30 organizations! Two of its main issues are Civic Engagement and Economic Justice, which will be largely shaped by the Senate next year.

Georgia’s first Black Senator, Incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, is being challenged by Trump-endorsed former football star Republican Herschel Walker.  Attracting female voters may be difficult for Walker. Women have accused Walker of violent behavior, and he told reporters at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, “There’s no exception in my mind” for banning abortion. However, he did not mention making exceptions for rape, incest, or saving the mother’s life.

Georgia swing voters in the latest Axios Engagious/Schlesinger focus groups strongly support abortion rights. However, before the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe they said that issue alone probably would not decide who they support in November’s midterm elections.

Unlike Arizona and Nevada, Hispanics make up only 6% of residents in Georgia, while Black residents are at 33%. Luckily for the Democrats, of all ethnic groups, Black voters in Georgia had the most significant increase in registration from 2016 to 2020. This trend is in line with national numbers, which show the growth of eligible Black voters moving to 12.5% of the US electorate, up from 11.5% in 2000. 

This growth appears to be coming from younger, more educated voters, particularly noticeable in Georgia and Arizona.  On the downside, Black voters’ perception of Biden being sympathetic to their concerns has slipped from 74 percent in 2020 to 66 percent in 2022. And this disappointment has been measured to be highest among the youngest voters. 

More so than any other ethnic group, including whites, Blacks see religion and morality as vital civic virtues.  Most black Democrats (57%) say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm. And the majority also believe that morality is linked to a belief in God. Democrats must consider that belief when addressing the issue of abortion. Saving a mother’s life or considering a pregnancy due to incest and rape are all conditions that appeal to the morality of terminating a pregnancy.   

Georgia has a robust organization to help overcome the state legislature’s newest voter suppression bill SB 202,which, among other things, criminalizes Georgians who give a drink of water to their neighbors while waiting in line to vote, attacks absentee voting, and allows the state to take over county elections. To counter it, the Fair Fight Actioncommunity-based political organization, led by Democrat Stacey Abrams, is in the field encouraging voter participation in elections and educating voters about elections and their voting rights. 

Democrats Can Keep Control of the Senate if they do two things 

Democrats have the votes to retain their most vulnerable Senators in November’s elections. And, data fromCatalist makes it clear where they can get them. First, they must continue to retain white college-educated voters. Over the last three presidential elections, Democrats’ support among white college-educated voters increased by 16 margin points. 

Second, they must halt the decline in support from nonwhite working-class voters, which decreased by 19 margin points over this same period. A recent Times/Siena poll shows Democrats holding a 20-point advantage over Republicans among white college-educated voters — but are statistically tied among Hispanics going into this November’s midterm elections. 

The big picture of saving our Democracy, as epitomized by Congress’s Committee on January Six hearings, is resonating with college-educated voters. Meanwhile, working-class nonwhites are more concerned about their public safety and finances. Democrats have thankfully stepped away from the “defund police” mentality and have moved toward emphasizing more police accountability, which can provide safer and more respectful police conduct in black neighborhoods. 

Banning abortion is a passionate national issue and denying access to any abortions is widely opposed. But abortion has not registered as the top issue for the Black and Hispanic communities, even though studies show that banning abortions has a significant financial burden on minority families. Accordingly, Democrats must also frame abortion as an economic issue to attract voters beyond those concerned with abrogating a constitutional right.

There is a path forward for the Democrats to retain control of the Senate and perhaps even the House. But it is a narrow one that requires discipline in messaging understandable and believable solutions and not relying on slogans. 

Nick Licata is the author of

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

           Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition for $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

Passion for overturning the Abortion Ban outweighs Anger over Inflation        

SCOTUS has lit a fire under the Democrats and Independents to get out and vote

 
 

        Passion, not facts, drives voters to the polls. Republicans and Democrats are attempting to tap into America’s most passionate issue. 
 
        The Republicans are focused on anger with high inflation. Non-Trumpian conservative adjunct lecturer at Hillsdale College, Henry Olsen, wrote in his Washington Post column that inflation is even worse than the official numbers suggest. Citing statistics from an American Farm Bureau Federation survey, he sees prices for goods people regularly purchase rising much faster than for things they don’t. For instance, food used at home, rose by almost 12 percent over the past year; eggs in particular cost more than 32 percent. These numbers are real and alarming. 
 
            Democrats, on the other hand, are highlighting the large demonstrations resulting from SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade. Pro-choice organizers said there were more than 380 protest events in cities including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago against the decision to eliminate a woman’s constitutional right to determine if she wants to be pregnant. 
 
         Although the biggest turnouts were from large cities dominated by Democrats, a  Washington Post-ABC News poll just before the court’s rejection of Roe showed that 54 percent of Americans think the 1973 Roe decision should be upheld, while 28 percent believe it should be overturned. Consequently, a large pool of voters could be motivated to vote against those supporting the SCOTUS decision. 
 
            Both issues are igniting passion. However, passion is sustained when there is a visible opponent to fight against.
 
          Inflation does not have a single advocate to fight against. There is no public body that is directly responsible for inflation. President Joe Biden will be blamed, but so will the Federal Reserve Board for raising interest rates and oil companies for making billions in more profits while gasoline prices have jumped 50 percent from a year ago. However, banning abortion rests solely with the Supreme Court and the Republican Party, which appointed the justices who voted for it. They make for visible opponents, particularly as they embrace that decision. 
 
               Before SCOTUS stripped women of their privacy, fewer Democrats than Republicans were apt to vote in this coming November’s elections for Federal and State offices. A March 2022 NBC News poll showed Republicans with a 17-point advantage in enthusiasm, with 67 percent of Republicans indicating a high level of interest in the midterms (either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale), compared with 50 percent of Democrats planning to vote. 
 
          According to Roll Call, the four incumbent Democratic Senators in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and New Hampshire are most likely to lose. However, they can win if they offer voters a clear choice to the voters. Do people want a government demanding how citizens should behave in their personal lives? It’s not about some secret deep state cabal making decisions about policies. This is about publicly forcing a woman who becomes pregnant to give birth based on a religious doctrine, not on science or civil law. 
 
               Republicans are saying women’s rights should not be determined by the federal government but by state governments. This is faulty logic. The federal government is constrained by the US Constitution, as should the states. The SCOTUS decision, made by six reactionary justices, said there is no express constitutional right to abortion. Therefore, the people of each state are free to decide to deny those rights.
 
               The justices’ decision reduces a citizen’s freedom, not protect it. The Constitution intends to defend our freedoms, as long as they do not impinge on the rightful freedom of others. Wendy Parmet, the director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law, described the SCOTUS decision as “Nothing of this magnitude have we seen since the Civil War.” A similar Supreme Court decision made over a hundred years ago, the Dred Scott decision, inflamed a dynamic movement to free Black citizens from enslavement. 
 
               In that era, Republicans led the movement to treat Black citizens as free people, not property; today, they support a philosophy that treats women as property, not as people free to choose how to live. The majority of Americans do not share the justices’ philosophy. While 78% of Republicans approve of the SCOTUS decision, a recent CBS News/YouGov reaction poll showed that 59% of Americans disapprove of that decision, with 67% of women disapproving.
 
            Once the SCOTUS decision came out, only 38% of independent voters, who play a critical role in the swing states, approved of it. Before that decision, a March 2022 NBC News poll found that 41% of independents preferred a Republican-controlled congress versus only 31% of them preferring a Democratic one. This indicates that if Republican candidates push for banning abortions, independents are more likely to vote for Democrats over Republicans.
 
           Inflation will not disappear overnight, no matter who is elected to Congress in 2022 or president in 2024. But those elected to Congress this November will have the power to codify Roe as the constitutional law initially approved by the Supreme Court, or they could force a ban on abortion in all states. 
 
          Protecting the rights of citizens to lead private lives will trigger more passion on which candidates to support this November than electing those promising to solve inflation that cannot be legislated away with a single vote.
 
 
Nick Licata is the author of
Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

Now available onAmazon as a Kindle editionfor $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

The Biden Problem and the Midterm Elections

            To win the midterm elections, Democrats must address the problem of President Biden’s poor approval ranking with voters. The public’s support of a candidate for office is based on their perception of their personality and competence. But for over 90% of the voting population, that perception is tied to the party they represent, Republican or Democrat. In the 2020 election, less than 3% voted for a presidential candidate outside those two parties. 

            As sitting president, Joe Biden is the head of his party. Although former President

Donald Trump is out of office, the public still sees him as the Republican party’s leader. Consequently, their stature shapes how voters value that party and their party’s candidates in the midterm elections.

Although Biden and Trump are not on the ballot this November, speculation abounds on whether either will run in 2024. Despite their extreme policy differences, they are more alike than any of their potential in-party challengers, except for 80-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. They are old men. Only three years separate Biden, who is 79, and Trump at 76. Their legacies and persona will help or hinder their party. Consequently, they present a challenge for candidates campaigning in local districts and states.

Regardless of Biden’s optimism, the generally accepted view by those inside and outside either party is that the Democrats are likely to lose majorities in both Congressional chambers. This expectation, in part, is due to the historical trend where the president’s party losses seats in the midterm elections. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House and an average of four seats in the Senate. Moreover, President Obama’s first midterm election saw the largest number of seats lost in the House (62) since FDR’s midterm in his second term when the Democrats lost 72 seats in the House.

Biden’s plummeting approval rating reinforces the belief that this trend will continue. His rating is about on the same level that Trump had when he lost his reelection, and the Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2020.

In a January 2022 Quinnipiac University survey President Biden’s job approval was rated at 35% by all voters. The lowest they found for Donald Trump as president was 33%. Senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende, is not optimistic for the Democrats. He sees a Biden rating at or below 42% as giving virtually no chance for Democrats to hold the Senate and predicts a loss of four seats as the most likely outcome. Even if Biden’s job approval falls below 51%, Trende sees a likely Republican-controlled Senate in 2023.

Biden’s support by democrats has also fallen from 82% last year to 73% in April of this year. Some candidates facing tough federal elections have avoided calling in Biden to help. One of them is Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who is running in a high-profile race against Trump-endorsed author J.D. Vance for the open senate seat.

Biden’s support among his strongest supporters, Black and Hispanic voters, has weakened since being in office. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden received 92% of Black and 59% of Hispanic voters. 

Washington Post-Ipsos poll  found that the share of Black voters who say they are “absolutely certain to vote” this November has dropped from 85 percent in 2020 to 62 percent this year, a 23-point drop that is larger than the 12-point drop among White voters. The poll also showed that 12 percent of Black voters say what President Biden had been doing in office is somewhat or very bad. If that percentage of disgruntled voters with the Democratic party is reflected in Ohio and Georgia, which have many black voters, the Democrats will not win those Senate seats. 

Meanwhile, more than any other racial or ethnic group, Hispanics have drifted away from Biden, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation of all available polls. In one recent survey from The Wall Street Journal, Hispanic voters were about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats on the question of which party they intended to support in next year’s midterms.

Since a disproportionate percentage of Blacks and Hispanics are lower-paid wage workers, they were most affected by Covid restrictions. A recession may cause them to think twice about whether the Democrats can best help them.

Equis Research is a progressive data firm dedicated to analyzing Hispanic voters. Their 2021 poll found that two-thirds of Hispanic 2020 voters voiced approval for Donald Trump’s position on reopening the economy, while 55 percent endorsed his view that Americans should “live without fear of COVID.” In addition, many Hispanics work in industries adversely impacted by shutdown orders, such as hospitality and food service.

Concern about the economy may be affecting minority young voters in particular since they are just entering the job market for less-skilled jobs. In 2020, Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters 69% to 30%. But Biden’s advantage over Trump among Hispanic voters who did not have a college degree was far narrower (55% to 41%). These voters could feel disappointed by Biden since the future is not as bright as he promised. For instance, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll, younger Black Americans are significantly less enthusiastic about the president than older ones.

Biden has achieved a remarkable turnaround from an economy sinking under the Covid pandemic’s impact. He dramatically increased job creation and reduced unemployment. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.2% when he took office to 3.9%. That was the biggest single year drop in American history. In addition, when the Biden took office, over 18 million were receiving unemployment benefits; as of January 2022, only 2 million are. Again, that is the biggest single year drop in history.

Although an economist poll taken this June found that 56% of Americans believe the US is currently in a recession, a May Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 86% of Americans are still satisfied with their lives. 

The impact of inflationary prices is easily noticed at the gas pump and the grocery store. However, suppose the Democrats can build on most Americans’ satisfaction. In that case, they have a chance of placing inflation in the context of an overall better life for most and helping them win elections.

Democrats need to build on Biden’s message that the Democrats can turn America back to normal. A more stable society and economy can be created with less political divisiveness. Neither has been achieved, but Democrats have made valiant efforts. They can reasonably argue that the Republicans, although not controlling Congress, have blocked them. That may be factually true but blaming the Republicans can only go so far. It doesn’t inspire people; it’s seen as an excuse for failure. 

If a recession and growing inflation continue to dominate the media, Biden will be blamed no matter what he does. But, as the president, the buck stops with him. That means the Democrats must graciously acknowledge his leadership and present a new, more vibrant message for their campaigns this November. 

 If they champion their popularly accepted and rational abortion access, gun control, immigration protocols, and criminal reform policies, they can hold onto their base among minorities. That approach will also repeat Biden’s success in attracting more independent and Republican-leaning voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, allowing Democrats to win their elections. 

Looking down the road, the Democrats need to encourage Biden to guide their party to select a new messenger in 2024 if he cannot sharpen his image and message.  

And the Republicans – face an even greater problem with Donald Trump!

Nick Licata is the author of

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

           Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition for $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

Democrats need the Independent Voters to keep the Senate

If the Democrats can keep the support of Independent Voters, they can win key swing States and maintain control of the Senate. But who are they? And what do they want?

A popular image of an independent voter is a white middle-class suburbanite. But that image, if it was ever true, is far more complex. 

One surprising finding that came out of a Pew Research study of independent voters was that they had a most significant share of those under the age of fifty (62%) compared to the Democrats (50%) or the Republicans (44%). That younger slice of the voting population is why the following policies rank within the top ten issues of importance to Independents: debt-free state college, a $15 minimum wage, and legalizing marijuana. Democrats attract independent voters that they lead on these issues, not the Republicans.

Another research finding was that more men than women identified as independent voters. Pew reported: Men constitute a majority (56%) of independents. That is higher than the share of men among Republican identifiers (51% are men) and much higher than the share of men among Democrats (just 40%). Democratic candidates must consider the prominent presence of independent male voters when they approach all issues. Candidate Joe Biden made more significant headway in getting male voters. He evenly split their vote with Trump, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points

On the downside for Democrats is a growing trend of more minority voters becoming independent voters. A Gallup poll from 2012 found that many independent voters are indeed white. However, non-Hispanic whites comprise 89% of Republicans while Indies are at 70% Republicans. Democrats are 60% white.

The largest minority appearing among Independent Voters is Hispanic, comprising 16%, where only 6% of Republicans are Hispanic, and Democrats are at 13%. Although, as early as 2012, half of Hispanics identified as independents, their voting pattern is noticeably 

drifting away from supporting Democrats. 

According to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation of all available polls, Hispanics have turned away from Biden more than any other racial or ethnic group. Moreover, their distancing from the Democrats began before Biden became president. The Democratic data firm Catalist figured that the GOP gained eight points among Hispanic voters in the November 2020 elections, with overall support for Democratic House candidates down from over 60 percent to 37 percent in a year.

If this trend continues, Democrats will face more challenging elections to win. This is particularly true since the Hispanic share of the electorate has increased by about 30 percent from Obama’s first presidential election to Biden’s election.

Black voters have also been slipping away from the Democrats to a much smaller degree during this period. A Gallup found that 8% of Independents are Non-Hispanic Blacks — compared to 22% for Democrats and 2% for Republicans. However, an independent study found that about 30% of Blacks self-identify as independent voters. Moreover, although Blacks have overwhelmingly voted for Democratic presidents in the last three elections, from a high of 97% in 2012 for Obama to 90% for Biden in 2020, close to a third consider themselves independent of the Democratic Party. 

Aside from the mistaken belief that independents lack ethnic diversity, another false perception sees them as a single group. In fact, they consist of three groups. Pew Research in 2017 found that independent voters that decline to lean toward a party make up less than 10%, and they are the group with the lowest voter turnout. The balance is roughly divided in half. Various polls have given an edge to the D or R but looking at the results over the last three decades leaves those leaning to either party roughly equal.  

Nevertheless, Pew discovered that even if independents lean toward one party, they often hold beliefs that conflict with the party toward which they lean. Democrats need to recognize how to approach issues that would move Republican-leaning independents to vote for them.

Take gun control as an example. While most Rs, Independents, and Democrats oppose a total ban on guns, not banning them was the third-most important issue for independents. Nevertheless, Independents are far more open to considering restrictions on access to guns than Republicans. They ranked universal background checks before gun purchases as eighth in importance and had the support of 93% of all independents. 

This issue could favor Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who will be facing a Trumpian Republican to replace the moderate Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey, who is retiring this year. Toomey worked with Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin to expand background checks, but the Republicans blocked it in 2012. That was the closest the Senate got to passing a gun-control measure in a decade. Fetterman can take this same position and force the Republican candidate to accept it or face the wrath of the NRA. Moreover, Fetterman will win over Independents no matter how the Republican candidate responds. 

Of higher importance is independents opposition to completely banning abortion which is ranked the fourth-most important issue for them, with 77 against prohibiting abortion. Democrats were 87 against it, and Republicans were at 65 percent against it. However, Republicans ranked completely banning abortion at 13 in importance. Republican-leaning independents will support retaining Roe, while the Republican candidates fuel the message of anti-abortion groups that label Democratic Senate candidates as abortion extremists.

An anti-abortion group has a $1 million statewide ad campaign attacking U.S. Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. He is accused of being a pro-abortion extremist because he voted for, like all Democrat Senators, the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which the anti-abortionists label as the “Abortion on Demand Until Birth Act.” 

The Act retains the intent of the language in the Roe ruling, which allows for abortions if deemed necessary by the “appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.” The legislation has similar language. It allows abortion if “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.” There is no practical difference, yet all Republicans in the Senate voted to overthrow the Roe policy that has been a constitutional right for fifty years. 

Supporting gay marriage is another clear distinction Pew uncovered between Republican-leaning independents and Republicans. As of 2017, a narrow majority of Republicans (54%) opposed same-sex marriage, while 58% of Republican-leaning independents favored allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, and 70% of all independents favored it.  

Consider how efforts by the most conservative Republican leaders interpret a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade as also outlawing gay marriages. Democrat candidates could force Republican candidates to part ways with this effort and show how a Democrat protects the rights of all citizens. 

Some Democrats argue that they need to get more of their base out to win elections. But unfortunately, voter suppression measures passed by Republican legislatures will make that a more difficult task for Senate races, which are not impacted by gerrymandering. 

Fortunately, research shows that attracting independent voters does not necessarily water down the Democrats’ agenda. Instead, their policy objectives are sharpened by focusing on specific measures that can implement their basic principles. And importantly, that outreach also provides them a way of bringing in new independent voters and retaining prior ones who had previously not voted or voted for Republicans.  

A strategy that secures and expands the movement of independents to vote for Democrat Senator candidates is necessary to ensure their control of the US Senate. Suppose they push for measures that don’t recognize the nuanced positions independent voters take. In that case, the Democrats can expect to lose the Senate and have Biden’s legislative initiatives be confined to taking losing votes in Congress. That will demonstrate how brave they are and how ineffective. That’s not a winning strategy for winning the next presidential election.  

Nick Licata is the author of

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

           Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition for $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletterCitizenship Politics

Messaging Abortion Rights in Swing States Will Determine Who Controls the Senate in 2021

Wisconsinites rally at Capitol in support of abortion rights after leaked draft opinion | Wisconsin Public Radio – Creator: Angela Major

With the Democrats blocked from codifying the protections provided to women by the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, they must now turn their attention to organizing state-level elections this coming November. But not in all states — only in those with reasonably winnable seats.

The Democrats’ strategy of relying on national polls, even accurate and reliable, would continue to lead to defeats in the Senate. As I argued in To Save Roe in Congress, the D’s Must Change Their Strategy, that strategy fails to target critical races that can sustain or enlarge the Democrat’s presence in Congress. It also fails to recognize that being pro-abortion does not mean the same thing to all who oppose banning abortion.

The D’s must consider how the abortion issue affects the Democrats to keep control of the Senate. They need to protect four incumbents listed by the non-partisan Roll Call website as the most vulnerable Democrats to lose in November: Mark Kelly in Arizona, Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire. Biden won all four states only by slim margins.

If the status of all Senate seats is not changed, losing just one of these races will turn control of the Senate over to the Republicans. To obtain a margin of safety, the Democrats must gain seats. They have a reasonable chance of taking three seats from the Republicans. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson holds the most likely seat. Two incumbent Republicans chose not to run for reelection: Ohio’smoderate Republican Rob Portman and Pennsylvania’s conservative Pat Toomey.

Although an abortion ban will happen almost immediately in four of these seven states, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin, a national future prohibition would apply to all states. That is a real possibility if the Republicans gain 60% of the seats in the Senate or if the filibuster is removed by the Republicans. With they increase their seats by one above their current number they could amend the filibuster rule without Democrats blocking them.

Democrats must frame their abortion position as protecting constitutionally protected personal rights. However, embracing the right to have an abortion any time before birth may lose those Senate elections. An MSNBC poll shows that while 58% of voters oppose overturning the Roe decision, support for abortion dramatically decreases with having an abortion in the third trimester. Support for legal abortion in most or all cases is at 61% for the 1st trimester, 34% for the 2nd trimester, and 19% for the 3rd trimester.

In approaching future elections, the debate over the right to have an abortion has become a cultural war between the parties. The Republicans accuse the Democrats of murdering human life, a position that Justice Alito references as common law. The Democrats accuse the Republicans of returning women to being second-class citizens.

Organizers, mostly from Planned Parenthood, UltraViolet, and MoveOn, initiated more than 380 protest events demanding that the right to an abortion is a protected right under the constitution. The immediate intensity and national breadth of support for retaining Roe demonstrate the energized core of pro-choice voters. If organized, they could replace anti-abortion Republicans with pro-abortion Democrats.

The anti-abortion movement has not ignited similar massive rallies to Justice Alito’s leaked majority opinion. Although his opinion validates conservatives’ belief that the Roe decision was “egregiously wrong,” as Alito opined, protest rallies have garnered a much larger response than celebrations. Democrats’ more visible demonstrations are evidence of greater passion but not as proof that more Republicans will be voted out of office for their anti-abortion stance.

Nevertheless, polling shows that the Republicans’ overthrowing the Roe decision may motivate more Democrats to vote in November. Ayman Muhyiddin of MSNBC shared a new poll on May 6 showing that overturning Roe would make 45% of Democrats more energized to vote in November. Still, only 25% of Republicans will be more energized. If that poll is correct, it will help the Democrats overcome some strong headwinds. According to conservative columnist Marc A. Thiessen, the Ds “face a massive 17-point enthusiasm gap going into the midterm elections. The last time Republicans demonstrated so much more zeal was in 2010 when Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.”

But getting more Democrats to vote may not be enough to win elections, considering that independents and former Trump supporters helped elect Biden in 2020 by a very slim margin. So will they vote again for Ds based primarily on abortion rights?

Emma Hurt in Axios reports how Georgia swing voters in the latest Axios Engagious/Schlesinger focus groups strongly support abortion rights. However, they say that issue alone probably won’t decide who they support in November’s midterm elections.

The focus groups consisted of 13 Georgians, all from the greater Atlanta metro region, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, then Joe Biden in 2020. Three identified as Democrats, six as Republicans, and four as independents. Although focus groups are not statistically reliable, they reveal subtleties that raw data often miss. For instance, consider a recent poll taken by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The UMass poll was conducted immediately following the Supreme Court leak of Alito’s opinion. A nationwide sample of a thousand people gauged their feelings following that leaked opinion recommending that Roe be overturned. Fifty percent of the respondents thought the Supreme Court should not overturn Roe v. Wade and 40% were unhappy if they made that ruling. However, there is not a clear path ahead because while 45% said they want to see a law passed that would make abortion legal in all 50 states, 39% want to see that decision left up to individual states. Polling results based on aggregate totals do not help guide political strategy if you do not know from which political districts and states they originate.

Those most committed to the cause lead the charge into battle in most wars. But unfortunately, that while passion may win a particular action it may not win the war. Such is the case in the current abortion battles. The side that has the most to lose is the side that succumbs to being led by those that are most adamant about pursuing a total victory.

The Republicans are being led down that path by the Republican leaders that make no exception to abortion for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts came out to support a no-exemptions ban on abortions. Stitt later agreed to allow them if a police report was filed. But now, he is preparing to sign a new law bill that would ban abortions from the moment of “fertilization,” which would effectively prohibit almost all abortions in the state.

Total rejection of abortions goes against traditional Republican policy. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, including former President Donald Trump, said that there should be exceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. In addition, Republicans, in the past, had adhered to the principle of “vulnerability” for living outside the womb not fertilization as the threshold for not proceeding with an abortion.

The Democrats, meanwhile, need to avoid taking a position that defines abortion as being completely unrestricted. If the Republicans successfully tag Senate Democrat candidates as supporting abortion up to the time of birth, Democrats retaining control of Congress diminishes dramatically.

Should the Democrats maintain control of Congress, they may be able to codify the Roe and the subsequent Casey rulings. It’s a conservative position in that it preserves a law that has been depended on for half a century. On the other hand, should the Republicans take control, they may be able to pass a national abortion ban, which would be a radical position — placing women in a role that they have not been in since the 1800s.

The challenge for Senate Democrat candidates in these seven swing states is to rationally discuss abortion rights outside of the cultural framework of only accepting perfect solutions. If the Democrats are the more reasonable party, they will win.

Nick Licata is the author of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties, available as a Kindle edition

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

To Save Roe in Congress, the D’s Must Change Their Strategy

BACORR Clinic Defense at Planned Parenthood on Valencia | Flickr

On Wednesday May 11, the Senate, for the second time this year, defeated Democrats’ legislation to protect abortion rights under federal law. The legislation went down 51-49 on the newest version.

Progressive lawmakers have pushed the original bill since 2013, and it went further than codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law. It barred states from enacting restrictions that have been allowed under that ruling. In February, it was previously defeated by the Senate 46-48, with Sen. Joe Manchin joining the Republicans against it as he did again on the second vote.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal sponsored the most recent version of the Act. He stripped out non-binding statements linking abortion restrictionsto “white supremacy” and “gender oppression.” The new version also eliminated, emphasizing that the protections apply to women and “transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender, and others.” So, while it did not extend Roe’s protections, it did retain them.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pressed ahead with the second vote to put Republican senators on record. He continued the strategy to turn public opinion, especially women voters, against the Republican Senator’s anti-abortion stance. Schumer had warned the Republicans that their support of the Supreme Court Justices’ banning abortions would cost them at the polls. On the Senate floor, he said, “the elections this November will have consequences because the rights of 100 million women are now on the ballot.”

Democrats have reason to believe that they have a winning approach. Polls have shown that most voters don’t want to see the supreme court overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that protected abortion rights.

            William Saletan writing in The BulkWork, relies on polling to overwhelmingly conclude that overturning Roe is terrible for Republicans. In February, a Yahoo News survey found that most voters supported “a constitutional right that women in all states should have some access to abortion,” while only about 30 percent agreed that “states should be able to outlaw” abortion.

            Polling for retaining Roe is surprisingly strong across the political spectrum. In a Fox News poll this month, May 3, most Democrats and Independents (both over 70%) voted to let it stand. Even 60% of Republicans were of that opinion. 

Another recent poll in May taken by Politico found that nearly 50 percent of voters want Congress to pass “a bill to establish federal abortion rights granted through Roe v. Wade, in case the Supreme Court overturns the ruling.” And only about 30 percent oppose overturning Roe.

Vice President, Kamala Harris, was spot on when she told reporters that the Senate is “not where the majority of Americans are on this issue.” So how could the Republicans possibly think they can be re-elected if they vote against what most Americans want? 

The answer is simple. Do the math. When a poll shows whatever most voters want, they often miss the most significant factor: converting that poll into Congressional votes by district or state. That’s because most of those favoring pro-choice are not evenly distributed across the country. Instead, they are concentrated in the most populist areas, states, or cities. 

The Senate does not represent the nation’s population equally. Republican senators currently represent 43.5% of the country’s population. Democrat senators represent 56.5% of Americans. 

Repeatedly relying on the majority sentiment of the public on pro-abortion to be reflected in the Senate is foolish if not misleading. This expectation allowed the progressive wing of the Democrats to believe that they could pass President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan. They rightfully pointed to widespread support for many elements within it. Therefore, they concluded Republicans would be forced to vote for it. However, there was no coordinated effort to organize pro-choice support within swing Republican states.

Regrettably, Senate Democrats face a severe challenge in codifying Roe into federal law. The only open path is to bring onboard some Republicans, along with Manchin, if the legislation is bipartisan. 

The only Republican Senators that may join the Democrats are from states where they could either lose to a Democrat or honestly believe in voting on principle and possibly losing their next primary election. Currently, that would be two women Republican Senators who are the least Trumpian and reflect traditional conservative horse-trading Republican politics.   

Although Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins has voted to stop the Democrats from moving forward, she is working with fellow Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to draft new legislation. According to Collins, it would put protections from the Roe v. Wade decision and the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision into law. They have publicly supported pro-abortion rights but within a narrower framework than the Democrats have championed. Democratic leadership has been reluctant to engage, saying they hadn’t seen their legislation before voting on Blumenthal’s version. Even getting a majority vote might not happen if progressive Democrats see the final version as seriously flawed.  

The last and most significant hurdle is to obtain the needed 60% vote in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. Those most opposed to any abortions or any restrictions on abortion could comprise just over 40% of the Senate and defeat any abortion legislation. 

Progressive Democrats have repeatedly called for eliminating the filibuster, which has often been used to stop past progressive issues, like protecting civil rights. Donald Trump as president, agreed with them in abandoning the filibuster. As a result, the party that can muster a bare majority in the Senate could pass sweeping legislation. 

Sen. Mitch McConnell told reporters that “Historically, there have been abortion votes on the floor of the Senate. None of them have achieved 60 votes,”. He concluded that with the filibuster, “no matter who happens to be in the majority, no matter who happens to be in the White House,” no abortion legislation will pass. 

Of course, if the Republicans gain the majority in the Senate without a filibuster, which is likely, they could pass a national ban on abortions. Ironically, as I wrote, Democrats say eliminate the filibuster, but they use it more than the Republicans.

If Congress, in its current makeup, is unable to protect the right of women to have some freedom over their choice in having a child, then the Democrats will have to focus on state politics. They must craft a message on abortion that will assist their candidates in select states to retain or expand the number of seats in that chamber. That will be hard work, but it will be taking the advice of Justice Alito when he wrote in his opinion that abortion should be decided “by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” 

The Senate, as organized, does not represent a balanced representation of its citizens, so the decision must be returned directly to the citizens. 

Nick Licata is the author of

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

           Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition for $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

A Political Disinformation Campaign Is Threatening Our Democracy 

We are in an era of disinformation. That term is thrown around by all political persuasions to accuse their opponents of not being truthful. The systematic dissemination of disinformation, however, is more than just lying. It is a political strategy in a war to take control of public power. Its intended purpose is to create confusion, which leads to rejecting government institutions entrusted to deliberate over verifiable facts. 

There is a significant difference between lying about a particular action or product and a disinformation campaign to undermine public trust in a democratic republic. A classic example of the former is how the tobacco industry lied or created doubt about scientific findings that demonstrated that smoking caused lung and cardiac diseases. Up to the mid-Fifties, the tobacco industry had succeeded in elevating smoking to be one of the most popular, successful, and widely used items of the early 20th century.

 In response to the mounting evidence that smoking cigarettes damaged one’s health, the tobacco industry hired the nation’s leading public relations firm. The industry followed the consultant’s advice and focused its efforts on disrupting the usual processes of knowledge production in medicine, science, and public health. Consequently, the leading tobacco companies embraced the scientific discourse that assumes there is always more to know. 

The tobacco industry’s strategy was to exaggerate that principle in order to spread doubt and uncertainty about the known facts. The tobacco industry’s campaign did not attack the validity of scientific institutions to analyze the facts; instead, they accused scientists of not wanting to find the correct data.

Eventually, the tobacco industry lost its battle by paying over $206 billion through a court settlement. However, that punishment was only achievable because it was delivered by an independent court system that fairly weighed the facts. 

Borrowing a page from the tobacco playbook, Donald Trump has not directly attacked the concept of democracy; instead, he undermines the creditability of democratic institutions by accusing them of not treating him and his supporters fairly. For example, he attacked Congress for not throwing out Biden’s electoral votes, and he condemned the courts for them tossing out his 60 cases challenging the outcome of the election. His repeated message was that the election was rigged. 

All politicians and political parties can be justly accused of lying from time to time about their accomplishments or their intent to accomplish things they have no power to do. However, past efforts from major political players have stayed within a sandbox of playing with democratic institutions. 

Trump stepped outside that sandbox on the night of the 2012 presidential election when he tweeted, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” He mistakenly thought that Obama had won the election without the majority popular vote. 

Four years later, Trump won his presidential election without winning the popular vote, but he didn’t mention that fact. Instead, when the polls indicated that he might lose the 2016 election to Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, he claimed it would have been rigged if she had won. Then, even after winning, Trump made the unfounded accusation that millions of illegal votes were cast for her. That claim never received any factual support from his supporters.  

He has insisted that government institutions allowed Biden to steal the election, a claim that he has not substantiated. Consequentially, as he and his supporters see it, not only are the institutions corrupt but so are their leaders. And what do you do with corrupt leaders? You jail them.

At a campaign rally 12 days before Election Day 2020, Trump called for locking up his opponent, former V.P. Joe Biden, his son Hunter and tossing Hillary Clinton into the clink. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump excused her father-in-law’s encouraging rally attendees to chant “lock her up” as just him “having fun.” Perhaps, but then again, elected Presidents in other countries, who gained authoritarian powers, have locked up their political opponents so they could not run for election. President Russian President Vladimir Putin jailing Alexei Navalny for unproven fraud charges is the most famous recent example. 

But Trump lost the election, and his opponents took office. Our democratic electoral process worked. Nevertheless, after the results were counted, Donald Trump tweeted, “I won this election by a lot…watch for massive ballot-counting abuse…Remember I told you so!” Trump never acknowledged that all fifty states had certified the election results, with the Republicans controlling more state legislatures than Democrats. 

His campaign of disinformation has been continuous since the presidential election.

Resulting in convincing close to half of the population that he, not Biden, won the election. Two months after the November election, a poll showed that only 55 % of Americans believed that Biden was legitimately elected. Particularly disturbing is that only 52% of independent voters agreed that Biden was a legitimate president. 

How did we get to the point where the current disinformation campaign has undermined trust in our electoral process more than any single effort in the past century? Two attempts are currently underway to that answer that question. 

            Economic Justice and Labor Educator Mark McDermott has introduced a webinar: “We Must Win the War for the Truth to Preserve and Strengthen Our Democracy.” He provides a history of past efforts at disinformation in and outside America. Those efforts are designed to undercut democracy by dividing people, feeding their emotions, destroying their ability to recognize truths, and undermining their capacity to find them. 

McDermott uses the following quotes to illustrate how these strategies are pursued.

            “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” August 28, 2012, Lindsay Graham, former GOP Presidential candidate and current U.S. Senator. 

            “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party

            “Voters are basically lazy…Reason requires a high degree is discipline…The emotions are more easily aroused.” William Gavin, a Nixon media advisor

            “The goal isn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it is to convince people that the truth is unknowable, so you need “to follow a strong leader.” Peter Pomerantsev, a Russian propaganda expert

Paul Loeb, the founder of Campus Election Engagement Project (CEEP), said they havw published a Do Not Be Deceived: Detecting Disinformation guide. It advises readers to start reading news by putting its information in context, zooming out to get a broader picture. Also, if you post a story that you later learn is false, go public with your discovery. Your admission can help rebuild trust with your online community. 

Overall, Loeb’s guide shows how social media is a spawning ground for disinformation. For instance, in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, the top 20 fake election stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the 20 best-performing stories from major news websites.

Political disinformation efforts date to the Roman Empire and will continue indefinitely. So, a democracy must learn to live with it. However, a democratic society can rebuff attacks on its institutions if citizens are educated. As I have argued in Teach Civics In Schools or Face More Insurrections, students should learn how to evaluate the reliability of all information they receive, regardless of the source. Accepting verifiable knowledge pours water on enflamed irrational fears. 

Nick Licata is the author of

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition for $9.99

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times

Monica Guzman Author of Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times

            With the public gravitating toward insular hostile camps, bipartisan cooperation is rare in our current politics. Mónica Guzmán building a bridge between such groups. She has experience in doing so as the director of digital and storytelling at Braver Angels, a nonprofit dedicated to bridging the partisan divide in our democratic republic. 

            Guzmán argues that creating and sustaining a discussion is very achievable in her book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Guzmán shows we can participate in less hostile conversations if we are open to listening and understanding why others have different beliefs.

            This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you have a conversation with someone who sees the left’s agenda being akin to communism, something dark and destructive?

            In the same way I have a conversation with anyone who holds views I don’t share and struggle to understand: by getting curious not just about the perspective but the person. What led them to that view? What have they done or seen that points to it? I’ve had this particular conversation with several people and have found things I can relate to by asking not why they believe what they believe but how they came to believe it. 

Is there a bias in the narrative of mainstream media that contributes to our national divide? For example, Eddie, a man in rural Kentucky, told you he’s tired of the news lecturing him as if he were a racist.

            What we call our mainstream media does tend to lean left in its views, when they arise, and what we call conservative media does tend to object and react to those views. The hostility we see between these two amplifies the already exaggerated hostility each “side” sees in the other. A majority of working journalists are liberal. That doesn’t mean we’re incapable of truly listening to people like Eddie. But when we’re this polarized, we’re going to have to work harder to do it. And fast.  

Why were you afraid to tell your fellow Seattle liberals that you speak to and understand your Trump-supporting parents? 

            I was afraid that the liberals in my life would look at me differently and with suspicion — especially in 2017, when our anxiety about the country’s future had reached soaring new heights. It was one thing to tell them that I knew my parents’ reasons for voting for Trump. It was quite another to say that I’d come to understand and accept them. I don’t mean to imply that I agree with them (ha!), or that I’ve stopped sharing my own political views, fully. We don’t change each other’s minds on big questions when we talk, but we often see each other’s views as less threatening — and less divided than we thought. 

You point out that social media platforms enhance the opportunity for people to sort themselves into groups that have the same political philosophy. Since that sorting significantly contributes to a divided nation, is there a need to limit social media from feeding this trend?

            Yes, but I hesitate to point the finger at technology and media. They’re part of the problem, but when we throw it all on them, we miss how each of us — in our own assumptions, conversations, and actions — contributes to the broken, incurious culture that to me is the biggest threat of all. The internet is a nonplace that makes us into nonpeople. We need tech platforms to come up with creative ways to help us see each other clearly again, immediately. As businesses, they have to give users what they want. So where we go, our social media platforms will follow. 

Researchers found in a 2020 study that Republicans and Democrats think the other despises them about twice as much as they do. Could public education encourage more one to one discussions?

            Yes! We can’t pretend to be informed when we’re not informed about each other, and the more aware we are of how warped our view of the “other side” has gotten, the more likely we’ll be to get curious enough to fix it. Whoever is underrepresented in our lives will be overrepresented in our imaginations, so we have to talk with each other instead of just about each other. Not on social media, but in contained one-to-one conversations where we stand a better chance of being honest, clear, and most importantly, heard.

You say that bridging can lessen our nation’s divide into hostile camps. How does bridging work? 

            We are Sorting into like-minded groups, Othering people who are different from us, and Siloing into spaces that amplify our favorite voices and drown out so many others. It’s an SOS — a call for help — and the only way to answer it is to take steps toward each other even when so much is pushing us apart. That’s bridging. We each move on our own terms — no one else’s. But here’s the good news: The most important thing you can do with a bridge is to keep it, not cross it. So as long as you can have another conversation with the same person about the same topic, you never really left it, and bridging is still possible.  

“Mind the gap” means that your curiosity seeks to fill the gap between what you know and don’t know, it’s a thirst for knowledge. From your experience, who is more curious: liberals or conservatives?

            Curiosity is a practice, not a personality trait, and I’m not convinced that whole groups of people are more or less curious. Many liberals I’ve talked to assume that they are more curious than conservatives, but based on my conversations with conservatives, I just don’t think this is true. People can only hear when they’re heard, and I’ve found that all people I’ve talked with — conservatives, liberals, and everyone between and off that spectrum — are capable of practicing curiosity as long as they feel heard, respected and never condescended to.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Could there be a regime change in Russia?

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            White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said President Biden was not advocating for regime change in Russia when reporters asked. The US has done it in the past, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and other nations, so it is a fair question. In those instances, we have taken direct military actions or manipulated others to eject their leaders. However, it may have to result from their internal politics in Russia.

            There are serious political conditions brewing that threatens 69-year-old Vladimir Putin’s 22-year autocratic control over Russia. Moreover, its current economic collapse coincides with percolating discontent despite massive censorship. 

THEIR ECONOMY IS COLLAPSING 

            Russia’s economy is entering a free-fall resulting from the US lead financial punishments. On March 15, Wharton finance professor Nikolai Roussanov said that the ruble is now worth less than a penny, and the economy is teetering. He said the disappearance of goods from supermarkets coupled with rising prices will be very unpleasant in the short run and will likely lead to jobs disappearing. 

            Russia is behind payments on billions of dollars in foreign debt. Consequently, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on March 13 that the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the Western democracies will trigger a deep recession there this year. In light of these predictions, the Yale-educated economist head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, reportedly has resigned and told Putin that his invasion of Ukraine has plunged the Russian economy into a ‘sewer.’

            A shrinking economy hurts working families and businesses and cripples the state from raising money to finance a stalled war. These were the same conditions that eliminated 300 years of Russia being ruled by the Czars.  Nicholas II was forced to abdicate a century ago. While his army was losing massive amounts of soldiers in WWI, the economy was collapsing, and his nobility was deserting him. 

            However, economic penalties are not enough to dislodge an autocratic regime. America has levied complete embargoes on Iran and Venezuela, bringing hardships to their citizens, but not toppling their leaders. Even the participation of foreign companies halting their businesses in Russia could have a limited impact. According to The New York Times, Putin said assets of those companies should be put under “external management” and transferred “to those who want to work.” Cutting to the chase, he’s talking about nationalizing them.

            Sanctions must be linked to discontent to push Putin off his throne. And that movement must involve both the upper and lower levels of Russian society.

PUBLIC DISCONTENT IS ONCE AGAIN BEING SUPPRESSED

            Public discontent, even if it is widespread, failed to topple Putin with the massive protests of 2017–2018. The timing of these protests occurred in the aftermath of Russia’s two-year financial crisis. The current economic sanctions could lead to similar discontent, but street protesting is being more suppressed now.

            Over  100 cities in 2017 saw thousands of citizen protestors sparked by the investigative film He Is Not Dimon to YouIt exposed the corrupt activity of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. It had more than 23 million views on YouTube

            Putin was the president at the time. The non-governmental polling and sociological research organization, Levada Centre survey, showed that 38% of surveyed Russians supported the protests and that 67% held Putin “entirely” or “to a large extent” responsible for high-level corruption. Tens of thousands protested in central Moscow, and riot police detained more than 1000 of them.

            In the summer and fall of 2017, there were more large protest gatherings; It was estimated that 60,000 people took part in anti-corruption protests across 80 Russian towns and cities. Hundreds of protesters were detained, including the creator of the expose on corruption Alexey Navalny. Additional protests continued in 2018, including protestors against the government-planned retirement age hike.

            These massive protests show that Putin is still in power, and Navalny is in prison after Putin failed to have him assassinated. Putin has been able to hang onto power through police suppression of any dissent and control or limit all the public’s information.

            Police suppression has reached a new level with the war on Ukraine. Instead of arresting 1,000 protestors as in 2017, police arrests have amounted to over 14,000, according to a post on the website of OVD-Info, an independent media project on human rights and political persecutions in Russia. Although most arrested were released, individuals could still be charged under a new law that passed unanimously in both houses of Russia’s parliament. 

            Spreading false news about the military, such as Russia invading Ukraine, could result in fines or three years in jail. If a statement resulted in “severe consequences,” a person could face 15 years in prison. The speaker of their lower parliamentary house said that they passed the law “to protect our soldiers and officers, and to protect the truth.”

HOW TO GET THE TRUTH TO THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

            The question is, how would Russians receive the truth? To grasp the enormity of that task, look at the demographics. You have a population of 143 million, which is less than half of the US, but in an area nearly double ours. 

            When network pundits blithely suggest that the Russian people must get rid of Putin, they must be ignoring the demographics, history, and current political suppression of the news that exists. For a nation’s citizens to successfully challenge the power of their government, they must have reliable knowledge and an opportunity to share that knowledge with others openly. Unfortunately, Russians face severe obstacles to having both.

            Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, its government prosecutors had the Russian media watchdog restrict access to several media broadcasts from western democracies, including BBC and the Russian-language website of the United States-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Russia complained that Radio Liberty’s Russian service had spread “obviously fake” socially significant information about the alleged Russian attack on Ukrainian territory.”

            To get past Russia’s blocking of BBC’s popular Russian language internet news site, BBC has introduced shortwave radio, whose radio uses frequencies carry over long distances. Blocking shortwave transmissions is labor-intensive and takes time and experience, so the BBC’s programming is getting through. However, reception is limited to shortwave portable sets, not commonly found in households.

            Despite the Russian constitution providing freedom of speech and press, Putin’s administration has forced the press to exercise self-censorship. This practice has constrained the press’s coverage of controversial issues. For instance, Al Jazeera reported that Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, whose editor Dmitry Muratov was a co-winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, would remove material on Russia’s military actions in Ukraine from its website because of censorship.

            Putin has also moved to curtail internet content that criticizes the government. As a result, TikTok users can see only old Russian-made content, and all non-Russian content is blocked. Also, adding new content originating within Russia is banned or heavily censored. 

            A Russian court banned Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for “extremist” activities, making its work in Russia illegal. The ruling was precipitated by Meta relaxing its rules against violent speech by people inside Ukraine, which was directed at the Russian military invasion of their country. Meta does not permit calls for violence, harassment, or discrimination against Russian people. Russian authorities have also restricted access to Twitter under a federal law regulating calls for riots, extremism, protests, and the spread of false information.

            Russians circumvent these restrictions and bans by using virtual private networks or VPNs in response to these multiple restrictions and prohibitions. Their use has increased almost by 3,000% since the war began. One app being used is Psiphon, a free and open-source Internet censorship circumvention tool that uses secure communication and obfuscation technologies. 

            One of the most unique and potentially powerful mediums to reach Russians is Reface, a viral face-swap app from Ukraine that adds anti-war push notifications. As of the end of February, their anti-war campaign has targeted specific messages to its 5.5 million users in Russia. They provide a link to a slideshow of war imagery from inside Ukraine — including images of burnt-out and bomb-damaged buildings and photos of civilians trying to shelter. More potent than words, images do not need to be in Russian to convey a message.

            Meanwhile, Russia’s RT platform had over a million subscribers in the European Union before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok dropped Russia’s RT off their platforms. Their action followed the EU imposed sanctions on the Kremlin-backed media network for distributing disinformation. However, the Telegram platform, which has massive audiences, still carries RT in Europe.  

            Putin’s regime has shaped the internet pipeline into the country. Only an unchallenged narrative is presented to the Russians where the Ukrainian conflict is a minor police action to attack a stronghold of Nazis. Putin augmented his internet dominance with a massive rally in a Moscow stadium last Friday. 

            City police said more than 200,000 people gathered in and around the stadium. He spoke for just five minutes. Although photos showed a flag-waving crowd, the speech was not interrupted. Reuters and several Russian outlets reported that state employees had been ordered to attend. 

            Could there be some discontent with a war that is dragging on? Is there some unease with restricted access to their bank savings underneath this passive acceptance of turning out to wave flags as required? Is news of the possible 12,000 Russian troops killed in Ukraine spreading word-by-mouth among the general public?  Even the pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda posted that 10,000 had died, quickly removing that post.

RUSSIANS NEED A SAFE PLACE TO GATHER 

            Mass rallies or solo internet surfing do not provide the needed ingredient to allow Russian citizens to exchange and discuss the limited amount of critical information that is getting through to them.

            Although people could gather in their homes, they might feel that their homes and families could be threatened if any criticisms were leaked to the government. However, coffee houses have provided a gathering place in the past that welcomed open and intimate discussions among friends. Like other momentous civilian movements, the American Revolution owes its origins to such a setting. 

            The US could promote coffeehouse environments to allow for some fermentation of ideas on how Russian citizens could regain some control over their government. Ironically, that effort could be nourished by Starbucks reopening a limited number of its 300 venues. The ones selected to be reopened could be in just five cities: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Samara, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod. A third of all Russian universities are in these cities. Students and youth would most likely be Starbucks customers. If Starbucks provides settings like those in the US, discussions could flow naturally among these young, probably news-conscious customers. 

            Starbucks would not have to lift a finger to encourage discussions. Doing so might alert the authorities to the possibility of seditious activity. These coffeehouses merely need to operate as a business that serves the needs of their customers to drink coffee, read whatever they wish, and talk among their friends. 

            This approach has a chance of allowing citizens to think about what is happening in Ukraine and share their thoughts with others. Students are also likely to be in that tiny 5% of Russians that speak English, which is the language that carries critical information about the Ukraine War into Russia. So, yes, a multi-national corporation could serve to stimulate democratic ideas within an autocratic state. 

PUTIN’S KREMLIN IS CRACKING

            Students attending the best Russian colleges, located in these five cities, would have the most influential people in Russia be their parents:  government and military leaders or business oligarchs that are becoming seriously bothered by the economic sanctions. Just as the sons and daughters of America’s leaders in the sixties brought home their ideas about the need to stop the Vietnam War, Russia’s youth could do the same regarding the war in Ukraine. They could be the seeds that break the ground upon which Putin stands.

            And recent reports indicate that Putin is on shaky grounds. He fired eight generals due to his military losses in the invasion of Ukraine coupled with the Russian invaders facing severe shortages of fuel, food, and ammunition. One of those fired was his deputy chief of Russia’s National Guard, accused of leaking information. 

            Furthermore, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s military and security services, a top Russian intelligence official has been put under house arrest along with his deputy. Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, has lost his standing with Putin. In protest of the war, Russian climate envoy Anatoly Chubais resigned and left the country.

            These and other top-level firings, still to be revealed, may portend a reenactment of Joseph Stalin’s purging of his closest subordinates. Putin’s public announcements called for Russia to get rid of “scum and traitors” as “a necessary self-purification of society.” Oligarchs and those in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) who profiteered from Putin’s kleptocracy may be targets more than any street protestors. They serve as visible scapegoats for a failing war and the corruption that has been a source of huge public demonstrations in the recent past.

            Putin shaped the FSB from its predecessor, the KGB, the Soviet Union’s security agency. He is most aware that the KGB attempted to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev in a failed coup d’état. Consequently, Putin has a keen interest in keeping FSB leaders in check by either detaining, arresting, or demoting them. Moreover, they hold the secured knowledge of who has the political, economic, and military power to challenge Putin. 

            Putin’s arrests of those with power around him and his attempts to project himself as Russia’s champion against the elites could be his play to block any coup. However, as the war drags on, his efforts may consolidate opposition more than diminish it. So, the race may have begun to determine if Russia’s internal high-level opposition will be mobilized and act before Putin can end the war with some measurable victory, no matter how small of a fig leaf. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Laura Coates’ Just Pursuit seeks a fair legal system for Blacks

Laura Coates, author of “Just Pursuit,” touches the heart as few other writers can. Her stories are not filled with anger or pity but with empathy for those caught in the legal-system web, both as victims and perpetrators.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Explain why a colleague described working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “human misery.”

The justice system takes its toll on every person who plays a role in the system, whether it’s the offender or victim, the people defending or prosecuting. Everyone with their fingerprints in the system will be marked by it, and at times it is indelible.

One of your most heartfelt chapters tells of an unregistered immigrant who, as a crime victim himself, was deported due to your legal obligation to report his status to your superiors. How did that feel?

I don’t want to compare my feelings in any way to the person’s emotions who was most impacted by the deportation. The incident marked the battle of allegiance that I felt during my work in the Justice Department — trying to reconcile the distinction of what is fair and what is lawful. I feel now, as I did then, torn that the requirement for justice often creates injustice.

You write that you were taught “to understand the Civil Rights Era not as finite but as a movement … to keep in motion.” Are you saying that civil rights laws must be enforced and updated to address ongoing societal changes?

Civil rights is often mistaken as an era, when it really is a concept that should define any democratic nation. It should match who we are as a people and be practiced every single day. But, unfortunately, America is often not who it is on paper. We need to look no further than the Voting Rights Act and the clawing back of the gains from that period. We must enforce laws and not treat them as just words on paper. We have to police our philosophies to ensure they are still in place, or lose their benefits.

Your stories poignantly illustrate institutional racism influencing how justice is administered. But the word “racism” only appears twice in “Just Pursuit.” 

I wasn’t intentional in avoiding the word racism. The concept as a word is too reductive, which makes it easy to discount as playing the race card. However, racism is illustrated on every page of “Just Pursuit.” I wanted people to feel what the law does and see what justice looks like. We have a legal system that strives to be a justice system because nothing in this country has ever been accomplished by just preserving the status quo.

You feared that your decision not to prosecute a case could have fatal consequences. Please explain what you mean.

If I think it is too much to prove the burden of guilt on the accused because the victim is not cooperative, I know there could be consequences down the road to this person’s life. However, making that decision is like having the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. As a prosecutor, you should be perfect, but you aren’t given the time or resources to be so.

You wrote that “Our society denies the prevalence of domestic violence and actively seeks to discredit its victims.” What did you see as a former prosecutor?

Sometimes we deny the presence of evil actors because it makes us feel safer. It makes us think that people are in the justice system because of the consequences of their choices. But unfortunately, there are many victims of crime through no fault of their own. For instance, the victims of sexual violence are victimized twice: first from the crime itself; second, by being judged and blamed. People do that not out of cruelty but as a coping mechanism, thinking, “this could never be me.” They would have made different choices.

“Race permeates our entire justice system and informs how we even define what justice is — and who it’s for.” You went to law school, so do you believe that critical race theory, as discussed in law school, was saying just that?

I think critical race theory describes how race influences all of America. It points out the truth and how you can resolve it. Then you can work toward progress. It’s wrong to think that the justice system is the one place immune from the effects brought about by our history of slavery.

How do you respond when you hear that you can’t teach or discuss racial relations because white people will feel guilty?

It’s a silly notion because it’s the one discussion where critics mention creating guilt when it comes to race. We’ve learned a lot about women’s rights and the suffrage movement, and do we hear men saying that it shouldn’t be taught because it impugns men?

You don’t write about democracy as relevant to how laws are applied. Why is that?

Democracy is important, but in the justice system, we justify how we use it to take away democracy. Your status in the justice system determines your access to democracy. You can tell how important a right is, like voting, by how often they try to take it away.

The movement to defund the police can see all police as oppressors. However, you found them diverse in being fair, with the majority serving honorably. So, how should we deal with institutional police abuse?

The “defund the police” slogan is being misconstrued. Police are treated as a panacea, but they cannot do it all. When talking about justice reform, the conversation should not be confined to police encounters. It’s an ecosystem that needs a comprehensive approach that begins with the courts and goes to the Supreme Court. Everyone has a role from the bench to the Senate floor.  

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Trump-Republicans Should Fear Mike Pence – as a Libertarian Presidential Candidate

Gov Mike Pence speaking at a 2016 campaign rally for Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore

 Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly hinted that he will run again for President.

He ended this month’s influential Conservative Political Action Conference saying“Who knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is most often mentioned as the emerging Trump primary opponent. Fifty-one percent of the nationwide Republican base view him favorably — up from 43 percent in mid-May.

But the real threat to a future Trump-dominated Republican Party comes from his former Vice President Mike Pence, not DeSantis. That’s because Pence might just have enough sense to realize that he will not get the Republican nomination.

By avoiding the dead-end Republican primary, he could become a viable third-party candidate. One that could slice off a significant number of Republican and conservative independent voters in the general election to eliminate Trump’s chance of a victory. He may lose the election, but a new or revitalized non-Trumper Republican Party might just result.

Tara Setmayer, former GOP congressional communications director, summed up conventional logic last week on the NBC website that paints Pence as a loser. “There is no viable path to being the GOP presidential nominee without Trump’s MAGA supporters, who won’t support anyone publicly rebuking the former president.” Consequently, Setmayer declared that Pence’s political career was right on top of a heap of ash for telling the gasping Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” and “un-American” for wanting Pence to reject certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Pence gave that speech smack-dab in the middle of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound. That same day the Republican National Committee passed a resolution censoring fellow Republicans Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Lininger of Illinois for joining the bi-partisan congressional committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection.

So, the political insiders and pundits chalk up Pence, once the undying loyal and servile Vice President to Trump, as now locked out of his party’s wheelhouse. But, seriously, didn’t he know criticizing Trump was tantamount to heresy.

But wait just a moment. Pence was the Governor of Indiana, a solidly red state. With Pence on the ticket as V.P. in 2016, Trump won the state with a 19% victory margin. Four years later, Pence’s Republican successor as Indiana Governor won with a 24% victory margin, while Trump’s presidential victory margin slipped to 16%. That slippage could be seen as totally due to Trump and not Pence since he was continually in Trump’s shadow.

There is another factor that accounts for the drop, the Libertarian Party. They are a growing force in Indiana. For example, in 2016, the Libertarian candidate for governor got 3.2%, but in 2020 their candidate received 11.4%. However, Libertarian candidates have never garnered more than 4% in a Presidential election. Still, since its formation in 1971, they have consistently outpolled the largest leftist party, the Green party, three to one. The Libertarian Party also is the only third-party registered in all fifty states to run a presidential candidate.

While the Libertarians come from both sides of the political spectrum, a Pew poll taken in the late summer of 2016 showed that 11 percent of them leaned to Republicans, 7 percent to Democrats. An earlier 2012 survey found only 5 percent called themselves Democrats or liberals (3 percent). And like the Trump-Republicans, they are overwhelmingly white (94 percent) predominantly male (68 percent). Consequently, a Libertarian-backed Presidential candidate would hurt the chances of a victory by a Republican candidate more than a Democrat in swing states.

Aside from raising critical issues, a third-party candidate can spike the chances of either of the major parties’ presidential candidate. It conceivably happened most recently with Green Party candidates in 2000 and 2016. Number crunchers have argued that Ralph Nader may have taken enough votes away from incumbent Vice President Al Gore in New Hampshire and Florida to allow George H. W. Bush to win the 2000 election by electoral but not popular votes.

Critics accuse Green Party candidate Jill Stein of taking votes away from Hillary Clinton in the three Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which allowed Trump to win the 2016 race. His margin of victory was less than Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s vote count in those states.

Other past third-party attempts have derailed an incumbent or favored candidate from winning. For example, although no former Vice President has ever run against his former President from the same party, a former president ran against his former vice president, an incumbent president. In the 1912 election, Republican Theodore Roosevelt running under the Progressive Party, cost Republican Howard Taft to lose the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Roosevelt ran to the left of both the Republican and Democratic candidates. Pence would be running to the right of the Democratic candidate. But even in comparison to Republican Donald Trump, he has the credentials for running as the most winnable right-wing candidate. As the Indiana Governor, FiveThirtyEight ranked him as the second most conservative governor. While serving in the House of Representatives, Pence was rated as a far-right Republican leader based on an analysis of bill sponsorship by the non-partisan GovTrack website.

Pence’s record helps him with the reactionary Republican voter base. A recent GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio, who previously did polling for Trump’s 2020 campaign, shows support for Pence at 19 percent and DeSantis at 17 percent among GOP primary voters ­without Trump in the mix. However, Trump gets 51 percent support when his name is added, trailed by Pence at 9 percent and DeSantis at 7 percent.

Still, Trump is not an unbeatable juggernaut. A CNN Poll conducted by SSRS from January 10 through February 6 shows that Republican and Republican-leaning voters are about evenly split between wanting their party to nominate Trump again (50%) or wanting a different candidate (49%). A majority of Republicans (54%) favored Trump, compared with 38% of Republican-leaning independents. In other words, overall, Republican and Independent conservatives are open to another candidate.

These polls show that Pence could hook up with the Libertarian Party to avoid the internal Republican Party blood bath if Trump is challenged in the Republican Primary. DeSantis’ reputation as a fighter makes it more likely to battle Trump within the party. He knows that the odds will be against him. That battle lands at the feet of the RNC, whichcontrols the party’s presidential primary and the nominating convention. And Trump owns the RNC. Nevertheless, the New York Times reported that DeSantis is refusing to commit to clear the way for Trump if the ex-president jumps into the 2024 presidential race.

The Daily Mail reported how DeSantis is preparing for a showdown with Trump by working media influencers. On January 6, for instance, DeSantis invited nine social media stars to Tallahassee to stop at the governor’s office, have dinner at the governor’s mansion and go for drinks at a local lounge. Each of the attendees, including those from Fox News, New York Post, Turning Point USA, and the Claremont Institute, had more than 95,000 Twitter followers.

Pence has also been making the rounds but in a quieter undertaking. For instance, he skipped the opportunity to speak at the critically important CPAC conference, while Trump and DeSantis were featured, speakers. So, what do the Libertarians have to offer Pence to offset going down the primary rabbit hole in the hope of getting the Republican nomination?

First, without hesitation, Libertarians publicly condemned the January 6 insurrection. As the U.S. Capitol building was being breached, Libertarian National Committee Chair Joe Bishop-Henchman issued the following statement: “This is not patriotism. This is not protesting. This is reprehensible violence and aggression and needs to stop now. We hope safety for all those who work in the Capitol.” Instead, the RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel identified the January 6 insurrection as “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

Pence is not a dynamic speaker like Trump or DeSantis, rather he is seen as a somewhat dull and everyday politician. His policies are almost identical to Trump and DeSantis’s, but his demeanor is closer to good-old plain Joe Biden’s. Liberals and moderates will vehemently fight against Pence’s reactionary policies that block social justice and environmental protection legislation. However, his extreme conservatism is not coupled with unquestionable loyalty to one man’s autocratic vision for this nation. In other words, he could be a safe candidate for conservative Republicans who, like Pence, believe in following the constitutional rules and norms even when they don’t validate your desires.

Vice President Mike Pence has described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” Pence’s beliefs could be acceptable to Libertarians as long he accommodates their principles of opposing government censorship in any form, opposing all government interference with private property, and prohibiting initiation of physical force against others. On the issue of abortion, which Pence has intensely opposed, the Libertarian Party recognizes that its membership includes both “pro-choice” or “pro-life” advocates. However, the party believes these views should remain matters of individual conscience. Given the make-up of the Supreme Court, Pence doesn’t need to do much on abortion other than support state rights to regulate it out of existence as they choose.

Overall, a workable relationship for a campaign could be had between Pence and the Libertarian Party. For Pence to get the electoral votes in a state, he must run as a candidate from a new Republican-like third-party or the Libertarian Party. If both endorsed Pence as their candidate, just one of them would sponsor him in a state to not divide his vote in that state.

All states, but two, use party block voting (PBV), in which all the state’s electoral votes go to a party’s candidate that won the popular vote. The electoral voters swear to vote for their party’s candidate. So, if Pence won a state as a Libertarian or as a New-Republican candidate, the electoral voters would still be pledged to Mike Pence. The constitution does not obligate candidates to run from a party. Instead, the electoral voters are committed to the candidate, allowing the electoral votes to be combined to a single candidate when presented to Congress for a count.

With this strategy, Pence gains an invaluable social and political infrastructure for getting on the ballot in every state. The Libertarian Party would gain a unique opportunity to garner more votes than any prior third party had since the formation of the Republican Party, which saw the dissolution of the Whig Party. And the New-Republican party could see its candidate not be shut out from obtaining electoral votes.

This approach may also appeal to many non-activist Republicans who are disgruntled with Trump, either as individuals or organized into groups like the Lincoln Project. For example, many would agree with Representative Liz Cheney when she says, “I’m a constitutional conservative, and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump.”

It is a strategy that conservative politicians like Cheney might see an independent presidential campaign, working in alliance with the Libertarian Party, as necessary to restore the Republican Party. A new entity could emerge which would be just as conservative as the current Republican Party. However, it would acknowledge the peaceful transfer of executive power every four years, which Trump-Republicans do not accept.

Here’s the final kicker. Funding this unique amalgam may well come from billionaires like the Koch brothers. For instance, Billionaire David Koch ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, contributing $2 million, worth $7 million in 2022 dollars. His idea that government is the problem, and the free market is the solution to everything has been embraced by the Republican Party.

The Koch Charles and David brothers did not initially support Trump and have been critical of him. Although David died in 2019, Charles Koch and other reactionary billionaires could pump money into a Pence campaign if Trump snuffs out his opposition within the Republican Party. Having been hijacked by Trump, taking back “their” party could be the backdoor to funding Pence’s campaign effort.

Why Making the COVID Vaccine was a Long Shot

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longshot

An interview with David Heath, author of Longshot, reveals that government, businesses, and many researchers discounted the science that made the COVID vaccine possible. 

“Longshot: The Inside Story of the Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine” by award-winning investigative journalist David Heath exposes the political underside of how the race was won. Heath explains the complex chemistry involved in creating vaccines in understandable terms. He also describes the incredible challenges a handful of scientists faced in convincing other scientists and investors that making a COVID vaccine was possible.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Vaccines have been used for a hundred years but explain how the COVID vaccine introduced a revolutionary new approach to making them.
The COVID-19 vaccines are among the greatest achievements of modern medicine. Never before have we developed a vaccine fast enough to tame a pandemic. Traditionally, vaccines were made of dead or weakened viruses. The mRNA approach uses the same method as our body’s DNA to produce a protein that mimics the virus, thus triggering our immune system. Scientists also built on HIV vaccine research to replicate the protein with unusual precision — a method Jonas Salk could have never imagined. That’s why the vaccines are so safe and effective.

You wrote that scientists had looked at RNA but that, “The trends had moved on. Nobody cared about RNA.” How has this attitude influenced finding a new vaccine?
Most researchers thought using mRNA would be a revolutionary advance in treating many illnesses, but nobody could get it to work. Scientist Katalin Karikó spent her career trying to figure out why mRNA kept failing in experiments. Unfortunately, the government wouldn’t provide her any funding. Eventually, she and Drew Weissman solved the riddle of mRNA, but they did a poor job explaining the importance of their discovery. So it went largely unnoticed.

The COVID vaccines were created at speed unparalleled by historical standards. There had never been a vaccine developed in less than four years. What accounted for this incredible speed?
Actually, it took years to figure out how to make them. Barney Graham and one of his scientists, Jason McLellan, made the first critical breakthrough in vaccine science in 2013 while developing a respiratory vaccine that is still in clinical trials. Graham immediately employed this new approach on coronaviruses. He knew it was inevitable after SARS and MERS outbreaks that there would be another coronavirus epidemic eventually. By the time COVID appeared in Wuhan, Graham only had to tweak a MERS vaccine he had developed.

You write that although the CEO of Moderna was more of an extraordinary salesman than a scientist, without him, Moderna might not have developed an mRNA vaccine. 
Moderna takes credit for the scientific breakthroughs that made its vaccine possible. But based on my interviews with scientists who made the key discoveries, this is not true. Nevertheless, the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, raised an awful lot of money for Moderna, which made it possible for the company to mass-produce a vaccine when the pandemic hit.

How does resistance to vaccinations fit into your story?
Past epidemics, such as polio or smallpox, have been all but eradicated because everyone trusted science and got vaccinated. We even achieved herd immunity against the highly contagious measles virus. The U.S. had only 13 cases of measles in 2020. Anti-vaxxers say that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t perfect. That’s true of all vaccines; however, the pandemic will continue until virtually everyone is either vaccinated or gets sick.

How does the market economy influence the discovery and use of new vaccines?
Many vaccines are perceived as not terribly profitable. To inoculate the whole world, vaccines must be very cheap, like a dollar a shot. Moderna wasn’t all that interested in vaccines at first. The company didn’t think they’d be that lucrative. But, over time, it became clear that vaccines were the easiest way to show how mRNA could work as a marketable product and make money for the company.

You wrote that “The brutal truth is that this is not likely the last pandemic we will face. There is a high probability that we will see new strains of novel coronaviruses in the future.”  
As weary as we are of this pandemic, keep in mind that this is the third novel coronavirus epidemic in the past 20 years. Thousands of other coronavirus strains in bats could leap to humans. The worst-case scenario would be a virus as contagious as the omicron variant and as deadly as MERS, where 35% of those infected die.

Is there currently sufficient government oversight to assure that vaccine trials are safe and the results are reliable? 
Past protocols for testing vaccines on humans were insufficient. In the 1960s, researchers at the National Institutes of Health were using vulnerable African American babies at an orphanage as guinea pigs. There were three trials, and an experimental respiratory syncytial virus vaccine failed in all of them, with two toddlers out of 31 children dying. The vaccine had made them more vulnerable to RSV. To be clear, there is no evidence at all that the COVID-19 vaccines cause vaccine-enhanced disease. These vaccines are among the safest in history.

Why did Moderna initially resist adding Black and Latino participants in their trials?
Operation Warp Speed determined that it was unacceptable that Moderna was not recruiting enough minority candidates. Data at the time showed that people of color were more likely to die of COVID-19 and less likely to accept the results of scientific trials. Moderna’s CEO Bancel worried that delaying the trial to expand the number of participants might mean getting beat by Pfizer, but he relented after pressure from the government.

Did Seattle play a significant role in discovering a new COVID vaccine?
Seattle plays a pivotal role in my book “Longshot” for two reasons. First, it’s the site where the rest of the country first saw that the epidemic was out of control. And second, by coincidence, it was the site where the first experimental COVID-19 vaccine was administered. Jennifer Haller’s historic first vaccine on March 16, 2020, was the same vaccine that was approved by December of that year.

The Democrats Can Avoid a Devastating  Loss in November

A day doesn’t go by without news that the Republicans are making another move to oust Democrats this November from Congress and state governments. 

            Democrats have major hurdles in the courts and congress trying to curtail unethical if not illegal practices. With reactionary Republicans controlling the Supreme court, arguing that they are unlawful will not carry the day. There are not enough bipartisan votes in congress to eliminate the filibuster or pass the Build Back Better bill or any bills protecting or expanding voting access. Forcing votes they know will be lost is not a strategy for winning.

            Democrats should keep in mind that smaller armies have beaten bigger armies throughout history. So how did they do it? They picked the landscape that improved their chances of winning a battle. They made orderly retreats from battles rather than losing the resources needed to fight on. And they trained their soldiers to know how to best engage in a struggle. The Democrats can derail the Republican’s plans if they keep these lessons in mind.

The Republican Game Plan’s Three-Prong Attack

Limiting access to voting

            Republicans limiting Democratic access to voting simply targets large cities. An Associated Press’s analysis of the Clinton vs. Trump votes revealed that Clinton lost the election because of lower turnout in predominantly black areas and Democratic bastions, i.e., urban areas. A Brookings Institute report found that Biden had won 509 counties and Trump 2,547 counties in 2020. Biden’s counties had the largest populations and the most diverse. 

            Republicans on the courts and state legislatures severely limit access to drop boxes for collecting ballots, forcing folks to wait in hour-long lines. A Wisconsin Republican judge invalidated years of guidance from that state’s Elections Commission by ruling that drop boxes for absentee ballots are illegal statewide.

            Meanwhile, state Republican legislatures are taking similar actions. For example, Georgia eliminated 73 percent of drop boxes in Fulton County, which contains Atlanta. In addition, a Republican-controlled legislature passed new voting laws in Texas that rejected as many as half of absentee ballot applications in the most populous counties. Overall, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote.

Throwing out already cast ballots

            The former government-paid advisor to then-President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, told his radio audience of over 100,000 that they need to occupy the vote-counting positions in their counties to oversee elections. His vision was “we will decertify all those electors in those four states,” the swing states that Biden won.

            The most powerful path to negating votes already cast is to use the Independent State Legislatures doctrine, which would allow a state legislature to choose a separate list of electors than what a popular vote in that state had chosen. Consequently, the party that controls the state legislatures can switch elector delegates assigned from the winning candidate to those whose party controls the state legislature. Currently, the Republicans control both chambers in 30 states, and the Democrats control both in 18.

            This barely legal transfer would be with the understanding that massive fraud had occurred. The elected or appointed state officials would make that charge. If they all came from the same party, there might be no problem. However, Trump ran into a problem overturning the popular vote in Georgia. The Republicans counting the votes refused to “find” the votes that Trump needed to take the electors from Biden. 

            Republicans are now running candidates in many states who believe, without any evidence, that Trump won the election. It is expected that if Biden or another Democrat wins the 2024 Presidential election, these Republicans if they get into office, would transfer the electors to a Republican Presidential candidate on the flimsiest claims of massive fraud. 

Creating more Republican House Seats

            Both parties gerrymander district boundaries to their advantage. However, since Republicans control more state legislatures than Democrats, 

they can redraw voting boundaries in states that represent 187 congressional seats, compared with just 75 for Democrats.

            A good-government movement helped create new independent state commissions or bi-partisan ones to draw district boundaries based on non-racially biased demographics. However, New York Times journalists report that these commissions have become “bogged down in political trench warfare.” 

            In Iowa, Republican legislators rejected their nonpartisan career staff members’ redistricted map and substituted one with new districts were carried by Trump in 2020. Utah Republicans adopted their own maps, ignoring proposals from a redistricting commission that voters approved in 2018. Likewise, Ohio Republicans controlled the legislature and simply ignored its redistricting commission, although the Ohio Supreme Court tossed out their map.

            The same NYT reporters in another article reviewed the new Republican gerrymandered districts for the 2022 November congressional races. They concluded that the Republicans had already added enough districts to capture control of the House of Representatives. Just five of the most likely to flip from a Democratic victory to a Republican would be enough. Only a quarter of all congressional district boundaries have yet to be adopted by state legislatures. 

         The Democrats’ Game Plan Should Include the Following

Know the political landscape of states and state legislatures  

            For Democrats to keep the states that Biden won and have a chance at winning key state legislature races, they must coordinate state efforts. In the future, the party leaderships in swing states need to meet at least quarterly to share tactics on how best to move forward. 

            Each State Democratic Party Committee needs to work with community-based get-out-the-vote organizations in sharing resources to identify likely Democratic voters. But unfortunately, that coordination is not apparent on the Democratic Party website.

            There are no links to statewide community-based organizations, many of which have achieved phenomenal victories. One of them, the New Virginia Majority, focusing on working-class communities of color, registered 140,000 new voters in 2016, which led to Democrats gaining 15 house seats. The Republicans had expected to lose no more than five. 

            This feat was accomplished despite Republican gerrymandered districts. The organizers chose to use their limited resources on efforts they could win. They didn’t try to change the minds of solid Republicans. Instead, they focused on the landscape of potential voters who would likely vote for Democrats. 

             On the Democratic State website page, a Democrat will find their state map divided up by county boundaries. What good does that do? Indiana has 92 counties, but more than half (3.4 million) of that population resides in just 20 of them. Florida has 67 counties, with over half in just six counties. Linking Democrats to one another across vast areas of a state is comforting, but that alone will not win elections. 

            Every state should have two state maps on this website. One would show congressional districts, and the other showing state legislative districts. The districts that have the potential to swing from Republican to Democrat in the next election must be highlighted. Volunteers then should be directed to those districts.

             In other words, the Democrats need to select the turf that they can win instead of wandering around in a state’s political wilderness. 

Know when to retreat with a limited victory 

            George Washington’s greatest skill as a general was mastering an orderly withdrawal in battles he could not win. That enabled his troops to fight on to win the war. Progressive Democrats should consider that strategy. But unfortunately, they did not apply it to Biden’s proposed Build Back Better Plan. After meeting resistance to his three-trillion-dollar plan, Biden recognized that he could get a smaller infrastructure bill passed. So, he pushed for a separate vote on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

            It was a smart move. The size of this federal investment is twice what was spent to build the interstate highway system when adjusted for inflation. According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill was backed by 63% of Americans. More importantly, it opens the door to address counties’ concerns in every state. Counties spend $134 billion each year building infrastructure and maintaining public works. In the last three presidential elections, 80 percent of the 3,069 counties have gone for a Republican President. Now, Democrats can boast about providing something tangible that those counties can see.

            Unfortunately, the media coverage of this historic bill was sidelined by Congressional Democrats. Moderate house members got a delay wanting the Congressional Budget Office to review the bill’s fiscal impact. But most of the media coverage covered the Democrats’ ninety-member Progressive Caucus opposition. Most of their members would vote against the infrastructure bill unless tied to voting for the larger Build Back Better bill. The USA/Today poll indicated that 52 percent of the public supported expanding the social safety net provided in the BBB plan. Not publicized is how much of that support was concentrated in areas already voting for Democrats.

            The intra-party struggle damaged Biden and the party’s image. Biden’s approval rating dropped from 57 percent at the beginning of his term to 40% in January 2022. He has the lowest approval rating of any President’s first-year term, except for Donald Trump. The most significant drop has been among independent voters, losing 11 percentage points since July. There has also been a dramatic downward shift this last year in the approval ratings for the Democratic Party. It dropped nine percentage points, while the Republicans gained. They now are 5 percent higher than the Democrats.

            If the Biden is seen as weak and ineffective, and if the Democrats are seen as uncompromising as the Republicans, they will lose the next two rounds of national elections. However, there are probably enough independent voters even in the newly gerrymandered congressional districts to flip Republican districts to Democratic. 

            To get their votes, Democrats must have a clear message that they can get something done and the Republicans cannot. Former President Donald Trump could not fund the nation’s infrastructure with four years in office. Only a handful of Republicans voted for the Biden infrastructure bill in the House. If the Democrats can pass a slimmed-down BBB bill, they will deny the Republican charge that the Democrats cannot govern. 

            Enough of those gerrymandered districts have independent voters that could flip to win the election wars. It takes discipline to make an orderly retreat on the legislative front to settle for more minor victories in exchange for retaining the resources to win future ones.

Prepare to monitor local voting stations 

             Steve Bannon encouraging his radio listeners to occupy the official positions that oversee local ballot-counting sounds like a riff attributed to Joseph Stalin by his former secretary: who votes is not as important as who counts the vote. Stalin never lost an election. 

            The Democrats must run candidates for these local positions. If not, then many will be filled by folks who may deny a Democrat having won any election. All they need is an unsubstantiated rumor of ballot fraud. Volunteer poll watchers also need to be trained to monitor possible challenges to the normal functioning of collecting and casting ballots. A national program could distribute training materials. Videos could help volunteers prepare to be knowledgeable poll watchers. 

            The Republican’s strategy is built around the belief that Trump did not lose the vote count but that massive fraud allowed Biden to win. The Republican website has a clear national message “to ensure the protection of the ballot box.” To meet that objective, they created a Committee On Election Integrity Nationwide chaired by Florida’s state party chair who wants to “build out an expansive Election Day Operations program, backed by legal efforts.” 

            Meanwhile, the Democrats’ message is the usual “lets all vote.” On their website national page, I Will Vote offers advice to the individual: “Select your state, make sure you’re registered to vote, then choose how you’re going to vote this year.” Unfortunately, this is not an organizing strategy. There is no option to join a group or a project organized to win elections.

            Democrats need a succinct counter-message. It could be as simple as “honest in and honest out” on ballots cast and then counted. Democrats can highlight the possibility that anyone’s honest ballot could be rejected if any objection was made to it from a partisan ballot counter or a poll watcher. A nationwide coordinated effort that links state parties with local community organizations and local media print and internet outlets must deliver the same message. 

            The Democrats can retain both chambers if they use their resources to get out the vote in the critical swing states. To keep them Democratic, they should look at how victories have been achieved in the past when the odds looked bad.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

A National Network of Election Deniers will Oversee the 2024 Election

            Followers of Donald Trump are methodically placing election deniers, those who believe Biden stole the election through fraudulent voting, in crucial state positions who could legally overturn a popular vote if a Trumper candidate does not win the next presidential election.

            The liberal press has covered this effort with Barton Gellman’s article in the Atlantic Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun, leading the charge. But as Gellman immediately notes, Trump’s attempt wouldn’t be an armed uprising.

            Nevertheless, violence like the January 6 offense on the Capitol could be repeated in the future by right-wing groups like the Oath Keepers, 1st Amendment Praetorian and the Proud Boys. There is no other word than “violence” to describe what happened. At a congressional hearing last week, four officers testified before congress that crowds of people, many wielding weapons, attacked and threatened them. Over one hundred were seriously wounded in protecting our nation’s Capitol.

            Reporters from CNBC revealed that an indictment in a Washington federal court described a “conspiracy among at least 18 Oath Keepers in which members of the Oath Keepers planned to move together in coordination with regular communication to storm the United States Capitol.” Another subpoena said that at least 34 people affiliated with the Proud Boys had been indicted by the Justice Department in connection with the riot.

And, the 1st Amendment Praetorian and its chairman, Robert Patrick Lewis, tweeted on the day of the attack on the Capitol that “Today is the day the true battles begin.”

            Aside from the threat of violent force to alter the results of a 2024 election, the more substantial threat rests in Trumper Republicans controlling state positions that typically perform perfunctory roles in executing procedures that should be nonpartisan, like counting votes. By resurrecting the vague and rarely used Independent Legislature Doctrine (ILD), Republican-controlled state legislatures could substitute Trump electoral votes for Biden or another Democrat should one win that state’s popular vote. Four Supreme Court Justices have indicated that they consider the ILD as a legitimate doctrine.

            However, they can’t use this Doctrine without some justifiable rationale. The cornerstone of a legislator using the Doctrine is that our democracy is about to see a second presidential election stolen. Trumpers are becoming public officials who are willing to believe that there could be significant voter fraud in 2024, regardless of any evidence. That is a hurdle Trump was unable to get past last time.

            He failed to convince his Vice President Pence and the majority of the Republicans in Congress of massive voter fraud. It didn’t help him that every court and state election official upheld Biden‘s victory. However, Trump’s repeated insistence that there was massive fraud has been widely accepted by the public. 

            According to a November 1 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, Trump convinced 68 percent of all Republicans that the election had been stolen from him. A belief stronger than what the Southern Confederacy held regarding Abraham Lincoln’s election as president. They did not challenge the legitimacy of Lincoln’s victory even though he wasn’t on the ballot in any Southern state.

            The enduring anger from Trump being a victim in the last election is reminiscent of the South’s belief that they were forced to fight the Northern non-slave states from destroying their culture. Therefore, they had a right as sovereign states to leave the Union and, by violence if necessary, to preserve their freedom from Yankee domination. 

            A similar belief can be seen in a recent PRRI poll that found 12 percent of Americans believing both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”  In other words, to save their country from liberal democrats.

            That fear is fanned today by right-wing broadcasters, some of whom follow the QAnon conspiracy that if Democrats continue to run the country, they will allow rampant child pedophilia. Embracing extreme beliefs is not new in our history. When Abraham Lincoln was elected as president, many Southern politicians saw that as an act of war. They predicted Union armies would seize their slaves and force white women to marry black men.  

            Former Trump presidential advisor Steve Bannon is one of the more popular right-wing broadcasters with over a hundred thousand listeners. The day before Trumpites stormed the Capitol on January 6, he told his listeners that “All hell will break loose tomorrow. It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?” Congress wants to know what Bannon communicated with Trump, as the mass rally on the National Mall turned into a march on to the Capitol to stop confirming the election results.

            A September ProPublica investigation detailed how Bannon’s continuing radio broadcasts encourage election deniers to challenge the 2024 election by becoming election poll ballot counters and precinct officers. According to Bannon, President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. As a result, Bannon has pushed a “precinct strategy” for taking over various counties’ Republican Party leadership. 

            Following his broadcasts, thousands flooded into local county Republican meetings to replace established Republican Party leaders with new Trump-supporting members. ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups after hearing Bannon say, “This is your call to action.” There has been no similar increase in Democratic Party precinct officers who vote for local party leadership. 

            These lowly positions play a critical role in getting out the vote because they go door to door, distribute literature, and talk to residents to vote for their party’s candidates. As a result, more precinct officers increase voter turnout for their party’s candidate. But even more importantly, in some states, they help pick poll workers, and in others, they help determine members of boards that oversee elections. The new Republican recruits for these positions are not like the traditional conservatives who ran the party. Instead, these folks are fired up and often embrace unproven conspiracies espoused by far-right groups. 

            The New York Times has highlighted instances where election deniers are running and winning critical election oversight positions that the parties have largely ignored in the past. The Times provided an example of a pastor who attended the January 6 rally who said he attended because he was “standing for the truth to be heard” about the stolen election. He returned to his conservative Pennsylvania township, ran, and won the office that administers polling on Election Day. The Times concluded that “Until this year, races for administrative positions like a judge of elections were non-competitive to the point of being more or less volunteer opportunities.”

            Meanwhile, according to Gellman’s article in the Atlantic, officeholders receive death threats and harassment from Trump supporters. As a result, nonpartisan voting administrators are being driven to contemplate retirement. Gellman sites Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board because she had been bombarded with threatening emails from Trump supporters, one of which read, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” She knew colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions. Are these isolated incidents or a part of a wave to sweep public officials out of office who are not willing to fight for the Trump version of reality? 

            There has been no evident effort by Democrats to track to what extent Republicans are putting election deniers in crucial positions to supervise election counts. Perhaps Democrats, and liberals in general, believe that our democracy will survive, while Republicans and right-wing adherents see our democracy being threatened by liberal Democrats and Socialists. An October poll found that 71 percent of Republicans believe democracy is facing a “major threat,” as compared to just 35 percent of Democrats. 

            The Republican Party, since Trump knocked out all the establishment Republican candidates in 2016 to become the party’s presidential candidate, is becoming dominated by a Manichean zeitgeist that the US is now in a struggle between the good and the evil. And they clearly see liberalism and liberal democracy as evil. 

            The role of the Republicans is to save our nation from the Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to protect our nation’s three most essential freedoms. These are defined as protecting human life from abortion, protecting our freedom to defend ourselves from stopping the government from controlling our access to guns, and defending our borders from an invasion of foreigners who do not think, act or look like us. 

            Republicans have held these views for a long time, but with Donald Trump, they found someone willing to throw out liberal democracy altogether because it is corrupt by attacking all three of these freedoms. 

            There is some irony in that Trump acts as a revolutionary in tearing down our government. But rather than leading a violent overthrow (which lingers in the background as a possibility), he is astutely attacking democracy’s governing norms. The most critical norm is that our democracy works. By arguing that the last election was a fraud, without any evidence, Trump directly undermines the founder’s belief that the peaceful transfer of power from one national leader to another was their most outstanding achievement. Moreover, America was exceptional in being a democracy ruled by-laws, while other nations were ruled by a single monarch ordained by that nation’s dominant religion.

            Trumpers could shape elections rules based on their beliefs instead of performing their duties based on evidence. That hyper-partisan approach will continue to fragment our nation. Consider that the federal government’s legitimacy already appears to be crumbling. According to the Grinnell College National Poll taken in October 2021, there is a grand canyon size gap between Democrats and Republicans in trusting election results. Only 38 percent of those leaning to and being Republicans have “Very or Somewhat Confidence in votes being counted correctly in the next election in 2022.” Meanwhile, those who lean to or are Democrats score 82 percent on that question.

            Autocrats in other countries, past and present, have used the anger of the many to consolidate power in the hands of the few. This transfer has occurred because a hollowed-out shell of a democracy could not stop it. In his extensive Atlantic piece, Gellman concludes that Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. Yet, he is preparing in plain view to do it again. Unfortunately, Gellman misses the damage currently underway to our national perception of democracy, which has always been widely supported but shallow in understanding. 

            If that damage is lasting, it is not just the election results of 2022 or 2024 at risk but perhaps most importantly of what occurs in 2028. What happens if a Trumper candidate wins in 2024 but refuses to concede defeat in 2028? A replay of January 6, 2020 would be likely, but not necessarily with a storming of the Capitol. The vice president at that time may have no qualms as to which votes to count. A legal challenge to that power grab would be decided by a Supreme Court dominated by right-wing justices who have strongly supported the three significant freedoms previously described that Trumpers have championed.

            The solution is not in providing more social welfare programs, as much as they are needed, but in addressing the importance that we survive as a secular democracy, not as an autocratic theocracy. The path forward must be a nonpartisan clarion call for all citizens to unite around conserving the rules and norms of democratic behavior, which protect the freedom of everyone to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Jelani Cobb Reflects on the Matter of Black Lives

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In the last 12 months, Professor Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has authored three groundbreaking books on race in America. The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker, which he co-authored with David Remnick, came out this fall. It collects many of the most thoughtful writers portraying Black life in America over the last century. 

This past summer, he co-edited with Matthew Guariglia, The Essential Kerner Commission Report, which examined and explained the underlying conditions that led to a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967. Cobb says Republicans used the uprisings as political fodder but ignored the Report’s findings.

Last fall, he wrote The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, where he explores the paradoxes that President Barack Obama’s election raised with regards to race and patriotism, identity and citizenship, and progress and legacy. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Licata: In The Matter of Black Lives, you imply that some people consider race a biological trait rather than a social artifact. A Northwestern University study found that 37 percent of white people and 25 percent of black people believe biology determines race. However, the Human Genome Project found that all humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical.

            Should thinking of race as a societal label instead of a biological fact be a significant discussion today?

Cobb: Yes, it’s important to have that discussion because race is a social concept based on political expediency and bad science and has wreaked havoc for centuries. And not just for black people but lots of others as well. The word race is so loaded with various meanings that you are never certain if the person who is saying and the person hearing are operating from the same definition.

Licata: You note that the inequalities between Black and white Americans are well documented by looking at morbidity and infant mortality and wealth and employment. Conservative whites have introduced legislation in over two dozen states to stop discussing race relations in public schools, saying that white students’ self-esteem would suffer from “white guilt.” 

How do we discuss race and black history in schools?

Cobb: It’s a difficult task because the laws are not written in good faith to establish an honest discussion. Without a truthful conversation of our history, the fault lines of the past will continue to haunt us. And I don’t think that “white guilt” need be the product of an honest reckoning with our history. Instead, we need more enlightenment on how we can avoid repeating the problems of the past. 

Licata: You wrote that Barack Obama in 2008 authored the term mixed-race as a replacement for mulattoe to describe folks with multi-racial parents. Two years later, a Pew showed that more whites saw the President as biracial instead of Black, while most African Americans saw Obama as Black, not as mixed race.

            Did Barack Obama’s approach reduce discrimination? 

Cobb: Obama was working with different definitions of race. Being an astute observer of society, he used mixed-race to have white people identify with his heritage.  His white mother and grandparents looked like their grandparents. He obtained a greater surface area by white people identifying with him while Blacks still considered him Black. His approach helped us see race differently but still didn’t stop our grappling with defining race.

Licata: There are more than thirty Black Lives Matter chapters, and while there is a written statement of principles, no national organization is leading the chapters.

            Can the BLM continue to be effective remaining as a movement without national structural leadership?

Cobb: I cannot prognosticate on that, but BLM has managed to be effective for a startling amount of time without one central leader. They have moved away from wanting a single charismatic leader, whose fortunes parallel that of a movement like the civil rights movement was with Martin Luther King. I think that’s a strength, but it can also be a liability.

Licata: You write that Reverend William Barber of North Carolina is a person most capable of crafting a broad-based political counterpoint to the divisiveness of Trumpism. 

            What do you mean?

Cobb: Barber cogently looks at the world using facts and remains optimistic about changing it for the better. He organizes around having different kinds of people recognize that they live in similar economic conditions. His strategy is like MLK’s effort creating the Poor People’s Campaign. There is hope that an economic populism can cut across the lines that have divided people. Aside from economics, another potentially powerful bridge between conflicting movements is through a Christian-inspired movement, much like MLK did. Our democracy right now is at peril. We need to bring people together to do something about it, rather than lamenting.

Licata: BLM’s goal is “organizing people who are at the bottom,” like transgender people. The Human Rights Campaign reported that between 2013 and 2015 of the fifty-three known murders of transgender people, thirty-nine were African American. 

Has BLM’s inclusive approach weakened its message?

Cobb: I don’t think it has weakened BLM at all. Those statistics point out the real need to address the safety of those at the bottom. BLM is committed to organizing all these people regardless of who they are. People who have been exploited and marginalized are at the bottom in significant part because of their identity. BLM is providing a real need for an organization to put together an agenda for people at the bottom.

Licata: What are your thoughts on challenging progressive or liberal politicians rather than going after reactionaries or conservatives?

Cobb: I don’t understand that approach. The important thing is to deal with the people who are dragging the people of this country back decades.

Licata: In The Essential Kerner Report, you said that the report believed the absence of true liberalism had resulted in the riots. 

Can liberalism provide any long-lasting solutions to dismantling systematic institutional racism?

Cobb: Some aspects of liberalism address these solutions, but there are some deep structural troubles remaining. We must be prepared to deal with them, but we are often caught up in a type of tribalism in which we think this, but the other side thinks that. I’m most interested in useful ideas; I don’t care where they come from.

The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker

by Jelani Cobb (Author), David Remnick  (Author)

Hardcover – September 28, 2021 Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

An obscure doctrine may allow Trump to win in 2024 regardless of the popular vote

Trump did not accept an election loss in 2020, and he may not have to in 2024. Trump supporters have begun arranging a play for winning the presidential election no matter what the popular or electoral vote would indicate. The vehicle that will place him, or a Trumpite Republican, in the White House, is the Independent State Legislatures doctrine. 

This is how the play unfolds in four acts.

The first act is pretty much completed. The audience has been prepped to expect that if a Republican loses the next presidential election, it will be because of fraud. For them, that is understandable because it has already happened.

For the last year, the chant of “the election has been stolen” has been repeated almost daily by Trump, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets or a small but loud section of Republicans in Congress. Last August, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that they have successfully convinced two-thirds of Republicans that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” And Twenty-eight percent of independent voters think Trump won the 2020 election. To some degree, all major potential Republican presidential candidates have signed off on that lie to secure the Trump Republican base in the primaries, should he not run.  

            The second act is underway now. Republicans have begun rolling out candidates that they can count on for controlling key state offices that oversee federal elections in their states. Reuters foundthat ten of the 15 Republican candidates running for secretary of state in five battlegrounds states question whether Trump lost the 2020 election. 

            The five states investigated were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Joe Biden won all of them. Three, he won by less than one percent, and Nevada and Michigan were less than three percent. 

            Except for Wisconsin, the secretary of state oversees the elections. These are the folks who will toss the voter’s majority vote for a Democratic winner to their Republican-controlled state legislatures if they think there has been fraud or voting irregularities. The legislatures can then overturn the popular vote if they believe it was tainted in some manner. Trump asked various state officials to do the same when he lost by a close vote in the 2020 election. 

            Republicans control both houses in four of the states and the governorship in Arizona and Georgia, which would make these last two states the most vulnerable to having a vote for a Democratic president overturned by the state legislature. Nevada has both chambers and the governorship in the hands of Democrats, which makes it the least vulnerable. It also has the fewest electoral votes (6) of this group.

            While Michigan and Wisconsin have Democratic governors, they are both up for reelection and face tough elections. Past court decisions indicate that a governor may not halt a state legislature from replacing election results. 

            Until statewide elections are held in 2022, Trump’s organization may not have enough Trump politicians in power to judge the coming presidential election in the swing states. Nevertheless, Boris Epshteyn, a former special assistant to Trump, said the Republicans focus on secretary-of-state elections. “It’s vital they have the right ideals,” Epshteyn said. “That includes, first and foremost, … making sure widespread voter fraud doesn’t happen going forward.” 

            Act three builds on the assumption that the last presidential election did see widespread voter fraud. The Trump machine hauls out their big gun: the Independent State Legislatures doctrine. It rests on shaky legal ground because it’s vague and has been largely ignored in the past. But it has not been outright rejected, so it has been used as one way to interpret the Constitution’s Article II, which says, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, [presidential electors].” 

Hayward H. Smith explores the history of this doctrine in the Florida State University Law Review. He concludes that the founding fathers’ original understanding of Article II did not identify independent powers to state legislatures that the doctrine is based on. 

He shows how the Supreme Court sketched a rough outline of an expansive interpretation of Article II to support an “independent legislature” doctrine. They decided to give that state’s electoral votes to George W. Bush, not Al Gore, in their 2000 presidential election. Smith writes that the Supreme Court’s decision meant that when a state legislature directs the manner of appointing electors pursuant to Article II, it operates with independence from its state constitution. Hence the state legislature is independent of the state constitution and possibly even of state court rulings. 

In essence, the Supreme Court’s ruling federalizes the legislature’s responsibilities instead of having the state legislature subject to a state’s Constitution or judiciary. This interpretation would strengthen placing limitations on state’s rights which have run counter to the principles embedded in the U.S. Constitution.  

If this doctrine is followed, the state officer or body overseeing the next presidential election could request that the state legislature intervene to direct the “manner of appointing electors.” Removing one set of electors, say from a Democrat to a Republican, is possible if there is a “sense” of massive fraud. However, any court challenge of that action would have to go through the federal courts, which would take enough time to halt the installation of a new president. Consequently, the Supreme Court would be asked to act immediately to avoid a constitutional crisis. 

The fourth and final act belongs to the Supreme Court Justices. How will they handle this explosive issue if the election is a close count? 

In the 2000 Bush decision Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas signed off on a concurrence statement that said any “significant departure” by a state court from the legislature’s elector appointment scheme “presents a federal constitutional question.” Smith sees this as a super-strong independent legislature doctrine. Justice Thomas is still on the Court. Could he convince the other justices that state legislatures have the authority to change the electors AFTER an election has been held? 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote an opinion a few years ago that the Constitution’s mentions of “the legislature” meant each state’s legislative process. It would entail the process of how both houses must pass bills, the governor must sign them, and the state’s Supreme Court must not rule them unconstitutional. The chance that two of the six conservative justices would support this liberal definition is non-existent. 

If this issue comes before the Supreme Court, they would most likely repeat the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s procedural approach on the Bush vs. Gore case. In that instance, the clock was ticking on the need for Florida to select their electors before a deadline. The Supreme Court stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. That effectively killed Gore’s chance for closing the gap of fewer than 600 votes from Bush’s total. 

Trump has won many of his court battles by dragging out the appeal process so that the final decision is often moot. For example, a state legislature could switch electors from a Democrat to a Republican presidential candidate. To alter that action would require filing an appeal; however, there could be no time to reverse that decision. So, the new electoral votes would go to D.C. to be confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and chaired by Democratic Vice President Harris. All of whom have vowed to follow the laws, not partisan politics.

It is far from certain that Trump’s efforts will unfold as planned. However, wearing blinders does not make this scenario any less probable. Democrats must coordinate a campaign like the Republicans to win elections for secretaries of state positions, state legislators, judges, and governors in crucial swing states. That is where the election will be won or lost.

If the Democratic Party continues to focus on just big-ticket legislation providing a better future for everyone, they could be blindsided by the independent legislature doctrine. It would hand over an election victory that the Democrats won by a popular vote to the Republicans.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, was named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Can the Global Corporate Tax Clip Corporate Power?

What is the Proposed Global Corporate Tax?
In early October, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), consisting of 136 countries representing more than 90% of global GDP, agreed to levy a global corporate minimum tax rate of 15% on overseas profits from 100 of the world’s largest and most profitable multinational corporations (referred to as MNCs).

In addition, each country would be entitled to share in the revenue generated by the tax, which should raise a total of $150 billion. The increase in funds will allow developing countries to better pay for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, although the deal will not take effect until 2023.

The Historical Context of State’s Trying to Control Capital 
Throughout history, there has been tension within the state between its governing body and other organizations. The state in its earliest forms can be viewed more as tribes than bureaucracies. Nevertheless, the struggle always came down to control of resources. The resources can take three forms: people’s loyalty, physical elements, or economic activities. Examples of each struggle can be easily illustrated during specific historical periods.

During the medieval ages, it was the state versus the church vying for allegiance; in the 19th century, it was the state versus ethnic entities vying for control of the land. Finally, in our present world, it is the state versus corporations vying for control of capital, i.e., financial wealth. All three conflicts existed and overlapped from the beginning of civilization and continue till the present day. The proposed Global Corporate Tax (GCT) is the current manifestation of the struggle for controlling the flow of capital.

Can a GCT shift the flow of capital from corporations to states?
That’s the plan, but since each country would incorporate the rate and rules of the multinational agreement into its own tax system, the effectiveness of a GCT country could be dramatically limited. For instance, the agreement, as it stands now, eliminates Trump’s Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) legislation which allows MNC’s income earned overseas to be brought back to the U.S. tax-free. Instead, that income would be taxed 15 percent under the CGT.

The GCT agreement is designed to discourage nations from tax competition through lower tax rates that erode their tax base. Biden’s U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen called the agreement “a once-in-a-generation accomplishment for economic diplomacy” that will “end the race to the bottom on corporate taxation.” Under the current tax system, MNCs could establish their headquarters in small countries lacking large infrastructures but offering lower tax rates. For example, Ireland’s top corporate tax rate is only 12.5%, whereas it is 21% in the U.S., 19% in the United Kingdom, and averages about 22% in the European Union.

While MNCs can range from a single-family to a network of intertwined legal entities, together, they shape the global market more than ever before. States primarily rely on revenue from a domestic tax base. When their homeland businesses conduct and establish branches in other states, they maximize their untaxed profits by exploiting gaps and mismatches between different countries’ tax systems.

According to Michelle P. Scott of Investopedia, creating a universal CGT gives little or no tax advantage to MNCs shifting profits to lower-tax jurisdictions. Importantly then, countries could compete globally on the relative strength of their infrastructure and skilled workforce. That advantage benefits developed countries. Consequently, it is not surprising that the organization representing the wealthiest countries, the G20, initiated establishing a CGT.

A critically important change in global taxation would be that corporate income from intangible property, like royalties from trademark, patent, and software licenses. They would be taxed where it was earned, even if the MNC didn’t have a nexus (i.e. a physical presence) in that country. Only the largest MNCs, approximately 100 companies, would be subject to the rule permitting countries to tax a corporation without having a nexus to that country.

Must the U.S. Senate ratify a Global Corporate Tax?
In the last 80 years, a succession of presidents has avoided U.S. treaties being confirmed by a two-thirds Senate vote. They have done that by signing treaties through an executive agreement. From 1940-1989, presidents entered into more than 13,000 executive agreements and signed only 800 treaties. The controversial executive agreements stand out, such as when President Franklin D. Roosevelt used an executive agreement in 1933 to extend America’s recognition of the Soviet Union. The 1937 Supreme Court ruled that executive agreements, signed and approved only by the president, have the same legal status as treaties.

Nevertheless, a succeeding president can withdraw from a prior president’s treaty entered into by an executive agreement. For instance, President Barack Obama signed the Paris Agreement as an executive agreement in August 2016 without ratification from the Senate. In 1920 President Donald Trump officially withdrew from the agreement without ratification from the Senate.

Two characteristics of a treaty by executive agreement. 
The first is a relatively minor procedural step. A law passed by a Democratic Congress required that the President’s Secretary of State must inform the Senate within 60 days of any executive agreement. With the real possibility of Republican opposition to the agreement, if the Biden administration misses this simple requirement, they will be inviting a needless obstruction.

Second, congress may not disavow an executive agreement, but it has plenary authority to modify or abrogate them regarding domestic law purposes. For instance, it passed legislation allowing American hostages and their families harmed by Iran to proceed with tort claims. It is unclear how this feature could impact the GCT if people, and corporations acting as people, bring suits under domestic laws to hinder the GCT somehow.

Two Alternative Paths Forward
There are two other paths that President Biden could take to get the GCT adopted, a reconciliation bill or a congressional-executive agreement. Both would require a majority vote by both Congressional houses and avoid being blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. However, the reconciliation bill has limits on the subject matter, such as being limited to revenue-related elements of the treaty. Also, reconciliation legislation has limits on how often it can be used. Parliamentarian rulings could come into play as they had in the past when they limited the breadth of Biden legislation.

Congressional-executive agreements do not face those restrictions. Instead, they have been used when a contentious proposal could muster up a simple majority in both houses. The 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the agreement whereby the United States became a member of the World Trade Organization(WTO) in 1995 serve as good examples.

Unlike the sole executive agreements, one would expect that a new president could not overturn Congressional-executive agreements. However, last year Abigail L. Sia in a Fordham Law Review piece, concluded that “It is neither clear nor well settled whether the president has the constitutional authority to withdraw unilaterally from this type of agreement” [Congressional-executive agreement]. So, even if Biden were to get the majority of both houses to pass the GCT treaty, the next president might unilaterally withdraw from the treaty. And as a result, the nation would once again witness the conservative Supreme Court deciding the extent of presidential executive powers.

GCT could be a game-changer if we had a functional government
The GCT treaty could ignite a public struggle between the state and multinational corporations as to who determines a nation’s foreign policy, which is the ultimate exercise of sovereign power. It is most likely that Biden will choose the sole executive agreement path. The other paths lead to an inevitable rejection by the Senate if the Republicans oppose it.

In the executive agreement scenario, if a Republican becomes president in 2024, we could see the U.S. once again pull out of an international treaty after its executive officer signed off on it. That will reinforce the perception that U.S. foreign policy will be inconsistent for the foreseeable future. It is not just because Republicans and Democrats do not share a common vision for America’s future, which has always been the case. It is because of the excessive weight of private and corporate wealth in electing members to congress.

Corporate influence on congress has always been present, but the accumulation of wealth has led to them accumulating a historically high concentration of economic resources and political influence. Congressional criticism of the GCT will not manifest itself as sympathy for corporations. Instead, it will consist of both arcane stalling tactics and issues, like enforcing the agreement.

For advocates of maintaining the GCT treaty, it will be necessary to raise the question of where national political power to make foreign policy decisions should rest. Should it be with the elected representatives of the public or the corporate bodies which are legally bound to represent the interests of their investors? However, the debate must go one step further because many of those representatives of the public are also indebted to their corporate benefactors.

Consequently, the success of adopting and maintaining a GCT treaty must not rest on the shoulders of just one person, the president. Or even congress for the matter. It must be supported by a national discussion occurring in both red and blue states on what is the proper relationship between corporate wealth and a republican state that can be independent of their wealth’s influence.

Fifty Years ago, there was a successful populist revolt in Seattle!

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Sign-carrying members of the Friends of the Market picketed City Hall in February 1971 to protest the proposed Pike Plaza urban-renewal project for Pike Place Market. (Richard S. Heyza / The Seattle Times, 1971)

There is a lesson for progressives to learn from the past successful effort to save the Pike Place Market from being torn down.

Seattle’s initiative 1 in 1971 to save the Pike Place Farmers Market from a redevelopment plan that would have replaced 90 percent of the Market with offices, hotels, and a parking garage. The initiative collected 25,000 signatures in just three weeks. And this was done without any paid signature gatherer; it was accomplished with volunteers!

The initiative passed with 59% of the votes cast. Despite the city council having voted unanimously for the redevelopment plan, both daily newspapers endorsing the plan, and the federal government offering millions of dollars in urban renewal funds to tear down the old buildings.

This was a populist revolt against an elitist attitude of modernizing Seattle that ignored the city’s heritage. Yet, at its core, the initiative could be considered a conservative movement to improve the present conditions that allowed open access to everyone rather than to tear down the open forum of the Pike Place Market and replace it with a soulless market that would constrain public access.

Should progressives consider that populists will support change when it preserves a democratic condition that doesn’t threaten to tear it apart.

 

When Seattle Declared Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day

President Joe Biden last Friday, October 4, issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Congress established Columbus Day as an annual October federal holiday.

Biden did a balancing act, in that he also issued a proclamation on Columbus Day, Monday, Oct. 11. However, while he praised the role of Italian Americans in U.S. society, he noted the violence and harm Columbus and other explorers of the age brought upon Native Americans.

Although there are now well over 50 cities & states that have adopted “Indigenous Peoples Day” as a holiday celebrated on the date designated for Columbus Day, Seattle and Minneapolis, according to Wikipedia’s timeline, appear to have been the first two major cities to make that change in 2014.

In 2014, then Seattle Mayor Ed Murray invited the Seattle City Council to join him in recognizing our continent’s First Peoples contributions to the United States by instituting an Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day.

The City Council did unanimously pass a resolution sponsored by Bruce Harrell, Kshama Sawant and me. It declared the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the City of Seattle and encouraged other institutions to recognize the Day.

When the Seattle City Council was adopting an Indigenous Peoples’ Day all hell seemed to break loose for me as the Italian community wanted to know why as a “good” Italian I was “disrespecting” Italian heritage by adding to the second Monday in October an observation of Native American culture.

One Florida trucker even called from the road suggesting we all face a firing squad. Seattle’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day does not, of course, abolish Columbus Day. Columbus Day has been and remains a federal holiday.

The following is a condensed reprint of my councilmember newsletter, Urban Politics, that gives a history and rationale for why an Indigenous Peoples’ Day was needed.

Indigenous People and Columbus Day

I have the good fortune of being one of only three people with an Italian surname elected to the Seattle City Council in the last one hundred years. I limit this to surnames because there could have been others of Italian descent. It is not apparent from their names.

This led me to meet with a number of prominent Italian civic and business leaders in my office to discuss my role as the defender of Italian pride and culture. This was the first opportunity I had to discuss this particular topic in the 16 years I’ve been on the council. Then again, I had not previously opened my mouth (aperto la bocca) to question the appropriateness of celebrating Columbus Day as something other than Italian Pride Day.

I am proud of my Italian heritage, though I did not follow my grandfather’s profession of being a barber. I am also proud to honor the heritage of many others with whom I share this country, especially those who lived here before Europeans came.

Let me set the context. Columbus discovered the New World for Europeans. Those already living here were aware of it. Columbus was an Italian – actually from Genoa, not strictly Italian, since Italy had to wait about three hundred more years to come into existence. But, Italians as a distinct ethnic group can be traced back to the Roman Republic and its Italian allies.

Although Columbus Day first became an official state holiday in Colorado in 1906 and Franklin Roosevelt declared it a federal holiday in 1937, our nation has celebrated Columbus Day since Colonial times, though not universally. Currently, Washington State, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota do not recognize it as a legal state holiday.

In 1792, New York City and other U.S. cities celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World. President Benjamin Harrison called upon the people of the United States to celebrate Columbus Day on the 400th anniversary of the event.

During the four hundredth anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets, and politicians used Columbus Day rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These patriotic rituals were framed around themes such as support for the war, citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and celebrating social progress.

According to the Pew Research Center, Columbus Day is now one of the most inconsistently celebrated U.S. holidays. Federal employees get the day off, but in only 23 states is it a paid holiday for non-federal workers.

National Public Radio reports that since the 1980s, Denver’s American Indian Movement has taken to the streets almost every year to protest Columbus Day, with their demonstrations frequently ending in arrests.

And, anti-Columbus sentiment extends beyond the U.S. to Chile, where last year Mapuche activists held anti-Columbus demonstrations that turned violent; to Guatemala, where 2002 protests shut down highways across the country; and to Mexico, El Salvador, Argentina, and Venezuela.

So, at the core of the current controversy surrounding Columbus Day is the question: what are we celebrating?

For many who claim Italian heritage, and for some who do not, it is an ethnic holiday akin to St. Patrick’s day representing Irish heritage. The irony here is that St. Patrick was actually British, having been kidnapped at the age of 16 and spirited off to Ireland.

Our flawed hero Columbus has been heralded over the centuries for a discovery that came at a terrible cost to those he found inhabiting that world.

His mission was to search for gold and the continent of Asia. In just 2 years, his quest resulted in the death of half of the 250,000 or so indigenous population of Haiti, due to murder, mutilation, or mass suicide under the conditions Columbus created. This comes from a young priest named Bartolome de las Casas, who participated in Columbus’ conquest of the new world.
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Description automatically generated The Taino Indians of Hispaniola (presently Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where Columbus ran his gold and cotton industry, were enslaved via the encomienda system, which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe. According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, fewer than five hundred of the original 250,000 Taino remained on the island.

History is written by the victors, not by those defeated, and certainly not by those driven into extinction.

Many Latin American nations celebrate Columbus Day as Día de la Raza, or “Day of the Race.” In the U.S., the holiday is generally observed by banks, the bond market, the U.S. Postal Service, other federal agencies, most state government offices, many businesses, and most school districts.

However, actual observance varies in different parts of the U.S., ranging from large-scale parades and events to complete non-observance. California and Texas actually abolished Columbus Day as a paid holiday for their government workers.

Slowly, society has come to realize it needs to recognize something beyond a conquering hero, that we all need to acknowledge and respect the once-dominant cultures that present cultures replaced, along with their descendants who remain with us today.

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties

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Since the Sixties, college students have disrupted our politics and culture. On-campus, their activism has reshaped our higher education institutions; off-campus, they have expanded our concept of freedom. Students questioned the status quo by asking, why not try something different? Why not pursue peace instead of war? Why not treat blacks and whites alike? Why not protest if our democracy is not working?

A higher percentage of youth than ever before began attending college in the Sixties. Although overwhelmingly white, new ideas and knowledge pushed them to seek justice for everyone. While the Berkeley Free Speech movement and students occupying Columbia University buildings grabbed national attention, an activist student movement slowly formed in hundreds of lesser-known colleges. I attended one in the Ohio Bible Belt, where Republicans dominated the town and segregated fraternities dominated the campus.

Like the majority of students, I was from a white working middle-class family. My parents never completed high school, worked at factory jobs, and voted for the Democrats out of habit.

Going to college seemed like an unattainable dream. My grades were solidly average, and my parents saved for years to pay for one year of college. Two-year community colleges had not yet emerged. Thanks to federal low-interest loans and working in the dorm’s cafeteria and at McDonald’s during the summer, I attended Bowling Green State University, aka BG.

Books about Sixties activism often focus on the most radical and visible student-initiated groups: the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Most of them lack an insider’s view of the genesis of the student power movement and the counterculture phenomena. Absent is a feel of what average students experienced trying to adjust to those turbulent times. Notably missing is how activist students in the nation’s conservative regions tried to make radical changes peacefully. These insights are at the core of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

During my freshman year (1965 to 1966), the only demonstration that occurred was a spontaneous outpouring of hundreds of male students rushing over to the girls’ dormitories, climbing onto the sides of their buildings, and chanting, “We want panties.” The riot caused an estimated $600 of damage and a displaced park bench left in the middle of a road. Meanwhile, the campus was seemingly unaware that the combat death rate that month for American soldiers in Vietnam was averaging 100 per week.

In my sophomore year, I joined a handful of students to start a chapter of SDS. It was a bold move to take at a university that hosted the American Nazi Party leader to speak to 3,000 attentive listeners that year. He told them that they had to fight for the “White majority” in this country. On BG’s campus, that was a pretty big majority. Black students made up just 1 percent of our student body.

Our chapter of SDS promoted a democracy to allow all citizens to participate in it equally. None of us were interested in the impenetrable language of leftist ideology. However, we did push students to question what was happening around them. Many recognized that they had no classes that taught the history of Blacks or women fighting for the right to vote or how the mainstream culture limited everyone’s opportunities. In response, we initiated a Free University providing open-air classrooms on these topics. The university’s Administration and faculty responded by creating new curricula. Eventually, whole new departments arose on hundreds of campuses dealing with Black and minority histories and women’s role in society.

We openly questioned the necessity of the Vietnam War in light of the mounting Vietnamese civilian deaths and the 30,000 casualties from our young soldiers. Consequently, we were considered communist sympathizers. The funny thing is, I had always wanted to meet a Communist since I grew up reading my Dad’s John Birch Society pamphlets. Now, I was possibly one of them.

This book is also about the cultural explosion that upended normality through simple acts of rebellion. In spring, a “Gentle Thursday” celebration occurred. The idea originated from a Texas SDS chapter. The event urged students to break out of their daily routine and alter their immediate environment. For one day, they didn’t wear shoes on campus, they held picnics on the campus lawns, and, most daringly, they broke the dress codes; women did not wear the mandatory skirt to their dorm cafeterias to have dinner. Alerted to this planned rebellion, the campus police came out prepared to do battle with us. Instead, they departed confused and amused by the campus’s central quad awash with colored chalked art on the sidewalks.

In the Sixties, anarchists were not known as firebomb throwers. Instead, they were counterculture troubadours, represented by the Yippies. They led thousands to the Pentagon to protest the war and threw Wall Street into panic by tossing dollar bills onto their Stock Exchange floor.

Our college life at BG was so culturally prosaic that the university newspaper headlined a student who had dropped out of college to visit San Francisco’s hippie mecca, the Haight Asbury neighborhood. A few months later, 21 police from five different bureaus raided the house that he and other cultural disruptors were renting. He was imprisoned for a year because they found a single joint of marijuana in the place.

Afterwards, I and others were determined to make a difference. Our SDS chapter began listening to what students wanted and not preaching to them about what they should want. I was then elected student body president, even though I had led our SDS chapter. I may be the only SDS organizer in the country elected to lead a university student government and remain in power.

Although I opposed the Vietnam War and promoted civil rights, I got the majority of the student council members to make some dramatic changes. They were still very conservative, representing a student body that supported Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey 64 percent to 18 percent, even though Nixon only beat Humphrey by 1 percent.

Nevertheless, they supported conscientious objector counseling on campus and passed a bill of rights for students that negated many of the Administration’s social codes. Most importantly, the council reversed the discriminatory institutional practices that had led to a 99% white student body. When Black students politely asked for two representatives on the council, the council agreed.

While student activism was altering colleges across the country, SDS imploded in 1969. I attended one of the last national conferences. At the final session, the two largest ideological factions chanted competing slogans “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” and “Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung.” I wrote in our BG student newspaper that SDS “would falter and die, even if the student movement itself continued to grow.” Months later, the nation’s largest and most influential student organization was no more, but student activism continued to grow.

Activists in the twenty-first century can learn from the successes and failures of the Sixties. It is understanding that progress requires striking a balance between passion and pragmatism and between tactics and strategy, and, above all, recognizing that culture and politics are intertwined. Going forward is fueled by a culture that enjoys life and working with others so that they too can enjoy life.


Praise

“Licata tells how the student movement played a critical adversary role to the prevailing culture of accepting authority without questioning who benefits.”
Thom Hartmann
The Thom Hartmann Program

“Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties demonstrates how grand movements, like the student movement, begin by taking small steps.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Former editor of The Nation

“There is no more engaging or informative read to know how ‘60s campus protests unrolled and felt to participants ‘on the ground.’”
Paul Lauter
Author of Our Sixties: An Activist’s History; Past President of the American Studies Association.

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties captures the evolution of the student movement coming from localized student rights.”
Ashley Brown
Program Executive Director, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University

“This fascinating book should be on every student’s shelf.”
Peter Dreier
Founding Chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, Occidental College

“You want to read this book. Licata writes with insight and humor about politics, student activism, counterculture, and music (yes, he went to Woodstock).”
Lance Bennett
Professor of Sociology, University of Washington; author of Communicating the Future

“Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties sizzles with the freshness of a first-person account of navigating his way through the pitfalls of the far left and far right. He became a believer in step-by-step democratic change.”
Harry Boyte
Backyard Revolution

Licata provides a primer on effective organizing; I recommend this book for classes dealing with community organizing, social movements, and people’s histories.”
BJ Bullert, PhD
Core Faculty at Antioch University

“Lessons are learned by traveling with Nick Licata—he was part of a movement that intended to change the community and the country for the better. As human beings, we are at our best when we believe in something much larger than ourselves. Therein lies the real hope for a better world.” (read the full review)
Patricia Vaccarino
, founder of PR for People


Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties is available now in Hardback at a 25% discount at this link here. Enter PROMO25 at the checkout to redeem.

Making a case for Legalizing Psychedelics

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Aside from issues that rightly dominate print headlines and social media, there is an inconspicuous national movement arising: legalizing psychedelics. 

This movement may cause many boomers to smirk as they conjure up memories of Dr. Timothy Leary, the iconic advocate for using psychedelics. He coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.Such skepticism also greeted the advocacy for legalizing marijuana, renamed more accurately as cannabis. In the sixties, it was unthinkable that possessing cannabis would be legal.

Fifty years ago, the jails were filled with Black citizens for smoking cannabis. Even in liberal California, after forty years of anti-cannabis laws, Black people were imprisoned ten times more often for possessing marijuana than other racial groups. As recently as 2010, cannabis arrests accounted for 52 percent of all drug arrests. Nearly eight million people were arrested on pot charges from 2000 to 2010, with cannabis arrests accounting for 52 percent of all drug arrests. And 88 percent of those arrests were for simple possession.

Nevertheless, despite police pursuing those arrests across the country, popular sentiment on using cannabis began shifting. In November 2012, Washington State and Colorado, through initiatives, became the first two states to legalize personal use of marijuana for adults twenty-one and over. Washington’s passed with 56 percent of the vote, and the majority voters in some of the most conservative regions of the state voted in favor of legalizing. 

Long before those votes, the path toward legalizing cannabis occurred through approving its use for medical purposes. California effectively legalized medical cannabis in 1996, when voters approved Proposition 215 by a 56–44 margin. By 2016 most states had legalized the medical use of cannabis, reaching 36 states in 2020.

Psychedelics are following the same path as cannabis did in being legalized. Advocates for both drugs argue that they provide medicinal properties to relieve pain, particularly in end-of-life treatments. That approach worked for cannabis. An April 2021 Pew poll found national support at 91% for the medical use of cannabis. 

But in taking that path, advocates for psychedelics don’t post any LSD signs. That’s probably because the history of LSD is embedded in the sixty’s colorful and anti-establishment counterculture. As a result, advocates emphasize plants, like psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and iboga. All of them have psychoactive chemicals that profoundly affect consciousness, like LSD.

These plants are categorized as entheogens, historically associated with religious ceremonies that predate the sixties by hundreds if not thousands of years. Consequently, much of the legislation advocates pursue the use of the term entheogens and not psychedelics.

At the local, state, and congressional levels, legislation has been introduced that sets the stage for using entheogens for treating illnesses. As is often the case in rolling out most progressive legislation, cities are at the forefront. Even though they have fewer financial resources than state or federal governments, their proximity to tackling local issues encourages more citizen involvement to initiate creative solutions. Moreover, if their efforts are successful, they help push the need for state initiatives and congressional hearings. 

Denver was the first city in the U.S. to decriminalize psychedelics. In the spring of 2019, Denver residents passed Initiative I-301 by a razor-thin margin. It directs police via ordinance to treat enforcement of laws against the possession of psilocybin mushrooms as their lowest priority. Although it did prohibit the city from pursuing criminal penalties related to the use or possession of psilocybin mushrooms, they remain illegal under state and federal laws. It also allows police to continue to enforce laws against the distribution and sales of psilocybin mushrooms.

Oakland became the second city when their city council unanimously passed legislation to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in the summer of 2019. Oakland’s law extended coverage beyond psilocybin mushrooms so that possession of mushrooms and other plants and fungi containing psychoactive substances would also be decriminalized.

The following year, Washington D.C.  also ran an initiative in the fall of 2020 to decriminalize “natural psychedelics.” It catapulted to victory with 76 percent of the vote.

Portland residents didn’t have to go the initiative route or lobby the city council because, in November 2020, 56 percent of Oregon voters approved initiative 109 to legalize psilocybin mushrooms for medical use. In that same election, initiative 110 passed. It decriminalized small amounts of drugs, including psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), among other drugs. 

In Seattle, the city council is working to decriminalize psychedelics citing new research, that show psychedelics can help treat mental health disorders like drug addiction, depression, and PTSD. Seven of nine council members signed a letter asking the Overdose Emergency and Innovative Recovery (OEIR) task force led by the grassroots organization VOCAL-WA for recommendations for liberalizing the use of entheogens. The task force released a one-page summary headed by the suggestion that penalties should be removed for controlled substances.

Except for Spokane, Washington, which was going to file an initiative to decriminalize psychedelics, the most visible and successful efforts have occurred in larger cities dominated by liberal or democratic politics. That demographic profile is also found in the smaller cities hosting large universities such as Santa Cruz, CA, Cambridge, MA, and Ann Arbor, MI. Those cities also liberalized their drug enforcement policies that include psychedelics. 

The decriminalization movement needs to attract voters beyond a liberal constituency to sustain a national movement. Advocates in cities that are more purple than blue may find passing legislation more difficult. For instance, in Spokane, Washington, which has many Republican voters, advocates have had to ease back on their efforts. They just don’t have as large or as active a constituency as the more successful cities in changing the laws. 

However, passing more initiatives in blue cities will build momentum for states adopting more liberal legislation. That is a similar path that cannabis took. Oregon was the first state to liberalize cannabis laws through decriminalization in 1973, and it took 26 years for the first state, California, to legalize medical cannabis. By 2021, 46 states have legalized cannabis for medical use. In 11 states, it is legal for recreational use.

Denver’s initiative to decriminalize psychedelics seems to have influenced public opinion in Colorado. A survey conducted by RBI Strategies & Research showed that some 50% of Colorado voters would support measures to expand psilocybin decriminalization throughout the state and legalize psychedelic mushrooms statewide. Colorado’s state legislature even passed the HB19-1263 law, which went into effect in March 2020, changing personal possession of any Schedule 1 or 2 drug in Colorado from a felony to a misdemeanor. However, other states have yet to adopt such legislation.

              On the federal level, Congress and the presidency have not addressed the issue of decriminalizing psychedelics. However, Democrats have introduced legislation on liberalizing drug policies. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., filed an amendment to a large-scale appropriations bill in 2019 to end the prohibition of federal money being spent on “any activity that promotes the legalization of any drug or other substance in Schedule I” of the Controlled Substances Act. It didn’t pass then or in 2021, but it gained about 50 “yes” votes on the second vote.

              This year Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Cori Bush (D-MO) are sponsoring the Drug Policy Reform Act (DPRA) to decriminalize personal use and possession of drugs. Most importantly, it would shift federal drug policy from the Department of Justice to Health and Human Services. 

Republicans in CongressCongress have generally opposed lessening restrictions on personal drug use. However, their constituency seems to be more open to it. For instance, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, most Republicans support legalizing cannabis for the first time.

Outside of politics, serious research is being conducted on the potential use of psychedelics like psilocybin to address health issues. Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has increased its research in this area of study. Somewhat surprisingly, in the fall of 2018, under the Trump administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” designation for its potential to help with treatment-resistant depression. In addition, this year, the Harvard Law School launched the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) to inform legislation and help clinicians promote safety, innovation, and therapeutics in the medicinal use of psychedelics. 

Political progress is being made despite State and Federal reluctance and resistance to changing the laws. However, with the emerging scientific and academic commitment to research the possible benefits of psychedelics, politicians will be more comfortable making changes. 

It took over 40 years of constant grassroots efforts to get where we are today on using cannabis legally, but advocates need a long-range game plan.

Cannabis’s success was partly due to the eventual recognition of how the enforcement of anti-cannabis laws resulted in minorities, particularly the Black community, who bore the brunt of arrests and imprisonment. However, the situation with the use or possession of psychedelics is different. First, it is not a street drug. Second, arrests for possession and sale of psychedelics are minuscule to what they were for cannabis.  According to the non-profit Drug Policy Alliance, only an annual average of 0.1% of the U.S. population reported using any drug under the “hallucinogen” category (including psilocybin) within the last 30 days between 2002 and 2014.

Consequently, decriminalizing psychedelics is an invisible issue for two organizations with the largest and most active communities engaged in social justice issues, the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign. Local Progress, a national network of over a thousand progressive local officials, focuses on other urban justice issues. However, they support the Drug Policy Alliance efforts urging the Biden Administration to focus on harm reduction and abandon criminalization.

Monica Bridges, Co-Chair for Education and Outreach of Decrim Nature Seattle (DNS), an advocacy group that supports ending the prohibition of plant-based psychedelics, spoke out on how the role of psychedelics can help cities tackle addiction and generational trauma. “This is about developing community. I’ve seen a lot of this Western mentality, where people want to extract the compound, put it in a pill, monetize it, and then think that’s going to cure everything. But it’s not just the medicine. It’s the embodiment of the medicine in relation to community.”

A strategy for building a national movement should support psychedelics to address a community’s social justice issues and the individual’s freedom to explore their creative consciousness. Both activities recognize that citizens in a functioning democracy should control their lives in a safe and non-oppressive manner. This dual approach can bridge the ideological divide in our nation by refocusing on an issue that can work for the greater good regardless of one’s party affiliation.  

Ironically, the genesis to decriminalize out-of-date repressive drug laws emerged from what the media often characterized as the disruptive sixties. But then, it was an era where students encouraged the nation to look at the status quo and ask, “Can’t we do better?” That spirit did not die. Instead, it remains alive and the driving force for demanding more accountability from our leaders to protect our citizens’ welfare and freedoms. I cover the history and legacy of this era in my just-released book, Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties (by Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

What is to be done about America’s growing disparity in wealth?

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Lumber baron William Carson’s Victorian Mansion built 1886 – photo by N. Licata

Over the past year, new research has shown how a phenomenal accumulation of wealth has become concentrated among just 1 percent of Americans over the last four decades.

      If that trend continues, our future as a democracy will come to an end. So, the first step is to recognize it, and the second is to address it now. 

            This trend was quantitively demonstrated in a RAND Corporation paper, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards. They used a time-period agnostic and income-level agnostic measure of inequality that relates income growth to economic growth. A summary and commentary of their work by Nick Hanauer And David M. Rolf is readily accessible to the public in Time.

            The RAND study shows how from 1947 through 1974, real incomes grew close to the rate of per capita economic growth across all income levels. Since then, Americans whose wealth was already in the top 1 percent have received a much larger share of our nation’s economic growth. At every income level up to the 90th percentile, wage earners receive only a fraction of what they would have received if the inequality ratio had held constant from 1974.

            In real wages, this means that an employee today with a median individual income of $36,000 would receive an additional $28,000 using the CPI as a measurement of growth. That comes out to an additional $10.10 to $13.50 an hour on top of the current wage. 

            Critics point out how the growing gap in wealth among Americans is not a random economic trend but a politically driven plan to protect a select group’s capital and their ability to increase it through manipulating our democratic decision-making process.     

            Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, argue that the Republican Party has merged plutocratic economic priorities with a right-wing populist appeal that threatens American democracy. In a YouTube interview referencing decades of research, Hacker and Pierson explain the doom-loop of tax-cutting that characterizes the Republican strategy.          

            Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse believes that approach is undermining our democratic government. His presentation during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court details how untraceable money from people “with practically unlimited resources have [manipulated] that most precious of American gifts—the vote.” It’s not just the popular vote they are attempting to control but also the votes in Congress to protect and expand their wealth.

         A ProPublica piece by Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut” uncovered confidential IRS records. They show billionaires business owners deploying lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. 

            Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson threatened to vote “no” on Trump’s tax cut unless it included a pass-through provision as tax relief for “small businesses.” The reporters connected that tax break to two families of the largest donors to Johnson’s and Trump’s campaigns. They contributed around $20 million just to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 reelection campaign. That is a lot of money, but they also netted $215 million in tax deductions in 2018 alone from Johnson, altering Trump’s original tax-proposed package. Elliott and Faturechi’s finding was based on lobbying and campaign finance disclosures, Treasury Department emails and calendars obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and confidential tax records.

            Why haven’t revelations like these prompted a populist movement to redirect these types of tax benefits to the shrinking middle class? Unfortunately, that potential political movement has been hindered by a narrative, primarily pushed by the Republicans, that any increase in a tax will lead to less money in the average voter’s pockets and less freedom in their daily lives. Republicans adhered to that message in opposing any new tax on the wealthiest to help fund President Biden’s legislation investment in our dilapidated infrastructure, disregarding that it would have created a more robust economy and more significant employment opportunities.  

            A tax on the top 1% or even the top 10% of the population does not lessen the income of wage-working families. However, the growing wealth gap is not seen as important by those families. Polls of voters show that the distribution of wealth lands near the bottom of their concerns. This attitude may be partly due to the perception that to close this gap, socialism would result, which the Republicans repeatedly link to the authoritarian governments of Russia or China. 

            However, the two biggest communist governments in the world are experiencing the same growing wealth gap within their populations as the largest capitalist country in the world. Why is that? Even though Russia and China pledged to create an egalitarian society and the U.S. professes to protect individual freedoms, all three have removed or reduced regulations on their domestic market that would stop elites from monopolizing it. These elites may come from inherited wealth or political party status or just individuals working within each country’s economic system. The result is the same: a concentration of capital resources among fewer people is happening in both communist and capitalist countries.

            For a moment, let’s look at what is happening in Russian and China. The grandest and longest experiment in eliminating the excessive concentration of wealth would be the Soviet Union. As the Soviet economy was formed, the royalty and the farmers who owned their land were stripped of their property, if not personally eliminated, because they hindered the creation of an egalitarian society. In some ways, that objective was achieved. For example, in the 1970s, the Soviet Union was heralded as a nation that had succeeded in providing more housing for its citizens than the U.S. 

            However, thirty years later, a new wealthy elite has emerged that rules Russia. Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny, argues that the Russian oligarchy came to power after 1990 due to the efforts of President Vladimir V. Putin. They remain in control, not only destroying that country’s democracy but working to destroy democracies elsewhere. 

            China, the world’s largest “communist” nation, and like Russia communist in name only, is now struggling with how to contain its wealthy oligarchy, according to an article in Foreign Affairs by Anko Milanovic, a professor at the London School of Economics. Milanovic believes that “Inequality has become the Chinese system’s Achilles’ heel, belying the government’s nominally socialist tenets and undermining the implicit contract between the rulers and the ruled.”

            The number of billionaires in Russia and particularly China has mushroomed. Beijing has more billionaires than New York City. If Hong Kong is politically merged with China, the U.S. will drop behind China in the number of billionaires. Russia currently has the fifth-largest number of billionaires in the world. Neither China nor Russia come close to having a democratic government or society, so the public has limited opportunity to close their wealth gap. 

            Some historians argue that there will always be some variation in the distribution of wealth in a society. In Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari notes that it may have begun when agriculture replaced foraging about 10,000 years ago. The resulting surplus food begat a “pampered elite.” Promoting the concentration of wealth in a society is rarely acclaimed as a goal by the rulers. Nevertheless, a history of revolutions initiated by the disenfranchised seems to always result in sustaining some noticeable gap in wealth among the population. 

            So, what is to be done about America’s growing disparity in wealth? As long as we have a functioning democracy that allows the public to shape our laws effectively, we can halt the growth of the existing wealth disparity and even reverse it. Our political parties must educate the public that it takes resources to maintain a stable society. 

            When the wealthiest do not contribute their fair share of resources, that society will witness populist movements pushing for radical and usually expedient but undemocratic changes. Coming from either the left or the right, they will support more opportunities to improve people’s lives. But, without a solid democratic framework that promotes the civil rights of all citizens, like encouraging the right to vote, their changes will not halt the emergence of powerful, wealthy elites, as is what is happening in Russia and China today. 

            The path forward is through establishing a fair tax structure to stop excessive wealth, and hence political power, from being accumulated by just a sliver of the population. There must be a tax system that does not reward speculation more than wage labor, as ours does now. Any political party stubbornly resisting a tax on those ablest to pay is traveling a fool’s journey into a long dark tunnel with no satisfying end in sight. 


Nick Licata is the author ofBecoming A Citizen Activist andhas served five terms on the Seattle City Council, was named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

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The wealthiest push nationalist conspiracy theories to win elections

Recently there has been extensive reporting on how a select group of the wealthiest Americans promotes Donald Trump’s accusation that he won the election, referred to as the Big Lie. Nothing new here.


However, the current reporting shows how multimillionaires, foundations, and news media stars use white ethnic nationalism to protect an unregulated market economy. An economy that best serves the richest from being tapped to fund government programs, like providing greater economic opportunities for the shrinking middle class. In that effort, a new role model for this strategy has emerged, the anti-immigration and anti-democratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.


The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer ignited a new round of discussing how the role of money in politics is undermining our democratic institutions. Her piece The Big Money Behind the Big Lie has received strong endorsements from other reporters, two of which are Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce and Dartagnan of the Daily Kos.


Mayer exposes who is behind the half-year-long Presidential election ballot recount in Arizona, despite no evidence that one was needed. She begins with the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrn, who financed the film “The Deep Rig.” It claims that Joe Biden supporters, including Antifa members, stole the 2020 Presidential election. According to Mayer, “the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.”


The film is relevant to the Arizona recount because it introduces Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults on software security. Logan asserts that CIA agents, among other “deep state” bureaucrats, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. He warns viewers that, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.”


Ignoring this attitude or because of it, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, put Logan’s company in charge of the “forensic audit.” His firm had never performed an election audit. They took months to complete an analysis of Arizona’s Presidential election vote. In July, the company released figures on how they funded the audit. They reported that private donations covered 97 percent of the cost. Public funding was $150,000; private funding was nearly $5.7 million. The identifiable funding groups were ones that have promoted false claims that the election was tainted. Do you think that might have influenced the auditors?


The attempt by Trump supporters to find fraud in their audit is not rationally justified by the data available to the public. For example, although the Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, state and federal courts rejected fraud claims, two previous audits of Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county, found the count had been accurate. That county went for Biden by more than two points.


Back in May, even the Republican-majority board of supervisors of Maricopa County in a public meeting called the audit a “sham” and a “spectacle that is harming all of us.” The Board Chair called the recount a “grift disguised as an audit” because Trump supporters raised funds for the recount without any public oversight on how the donated money was spent.


In August, a new report further weakened the justification for a recount. A team of three experienced election auditors using public records showed that Biden beat Donald Trump during every day of voting in the presidential election in Maricopa County, Arizona.


The researchers consisted of two from Clear Ballot, a federally certified election auditing and technology firm, and an experienced Arizona Republican Party election observer. They also discovered that the number of Arizona disaffected Republican voters who voted for Biden was over four times greater than the statewide margin of Trump’s vote loss to Biden. In other words, Biden won in Arizona because many Republicans voted for Republicans running for lower public offices but not for Trump.


So, why the need for a recount since there is so much evidence that the election was a fair one and no evidence to support the Big Lie that it was stolen? The answer is that the Republican Party needs Donald Trump’s populist appeal to turn out white voters in their primaries. And just as important, multimillionaire business owners will donate unlimited amounts to elect a Trump Republican candidate. So, the white voters believe they have someone who will protect their social interests and the business owners get someone who will protect their financial interests.


For both groups, servicing the economic needs and protecting the civil rights of everyone through mandated government regulations is seen as dangerously changing the status quo. They cannot believe that most Americans were so stupid to have voted for Biden, who would undoubtedly make their lives worse off. There must have been a conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. The only way to get Trump back in office is now to show how he lost the election through fraud.


Besides identifying individual multimillionaires Byrn and Logan, Mayer also identifies a couple of private foundations funding efforts to show that the election was stolen from Trump. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s website notes that a guiding principle is to “combat efforts to undermine economic freedom.” However, it has funded efforts over the last six years to find fraud in elections that have elected people who threaten that free market.


Mayer says Bradley’s track record shows how it has “become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules.” The foundation’s endowment of $850 million has funded a network of groups spreading fear about election fraud. Since 2012, when Barak Obama ran for his second term, the Bradley Foundation spent $18 million supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.


Mayer also identifies the Heritage Foundation as one of the leaders in the well-funded movement to constrain access to voting. The Bradley Foundation is its third-largest contributor. Both foundations are now pursuing an objective that Paul Weyrich, one of Heritage’s founders, openly stated, according to Nancy Maclean in her book Democracy in Chains, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”


The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative is headed up by Hans von Spakovsky, who worked in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, using the Voting Rights Act, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Afterward, he was a lawyer for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which immediately filed a suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter had been disenfranchised. However, Arizona’s Republican attorney general concluded after a day of investigation that the Sharpie story was nonsense.


The camaraderie between Trump and the Heritage Foundation led to at least 66 Heritage Foundation employees and alumni receiving positions in the Trump administration. According to Jonathan Mahler of the New York Times Magazine, both share the same constituencies. Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure donations from wealthy Republicans. The Foundation website claims to have voluntary support from more than 500,000 members, but there is no breakout of how much they provide to the foundation’s budget.


Appealing to aggrieved white Americans and frightened wealthy Americans is a dynamite formula for blowing up our democracy’s institutions. The passion of a reactionary populist movement and the deep pockets of the richest can dismantle any government trying to shift services and resources to those who have not been sufficiently receiving them.


And that is why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become the hero of this nation’s most-watched right-wing populist, Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He treated his 3 million viewer audience to a whole week of broadcasting from the Hungarian capital. In addition, Tucker personally met with Orbán and each posted photos of their meeting on social media.
He was in Budapest to address a conference of Mathias Corvinus Collegium. The New York Times reported that Orbán granted $1.7 billion (about one percent of Hungary’s GDP) to it to train a new generation of conservative elite across Europe.


However, like Orbán and Carlson, radical conservatives have relabeled a “conservative” as a proponent of primarily protecting the way of life for some racial or ethnic groups who fear other such groups from disrupting or destroying it. Immigration is the touchstone of such a fear in Hungary and America for them.
Carlson tweets that at the rate of immigrat

ion coming into Hungary, “unless something changes dramatically, there will be no more Hungarians.” Orbán’s solution, which Carlson applauds, is “helping the native population to have more children.” They both accuse liberals of supporting a policy to “import a replacement population from the Third World.” Sound familiar? Something like building a wall between America and Mexico. No need to stop Canadians; they’re one of us.


Orbán has embraced ethnonationalism (“Hungary for the Hungarians”) in opposing immigrants coming into his country who are not Hungarians. He also uses this perspective as a defense of “Christendom” against Islam and to save white Christian European Heritage from the corrupting influence of liberalism that accepts gays and women as equal citizens. Orbán banned gender studies from higher education and, in 2020, ended the legal recognition of transgender and intersex people.


Through these and other policies, he proudly hailed Hungary as an “illiberal democracy,” which he has recently renamed “Christian democracy.” But, unfortunately, the democracy component in either version has shriveled as Orbán has carefully undermined an independent press.  Reporters Without Borders listed Orbán as one of the world’s 37 “press freedom predators,” arguing that he “has steadily and effectively undermined media pluralism and independence since being returned to power in 2010.”


Hungary’s judiciary has also been severely compromised. When Orbán’s political party, the Fidesz, achieved a supermajority in parliament, they promptly changed the constitution to expand its constitutional court, which decides whether laws passed by parliament are constitutional. Orbán filled the new seats with Fidesz loyalists while also forcing all judges over the age of 62 to retire. He then filled their seats with Fidesz-friendly jurists.


Orbán and his party’s institutional changes have led to charges that Hungary is on the road to becoming an authoritarian state.  The European Parliament voted three years ago, in September 2018, to label Orbán’s government a “systemic threat to the rule of law.” More restrictions on traditional liberal freedoms have occurred since then.
Could this be America’s future if Donald Trump returns or Trumpites come to have a supermajority in congress?  Carlson asked his TV audience, “Should we follow Hungary’s example?” while lauding Hungary’s pro-nationalist and increasingly restrictive laws on personal freedoms.


An alliance of the very rich, the Christian white ethnic-nationalists, and the right-wing media are working very hard to win over the Republican Party to that cause. They appear to be succeeding.

Author of ‘After Cooling’ discusses Freon’s legacy and the societal cost of air conditioning

Originally published in the Seattle Times on 7/27/21

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Eric Dean Wilson

In opening Eric Dean Wilson’s book, “After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort,” I was prepared for a lot of data on how the Freon gas created a huge hole in our ozone layer and had threatened our human survival.

But Wilson goes beyond the technical explanation of how Freon (and other gases that have replaced it) still threaten our environment. Instead, he shows how our faith in the ability to cool the world without environmental repercussions is still with us. In an interview, Wilson unveils how our marketplace-driven economy creates a consumer culture where air conditioning has become a necessity underlying that faith.

“After Cooling” begins with an unusual insight — the public initially resisted the idea of cooling air for personal comfort. It was too strange to attract buyers.

Here are more insights gleaned from a conversation with the author. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Licata: How was the public sold on the idea that feeling comfortable was OK?
Eric Dean Wilson: There had been only a slow growth until the AC industry, in response to World War II, hitched the comfort of air conditioning to work efficiently. Suddenly you could work at all hours and in all temperatures. It was vital because it integrated comfort into the Protestant work ethic.

You wrote that the history of air conditioning reveals something essentially American. What makes it uniquely American?
Americans had to justify using air cooling as something other than just pursuing comfort. We needed to believe that cooling was useful to do something else. Initially, Europe mocked the U.S., and air conditioning didn’t catch on anywhere else in the world.

What has changed so that much of the rest of the world is now also pursuing air conditioning?
It’s not just our technology that has been exported, but also our cultural bias that conflates discomfort with the danger of being uncomfortable. For instance, we do have physiological limits. We die when we’re too cold, and we have a stroke when we’re too hot. But humans can tolerate a wide range of temperatures.

Historically, heat tolerance and strategies for cooling have varied throughout the world. When our technology goes worldwide, so does our cultural bias that requires a narrow range of temperatures to be comfortable and safe.

The American model of comfort is replacing other, more responsible ways of beating the heat. As a result, most new buildings are designed to provide a uniform temperature for all, regardless of what the local population had considered normal and safe.

You argue that air conditioning has increased the gap between social classes, as defined by race. You use the American South as an example of where enjoying air conditioning in a hot and humid climate did not contribute to everyone’s improved comfort. How did racial divides grow with air conditioning?

Air conditioning became a pretty insidious tool for racial segregation. With the coming of movie theaters, which were segregated by law in the South and often segregated by the social custom in the North, the segregation of races was both spatial and thermal. White patrons sat on the ground floor, which was cooler and better air-conditioned, while the Black patrons sat in the balcony, which was stuffier, more crowded, hotter, and less air-conditioned.

More recently, neighborhoods segregated by race make it easier, [for instance] when power grids are burdened on hot days, for power companies to cut off power to primarily Black or Latino neighborhoods to preserve the whole grid.

You write that “the regard for public space and community well-being all but vanished.” How did that happen?

At the end of the 19th century, there was a birth of gorgeous public parks and spaces as part of an ethos that access to well-designed public gathering spaces benefits a city’s general population. A century later, we started seeing the shuttering of those spaces into privately controlled areas. That development occurred before air conditioning began.

When AC became available, it was concentrated in large commercial spaces where you had to spend money to stay cool. Consequently, movie theaters or shopping malls received air conditioning, while there were far fewer public spaces providing shelter from the heat. Libraries are the major exception to this.

You quote theorist Fredric Jameson as saying, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” and with capitalism come assumptions of limitless progress and infinite energy. Are there any other economic systems handling the idea of comfort better?

Unfortunately, there is no outside of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best option. If we think it is, it’s simply Panglossian logic: It must be the best of all possible worlds! That’s illogical. I believe smaller communities that have attempted to retain a precapitalist idea of the commons are the last stronghold.

It’s not that the world before capitalism was Edenic. Certainly not. But they kept the possibility of living differently. That possibility of difference — an act of imagination — is crucial.

You write that the most significant problem going forward is that we haven’t curtailed our insatiable appetite for comfort, and we do not have free energy to meet an ever-growing demand.  So, what do you lay out as a positive and effective way forward to avoid destroying the Earth for human habitation?

We need to transition to renewables as swiftly as possible. But there are still many unknowns connected to extraction. Wind turbines and solar panels still need precious metals, the mining of which destroys communities in less industrialized areas. We don’t know how to keep air travel without using fossil fuels. Some claim it’s possible, but the point is that when you expend condensed energy to overcome time and space like that, the power must come from somewhere.

I don’t have a master plan. I wish I did, but I know that our solutions come in concert with dialogue from communities who keep getting the short end of the stick. When we center on the most vulnerable, we all win.

The Party of Fear vs. Party of Hope

Image by Here and now from Pixabay

Both the Democrat and Republican parties employ Fear and Hope messaging in marketing their campaigns.

The Republicans present Fear like a paperback novel you can’t put down. Will you be murdered on an evening stroll by someone who doesn’t look like you? And did you notice there’s more of them moving into your
neighborhood?

For the Democrats, Fear is like a chapter in an assigned textbook. There are x number of guns in America, unless we reduce them by 10%, thousands of lives will be lost by gunshot wounds.

Hope is treated similarly by the parties.

Under the influence of Former President Trump, Republicans treat Hope like a weapon: we must fight the Democrats, in the hope they don’t turn America into a Socialist prison. Republicans hope to go back to a peaceful era when there were fewer problems and fewer troublesome minorities.

Democrats’ most passionate messaging is wrapped around hope. But to be effective it must go beyond producing thoughtful position briefs, as Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren excelled in releasing. Former President Obama grasped that there was a popular yearning for more a more open and just society than any previous president since President Kennedy. They both gave hope to those that wanted the nation to move forward as a community to improve everyone’s life. They did it through projecting hope in a personal way.

However, fear and hope are emotions, not separated from facts but not confined by them either. Each party cherry picks the data and the real-life experiences that reinforce their positions.

Debates between candidates rarely sway the general public. It is the listener’s expectations that frame their judgement of a debate. Since the 1960’s the Democrat Party has gradually and uniformly adopted liberalism. While the Republican Party has done the same in embracing  conservatism.

These philosophical differences have led each party to encourage expectations that define hope and fear in diametrically opposite ways. For Democrats, hope is an expectation that life can be better for all through change. For Republicans, fear is an expectation that life will be worse for them if changes are made.

The nation’s demographics show an aging population and a greater ethnic diversity. Democrats argue that these growing cohorts deserve new social, political and economic laws to meet their needs. Those changes will benefit the national community-at-large. It is not a sum-minus view where someone’s gain is another’s loss.

However, that is exactly how the Republicans see it. As a result, Republicans are receiving a wave of populist support, particularly from white males who perceive that they have the most to lose, regardless of their economic status. The clash between the two parties comes down to a class between individualism and communitarianism.

Democrats have not appreciated that individualism has been a central national value since our founding. It is directly tied to protecting our liberty and freedom from an authoritative government.

For the original thirteen colonies, the King of England had been the enemy. Trump Republicans now see the federal government as the enemy. New laws passed by the Democrats are characterized as oppressing their individual freedoms, such as owning any type of gun or choosing not to wear Covid virus-filtering health masks.

Democrats on the other hand, embrace a communitarian approach that emphasizes a community’s welfare above that of any individual. This has led them to encourage an increase in the federal minimum wage and restrict the use of chemicals like Freon that destroy the environment and ultimately the public health.

Individual businesses may suffer a loss of profits from these new measures. That result is where the concerns of individualism and the interest in promoting a free market converge. The individual should be allowed to accumulate wealth even though the community may suffer from such activity.

In sum, each party’s messaging, that is based on fear or hope, reflects an underlying cultural perspective that prioritizes either the defense of an individual’s rights or protection of a community’s welfare.

This conflict has been politically manifested and executed from the beginning when a national federal framework for the United States of America was created. It attempted to balance the powers of individual states and those of the central government.

Our future has been guided to the extent that state rights or constitutional rights rule. It’s a question of whether the status quo can be altered nationally or for just self-selected states. That struggle began when each state originally possessed a level of sovereignty thar far exceed what they can muster today.

The high point for emphasizing state sovereignty was reached when the Supreme Court in 1857 issued the 7–2 Dred Scott decision – five of the nine justices were from slave owning families.

The following year, the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln, debated the correctness of the court’s decision. Douglas accurately explained that the court declared “that each State has the right to settle the question of suffrage for itself, and all questions as to the relations between the white man and the negro.” Hence, Blacks could be enslaved indefinitely or until a state decided to set them free.

The Civil War defined the moment when state’s rights as an exercise of sovereignty ended. They were part of something larger, the Union, and they could not withdraw from it. Consequently, they were forced to end slavery, against their will.

Limiting state’s sovereignty has since been pursued by the Supreme Court as demonstrated by two landmark decisions, reached over two generations ago.

The court’s 1954 unanimous opinion in Brown vs Board of Education ending racially segregated public schooling by states was inherently unequal and a violation of constitutional rights. In the Roe vs Wade case, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the US Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive state government restrictions.

Identifying the issue of state’s rights is necessary to show that it has been used as a tool by conservatives and now the Republicans to push a philosophy of individualism. The Republican Party hopes to turn the nation back to an era of tranquility for people, the preponderance of whom were of European decent.  There is no fixed period, but it is one that would come before the Supreme Court curtailed state’s power with decisions like Brown & Roe.

For Republicans, hope is closely tied to the fear of losing the freedom to live as one wishes, without any federal government interference. The right to carry a loaded gun is now a touchstone for measuring freedom. Ironically the other touchstone for state’s rights, is their ability to effectively deny a woman’s right to control their bodies. That contradiction is explained away by conservatives as a religious conviction which has a higher authority than government.

The differences in the parties’ messaging are already shaping the crucial 2022 November elections, which will select one third of the Senators and all of the Representatives.
At Trump’s first post-election rally, held in Lorain County Ohio on June 26, a 32-year-old physical therapist, was interviewed by NPR at the rally. She said that it was scary not having Trump as president.

The role of fear remains strongest among Republicans and conservative independents. For them, without a strong leader to stop the Democrats, bad things will happen.

Under the influence of former President Trump, Republicans now tend to hold loud rallies feeding that fear. If Democrats remain in control of congress their individual freedoms and liberties will be stripped away.

The only barrier the Republicans have is that the majority of state legislatures are controlled by conservative Republicans. But if the Democrats win a clear majority in congress, new legislation will accommodate voters who want dramatic structural changes.

That is why Republicans oppose retaining past measures that have encouraged voting. Those improvements led to Joe Biden becoming president and they could bring out new voters in deep red states like Georgie, where the Republicans lost two US Senate seats.

Democrats also fear the Republicans, but rather than holding rallies they issue policy papers about how Republican’s social and economic policies favor the few over the many. That disparity will only get worse if we don’t adjust government programs – discussion groups follow. Which party’s delivery attracts lines of people waiting to attend their events?

Democrats do not have to mimic the scare tactics of the Republicans to win elections. However, they must energize their constituents to the same degree.

To accomplish that feat, they need to unabashedly promote community welfare while protecting the livelihood of everyone regardless of racial identity. In particular they must acknowledge that independent businesses must be assisted in some manner during a period of transitional change toward a society that is less stratified by race and income.

A message of hope can beat a message of fear, if it provides a clear road ahead.

 

Can Critical Race Theory Reframe American History Successfully?

            For the first time in four decades, we have a new national holiday, the Juneteenth National Independence Day. It celebrates the liberation of Black American slaves from the last city enslaving them in Galveston, Texas.

            All the Senate Republicans, and all but fourteen of the Republicans in the House, voted in favor of establishing the holiday. Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mt., released a statement before the vote that captures Republican concerns that are festering within their ranks: “This is an effort by the Left to … celebrate identity politics as part of its larger efforts to make Critical Race Theory the reigning ideology of our country.” As a result, Republicans have begun a national campaign opposed to teaching Critical Race Theory in public schools and in some state universities.

            However, Michael Eric Dyson, author of Long Time Coming, told MSNBC that June 19 as a national holiday would not have happened without CRT moving people to grapple with race in our history and having to deal with it now. 

            Rosendale and Eyson’s comments reveal a divide in this nation from when the first African slaves were brought into the North American Colonies in 1619. It is a battle over who has the political power to interpret our nation’s history and shape our future. Critical Race Theory is the current battleground. 

            Stephen Sawchuk, in a May issue of Education Week, aptly captures both sides in this struggle when he asks, “Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people?” However, he quickly notes, “the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem.”

            Standardized history textbooks often credit the Civil War as the final resolution in achieving political equality of former African slaves as U.S. citizens. But some critical historical elements are often ignored. 

            First, by our constitution, “All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Importing slaves was outlawed in1808. One could argue that all slaves born in the U.S. after 1808 could be considered citizens.

            Second, the 13th amendment passed nearly 60 years after the last slave was admitted. According to the Stanford School of Medicine’s Ethnogeriatrics: in 1860, only 3.5 percent of the slaves were over sixty. Consequently, over 95 percent of the slaves were technically already U.S. citizens since they were “persons born in the United States.”

            Third, the Constitutional Convention declaring that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for determining representation in the House of Representatives. This measure acknowledged slaves as persons and not simply property like livestock.             

            Even though the constitution recognized and allowed slavery, it was silent on the status of the slave’s children. A legal argument could have been made that those children automatically were citizens and that their continued enslavement was a violation of their constitutional right. 

            Why wasn’t that legal avenue taken? Because the slave-owning states could stop any such legislation in Congress. They were disproportionately represented in the House of Representatives.  Sixty percent of their slaves figured into the number of representatives that they could send to Congress. In addition, they could influence the makeup of the Supreme Court to the extent that the court’s Dred Scott decision would forcibly send a free slave in a non-slave state back to a slave state to be shackled again. 

            When considering these conditions in our history, one can understand why Eyson says that CRT began with legal scholars who saw that systemic racism was embedded in the law. He concludes that our laws have not been a neutral arbitrator on race relations.  Those biased laws extend from the federal to the state to the municipal level. 

            And that brings us to where we are today. The fear, spearheaded by the Republican Party, is that CRT demeans America by suggesting that our laws since colonial days have been biased against black slaves and then their decedents. After the Civil War, that bias was most evident in the national politics in the presidential elections of 1868, which blatantly raised the fear of blacks having more political power than white voters.

            To some degree that happened, the participation of Black voters was critical for Republican Ulysses S. Grant being elected president. The Democrats, whose motto was “This is a White Man’s country, let White Men Rule,” ran Horatio Seymore. He lost by 305,000 votes; however, a half-million newly enfranchised Black men voted for Grant. Seymore had supported the Crittenden Compromise, which would have guaranteed slavery in the constitution to end the Civil War.

            Despite Grant winning, the former slave-owning states instituted laws that effectively eliminated Black political and economic power. They passed segregation and Jim Crow laws that ignored two constitutional amendments that they were expected to accept as a condition to being back into the Union. Those were the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 granting Black Americans the rights of citizenship and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 giving Black American men the right to vote. 

            When the South went about adopting Black Codes designed to “replace” Black’s slavery with some as close to it as possible, Northern States moved onto other concerns. Black Americans outnumbered and lacking the resources to fight against stronger forces were abandoned to go it alone in trying to achieve full citizenship. 

            But CRT goes far beyond the machinations of the Southern slave-holding states. It raises questions of how laws at all government levels have hindered Black Americans’ power to exercise citizenship on par with white citizens. And that theory assaults the American narrative that we have been taught, America is the land of opportunity for all. 

            When CRT attacks that storyline, it is seen as betraying our traditional image of a great, generous, and unique America. This tradition is based on the belief that a market economy can best provide those opportunities. Critical Race Theory appears to threaten the sanctity of preserving an unregulated marketplace when it shows how slaves were commodities in the market and the source of significant profits to their owners.  

            Professor Matthew Desmond at Princeton University wrote how the combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. Cotton was the nation’s most valuable export grown and picked by enslaved workers. 

            Two professors reviewing the 1860 census data reported that the median wealth of the wealthiest 1% of Southerners was more than three times higher than for the wealthiest 1% of Northerners. However, after the slaves were freed, who were considered personal property, the top 10% of the Southern wealth distribution experienced a 90% drop in the value of their personal property, while real property wealth was cut approximately in half. Consequently, the wealthy oligarchy of the South was crippled, but not down. 

            For the next 100 years, the new stratum of upper South wealth persuaded the white working poor that the freed Black slaves and their offspring would take jobs away from them. It was a fear also publicly expressed by many white workers in the North. 

            Due to the power of state’s rights, what followed was a torrent of segregation and Jim Crow laws in many states. The segregationist influence was also a powerful voting bloc in Congress that lasted from the 1870s to the 1960s. They almost defeated President Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965.           

            Before then, segregationists pushed FDR’s federal programs to deny services to Black citizens. Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson has documented, it was mainly at the behest of Southern Democrats that farm and domestic workers — more than half the nation’s black workforce at the time — were excluded from New Deal policies, including the Social Security and Wagner Acts of 1935 (the Wagner Act ensured the right of workers to collective bargaining), and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set a minimum wage and established the eight-hour workday.

            These are historical facts. Conservatives may not want to dwell on them or even discuss them. However, what frightens them is the Theory of Critical Race, which links the long-lasting effects of slavery with systemic racism ingrained in America’s laws. The laws that have shaped our politics, culture, and social relationships. 

            Conservatives believe this all-encompassing perspective has turned an enjoyable movie about our history into a horror show on whites oppressing Blacks. According to an Education Week analysis, that anger has resulted in legislators in 21 states, as of June 16, introducing bills that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. Five states have signed these bills into law. Opposition is not just concentrated in the South.

            Idaho Republican legislators cut $2.5 mill from their 2022 state budget from colleges and universities, citing the teaching of CRT, which “seeks to highlight how historical inequities and racism continue to shape public policy and social conditions today.”

They also passed a bill that bans the teaching of critical race theory in public and charter schools and universities in the state. But according to Republican Sen. Carl Crabtree, one of the sponsors, they declined to define critical race theory in the bill because “everybody has a different view” of what the term means.

            Crabtree was honest. There is no set definition of Critical Race Theory because, as a theory, it is constantly changing. It’s been around for forty years. As any social, political, or legal theory ages, there will be multiple interpretations. That’s true of theories originating from either the left and the right: constitutionalism, socialism, and all the “isms” have spawned schools of thought that debate how to describe what they believe. 

            Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law that prohibited teaching that “individuals, by virtue of race or gender, are inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” From what I’ve read, CRT does not focus on individuals being racist but institutions that promote policies that discriminate against people of color. 

            For example, Kiara Alfonseca of ABC news wrote in her piece “Critical race theory in the classroom: Understanding the debate” that CRT “analyzes benefits white people have in society, which is sometimes referred to as “white privilege.” This refers to the concept that white people continue to be protected from the effects of systemic race-based discrimination because of their skin color.” That may result in a white person feeling guilty. But that’s up to the individual. 

            However, advocates of CRT may also be undertaking a “mission impossible” in trying to convince most people in a nation that they must do something to help a minority which may result in fewer benefits to themselves. A noble and just pursuit, but one that doesn’t have many successful historical incidents to rely on for a proven path forward.

            Another approach articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and Columbia Law School professor is to see critical race theory as a discipline that seeks to understand how racism has shaped U.S. laws and how those laws have continued to impact the lives of non-white people. It’s an approach that opens a discussion about what has happened in the past and how it continues to affect everyone. 

            However, Stephen Sawchuk makes an astute philosophical observation that may just cut to the core of why there is so much resistance from some to CRT. He maintains that CRT is an extension of postmodernist thought, which is “skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.” 

            If CRT is rejecting those beliefs, then it has a steep hill to climb. Because universal values, objective knowledge, etc., are held dear by more than just conservatives. They are pretty much the groundwork of our society. Such an approach would put C.R. Theory on the defensive. Advocates would be forced to describe what beliefs would replace them. It doesn’t seem like a winning strategy for converting the entire nation to a new theory to live by.

            On the other hand, many of the CRT critics make claims that the proponents don’t make. Such as trying to indoctrinate children that the United States is inherently wicked. Or, when a Republican Texas lawmaker believes “the term “white privilege” blames children for actions of racism in the past and says critical race theorists believe if someone can’t acknowledge white supremacy or white privilege, then they are racist.” 

            If that approach were taken, CRT would be accused of identifying individuals as racist if they disagree with the theory. Some advocates may say those things, but as I pointed out, all theories have multiple and conflicting believers. Taking quotes from one or two people does not define an entire theory.

            What is needed at this time is recognizing what has occurred in the past and how it has shaped our present reality. That is not a theory, so much as an exercise in understanding and thinking. It is a rational process that many of us do hold dear. And it can lead to changing the laws so that we treat one another as citizens within a democratic and just society. 

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, was named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Can Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Peel-Off Blue-Collar Workers from the Republicans?

The Democrats have been losing blue-collar voters for the last decade; this legislation could reverse that trend.

            The Democrats and the Republicans are struggling over Biden’s infrastructure plan as a play for how each party can appeal to blue-collar workers. The Ds argue that this plan will promote good-paying jobs. The Rs can’t argue against creating better jobs, so they counter with the fear that it could bankrupt businesses and put people out of work. It’s a defensive position that lacks the more vital positive message that the D’s can make. 

            The R’s do fear that Biden is aiming to cleave blue-collar employees off from the Republican’s base by framing the debate as one of creating jobs versus padding the profits of corporations. His infrastructure legislation is cleverly titled the American Jobs Plan to address their primary concern, keeping and getting jobs. 

            Focusing on the economy is the pathway that Biden is taking to deliver that message to the Trump voters. A Pew Research survey of 12 issues asked voters to rank them by importance. It showed that 88 percent of Trump voters considered the economy the number one issue; the next closest issue was immigration at 74 percent. Meanwhile, Biden supporters ranked the economy as fourth at 72 percent; the number one issue was health care at 84 percent. 

            Blue-collar concern with the economy is reflected in that  “President Trump garnered his highest vote shares in counties that had some of the most sluggish job, population and economic growth during his term,” according to an analysis done by the Washington Post. These are areas that blue-collar jobs have been shrinking in the last decade. The regions with sinking economies have led them to be dissatisfied with a Democratic Party supposed to protect their economic interests.

            As a result, blue-collar workers identifying as Democrats have declined. An NBC survey found that drop was by 8 percentage points, while the number who call themselves Republicans has increased by 12 percentage points in the last decade. That trend is not limited to white workers. From 2010 to 2020, there was an increase of 13 percent of blue-collar Hispanics identifying as Republicans and a 7 percent increase of Black blue-collar workers. The totals are still minimal, but if they represent a long-term shift to the Republican Party, the Democrats will start losing more elections. 

            A critical factor contributing to the loss of blue-collar jobs is the weakened condition of unions to promote pro-worker legislation. Just over half of the state legislatures have passed right-to-work laws. Unions lose membership and funding to support candidates under these laws. Meanwhile, there are fewer restrictions on how businesses can raise funds and influence elections. As a result, fewer government efforts being made to improve employee benefits, rights, and wages. Those improvements are dependent on business owners seeing a self-interest in promoting them.

            Biden cannot interfere with the state legislatures, but his American Jobs Plan could help workers in businesses with federal contracts. Michael Lotito, an attorney with Littler in San Francisco, explained that if the AJP is passed, “federal government contractors will benefit from trillions in new spending” because they would get contracts to build new roads and bridges. He said, “The president will want that money to go for good union jobs. All federal contractors should expect … including neutrality agreements, no unresolved unfair labor practices outstanding and a positive position on unions in general.”

            Biden and the Democrats are still engaged in negotiations with the Republicans in determining if they can agree on some type of infrastructure plan. At this time, no agreement has been reached with the moderate Republicans. Even if an agreement is reached, there are some progressive Democrats who may vote against the compromise if it does not provide enough assistance to workers. In other words, the Republicans could just neuter the Democrats’ threat of appealing to the blue-collar workers by cutting some sections of the AJP. The Democrats would then be left with a plan lacking any significant job creation or security and nothing to point in the next round of congressional elections. 

            If a defanged AJP is offered and fails to pass, there will be a lot of finger-pointing. It will be difficult for either party to send out a clear message that the failure to pass a plan was the other party’s fault, particularly if members within each party are divided on the votes. 

            However, if Biden pushes for something close to the original plan, a Republican filibuster will sink it. Then the Republicans will be the party that stopped the train from delivering the goods. They will be accused of being incapable of governing and getting anything done. Biden can point to the dozens of meetings he has had with individual Republicans as proof that he was willing to meet and talk with them. That approach will not sway most conservative voters, but it may be enough to bring back some blue-collar voters into the Democratic fold. 

            Reactionary Republicans are not sitting on their hands. They are actively campaigning now against the AJP by reaching out to the voters. One group outside of the parties leading the charge in attacking Biden’s plan is The Job Creators Network. A few billionaires started it to fight federal legislation protecting employees from business owners interfering in their efforts to certify forming a union. In 2019 they collected $3.8 million in contributions, more than twice the amount they raised in 2016. 

            They have established a Job Loss Joe tracker “to calculate the employment opportunities that Biden has or is planning to throw under the bus.” Their website claims, “President Biden has already killed thousands of jobs with the stroke of a pen and has countless other job-killing policies in the pipeline, including the idea to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.”

              Biden’s American Jobs Plan is more than just about building bridges and roads; it’s about allowing working families an opportunity to obtain greater economic power by providing them the freedom to organize into bargaining units if they choose to do so. Regaining that opportunity without owners interfering would bring America back when organized labor provided blue-collar workers with a higher standard of living than they have now. To pay for the creation of new jobs, Biden’s infrastructure plan needs to be funded.  

            The Republicans are adamant in protecting the significant tax cuts provided by President Trump to big businesses. As reporter Christopher Cadelago noted in Politico, the Biden administration will not levy new fees on people earning less than $400,000, particularly as Republicans will not reverse Trump’s tax cuts. The AJP can provide decent-paying jobs to blue-collar workers if big businesses, which have seen their profits grow during the pandemic, are willing to shift their excess profits back to those who have worked to make America great.

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, was named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Democrats Say Eliminate the Filibuster – but they use it more than the Republicans

Image by b0red from Pixabay

Filibusters have blocked and supported progressive legislation

            Independent and Democratic progressives are pushing to eliminate the Senate filibuster. They see how it has often succeeded in stopping legislation that protects citizens’ freedoms. 

            Filibustering against civil rights legislation in congress is an unfortunate tradition. It was repeatedly used by Southern Democratic senators to successfully block efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and ’30s. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became the iconic example of filibustering when he talked twenty-four hours straight to stop the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Blacks to vote. His effort failed, and the Act passed within two hours after he sat down. The filibuster was used again in another failed effort to stop the Senate from passing the  Civil Rights Act of 1964

            Less publicized is how the filibuster has been used to block workers’ rights legislation, such as the 1978 Labor Law Reform Act and, more recently, the Employee Free Choice Act, supported by the Obama administration. Republicans are threatening to filibuster to stop the Senate from passing HR1. This is a critical bill that would negate past state-mandated laws suppressing voter turnout and curtail the impact in the 47 state legislatures that have bills before them to restrict ballot access further. Many Democrats use these examples to demand an end to the filibuster.

            Eliminating the filibuster would allow passing progressive legislation to protect civil, employee, and voter rights. That is true if a Democratic majority controlled the Senate. However, progressives should pause and consider that there will be different outcomes when the Republicans come to control the Senate.  In exactly half of the congressional sessions since 1989 to the end of Donald Trump’s term, they were the majority party in the Senate.

            President Donald Trump accused Senate Republicans, who were in the majority, to “look like fools and are wasting time” by preserving the filibuster. Without the Democrats being able to use the filibuster, Republicans would have passed legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and limit protections for undocumented immigrants. The Democrats were also able to deny the Republican Senate from banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans could not obtain the sixty votes to close the debate and allow the legislation to pass. 

The filibuster was a relatively dormant tool until the Nixon Administration

            The filibuster is more of a generic term than a legal one. It simply allows Senators of the minority party to delay a vote on legislation that the majority party would pass. The delay in effect becomes a veto if the talking or threat of a filibuster cannot be formally ended through a vote. 

            On a side note, the House does not have a filibuster. Back in 1806, when both chambers established their rules, the House retained the right to take a vote through a majority vote. The Senate, some historians say it was done by accident, dropped that requirement.

             Up until 1917, there was no way to force a vote in the Senate if the minority party refused to give way. The compromise reached that year would allow a two-thirds vote of the Senate members to cease an endless debate from stopping legislation. Before 1917, no precise measurement of how often filibustering occurred existed other than combing through the historical debate records. 

            Since 1917, a record is kept every time there is a motion for cloture, i.e., ending a debate to take a vote. There is also a record of the number of votes are taken after the motion was made. And there is a record showing how many of those votes resulted in cloture being invoked.

            Despite the ability to end a filibuster of the 21 congressional sessions from 1917 to the 1971-72 session, only six passed a cloture vote. In 11 of the 21 sessions, no vote was even taken. There is no formal record indicating when a filibuster occurred other than a vote being taken. There were undoubtedly delaying tactics used to delay or stop a vote, which might result in a motion to consider a cloture vote, but no such motions were made in 9 sessions. Even though filibusters were used to stop the adoption of lynching laws, as a rule, there is not a clear record of how they threatened to block similar legislation. 

            The record clearly shows that in the 1971-72 congressional session, which would have been the second half of Richard Nixon’s first term, filibusters did explode. They went from a high of seven votes for cloture in any single session to 20 votes in that session. From 1972 forward, the number of cloture votes per session dropped only once below 20 votes. 

            The trend began with the Democrats being the majority party in the Senate during Nixon’s second half of his first term. The Republicans used the filibuster to stop passing the U.S.-Soviet Arms Control Pact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Military Draft Extension but lost the cloture vote. That session saw a landmark of 4 cloture votes being invoked, and that session number rose steadily to the end of the Trump administration.      

            In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from 66 to 60. The Democrats had 61 members, so they avoided an effective filibuster from stopping their legislation by lowering the vote. However, following the end of the next congressional session, neither party reached a high of 61 members in the Senate. Consequently, the filibuster has become the weapon of choice for the minority Senate party. And it has been increasingly used by both the Republicans and the Democrats.

Tracking the Use of the Filibuster by Ds and Rs

            The majority party makes the motion to ask for cloture because their agenda is being delayed. The minority party filibusters to stop the majority from passing legislation. The higher the number of motions, the more the minority party employs filibusters to prevent the majority’s legislation from passing. 

            From the first congressional session in the W. H. Bush administration (1989-1990) up to the third congressional term in W. Bush’s administration (2005-2007), there were 601 motions for closure during that 9-session period. An explosion followed this period in using the filibuster. 

            During the six congressional sessions before the Joe Biden administration began, there was a total of 1,161 motions for cloture by both parties covering the Obama and Trump’s terms. The Republicans made 153 more motions for cloture than the Democrats did during this period, even though both parties were the majority party in the Senate for three sessions each. 

            More importantly, the Republicans were forced to have a vote on cloture 207 more times than the Democrats pursued such a vote. Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University, argues that cloture votes, while imperfect, are a valid measurement of minority efforts to block the Senate. Consequently, the Democrats used the filibuster more often than the Republicans to stop the other party’s legislation from coming up for a vote.

            This data runs counter to an article by Caroline Fredrickson for the Brennan Center for Justice. In her extensive documented “The Case Against the Filibuster”, she wrote, “During the Obama administration, Senate Republicans took obstruction to a new level, using the filibuster more than ever in history.” While that is technically correct, the record shows that Democrats then set a new historical record for “obstruction” when the Republicans became the majority party in the Senate. 

            It is challenging to figure how eliminating the filibuster, which the Democrats used more than the Republicans in the last 31 years, would benefit the Democrats. 

Filibuster’s role in our Democracy  

            Fredrickson also makes an argument that the filibuster has clogged up the democratic process. She implies that the filibuster has contributed to the decline in congress’s productivity. The problem is that most of the time that filibustering has been available, there is no parallel between enacting cloture and the number of bills that the Senate passed. She notes that  “In the 84th Congress (1955–1956), the Senate passed 2,410 bills, a high for the chamber.” However, from 1917 to 1956, cloture was only invoked four times, three of which were in one session. She further shows that “By the 92nd Congress (1971–1972), the number of bills passed dropped below 1,000 to 927.” During that period of eight sessions, cloture was only invoked eight times, half of which were in the last session. It is hard to make a creditable case that the filibuster is the cause for stifling the Senate’s productivity. 

            Congress has passed and introduced fewer bills, as she correctly notes. However, I believe it’s not because of the filibuster. It’s because ideology is taking the lead in shaping both political parties. The evidence is found in how the votes for invoking cloture have dramatically increased while productivity has shrunk.

            Invoking cloture never exceeded 48% of the motions succeeding during the combined terms of H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, even with each party controlling the Senate for three sessions. In the collective terms of all the presidents that followed them, W. Bush, Obama, and Trump, each party controlled five sessions for a total of ten terms. Only once did invocation fall below 48%.  It was during this period that passing legislation dramatically declined the most.

            The increase in the invocation rate and the decrease in passing legislation can be traced to the parties marshaling greater discipline over their members and increasing ideological differences. 

            There are more significant practices than filibustering that have hindered our democracy from functioning correctly. They would be representing less populated states disproportionately in the Senate, gerrymandering of state legislative districts that draw the congressional districts, and enacting voter suppression measures that target the other party’s voters. These all should be corrected to secure a more responsive government to the majority of citizens.

            The filibuster was not included in the constitution, which prescribes supermajority votes only for specific subjects, such as treaties. The implication being that a simple majority is an expectation for passing legislation. 

            Nevertheless, it is part of our political heritage that will be difficult to abandon, even for Democrats. Thirty of them, including now Vice President Kamala Harrison, joined an equal number of Senate Republicans signing a letter in April 2017 asking both Majority and Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer “to preserve the rules, practices, and traditions … to engage in extended debate.” Their message leaves the door open for adjusting the filibuster rules but not eliminating them. 

            Adjustments have been made to make the filibuster less disruptive. Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution has counted 161 exceptions to the filibuster’s supermajority requirement that the Senate or statute has created between 1969 and 2014. More have been made since then. For example, in 2017, the Senate reduced the number of votes needed to end debate on nominations.

            Another needed change, led by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), is to require attendance in the chamber to physically participate in a filibuster.  Allowing a filibuster to occur with just filling a notification is a significant flaw created when the senate rules lowered the number of votes needed to achieve cloture.  Both parties have taken advantage of requiring little effort to begin and sustain a filibuster. And why not? If the other side is doing it? The result has been a race to strangle the other party’s prime legislative priorities with minimal visible effort. 

            What is most insidious is that filibustering can occur throughout moving a bill through the Senate. It is not just one filibuster to keep legislation away from a final floor vote. Instead, multiple filibusters stop or slow down the processing of a single bill along its way to a floor vote. 

            The wisest course of action in resolving the filibuster’s negative impact on our legislative process is to think through the consequences of any change and take intermediate steps to lessen unintended consequences. That approach is not compromising principles. It is pursuing the most effective alteration possible to keep our Senate as a functioning chamber for passing significant pieces of legislation. 

The table below is a compilation of data collected from the following sources.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jun/25/control-house-and-senate-1900/

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm

https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/Presidents-Coinciding/

Table of Cloture Motions and Votes in every Congressional Session since 1991

Table

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            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, was named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Teach Civics In Schools or Face More Insurrections

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Special Note for classroom use – any portions of this essay may be reprinted freely. 

Bias, Discrimination & Hate From:ADL Education

Ignorance Does Not Lead to Freedom

The slogans of the January 6 insurrections who stormed the Capitol demonstrated much passion. But they had little understanding of how a democratic government works. Nor did they care to find out.

Foreign terrorists did not manipulate them. They earnestly believed as President Donald Trump told them that day and for weeks beforehand, that Congress was about to trample on their freedom and liberty. Most of them could have been your white neighbors.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a friend pointed out that the lack of an educated populace leads to the expectation that they can be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization and open to demagoguery.  Jefferson wrote they expect “what never was and never will be.” That unrealistic expectation is at the crux of why our nation’s schools must teach civics so that as adults, they understand what is possible in a democracy and the principles that sustain it.

Schools are failing to graduate future citizens of a democracy

“Schools are failing at what the nation’s founders saw as education’s most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues.” This was the conclusion reached by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Clifford Janey in their joint Century Foundation report released in 2011, “Putting Democracy Back into Public Education.” The foundation is a nonprofit public policy research institution supporting a mix of effective government, open democracy, and free markets.

An Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania survey taken in 2014 found that many citizens are unaware of how their government works. Only 36 percent of those surveyed could name all three branches of the U.S. government, and similarly, 35 percent could not name a single one. Four years later, their 2016 survey found that only 26 percent of Americans could name all three branches of government. Is this a rising tide of ignorance on how our government works? And at the same time, there is a wave of growing anger at the government not working.

Lacking knowledge not only makes our citizenry ineffective for making government accountable, but it leads to distrusting democracy altogether. Kahlenberg and Janey noted that a 2011 World Values Survey found that, “When asked whether democracy is a good or bad way to run a country, 17 percent said bad or very bad, up from 9 percent in the mid-1990s. Among those ages 16 to 24, about a quarter said democracy was bad or very bad, an increase of one-third from a decade and a half earlier.”

Without going into why so many young adults think democracy is bad, the fact that so many do suggest that our core democratic cultural values are slipping away.

Civics is about cultural values, not just elections

Damian Ruck’s December 2019 Nature research article, “The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies,” revealed that stable democracies tend to rest upon two cultural foundations: openness to diversity and civic confidence.” In other words, to survive, democracies must be “tolerant towards minority groups” and that “civic institutions, including government and the media, [must] command the confidence of the people.”

Teaching civics in schools should build confidence in a democratic government to be representative and tolerant of all citizens. However, civics could be selective in the historical information provided to students and thus as politically biased. Consider how former President Trump’s 1776 Commission and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been viewed.

In September 2020, Trump announced he would establish a 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education. He wished to combat the “result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” The 1619 Project was cited as an example where “the Left has warped, distorted and defiled the American Story.”

On November 2, the day before the 2020 elections, Trump by executive order established his 1776 Commission. The day before the January 6 insurrection, the commission of 18 members met for the first time.

No professional historians were included. The commission chair was Larry Arnn, president of the private conservative college Hillsdale College and a founder of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the spring of 2020, the institute tweeted, “The notion that everything to the right of Communism is fascism remains a fixture in the minds of Communists and other radicals. Marxist ideology lets them do that.”

On January 18, 2021, two days before the end of Trump’s term and only thirty days after the commissioners were appointed, they released a 41-page “The 1776 Report.” It came without citations or footnotes and no identification of its primary authors.

The report promoted “Patriotic education.” Trump, and seemingly most of the commissioners, felt that schoolteachers who echoed the New York Times’ 1619 Project theme were attacking the country’s founders and principles of freedom and liberty. The Times said to the contrary, its 1619 Project’s aim was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The 1776 Report, reflecting Claremont Institute’s political orientation, saw the Project as an expression of progressivism which they considered an “ism” like fascism and Communism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary when she kicked off the 1619 Project with an essay headlined: Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.

Her article is a polemic on the evils of slavery buttressed by extensive historical data. That evil began with the 400,000 enslaved Africans sold into America before the international slave trade was abolished. Although they formed one-fifth of the young nation’s population, they were treated as property that “could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, they laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, and they made vast fortunes for white people North and South. They fought in every American war, with the first person to die fighting the British in the American Revolution being Crispus Attucks, a fugitive from slavery.

Teaching history is not the same as teaching civics, but the study of a nation’s government must address its development over time. America became a nation-based Thomas Jefferson’s idea that it was a self-evident truth that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, such as life and liberty.

Some scholars disagreed with how Hanna-Jones summarized the span of history covering the role of slavery in shaping this nation and found fault with some historical references. However, the criticisms of her essay were far fewer than the broadside that academics unloaded on the slapped-together 1776 report. Was it logical for Trump and his commission to consider Hanna-Jones unpatriotic? All she did was describe the inhumane conditions of the slaves’ lives, their positive contributions to everyone else’s welfare, and how some colonialists opposed British rule because losing slavery would hurt their businesses and the economy.

The conservative Heritage Foundation ran an article “The New York Times Begins Correcting the Historical Record on “1619.” They characterized the correction as evidence that the integrity of the 1619 Project was flawed. The correction was minor. It read: A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.

The 1776 Report and the 1619 Project represent a long-standing cultural division in this nation in determining a civics curriculum. Conservatives highlight the written principles of the American revolution and believe that emphasizing our nation’s dependence on slavery is a deliberate slight to honoring our civic heritage. Liberals insist that slavery created civic institutions and a culture that still divides our country along racial lines.

The challenge is to teach students how government functions and how democratic principles that are the foundation of our unique republic must guide government functions to administer justice fairly to all citizens. The current efforts at promoting civics education focus primarily on the mechanics of governing.

Civics education is fragmented and incomplete

According to The Center for American Progress, only nine states and the District of Columbia require one year of U.S. government or civics. Thirty-one states only require a half-year of civics or U.S. government education, and ten states have no civics requirement. Since decisions are made by each state or school district, there is no required national coordination on fundamental principles or topics to be covered by civic classes.

The constitution leaves public school education in the hands of the states. Consequently, there is no federal jurisdiction to make civics a requirement or identify what the subject matter should be. Federal financial aid only amounts to 8% of the total cost to run the nation’s public schools, according to national data collected for the 2017-18 school year. The remainder of the funding is about evenly divided between educational districts and states. Most K-12 federal funding goes to the most economically vulnerable students through the National School Lunch Program and the Title I program. The money goes for social assistance, not educational programing.

To reach some standard measurement of civic education, 17 states require high school students to pass the U.S. citizenship exam before graduation. Unfortunately, the exam is heavy on dates and minutiae. It does nothing to measure comprehension of the principles underlying our republic.

Other states take more of a hands-on approach by allowing credit for community service, although almost none require it. Only Maryland and the District of Columbia require community service and civics courses for graduation. Surveys have shown that states with the highest rates of youth civic engagement tend to prioritize civics courses. Ten states with the highest youth volunteer rates have a civics course requirement for graduation.

Nonprofits have stepped up to expand the discussion to include the principles of seeking social justice as part of our heritage. One of the most significant collaborative efforts is an alliance of 36 nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations that formed the Civics Renewal Network, which grew out of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Their primary function is offering free online classroom resources for civics education, much of it available for teachers through the one-stop website www.civicsrenewalnetwork.org.

Another successful effort has been iCivics which offers free lesson plans, games, and interactive videogames for middle and high school educators.  By 2015, the iCivics games had 72,000 teachers as registered users, and its games had been played 30 million times.
Sandra Day O’Connor, whom President Reagan appointed to the Supreme Court, left the iCivics organization as her legacy. Unlike many other efforts, iCivics is committed to unveiling the larger context around institutional racism, saying “that civic education must be transparent and explicit about racism if we want young people to engage civically as partners going forward.”

Teaching Civics Nationally Will Not be Easy

By far, the most ambitious plan underway to bring a reasoned approach to teaching civics is the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap. It is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. The roadmap is not a national curriculum nor a set of instructional standards. Instead, it recommends approaches to learning civics.

The Educating for American Democracy initiative involves over 300 academics and educators. An executive committee of seven, including the executive director of iCivics, Louise Dubé, coordinate the effort. They have an ambitious plan to reach 60 million students by 2030 and provide them with access to high-quality civic learning opportunities. Over 100,000 schools have been designated as “civic ready” with a Civic Learning Plan and resources to support it.

This effort places civic lessons in the context of our country’s complex cultural history that championed liberty and freedom while still enslaving people for over 200 years. Changing culture is a thousand times more difficult than changing politicians and even governments. However, instead of preaching a singular view, this initiative encourages debate and exploring the need for compromise to make constitutional democracy work.

While this roadmap may serve as a template for teachers willing and able to teach civics, it is still a long way off from establishing any federal standards or recommendations for topics to be covered in civic classes. The last time that was tried, in 1994-1995, the Senate rejected the National History Standards proposed by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ U.S. Department of Education by a vote of 99 to 1.

In line with tradition, Trump said that the federal government should protect and preserve State and local control over their schools and curriculums. His administration opposed imposing a national curriculum or national standards in education.

But Trump went further by rejecting the Common Core curriculum, which state governors and school districts created, not the federal government. The curriculum specified what students should know at each grade level in the fields of math and reading. Since 2010, 41 of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia had adopted the curriculum. Although, as of 2015, five states had repealed Common Core, and additional state legislatures were repealing its use in their state.

States were encouraged to adopt the Common Core by the feds providing waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act. However, that act was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which prohibits the federal government from coercing States in any way from adopting the Common Core and any similar academic standards. Unless that law is amended or a new one passed, there will be no required national curriculum for teaching civics in public schools. Efforts to share a common civics standard will continue to be limited to nonprofits encouraging states and school districts to coordinate their efforts.

Improving our civics education is no easy task. Our country’s federal model delegates power to the states to control public education. The word “education” appears nowhere in our constitution. Within their boundaries, only states can mandate a civics curriculum. Teaching civics that promote democratic cultural values, such as tolerance and inclusivity, would have to be approved by state legislatures, many of which are currently limiting access to the ballot box.

Federal government democracies worldwide face a similar challenge, although all democracies need to teach civics. Charles Quigley, the Executive Director of the Center for Civic Education, summarized that need. “Democracy requires more than the writing of constitutions and the establishment of democratic institutions. Ultimately, for a democracy to work, it must lie in the hearts and minds of its citizens. Democracy needs a political culture that supports it.”

We need citizen-led organizations to work together to strengthen our political culture and to lobby state legislatures.  Our founding principles must be aspirations and guide our daily lives in being more tolerant and respectful of others. Suppose we can couple those principles with providing knowledge on the nuts and bolts of how our democracy works. In that case, we should be able to avoid future insurrections based on Twitter-born conspiracy theories.

How Can Hate Speech and Conspiracy Theories be Banned on Social Media?

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

            The legal answer to that question depends on how the courts treat the status of social media providers. The political answer depends on who and what you want to ban? The fragile Democratic control of Congress faces a steep challenge in passing legislation to answer these questions. And they must get the courts to accept their solution as not infringing on First Amendment rights.

            Let’s look at regulating free speech on social media from the perspectives of the courts and Congress. The first is concerned with legal precedents, the latter with the politics of passing legislation. But both are about determining who will exercise political power in defining what free speech is allowed on the internet.

            The Courts Perspective 

            Two years ago, in March 2019, the Congressional Research Service issued an analysis of Free Speech and the Regulation of Social Media Content.  Quite simply, social media sites provide platforms for content originally generated by users. According to the CRS review of court decisions, social media has been treated “like news editors, who generally receive the full protections of the First Amendment when making editorial decisions.” In effect, these private companies can remove or alter the user’s content and determine how content is presented: who sees it, when, and where.

            For instance, the major social media players, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned or suspended Trump’s accounts because they determined his accounts increased the risk of violence after inciting protesters to march on the Capitol. Data would seem to back up that concern.

            Before Trump was banned, research by a global human rights group Avaaz, and The New York Times, found that during the week of November 3, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments, and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal.” Erik Trump and two right-wing bloggers accounted for 200,000 of those interactions. After that period and before January 6, Trump was the top poster of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts containing the word “election,” according to Crowdtangle. All of his claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact-checkers.

            Facebook has also banned many other accounts. One of the largest groupings consists of anti-vaccination sites which post a wide range of baseless or misleading claims about vaccines and covid. Facebook removed more than 12 million pieces of content, including false narratives about covid-19 being less deadly than the flu and that it is somehow associated with a population-control plot by philanthropist Bill Gates. To date, no social media user posting this misinformation has succeeded in forcing the media services to carry their anti-vaccine messaging. 

            Most recently, SCOTUS (The Supreme Court of The United States) unanimously moved to vacate a lower court ruling which found that former President Trump violated the First Amendment. He had blocked people who had criticized him in the comment threads linked to his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle. However, Justice Clarence Thomas voiced his concern in a 12-page opinion, saying, “We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.” Conservative columnist George Will seconded Thomas’s concerns, without identifying a solution. Both seem to imply that conservatives are not getting a fair deal on these platforms.

            Conservative’s concerns about being discriminated against could be addressed by treating these social media giants, and perhaps other providers, as common carriers like licensed broadcast companies.  Based on this designation’s past application, providers could be at legal risk if they refuse to post a users’ material, such as misinformation or hate speech. 

            A more restrictive classification would result if they acted as a state actor. That would occur if they served as an open public forum that mimics a government-like function. According to CSR’s analysis, under this designation, that entity would have to protect its users’ free speech rights before making any editorial changes.  In other words, users of the platforms would have a First Amendment constitutional guarantee of free speech, leaving providers little wiggle room for denying a user access to the public.

            However, if the providers remain as private companies acting as an editor of publishing other’s works, the case is harder to make that the First Amendment applies to the users. This is because constitutional guarantees generally apply only against government action, not private actions.

            As social media sites continue to ban or suspend users who are posting misinformation that endangers public health or incites violence toward others, such as hate speech, the Supreme Court is more likely to be drawn into that discussion. They will have the last word determining how much the government can regulate social media without violating the First Amendment. 

            Aside from what SCOTUS may do, Congress is already in the process of drawing up legislation to address the many non-constitutional user claims that the courts reject because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.That law provides immunity to providers as long as they act “in good faith” in restricting access to “objectionable” material.

            The Political Perspective 

            At the crux of any congressional action is Section 230, which says that content creators, referred to as users, are liable for the content they post online. Therefore, hosts are not liable, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other major social media platforms. There are exceptions for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and federal criminal law violations, but no one is contesting these exemptions. 

            The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this section “the most important law protecting internet speech.” Because the courts treat these private companies as editors, they can create rules to restrict speech on their websites. For instance, Facebook and Twitter have banned hate speech, even though hate speech is protected under the First Amendment.  

             Section 230 garnered the attention of both former President Trump and now President Biden. In April 2018, Trump signed the FOSTA bill, which was intended to fight sex trafficking by reducing legal protections for online platforms. However, no evidence has surfaced that the law has diminished online sex trafficking. Two years later, following a kerfuffle with Twitter, Trump released an executive order in April 2020 which asked regulators to redefine Section 230 more narrowly, bypassing Congress and the courts’ authority. Trump also encouraged his federal agencies to collect political bias complaints, which conservative groups had been making. The agencies’ findings could justify revoking a sites’ legal protections.

            After Biden was elected, Trump pushed for a complete abolition of Section 230, even threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless it included a repeal of the law. Biden is also not a fan of Section 230. As President-elect, Biden favored revoking Section 230 completely, saying in January 2020 that Facebook and other social media sites are “propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” As of April 11, Biden has not proposed any legislation.

            Congress has not been sitting on the sidelines. While Presidents Trump and Biden suggested revoking Section 203, lawmakers instead aim to eliminate protections for specific kinds of content. They also question how social media algorithms have been used to attract more eyes to a platform without concern for the misinformation and the hostile political environment they help create.  

            The chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before Congress during the Trump administration and did so again in March 2021 during the second full month of Biden’s administration. In the past, congressional members were interested in anti-trust issues, child sex abuse, and prostitution ads. 

            This time it was different. Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc, and Twitter Inc’s Jack Dorsey were aggressively questioned by Democrats on how they handled misinformation and online extremism. Republicans continued to accuse the companies of censoring conservative voices. Strangely very little was said about Trump being banned from their sites. Republicans also demanded that the tech companies protect children and teens from cyberbullying and social media addiction.

            Rep. Mike Doyle (D- Pennsylvania) attacked the social media giants for using algorithms that promote attention-grabbing disinformation. He said, “You are picking engagement and profit over the health and safety of users. Your algorithms make it possible to supercharge these kinds of opinions.” A Next TV reporter wrote that a former Facebook exec told House members at a hearing last September that their site, at least in the past, was designed to promote content that drives engagement, even if it was misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news. 

            Other Democrats also focused on reducing the platforms’ incentives for promoting attention-grabbing content, including disinformation and misinformation.

At March’s hearing, Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) discussed her bill, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act. It would amend Section 230 to remove tech companies’ protections from lawsuits when their algorithms amplify content that leads to offline violence. As written, the restriction would only apply to platforms with 50 million or more users. The Parler website, which has only 20 million users as of January 2021, would be excluded, and it has a significant user base of conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists. While this legislation has over a dozen Democratic co-sponsors, as of March 23, there were no Republican co-sponsors listed. 

            However, two significant pending pieces of legislation have bipartisan support pending in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. 

            The Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act is co-

sponsored by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R–South Dakota). 

The PACT Act imposes new obligations on platforms based on their revenue and size. It requires them to maintain a complaint system, phone line and produce a transparency report. It also requires users to make complaints in good faith. Consequently, providers would be permitted to filter complaints for spam, trolls, and abusive complaints. And providers would have to review and remove illegal or policy-violating content promptly to receive Section 230 protections.
            The other pending legislation is the  See Something, Say Something Online Act of 2021. The co-sponsors are Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). It would require interactive computer services to report suspicious transmissions that they detect and show individuals or groups planning, committing, promoting, and facilitating terrorism, serious drug offenses, and violent crimes to the Department of Justice. Providers would have to take “reasonable steps” to prevent and address such suspicious transmissions. Failure to report a suspicious transmission would void their use of using Section 230 as a defense from being liable for publishing one.

            There may well be more legislation introduced given that there is bipartisan sentiment to tighten regulations, particularly on the social media platforms that appear to monopolize that medium. But Republicans and Democrats differ in their priorities. Republicans have emphasized fighting issues like sexual exploitation and various addictions on social media while taking less interest in stopping political misinformation concerning elections, covid-19, and vaccinations. Democrats have those issues in reverse order of priority.

            I expect that Republicans will use former U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress in September 2020 to guide what changes to pursue in Section 230. Barr acknowledges that this section enabled innovations and new business models for online platforms of social media. He makes several suggested adjustments, some are reasonable given as he notes,  “many of today’ s online platforms are no longer nascent companies but have become titans of industry.”  The largest digital platforms dominate markets; Facebook has roughly 3 billion users, and Google controls about 90 percent of the market in its field. 

            Barr captures the fundamental political tension in regulating social media’s ability to select what to post. He writes: “Platforms can use this power for good to promote free speech and the exchange of ideas, or platforms can abuse this power by censoring lawful speech and promoting certain ideas over others.” This last condition captures the Republican’s belief that social media has discriminated against conservative ideas. 

            However, a recent poll shows that while majorities in both parties think political censorship is likely occurring on social media, this belief is widespread among Republicans. Ninety percent of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party agree with this view. And 69 percent of this group say major technology companies generally support the views of liberals over conservatives, compared with 25% of Democrats and Democratic leaners believing that the industry is biased in favor of conservatives. 

            Researchers have found no evidence to support these conservative grievances. “I know of no academic research that concludes there is a systemic bias – liberal or conservative – in either the content moderation policies or the prioritization of content by algorithms by major social media platforms,” said Steven Johnson, an information technology professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. 

Moving Forward

            Some adjustments in moderating content are needed and supported by both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. As I have shown above, their perspectives do not agree on what type of bias needs to be addressed. Section 230 will most likely be amended and not discarded. Without some liability protections, our significant social media infrastructure on the web would be in chaos. But to continue with the current situation will only continue to generate the spread of conspiracy theories and political violence. 

            The bi-partisan legislation so far introduced will make some minor adjustments. They will clarify the responsibilities of both the hosts and the users on the platforms. However, they should go further in setting up a process or establishing a nonpartisan body to expedite the adjudication of any disagreements regarding the veracity of a user’s material. 

            These types of legislative solutions will lessen the necessity of SCOTUS entering into the fray. Their intervention would be the least desirable path to take in this era. Given the court’s ideological composition, their decision will most likely be subject to attack as being biased. It would likely result in a more divisive political climate and fuel the growth of conspiracy theories. 

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The inspired terrorists who invaded the Capitol were your neighbors!


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 Photo credit: Sebastian Portillo/Shutterstock.com

The major networks and cable news channels largely ignored research findings showing who were the “incited terrorists” that invaded the Capitol. Instead, they focused on those who had “planned” the violent break-in. While the FBI considers both groups to be domestic terrorists, research shows the “incited” people may be your neighbors.

Both the liberal and conservative TV media covered the event by asking who was responsible for organizing the attack and for not properly preparing for it.

The liberal stations tended to focus on the more clearly identified militant terrorist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as the on-site leaders. After vehemently criticizing the siege of the Capitol, the conservative commentators managed to accuse the Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for failing to protect the Capitol from the Trump rioters.

They made little mention of the various right-wing militant groups that were in front of the mob.
Before reviewing several studies that identify who the insurrectionists were, it’s essential to realize the level of danger to our democracy that January 6 presents in the long term. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, March 2, provides a needed perspective on that danger. Wray was appointed by President Trump and is a registered Republican. He is no liberal.

He said that the FBI considered the behavior of those who illegally entered the Capitol to disrupt Congress as criminal activity and viewed their actions as “domestic terrorism.” He told the Senate committee that their actions were “on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists.”

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked Wray: How about the dangers also from foreign-influenced terrorists? Wray explained the two groups “have a lot in common with each other.” He labeled those that are not inspired by foreign jihadists are domestic violent extremists who are inspired by domestic sources.

Wray did refute Trump and some Republican senators’ notion that the rioters were leftist-terrorists or were disguised as Trump supporters. The FBI had not seen “any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to Antifa in connection with the 6th,” he said. And he added, there was no evidence that there were “fake Trump supporters” in those that stormed the Capitol.

After dispatching those myths, Wray presented a more nuanced depiction of the thousands who participated in the march to the Capitol and invading the building. He said, “there are sort of three groups of people involved.” The largest group were “peaceful, maybe rowdy protestors, but who weren’t violating the law.” They had received minimal attention from the liberal press.

The second group “may have come intending just to be part of peaceful protest, but either swept up in the motives or emotion or whatever, engaged in a kind of low-level criminal behavior. Trespassed, say on the Capitol grounds, but not breaching the building.” He viewed them as taking the opportunity to engage in criminal conduct but were not violent. Their activity would still be addressed, but he was in no hurry to do so.

He said the third group is the smallest numerically. They were the people who breached the Capitol grounds and engaged in violence against law enforcement in an attempt to stop Congress from conducting their constitutional responsibilities. Some came with plans to engage in violence that the FBI considers domestic terrorism; others were “inspired” to attack the Capitol and had didn’t have membership in an organization.

I believe the third group should be seen as two clusters. One cluster consists of “strategic terrorists” who were the ones who came with a plan to DC. The second cluster would become “inspired terrorists,” who may not have planned what they would do once they arrived in DC like those in the second group. But like 70% of Republicans, they firmly believed that Trump had won the election.

President Trump addressed this cluster of supporters while Congress was in the middle of confirming Biden as president, telling them that the election is about to be stolen. His invited speakers told the crowd it’s time to fight. Aren’t these the conditions for inspiring those listening to stop, at any cost, what they saw as an illegal transfer of power?

Two important studies have been recently released that takes a closer look at the insurrectionists’ makeup, and one looks closely at who makes up the MAGA Movement. Together they point to something that the TV commentators didn’t dwell on; there is a growing domestic anti-democracy movement. Before addressing how pro-democracy proponents should respond,

it is best to understand what the studies reveal.

A study by Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, and Keven Ruby, Senior research associate of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, supports the view that average citizens acted as inspired terrorists. The Chicago study found that more than half of the arrested Capitol rioters came from President Joe Biden’s counties in the 2020 presidential election. And Biden won the fewest total counties – of any president-elect. “Most people thought right after the insurrection that these insurrectionists are coming from the reddest parts of America. That’s just not the case,” Pape said.

In February, the Chicago study analyzed 193 people charged with being inside the Capitol building or breaking through barriers to enter the Capitol grounds. However, keep in mind that there were roughly 800 people who entered the Capitol, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened more than 400 case files and 500 grand jury subpoenas. There may be many more inspired terrorists to be charged.

The researchers in reviewing court documents described the majority of those investigated as “normal Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right.” They joined extremists to form a violent mob “in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.”

Meanwhile, those charged who had some connection to gangs, militias, or militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters made up only one-tenth of the Capitol arrestees the researchers studied. The rest of the arrestees had no connection or previously expressed support for those groups. Overall, some 85% of the Capitol rioters who were studied were employed, and about 40% were business owners or held white-collar jobs.

In early March, a research report was released as the Preliminary Assessment of the Capitol Hill Siege Participants by the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University. Its findings were similar to the Chicago Project’s, although they reviewed more court records of people charged in federal courts for their involvement. The broad demographics of the 257 investigated revealed that their ages averaged in the forties. There were 221 men, 86%, 36 women, 14%, and they came from 40 states, 91% coming from outside the DC metro area. And 33 had military backgrounds.

This study divided those charged into three categories. The smallest (12.8%) represented the apex of organizational planning by domestic violent extremist groups for and on January 6They fall into the category of “militant networks.”

The next largest category (33%) consists of “organized clusters,” which are small, close-knit groups of individuals who allegedly participated in the siege together. They were comprised of family members, friends, and acquaintances. The study found that they were “Inspired by ideological fervor,” and that they “lacked top-down direction from a domestic violent extremist organization but jointly coordinated their travel to DC in groups of like-minded believers.”

The largest category (55%) are the “inspired believers” who were “neither participants in an established violent extremist group nor connected to any of the other individuals who are alleged to have stormed the Capitol.” Nevertheless, they did participate in the siege of the Capitol and were criminally charged. They were “inspired by a range of extremist narratives, conspiracy theories, and personal motivations.” They would belong to Wray’s smallest group and would be the same as the inspired terrorist cluster that I described. They would also be what the Chicago study found to be middle-class normal Trump supporters.

The Panel Study Of The MAGA Movement, conducted by Christopher Sebastian Parker, Professor, University of Washington, and Rachel M. Blum, Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma, is a more extensive, in-depth completed survey of 1,981 MAGA supporters. The survey was conducted just before and right after January 6. It was designed to assess the attitudes and behavior of the people who consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again” movement.

Details on data collection and sampling methods are provided here. In brief, their findings are aligned with those of the other two studies.  The MAGA movement’s demographic composition is overwhelmingly white, male, Christian, retired, and over 65 years of age.

The survey showed that MAGA supporters are attracted to groups that include gun rights, charities, pro-police, anti-lockdown, pro-life, and “stop the steal.” They’re extremely politically active, all support the Republican Party. However, only about 60 percent are solid Republicans; the rest either “lean” Republican or Independent. The vast majority blamed Antifa for the Capitol Riots, not Trump. Parker and Blum concluded that the MAGA movement is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

When a democratic government loses the middle class’s trust by believing in conspiracy theories, we see normal folks supporting radical anti-democracy solutions. The demographics of those that tried to overthrow Congress’s functions on January 6 reflect the same significant portion of the German population that abandoned its Weimar Republic and the Social Democrat Party, which had been Germany’s largest party.

The pro-business middle class and small business owners repeatedly voted for putting Germany’s National Socialist Party into power in the 1930s. Similarly, that same population has been a strong Republican constituency. In Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939, David Schoenbaum notes that the entrepreneurial middle classes were the Nazis’ leading political clientele as the Nazis’ railed against the government and big business.

A large radicalized anti-democracy movement’s potential is likely to remain even if Trump diminishes his control over the Republican Party. However, the actual number of politically active people in that movement may still be relatively small. For instance, the best estimate of the total number attending the multiple Trump rallies and marches is between three-thousand and ten-thousand, according to Stephen Doig, a data journalist and journalism professor at Arizona State University.

The 2017 Women’s March (440,000 people) and the 2018 March for Our Lives demonstration (200,000 people) were massively larger. If the size of a rally or a march matters, many more citizens are willing to demonstrate their support for the democratic process than attack its legitimacy. With the FBI recording an increase in domestic terrorism, there a growing trend to attack the government’s legitimacy.

FBI Director Wray said that while some of the Capitol riot defendants have apparent affiliations with white-supremacist ideology, many defendants appear to have been motivated by anti-government ideologies. Within the MAGA Movement, an anti-government philosophy is pursued through a network of people and organizations associated with the Trump campaign. One example is Rebecca Mercer – who founded Parler; which is a major site for posting far-right content, antisemitism and conspiracy theories, like QAnon.

What percent of the millions in the MAGA movement might be inspired to repeat the January 6 attack on the Capitol if they had a leader they trusted, like Trump. Short of that, they could continue to support voter suppression measures that narrow the voting poll to mostly white voters. This would erode democracy to the point of being a mere façade of what it proposes to be. As the Chicago study said, “Targeting pre-2021 far-right organizations alone will not solve the problem.” We have to reach those who are potentially inspired terrorists.

Congress needs to pass legislation to reverse our media’s increased monopolization, including social media, so they are not used as weapons against our democratic governance. And there must be greater outreach to our youth and all citizens in understanding how citizenship works in a democratic society to protect everyone’s interests.

In future pieces, I will discuss how these two objectives are currently being addressed and what further steps to take to make them useful and lasting.

Media Monopolies Amplify Conspiracy Theories 

While Congress was in session, the Capitol’s violent invasion illustrates the power of conspiracy theories to grip average Americans.

            The FBI believes that most who violently broke into the Capitol were convinced that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump. Studies of those rioters (see The inspired terrorists …were your neighborsconcluded they were largely middle-class ordinary Trump supporters who were inspired mainly by extremist narratives and conspiracy theories.

            At the heart of any conspiracy theory is that some group secretly controls the government to manipulate our lives. That belief goes back to the beginning of our nation.  

Past conspiracy theories have shaped national politics

            One of the earliest significant conspiracy theories was in opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s re-election in 1832.  Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, was accused of following the Masonic Order’s directions. The Masons are a secret society whose membership at that time consisted mainly of wealthy North-Eastern businesspeople. Many Constitutional Convention attendees, and three presidents, Washington, Monroe, and Jackson, were Masons.  Conspiracy theorists formed the Anti-Masonic Party, which eventually evolved into the Whigs and then the Republican Party. I guess one could say that a conspiracy theory gave birth to the Republican Party. 

            The most recent conspiracy theory shaping our national dialogue goes back to the 1950s with McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. Both U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy

and the Birch Society made unfounded accusations that a vast communist conspiracy existed within the U.S. government. Many federal employees and elected officials, including 

Republicans, like President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, were accused of being in cahoots with it and hence were disloyal to the nation. This logic is a similar accusation that President Trump and his supporters levied against those not accepting that Trump won the election. 

Media monopolies have the biggest megaphones for shaping public beliefs

            Freedom of the press is guaranteed in our constitution. It is understood to mean that the government does not control it. Anyone can publish what they wish in the marketplace of ideas. However, the constitution is silent on what happens when a few hawkers dominate the marketplace, and the free press is effectively narrowed to those controlling the most presses. 

            When analyzing the relationship between public media and the government, the role of social media providers, like Facebook and Twitter, must be considered separately. The Congressional Research Service issued a legal analysis of how federal courts and laws extend special protections from lawsuits, which are not available to public media. Consequently, I will not discuss how social media providers relate to media monopolies and conspiracy theories.

            With that issue put aside, the owners with the most presses have more eyes viewing their newspapers, T.V. networks, cable stations, and listening to their radio stations. In essence, they have the freedom to create and distribute information that could be fictitious or slanted to benefit their own financial and political interests. Two examples of this practice stick out: one from a hundred years ago and the other occurring today. 

            William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers made money and built readership by promoting sensationalist and distorted news. His efforts whipped up the public sentiment to help cause the Spanish-American War of 1898. At his peak in 1935, he owned 28 major newspapers and 18 magazines and several radio stations, movie companies, and news services. His total readership amounted to about 12 – 14 percent of the entire daily newspapers’ readership in the mid-1930s.  In 1936, he accused President Roosevelt of being a Socialist, Communist, and Bolshevik and carrying out a Marxist agenda.

            Hearst is a mere blip on the scale of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. In

2000, Murdoch’s News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion. Among his newspaper holdings are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. His T.V. flagship is Fox News, which according to Statista, the combined number of primetime viewers for CNN and MSNBC were only 81% of Fox’s share in Q4 2020. According to Nielsen Media Research, in 2020, Fox had its 19th consecutive year as the number one cable news network in total day and primetime viewers. Commentators on Fox receive some substantial credit for convincing 70% of Republicans that Biden and radical-socialist Democrats stole Trump’s election. 

Legislation has helped create media monopolies

            Over the last forty years, Congress and Presidents have contributed to the consolidation of media ownership and weakening the public’s access to balanced news reporting. The federal government had provided a more level playing field among the media owners. Thom Hartmann points out in American Oligarchy, “the telecommunications laws from the 1920s and 1930s kept most newspapers, cable systems, internet providers, and radio and T.V. stations locally owned to prevent oligarchs from asserting singular control over information and news across our nation.”

            In other words, laws made it a bit more difficult for them to use the free press to benefit their financial interests. The monopolies use their press as a powerful megaphone, which is as good as a large donation to a political campaign, and it is not reportable. 

            For instance, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team credited Murdoch’s paper, The New York Post, for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election. Once in office, Reagan “waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market.” Murdoch directly benefited because it allowed him to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television

            Reagan then vetoed a Democratic preemptive attempt to codify the Federal Communications Commission’sFairness Doctrine into legislation. Afterward, he had the FCC abolished it. The Doctrine was established in 1949 to “devote broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance.” In 1949, the FCC issued a report that established broadcast licensees’ duty to cover controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner. The Congressional Research Service identified the Doctrine’s essential requirement to be that broadcasters “devote a reasonable portion of broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance” and “affirmatively endeavor to make … facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues.” However, it only applied to broadcast licenses, not cable, satellite, and Internet platforms.  

            A further slide into enabling the growth of monopolies was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. President Bill Clinton enthusiastically signed after the Telecom industry lobbyists had spent tens of millions of dollars on both parties’ legislators getting the bill to Clinton’s desk. Hartmann concludes that the Act “wiped out those protections for local media, turning our nation’s cable systems, internet service providers, newspapers, and radio and T.V. stations over to a small handful of media oligarchs.”

            The result was an acceleration of concentrating the ownership of media outlets. In 1983, 90% of U.S. media was controlled by 50 companies; as of 2011, 90% was owned by just 6 companies, and in 2017 the number was 5.

The spread of conspiracy theories has consequences

            Because of their broad-reach and centralized editorial command, media monopolies supply oxygen to spreading conspiracy theories to the public.  They attract more viewers/readers than just reporting boring factual news. Conspiracies don’t cost much to produce. Once some bare-bones facts are tossed into the narrative, no further research is necessary. Think of conspiracy theories as clickbait for attracting anyone wanting to know who is behind the screen manipulating the truth. 

            Consequently, there is less need for real journalists doing investigative reporting. Brier Dudley, the Seattle Times Free Press editor, mentions a 2018 study that found declining local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. The decline in local coverage is due in large part to the dramatic reduction in newsroom staffing. 

According to the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, in 2019, there was a record loss of 16,160 newsroom jobs lost, a 200% increase in losses over a year. And Pew Research Center reported on top of that; the previous decade saw a 51% loss. The cumulative effect is that opinion-makers have replaced paid journalists over this period in print and even more widely in social media. News based on journalistic ethics is being replaced by opinion leaders who pick portions of facts that support their position. 

            This trend is that the difference between facts and opinions is blurred, and trust in all media and government sinks. According to the 21st annual Edelman Trust Barometer, (January 2021), which measures confidence in institutions, Americans’ trust in the media and government has fallen to a historic low. 

            However, business is the only institution perceived as both ethical and competent, with more than half in the Edelman survey (53 percent) believing corporations are responsible for filling the information void. There is a slight irony here that some corporations benefit from conspiracy theories that significantly reduce government oversight of corporate activities. 

            Another significant survey found similar results. A report assembled by Gallup and the Knight Foundation surveyed 20,000 Americans in the three months before Covid 19 hit America. The report found that roughly three-quarters of the respondents believe the owners of media companies are influencing coverage. Fifty-four percent said reporters intentionally misrepresent facts, and 28 percent believe reporters make the facts up entirely.

            Nevertheless, news media is either critical or very important for a functioning democracy, according to 84 percent of Americans. That need is not being met if conspiracy theories undermine the public’s trust in our government and mainstream media. Knight Foundation’s senior vice president Sam Gill, said the report’s findings revealed shattered confidence in America’s news media and were “corrosive for our democracy.” 

Laws fighting misinformation can lead to authoritarian governance

            The U.S. faces a challenge in sustaining our media’s independence from government control while serving our citizen’s desire to have reliable factual based news media. The trend for the last four decades has seen the concentration of ownership in the media that distributes anti-democratic conspiracy theories.  

            But to fight this trend, we must avoid what Hungary’s parliament, dominated by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’sFidesz party, adopted. With a vote of 137–53, they passed a law to allow the government to jail for up to five years “anyone who intentionally spreads what the government classifies as misinformation.” 

            This law resulted from Orban’s financial allies creating a vast propaganda machine to enable his Fidesz party to retain control of the nation’s government. In 2019, a team of European Union NGOs specializing in press and media freedom reported on how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has been treating the press. They concluded that without introducing the overt authoritarian laws that Russia and China have instituted to censure their media, Orban had constructed a pro-government media empire. As a result, large parts of the public are denied access to critical news and reliable information. An uninformed electorate can easily be swayed by who has the loudest megaphone. 

            So, what steps are needed to avoid Hungary’s draconian legislation and still hinder a political party or a nation’s leader from colluding with media monopolies to overshadow access to reliable news to the public? 

Legislation can diminish the extent of conspiracy theories

            Congress is considering proposals to address some issues that have contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories. One of them is the downward trend in the number of journalists and outlets in the print and digital media platforms that had produced original local journalism. U.S. Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Arizona, and Dan Newhouse R-Wash. have proposed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (HR 7640). It was introduced in July 2020; as of November, it had 78 co-sponsors (20 Republicans and 58 Democrats).

Although it might seem odd that Republicans support this legislation, its primary thrust is to provide economic incentives to help publishing businesses. The bill allows individual and business taxpayers certain tax credits for the support of local newspapers and media. Specifically, individual taxpayers may claim an income tax credit of up to $250 for a local newspaper subscription. The bill also allows local newspaper employers a payroll tax credit for wages paid to an employee for service as a journalist and certain small businesses a tax credit for local newspaper and media advertising expenses.

The Missouri Press Association representing 229 newspapers in Missouri, which is approximately 99.5% of all newspapers, strongly supports the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. Their Executive Director of the Missouri Press Association, Mark Maassen, spoke at a public forum noting that “nearly 36,000 employees and newspapers have been laid off, furloughed, or have had their pay reduced during this (Covid 19) crisis.”

He strongly recommended that its members contact their members of Congress in support of the legislation. 

            With over 99% of local papers in Missouri supporting the legislation, Missouri Republicans may find it awkward to oppose it. All but one of their six Republican congressional representatives objected to the certification of the election results in conformity with the election was stolen conspiracy theory. Will they vote to eliminate local jobs or be influenced by the media monopolies to oppose it?

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, the Senate Education Committee’s new 2021 chair, issued a report in October 2020. It recommended that a limited antitrust exemption from Congress be granted to news publishers to allow them to collectively negotiate for better terms with the tech platforms. Senate Bill 1700, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which was introduced in 2019, would allow for that. The News Media Alliance trade association, representing approximately 2000 newspapers and multiplatform digital services, helped write the bill. 

            The bill currently sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It has significant bipartisan support, with both Senators Mitch McConnell [R-KY] and Sherrod Brown [D-OH] becoming co-sponsors of the bill in 2020. One of the most ardent believers that the election was stolen from Trump is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. He sits on the Committee and will have to vote to pass it out of the Committee or not. The Missouri Press Association could play a role in moving him to vote it out of Committee. Former Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker and Senator Amy Klobuchar and the new Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff are part of the Committee’s membership. Their combined high national profiles could mobilize support for this senate bill and the related House Bill (HR 7640). Chairman Dick Durban will decide when to bring it up to a vote. 

            The bipartisan support for both the House and Senate bills must argue that the nature of maintaining a free press has been handicapped with the introduction of new social media technology, which has lower labor costs and reaches a broader audience. The result is that they have fatter profit margins for distributing opinions instead of distributing news based on facts and in-depth research.

            Another change would be to resurrect the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine that required stations to “program in the public interest.” It required an equal division between local and national news. More importantly, stations that aired “editorials” from owners or management had to be balanced by an outside source with a different perspective. Those changes would have to be initiated by the FCC. Currently, the commission is evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Biden will appoint another a fifth commissioner to give the Democrats a majority. 

In Summary

            The above legislation and regulatory changes will require a significant public education effort to overcome resistance from an expected well-funded lobbying campaign by the media monopoly owners. Even if these measures are passed, it will require ongoing monitoring of the media to assure that these minimal steps to provide balanced reporting are followed. 

            Failure to pass these laws or enforce them will result in the continued unchecked proliferation of conspiracy theories being broadcasted throughout the public media. As we have witnessed, that practice foments fractionalization of our national principles and distrust in a democratic society. 

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics