The FBI’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 presidential election is consistent with the agency’s history of undermining the left and progressive social movements and aiding the right. Its attempts to disrupt left-wing organizations such as the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party are well known. Its attacks on the civil rights movement in the 1960s included efforts to get Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide.
While we do not know FBI Director James Comey’s motives nor his agenda in the handling of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emails, his ability to act independently of the Attorney General has its roots in the FBI’s history as an agency with clout with members of Congress and the media. Moreover, the notion that the FBI has been neutral in electoral politics is inaccurate. The FBI has intervened in electoral politics to defeat the left and liberals and help the political right win.
During the 1946 Congressional elections, the FBI gave its media contacts information to undermine progressive Democratic candidates with accusations that they were Communists. This was one of several factors that led to Republicans taking control of Congress for the first time since 1930.
In 1947 the FBI helped the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) with its public hearings on the role of Communists in Hollywood. The investigation resulted not only in the creation of the Hollywood blacklist but also widened a developing split among progressive Democrats.
In 1948, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover gave President Truman information derogatory to Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. Hoover was no friend, of Truman, however. He worked with Republican candidate Thomas Dewey to defeat Truman that year.
The FBI supplied Dewey with negative information on Truman and some of his Cabinet members and inspired Communist spy hearings by a Washington grand jury, HUAC, and a Senate sub-committee. Headlines such as these in the New York Times on August 29, 1948 hurt Truman in the manner Hoover intended: “House Body Says Spy Rings Still Exist in Government; Scores White House Tactics: Truman, Clark Hit. Administration's Failure to Yield Data Called Menace to Security.”
Despite Hoover’s influence with the media and the Republican Congress, the voters decided in 1948 that keeping the party of the New Deal in power was the wisest course. Truman won election and the Democrats regained control of Congress. Nevertheless, divisions over Communist charges and an escalation of cold war conflicts prevented the enactment of significant Fair Deal reforms.
This election cycle, Democratic standard-bearer Hillary Clinton is working with the liberal wing of her party and putting forward a series of progressive reform proposals such as a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free public college education, and expanding social security benefits. The voters of 2016 may follow the example of an earlier generation, reject the FBI’s attempt to damage the Democrats’ campaign, and vote for Clinton and a Democratic Congress. To benefit from the victory, left, progressive, and centrist groups may work together to promote a peaceful foreign policy and secure the progressive agenda developed by Clinton with the help of Senator Bernie Sanders.
The New York Times and other national media sources are reporting that late Sunday night, the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine email messages belonging to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The messages were stored on a laptop belonging to her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. The laptop was seized by the agency in connection with an investigation into Weiner’s alleged sexting with a 15-year-old North Carolina girl.
The emails are clearly Abedin’s property, even if they were backed up on her husband’s computer. (If they jointly owned the computer, her ownership would be even clearer.) Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the owner of property seized under a search warrant must be given a copy of the warrant and an inventory of what was taken. Has she received a copy or an inventory?
Giving Abedin the warrant puts her in the position to exercise important legal rights. If it contains provisions that go beyond the constitutional limits on search warrants, she could even challenge the government’s assertion that the warrant was legal at all. Upon receiving the warrant, Abedin could also choose to share it with the media and the general public. That would bring much-needed transparency to what has so far been a mysterious and troubling government operation brought precipitously to public attention less than two weeks before Election Day.
Following one case to another
In a letter sent to Congress Oct. 28, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI “has learned” of the existence of emails “that may be pertinent” to the closed investigation of Clinton’s use of a personal email server during her tenure as secretary of state. He also said that although “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant,” he had directed investigators “to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information.”
At that point, agents delved deeper into the laptop. They sought to determine the dates of the emails and the identities of the people who sent and received them. They were hoping to identify emails that passed through the private email server used by Clinton while she was secretary of state.
In addition, federal rules of criminal procedure require officers or agents executing search warrants to “give a copy of the warrant and a receipt for the property taken to the person from whom … the property was taken.” Abedin must get not only the warrant but also an inventory of the emails in question.
Once Abedin receives the warrant, she has several legal options to protect her rights. She could:
Challenge its legality, asking for the government to show in open court that it had probable cause, sworn under oath, that any of these emails could be evidence of a federal crime. This is particularly relevant because back in July Comey had announced there was no evidence that Clinton’s use of the private email server was a crime. So why would the mere fact that Abedin had sent or received email linked to that server be probable cause to believe those emails were evidence of a crime?
Challenge its scope, arguing the warrant isn’t properly limited to specifically described emails. As documented in my article published last week by the Yale Law Journal, the FBI has a troubling history of abusing search warrant provisions to search vast troves of email messages. So it’s possible – even likely – that the FBI’s warrant is too broad.
Challenge the method of execution, demanding the warrant specify legal protections so government investigators will only read the specific messages described in the warrant. Her privacy rights mean government investigators shouldn’t be able to read unrelated emails of hers that happen to be on the laptop.
Time for new guidelines for handling digital data
The method by which the FBI located this information is also questionable. It is almost certain that the warrant authorizing the search of Weiner’s laptop for evidence in the alleged sexting crime did not authorize looking at any emails belonging to Abedin.
The FBI itself has admitted that agents didn’t know the messages were on Weiner’s computer until they began searching it. So it appears as if the FBI agents barged ahead, examining information about Abedin’s messages despite their constitutional obligations.
In 2010 five federal judges reviewed egregious misconduct in a federal search of computer data, and recommended that when a search warrant authorizes downloading a large set of data, the data should be placed under the control of a court-appointed third party. The judges said: “That third party should be prohibited from communicating any information learned during the search other than that covered by the warrant. Once the data has been segregated (and, if necessary, redacted), the government agents involved in the investigation should be allowed to examine only the information covered by the terms of the warrant.”
It seems clear that such a procedure should have been used when the Weiner laptop was initially seized and should be used now in handling Abedin’s email.
In the Presidential Election of 2016, we have two third party movements that could impact the results of the election and the future of the nation.
There is great disillusionment among many voters, particularly millennial voters, with both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump; polls indicate that there are high levels of mistrust and suspicion that have been generated against both major party nominees.
So there is a strong temptation to vote for either Gary Johnson, with 9-12 percent in many polls and Jill Stein, with 3 to 6 percent.
The question is what are the tradeoffs for young voters?
We have the key issue of government experience and expertise that is essential in a complex world, and we can ill afford to have a President who has little to no experience in politics and government to lead us into an uncertain future. Only Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton have such experience in politics and government, which is something to consider.
We have the reality that the Supreme Court is likely to see a major overhaul in the next four years, with possibly up to four new Justices, due to age and health factors. Such issues as these could be decided by the Court in coming years: Abortion, Affirmative Action, Campaign Finance, Class Action Suits, Climate Change, Contraception, Gun Rights, Immigration Reform, LGBTQ Rights, ObamaCare, Redistricting, Unions, Voter ID Laws, and the Voting Rights Act.
We have the crisis in world affairs, with the need for a steady and knowledgeable leader who understands foreign policy and has been near the center of major decisions and knows foreign government leaders. None of the three candidates, other than Hillary Clinton, have such a background, which is something to be factored in to the issue of whom one should vote for.
We have the need for a leader who understands the social and economic turmoil in America and who is equipped to deal with the changing circumstances that will affect all Americans in the next decade and beyond.
We have the urgency of having a proved leader who has substance and a record of accomplishment, and is desirous of uniting the American people in moving forward, rather than promoting division and conflict.
We need a leader who has worked across the aisle successfully and has the trust of people of both major political parties; of the military and intelligence and diplomatic community; and is seen as stable and consistent and reliable. Only Hillary Clinton has served in Congress, although Gary Johnson has been a two-term Governor of New Mexico. This is another consideration to keep in mind.
Voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein will not lead to the victory of either of them, as no third party has ever won the Presidency, but could lead to the election of someone ill qualified to be our President both domestically and in foreign affairs. Voting for a third party has affected American politics in the long run, but only once, in 1912, did a third party affect the result in a generally positive fashion, when Progressive Party nominee Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican party vote with President William Howard Taft, giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the election. Wilson proceeded to follow much of TR’s agenda during his administration. No such scenario now exists or is likely to exist again.
Third parties such as the Populist Party of the 1890s; the Progressive Party of Robert La Follette, Sr. in 1924; the American Independent Party of George Wallace in 1968; and the Reform Party of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 had an impact removed from the immediate situation.
On the other hand, voting third party helped to change the result of the 2000 Presidential election in a manner not beneficial to the nation, and this upcoming election is too important to allow someone far too dangerous to become the beneficiary of one’s discontent. One must recall that Ralph Nader, running on the Green Party line, gained almost 2.9 million votes nationally, nearly 3 percent of all votes cast, and won 97,000 votes in Florida, which ended up being won by George W. Bush over Al Gore by the small total of 537 votes.
And Pat Buchanan, running on the Reform Party line, won over 17,000 votes in Florida, including about 4,000 votes in Palm Beach County, where many elderly Jewish voters were confused by the so called “butterfly ballot” used in that county; they thought they were voting for Al Gore, but actually cast votes for Buchanan. Buchanan won only about 450,000 votes nationally, but both he and Nader affected the result in a very close election, making Bush President, although he was about 540,000 votes behind Gore nationally. This made Bush with fewer popular votes the White House occupant, a fluke that had only occurred much earlier in American history in 1824, 1876 and 1888. So the importance of recognizing the damage that a third party can render is extremely worthy of a voter’s attention.
We usually think of the Supreme Court in terms of what it means for abortion rights, marriage equality and the Second Amendment. At the third presidential debate, that’s what we heard.
Trump vowed to appoint justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia who would be hostile to Roe v. Wade and bolster gun rights. Hillary Clinton said her nominees would support women’s rights, marriage equality and reverse Citizens United.
The candidates did not, however, address the Supreme Court’s substantial impact on the workplace – an impact that’s often ignored amid these hot-button issues.
Almost five decades of a conservative Court majority have sharply limited the rights of workers to unionize, form class actions and fight discrimination. The results have been profound and help explain the deterioration of the working class and the rise of economic inequality in recent decades.
The court is now in a 4-4 split between liberal and conservative justices. The Senate’s refusal to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia means it’s likely the next occupant of the Oval Office will get to pick who fills that seat – and possibly several more. That will determine the kind of court Americans have for years or even decades to come.
Conservative appointments by a President Trump would likely continue the decimation of workplace justice, particularly collective efforts to improve working conditions and pay. As I have documented, a look back at some of the court’s recent rulings shows how.
In 2001, past and present female workers of Wal-Mart sued the company for paying and promoting them less than their male counterparts. The workers joined together to file a class action – a legal procedure that makes it possible for relatively small claims to be aggregated so that plaintiffs can afford to bring a case. They are also far more efficient for our judicial system than hearing scores of similar claims separately.
Yet in 2011, Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for a 5-4 majority that Wal-Mart was essentially too big to sue. Scalia said the plaintiff’s claims lacked a common basis and scoffed at the notion that Wal-Mart’s discretionary pay and promotion system could result in company-wide discrimination.
In dissent, Justice Ruth Ginsburg countered that discrimination is most likely to flourish in discretionary systems like Wal-mart’s due to stereotyped assumptions that managers make about female employees, even unconsciously.
Then, in 2016, the court – without Justice Scalia – declined to expand Wal-Mart v. Dukes (in a 6-2 vote) by resisting an employer’s bid to disallow statistical evidence in all class actions.
In that case, employees at a Tyson pork processing plant used statistics to establish the amount of time they were not paid for taking on and off their protective gear. Statistical sampling was necessary because Tyson failed to keep accurate time records. The analysis showed that employees spent an average of 18 to about 21 minutes on this task, depending on their job duties. This additional time made some employees eligible for overtime pay.
The Supreme Court has helped accelerate that decline. In 2014, the court struck down a 2003 law granting home health care workers in Illinois who are paid by Medicaid the right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the labor instability that would result from the court’s ruling. She also noted evidence that collective bargaining helped the workers double their wages, obtain health insurance and receive better training and enhanced workplace safety. Those benefits could vanish without collective bargaining, harming not only the workers but also the elderly and disabled people for whom they care.
Scalia’s sudden death in February ended up giving unions a reprieve in another important case involving the constitutionality of requiring public workers to pay their fair share of union dues, even if they aren’t a member. That case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, was heard in January, with a skeptical Scalia in attendance, but in March the Court issued a 4-4 decision that left a lower court’s decision upholding such fees intact.
Split decisions mean whatever ruling immediately preceded the hearing before the Supreme Court stands but doesn’t create a precedent. This issue will arise again, and, obviously, the next justice will tilt the balance.
Health care and religious belief
Health care is another area where a slim conservative majority has rolled back worker protections.
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., Hobby Lobby and other privately held employers objected on religious grounds to paying for certain forms of legally mandated contraceptive coverage for millions of employees and their dependents. The court in 2014 upheld the employers’ religious claims in a 5-4 ruling.
In so doing, the court privileged the religious beliefs of business owners against the health care needs of employees. The decision overturned part of the Affordable Care Act – a law passed through our democratic process with an express purpose of expanding preventative care for women and reducing gender inequities in the cost of care.
The connection between access to contraception and the economic success of women is clear cut. To succeed in education and in the workplace, women need the ability to control the timing and size of their families.
The Hobby Lobby ruling expresses a robust view of equality for corporations but none for women. It might spread to other areas as well. As Justice Ginsburg asked:
“Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work?”
The Obama Administration approved accommodations for religious employers to avoid paying for employees’ contraceptive coverage directly. All they had to do was fill out a form, and, under the accommodation, insurers would pay for it instead.
Apparently at an impasse and without a ninth justice, the court sent the government and the religious employers back to the drawing board to find a solution. Thus, it remains unresolved – for now – whether the Obama Administration’s accommodation on birth control coverage is lawful. And once again, who fills Scalia’s seat will likely determine whether such coverage remains a part of Obamacare for employees of religious employers.
The Supreme Court matters
These are just a few of the more significant cases of recent years in which a slim conservative majority has rolled back worker rights.
It’s likely that these issues will continue to be fought in the courts and find their way to the Supreme Court, along with many others. Simply put, a Trump-appointed Justice is far more likely, in my view, to rule against workers than a Clinton nominee.
Whatever impact his other policies would have on the working class, it is clear his appointments for the highest court in the land would hurt workers and make it that much harder for them to join together to fight for their rights.
Macklemore’s new song “Drug Dealer” is gaining a lot of media coverage and social media traction for its “powerful” and “emotionally raw and real” message about Big Pharma’s role in the increase of opioid-related deaths in the United States.
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
The song reiterates two popular, troubling narratives about the so-called opioid epidemic: Big Pharma and crooked doctors get people hooked just to pad their pockets, and heroin has made its way to the white suburbs, eliciting an unprecedented concern for white heroin users who were previously uninterested in the drug.
Macklemore’s credentials, as a white rapper who was formerly addicted to opioids, appear to cement his credibility—at least in the eyes of the media, still swooning over his statesmanship after he teamed up with President Obama to discuss this subject—as an expert on opioids.
The notion that he is any such thing is absurd. It’s like saying that Donald Trump, as a result of the many sexual assault allegations against him, is qualified to provide educational programming for preventing sexual assault. Are you kidding me?
But don’t take our word for it. Just listen to—but don’t purchase—the song “Drug Dealer.” It unequivocally demonstrates Macklemore’s cluelessness on the subject matter. Not only is the song corny in general terms, but it also sounds embarrassingly like a Reagan-era “just say no” PSA.
In it, Macklemore attempts to render drug users as victims without any autonomy, while characterizing the physicians (the “dealers”) as unscrupulous predators:
“My drug dealer is a docta, docta / Had the plug from Big Pharma, Pharma / He said that he would heal me, heal me
….
I think he trying to kill me, kill me / He tried to kill me for a dollar, dollar”
Really, Macklemore? Your physician is trying to kill you? How about you kill the hyperbole?
Setting aside the unlikelihood of this murderous intent to violate the Hippocratic Oath, let’s consider the reality of opioid-related deaths.
While it is possible to die from an overdose of an opioid alone, this is rare. Only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths each year occur as a result of a single drug. Combining an opioid with another sedative, such as alcohol or a benzodiazepine, causes many more of these deaths.
So if rappers wish to help people avoid opioid-related deaths, their message should be clear and simple: Don’t combine opioids with other sedatives!
Yes, it’s true that some physicians engage in unethical practices, such as overprescribing opioids and other medications. But to be clear, this group represents a small minority, and medical boards and committees work diligently to weed them out. Further, the majority of people who use opioids chaotically or addictively do not obtain them from their doctor; the largest group obtain them instead from relatives or friends.
The misinformation and exaggerations expressed in Macklemore’s song do not address real concerns. They may, however, have a real-world effect by decreasing the willingness of physicians to prescribe opioid medications, thereby making it more difficult for patients to obtain opioids when medically indicated. The agony of people whose pain is under-medicated is an under-told part of this story.
What’s more, this suffering is not evenly distributed: It has been well documented that physicians are much less likely to prescribe opioids to black people than to whites—one area in which unethical conduct by doctors is widespread.
Suffering and inequality will certainly be exacerbated if otherwise-reasonable people start taking the myths peddled by Macklemore’s song seriously.
But what’s even worse is that Macklemore attempts to express concerns about the plight of sisters and brothers (plus a couple of honorary members in Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger) as it relates to the dangers of drugs. At the same time, he lectures America for only being concerned when drug problems reach the white ‘burbs:
That’s Prince, Michael and Whitney / That’s Amy, Ledger and Pimp C / That’s Yams, that’s DJ A.M / God damn they’re making a killing /
Now it’s getting attention cause Sara, Katey and Billy / But this shit’s been going one from Seattle out to South Philly / It just moved out about the city / And spread out to the ‘burbs Now it’s everybody’s problem, got a nation on the verge /
Take Activis off the market / Jack the price up on the syrup / But Purdue Pharma’s ’bout to move that work.
The vast majority of the people named in the song died from drug combinations. In other words, they died from ignorance.
Macklemore’s over-simplistic and inaccurate characterization of the opioid situation reinforces the misguided victim-predator rhetoric of the War on Drugs era. Over the past three decades, this rhetoric has functioned to further subjugate the very people he claims to want to liberate: black people and his black friends.
“Drug Dealer” does not remotely approach the real conversation about race and drugs that the US so badly needs. But it does provide a blueprint for racists to show their support for punitive drug policies, policies that disproportionately lock up black and brown bodies, without appearing to be explicitly racist.
Sure, no one will shed a tear when Big Pharma and those rich doctors are painted as the villains. But if you encourage the scapegoating of one “dealer,” it follows that it’s ok to scapegoat another—and that’s a toxic message in a country that needs little encouragement to do so in the most vicious ways.
You can see this happening, for example, in Maine, where Governor Paul LePage said of dealers:
“The traffickers, this aren’t people who take drugs, these are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”
LePage later said:
“[I] made that comment that black people are trafficking in our state. Now ever since I said that comment, I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state. I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come, and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book—and it’s a three-ringed binder—are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”
With friends like Macklemore and Governor LePage, black people don’t need enemies.
Macklemore’s ignorance is further highlighted by the fact that he perpetuates the debunked “gateway theory” of drug use and lambasts one of the few effective addiction treatments:
They said it wasn’t a gateway drug / My homie was takin’ subs and he ain’t wake up
The gateway theory, in essence, states that drug use progresses from “softer” to “harder” drugs in an orderly fashion. For example, marijuana use will eventually lead to heroin use. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of users of marijuana never progress to heroin use—or any other illicit drug use.
And Suboxone (“subs”) is arguably the most effective treatment for opioid addiction—more effective at reducing mortality than other treatments. Would Macklemore have the thousands of people being treated with Suboxone discontinue their medication?
If Macklemore really cared about his fans, people with addiction issues or his black friends, he’d accept that drug use is a reality and try educating himself before he wrote an unsolicited anthem for drug users.
Macklemore, who after all, is ignorant rather than malicious, has a history of using music (or trying to) for the greater good. It’s time he put in a bit more effort.
This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.
Will conservatives break from Trump's GOP to form a new party? | Opinion
By Jennifer Rubin The future of the center-right is, to put it mildly, uncertain. It is not even clear there is a center-right in our era of polarization and ideological extremism. Over at least the past half-century the Republican Party has been the vehicle for political conservatism -- roughly defined as limited government, strong international leadership…
Slaveholding and the business of slavery undergirded the economy of British North America and later the United States. Historians long have demonstrated that the institution of slavery was central to the social and economic development of the northern colonies and states; and since the 1990s there have been a number of studies on how white northerners used slave labor and were key participants in the business of slavery—the buying and selling of people and goods that sustained plantations throughout the Americas. Nevertheless, there is little public knowledge or acknowledgement that the institution of slavery was socially accepted, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. For many Americans, slavery was a southern institution. The divide between scholarly work on northern slavery and public knowledge can be in part attributed to a lack of public education. K-12 history classes often sideline slavery and when it is discussed it is presented as a southern institution. There are also few public memorials to slavery in the North.
Recently, a few colleges and universities, including Brown, have acknowledged historical ties to slaveholding and the slave trade. Slaveholders and traders donated land and dominated boards of fellows and trustees. Enslaved people were put to work constructing buildings or were sold to manage institutional debt. These “recent revelations” contrast sharply with the stories the stories that America’s leading institutions of higher education have told about themselves being places where our founding fathers began to question tyranny and form our most treasured ideas of freedom and liberty; spaces where the entrepreneurial spirit was nourished and our economic principles advanced. Administrators, students, and the general public struggle with reckoning with a history that for many generations has either been willfully disguised or unconsciously ignored. But the uncomfortable fact is that many of the country’s most valued institutions of learning were built on the backs of enslaved people of African descent. This truth is uncomfortable because it is part of an even larger uncomfortable truth—the nation was built on the back of enslaved people of African descent.
In 1764, in a report to the Lords Commissioners of Trade members of the Rhode Island General Assembly wrote “without this trade, it would have been and always will be, utterly impossible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist themselves, or to pay for any considerable quantity of British good.” They were referring to the Atlantic Slave and West Indian trades. Rhode Island merchants provided the West Indies with slaves, livestock, dairy products, fish, candles, and lumber. The West Indian trade supplied the key ingredient, molasses, for Rhode Island’s number one export, rum.
Moreover, Rhode Islanders, who purchased African slaves with locally distilled rum, were responsible for more than 60 percent of all the North American traffic in slaves and by 1750 they held the highest concentration of slaves in New England. Ten percent of all Rhode Islanders were enslaved. A century later, in 1850, Rowland Gibson Hazard, a slave cloth manufacturer, stood in the state Assembly and said “I am by descent, by the interest of business and the ties of friendship, more closely allied with the South than any other man in this House or perhaps the state.” Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse cotton wool material made specially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved African Americans in the South. Between 1800 and 1860, more than eighty “negro cloth” mills opened in the state. The West Indian and slave trades employed shipbuilders, sailors, caulkers, sail makers, carpenters, rope makers, painters, and distillers. Coopers made the barrels that stored the rum. Farmers used slave labor to cultivate foodstuffs for the trades. Merchants, clerks, scribes, and warehouse overseers conducted the business of the trade. The textile revolution depended on slave-grown cotton, which was manufactured into clothing for enslaved people. In Rhode Island, the business of slavery was the cornerstone of the entire economy: it was not just central to the economy, it was the economy. Rhode Islanders were engaged in the same economic activities that occupied their neighbors; however, the intensity of their involvement set them apart.
The erasure or marginalization of this history bolsters the myth that slavery was a southern institution. As a result, the experience of black people in the North has been erased. The business of slavery served to enslave black people, in the colonial period and to impoverish, alienate, and disenfranchise them in the New American Republic. Although Rhode Islanders were among the first to pass, in 1784, a gradual emancipation law ending hereditary slavery, they were among the last northerners to abolish the institution altogether, in 1842. Enslaved Rhode Islanders labored in distilleries where rum was made to purchase slaves, built the slave ships that transported enslaved Africans, served as the crew on those ships as they crisscrossed the Atlantic, and grew the food that sustained the enslaved. Yet, enslaved Rhode Islanders, like counterparts throughout the Americas, refused to be simply property; they ran away, stole, damaged property, formed families and life-long friendships. They also lobbied for their freedom, and strove to build full lives within the confines of slavery. So while the business of slavery may have defined the strictures of their lives it did not define their lives.
During the Revolutionary War enslaved people ran away in unprecedented numbers, volunteered for military service in exchange for their freedom, and lobbied their enslavers for freedom. In the new nation, in the North, most black people were free but they did not have liberty. They did not have the same protections and opportunities afforded to white people because neither the law nor mainstream white society recognized them as citizens. Black people responded to this multi-faceted marginalization by building their own institutions to bolster and protect their vulnerable communities. They fought for freedom and liberty in the name of the Constitution. They were patriots who demanded the country live up to its greater principles of liberty and justice for all. Ignoring and disregarding the experiences of black people and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that the North has no history of racism to overcome. Consequently, there is no need to redress institutional racism or work toward reconciliation.
Christy Clark-Pujara is Assistant Professor of History in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016).
Halloween is part of the Carnival tradition, a holdover from the traditional Catholic year full of commemorations of the lives of Jesus and his saints. As part of that tradition, Halloween should be a time when the world is turned upside down, when the powerful are mocked and those with less power play pretend games in which they imagine "what if" they ruled the world. This year however, our Carnival -- Halloween -- racist costumes that mock the powerless are worn by rich celebrities, and privileged young white men don blackface. Welcome to Trump-o-ween 2016.
Historically, the liveliest time of the year for inverting culture's structures was during Carnival, the week leading up to Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) was the last day to eat meat before the imposition of Lenten fasting, and in the "last blast" celebrations that took place, the spirit of chaos was celebrated. Historians who write about Carnival celebrations often refer to the work of Francois Rabelais, whose 16th-century series of works about Gargantua and Pantagruel feature scatalogical descriptions of the giants excreting or vomiting, and engaging in sexual activities.
Carnival was about the flesh: the indulgence of the senses. People ate, they drank, and they had sex, and in the parades and parties that marked Carnival days, not only were those activities indulged in, but the literature and artwork about those activities were themselves provocative. But Carnival was not only an indulgence of the senses: it was a turning over of the world order. The high became low. Kings became servants. Bishops did not ride donkeys to symbolize their humility; they were pictured being ridden by asses. And women were on top. Women were depicted as rulers of their husbands, just as kings were depicted not just as commoners, but as lowly servants in charge of the most menial of tasks.
Carnivals featured the revenge of the "weak." Not only were the powerful represented in ways that showed them now serving those over who they had dominion, they were depicted acting in ridiculous manners. A bishop being ridden by an ass was not only serving the donkey, he was also being shown in a position that would suggest that the donkey might sodomize him. Men who were depicting a king playing a servant might also play that same servant-king defecating, which brought the king down to his most basic, human level. By showing the king in the position of taking a shit, the power that the king held over his people was satirized, too. A bishop who has been sodomized by a donkey, even in jest, is a less terrifying figure than the man who holds the keys to heaven in his ability to excommunicate someone from the church of believers.
Halloween was part of this Carnival tradition. It marked the nights prior to the day marking All Souls' Day -- the day of memorial devoted to the Church's martyrs and saints. It was a night for marking the line between life and death -- and it supplanted the Celtic holiday of Samhain, as many Catholic holidays were adapted to replace local festival days -- it involved a large number of traditions. Not only was it a night for watching out for spirits who were said to walk on that night, but it was also a night when the rich gave food and money to the poor in exchange for their saying prayers for family members. It was a night of mischief and pranks and for telling frightening stories about the types of ghosts and various souls who might be looking for the opening between the worlds of the dead and the living. It was a night for mocking our own fear of the power of death and the unknown. It continued the tradition of mocking the powerful.
Halloween is not a night where those in power mock those who are without power. It's not a night where bishops or governors or mayors walk down a street celebrating their power over the rest of us. And yet, this year, perhaps because Donald Trump has told white people that their racism is nothing to be ashamed of, we are seeing cruel Halloween costumes. Despite the horror of police arresting Native Americans protesting #NODAPL and locking them up in dog kennels, reports are pouring in of white folks not only dressed in Native American costumes, but costumes that bear signs openly mocking those who are fighting to preserve some of the last bits of land they own. Students wear blackface, despite years of being told that this is not okay. This year, when #BlackLivesMatter has focused attention on the extrajudicial killing of black people by cops, wearing blackface is an overt act of bullying and terrorism rather than celebration. Students wearing sombreros or other "Mexican" gear are mocking those who are threatened by Trump's rhetoric that promises violence against immigrants.
The rightwing has its knickers in a twist because people like me take offense when Halloween costumes are labeled "inappropriate." They claim that it is something called "political correctness" run amok, although in all the years that I have been asking, the only definition that I have been able to find for "political correctness" is when bigots are told that it's not cool to be jerks. Donald Trump has told white people, especially white men, that those in this country who have been traditionally denied access to power, are in fact, in charge. That the reason that a white man can't get ahead has nothing to do with an American political economy that increasingly redistributes wealth to the wealthiest few, but rather because everything is now weighted to make certain that women, people of color, and immigrants are given everything ahead of white men. They are aiming their anger at the people who are in the same boat that they are in, but rather than mutinying against their crazy captain, they're trying to toss the rest of us overboard.
In the carnival foment of the politics of white resentment, this Halloween has become an opportunity to hold up to ridicule and mockery the oppressors. Halloween 2016 is yet another opportunity for Trump supporters to become the real monsters who walk the dark. The fact that Trump's supporters cannot see the oppressor standing directly in front of them has been one of the greatest puzzles of this election season.
It is a cliché by now that Donald Trump has run a reality show campaign — a series of gaffes, surprises, outrages, weirdnesses, explosions, revelations, and just every other ingredient that comprise the popular TV genre of faux authenticity. On reality TV, the subjects are seldom artists or entertainers or high achievers in any field. They are personalities. Their roles are their lives, which creates a Möbius strip. What do the Kardashians actually do besides being on their show, which has, of course, generated all sorts of commercial opportunities that almost make it seem as if they are doing something? What is their talent, other than the talent for self-promotion?
All of this was anticipated 54 years ago by historian Daniel Boorstin in The Image, in which he defined a celebrity as someone who is known for being well-known. In a previous post, I discussed how this applied to Trump, who seems a hollow man except for his fame.
But I am not sure that Boorstin’s tautology, clever as it is, is really accurate. I would submit that celebrity isn’t a status, nor is it a media anointment. I think celebrity is actually a narrative form played out in the medium of life and then broadcast by the traditional and now social media. One earns celebrity — to the extent that you can call it earned — by keeping one’s narrative going. You lose your celebrity not when you lose fame or attention, your well-known-ness, but when you lose your narrative, which is what got you the attention in the first place.
Donald Trump is the first celebrity candidate in both Boorstin’s sense and mine — Boorstin’s because Trump is less a builder of edifices than a slapper-of-his-name-on-other-people’s edifices. He is literally known for being well-known. And in mine because Trump has spent the better part of his life providing narratives to the press to feed its insatiable appetite for gossip and his desire for attention. There are many ways in which Trump is a unique presidential aspirant, but chief among them may be this: He is the first candidate who ran for president to feed his celebrity. The entire campaign is a plot point – a means to a larger end, which is not the presidency, but keeping his celebrity afloat. Relevance is an issue for all of us, but especially for a 70-year-old man who is accustomed to the spotlight.
I thought of this when The New York Times ran two pieces this week. One was the first of a series based on interviews with Trump conducted by biographer Michael D’Antonio and given to The Times by him. What the interviews reveal is that Trump’s primary obsession is a fear of losing his fame. In the interviews Trump reviles Arsenio Hall, a former talk show host and one-time Celebrity Apprentice contestant. “Dead as a doornail. Dead as dog meat,” Trump eulogized.
Everyone knows that Trump hates losing, so his put down of Hall won’t raise too many eyebrows. But when you read the interviews, you realize that Trump’s desperate fear of losing isn’t of the athletic variety, with which we are also so familiar. It isn’t the contest he is terrified of losing — or an election. It is his celebrity. That is why he despises Hall. Hall went from a somebody to a nobody. He lost his narrative. He didn’t provide anything for the press to write about or readers and viewers to care about. There was no drama. What Trump understood is that celebrity has to be stoked; it isn’t self-sustaining. It is like spinning plates on the end of sticks in a Las Vegas novelty act. As soon as one plate begins to wobble, you have to twirl it again.
As for the Hollywood connection, it was not just a way to keep his face before the public. Cameos are cheap and evanescent. Like those losers on “The Apprentice,” all of them folks who couldn’t keep their celebrity going (you don’t need to be Freud to figure out why Trump would confect a show out of that), cameos certify the loss of celebrity; they don’t advance it. Rather, what Trump saw is a way to integrate himself into Hollywood narratives — a way to use his fame to create his celebrity.
As the Times piece about Trump’s Hollywood connections tells it, he began talking about running for president as early as 1988. Why? Trump didn’t have any overriding sense of national mission. He doesn’t have one even now. Clearly, his ongoing, three-decades-long flirtation with the presidency was just a plot twist — a way of juicing the narrative when it was flagging. In that sense, it was no different than his affair with Marla Maples, his feud with Rosie O’Donnell, his nonstop lawsuits and everything else. The presidency was a publicity stunt. It still is. Viewed that way, nearly everything Trump does, most of which seems fatal to his candidacy, actually makes sense – just not political sense. He is running to continue being a celebrity. Bad politics, good TV.
The problem is that Americans are now so habituated to celebrity, so excited by it, that in the Trump campaign it has managed to overtake politics for many of them. Or put another way, the dull routines of politics pale before the unpredictable narratives of celebrity. More, celebrity neutralizes those routines. Take Trump’s now-famous pronouncement in the last debate that he might not accept the election results should he lose. You might note how he phrased that to moderator Chris Wallace: “I’ll look at it at the time. . . . I’ll keep you in suspense.” Suspense is a narrative staple. What critics saw as subversion of democracy, Trump and many of his supporters saw as another plot twist. More celebrity. And it did exactly what he intended, which was to create a Trumpian cliffhanger.
Politics, as I have written many times, has long been integrated with entertainment. The devices of the latter serve the ends of the former, and this has especially served conservatives: The X-Files fed conservative paranoia, 24 fed conservative xenophobia, every superhero movie feeds conservative American exceptionalism. But Trump has subordinated politics to his own narrative. He is the entertainment. We often hear that this election is about the future of America. Donald Trump has always seen it differently. For him, it is about the future of his celebrity and his fear of becoming another Arsenio Hall.
This election will not only settle the question of who next gets to sit behind the large desk in the Oval Office. It will also settle another question, formerly of interest mainly to scholars, but now, for obvious reasons, of concern to a broad audience: How gullible voters are in the 21st century.
There are two broad schools of thought about this. One school, best represented most recently by historian David Greenberg in his book, A Republic of Spin, argues that voters are plenty savvy. Greenberg goes so far as to discount claims that the Bush administration manipulated public opinion in support of its decision to invade Iraq. After 9-11, he says, polls showed the voters were anxious to go to war. They were blood thirsty. In deciding on war, therefore, Bush merely gave the voters what they wanted.
For decades social scientists churned out books echoing this line with titles like The Rational Voter. For a time the belief that voters are indeed rational constituted the consensus view among social scientists. Even if voters lack hard facts, they can use heuristics (shortcuts) to compensate. The most obvious heuristic and the one most people use is voting their party. Even voters who know next to nothing about politics can still cast a rational vote in an election featuring the names of people they don't know by voting a straight party ticket.
These scholars had the advantage in the debates that took place for the main reason that their claims were consistent with what everybody wants to believe is true. Like V.O. Key, the dean of political scientists in the twentieth century, we want to believe "voters are not fools."
The other school held that voters in the main are grossly ignorant about public issues that come before them. The social scientists who held this position had a raft of disturbing statistics to point to. Studies undertaken at the University of Michigan beginning in the 1940s showed that a majority of voters cannot name the three branches of government, have no idea how much is spent on foreign aid (a majority think it's north of half the budget; it's actually less than 1 percent), and don't know that the Senate must confirm any president's nominee to the Supreme Court. In one study by the social scientists Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter it was revealed that about half the American people don't realize that the only country that has ever dropped an atomic bomb in wartime is their own.
Like the social scientists who believe the voters are rational, these social scientists also acknowledge that voters use heuristics. Alas, they don't take solace from this. While most political scientists like to point to the shortcuts voters use as evidence of their enlightenment, psychologists take exactly the opposite position. Heuristics aren't good, they're bad, reflecting a garden variety of biases: Voters pick candidates whose names are familiar; they favor people with square faces in wartime and round faces in peacetime; and worst yet, they let extraneous factors like the outcome of a football game influence their choices. (When their team wins they are more likely to stick with the incumbent.) Even the weather affects voter choices. Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen found that bad weather (floods and droughts) turned 2.8 million voters against Al Gore in the election of 2000. Bartels and Achen even discovered that shark attacks can affect voting.
These debates largely took place out of public view on college campuses and in scholarly journals and books with small sales. But this year the questions scholars debated in private have suddenly become an inescapable subject of public conversation.
Just how on earth, both pundits and even some leaders of the GOP, have wondered did we get where we are? While it's as yet unknown who will take the presidency, Donald Trump's success in winning the Republican Party nomination suggests that democracy failed during this election. Voters in the Republican primaries and caucuses cast a ballot for a man who seems on the face of it to be wholly unqualified to be president, not to mention that he regularly is caught lying and regularly makes bigoted, racist and sexist statements.
Voters might be forgiven for nominating Trump given the high level of dissatisfaction with the political establishment, but the evidence that something more disturbing is going on is abundant. Exhibit A is that his supporters have told pollsters they believe only Trump can be trusted to give them the truth. This is so laughably misguided it's hard to know what to make of it. Every time he opens his mouth the fact checkers catch him lying.
Why can't his voters see that? They don't want to see it. Once he had won them over by various means (anger, fear, xenophobia) they refused to revise their commitments. Like he said: His voters would stand by him even if he killed someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. To Trump this was evidence of their loyalty. But it's actually a clear sign that they were easily bamboozled by his histrionic appeals. Angry themselves, they felt a powerful bond with Trump when he expressed anger. Trump feels authentic to these voters because he traffics in emotions that are real. It's no wonder his voters say they can trust him. He seems authentic. And as one social scientists has argued, politicians like Trump who are unscripted lead many to think they are truthful.
I have been one of those who for years has complained that voters by and large are too ill-informed to fulfill their democratic responsibilities. For people like me Trump's nomination has been proof that skepticism about the public's capacity for intelligent debate is warranted. But so few voters participated in the primaries and caucuses that it can be argued that his selection didn't reflect the views of a majority. This wouldn't be the case were he to be elected in November. His election would be proof positive that I was right. Given what is at stake, I'd much rather be denied this one victory.
It appears from the polls that Trump is going to lose, perhaps in a landslide. That would be gratifying. But little consolation can be taken from these surveys. Most show that more than 40 percent of the country's voters are willing to cast a ballot for Trump despite his shameful history of nasty comments about Mexican Americans, blacks, and women. That's worries me.
Congress continues to resist decriminalizing marijuana even as a popular crusade to legalize its use state by state may soon mean almost a quarter of Americans can smoke up at will, not including the many more who can use the drug medicinally.
This has resulted in a patchwork of state laws alongside federal ones that have put the nascent industry in legal and financial limbo.
Voters in many states disagree. Presently, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska permit the sale and consumption of social marijuana, Washington, D.C. allows its consumption but not its sale, and 25 other states have legalized its medical use.
On Election Day, many more may follow their lead. Voters in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada will decide whether to legalize marijuana, while four other states will decide whether to allow medical use or ease restrictions. If the results of the legalization initiatives are all “yes,” about 23 percent of the U.S. – or 75 million Americans – will be able to use marijuana socially, up from 5.6 percent, or 18 million citizens, currently.
This conflict between state and federal law creates an unstable financial environment for producers and retailers of marijuana.
To get a better picture of the industry and the burdens imposed as a result of schizophrenic policies, a team of researchers from the University of Utah and the University of Michigan are conducting a survey of businesses that grow, process and sell marijuana in several states that have legalized it.growth
Preliminary results from Colorado suggest the conflict between state and federal policies is taking a severe toll on the industry.
Petition signature gatherer Peter Keyes, right, discusses a petition to legalize marijuana in Sacramento, California.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Taxed through the nose
How the federal government taxes cannabis companies is one of the biggest burdens the marijuana industry must bear in the current environment.
In particular, section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code prevents companies from taking any deduction or credit from a trade or business that consists of “trafficking in controlled substances.” In other words, they pay far more than other businesses because they can’t deduct most legitimate business expenses such as labor, materials and other costs of production. They can, however, take a small deduction for “cost of goods sold.”
Preliminary results from the survey suggest that businesses are paying effective combined tax rates of 40 percent to 75 percent. The wide range is likely due to the sophistication of the larger, more established companies that can afford both an aggressive tax-planning strategy and set aside money for a likely IRS audit. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, lack such resources and are more likely to self-file, which means the companies least able to afford the high tax rates are the ones paying them.
This exceedingly high tax burden leads to operating losses, discourages reinvestment and expansion and results in artificially depressed industry wages.
In addition, the level of taxation dampens the industry’s natural growth rate and distorts market transactions from customers in the form of higher prices, from businesses in the form of reduced profits and from states in the form of reduced tax proceeds due to reduced sales because of inflated prices.
Overall, the current federal tax design results in a large deadweight loss to all stakeholders in a state’s economy.
Matthew Huron, owner of two medical marijuana dispensaries and an edible marijuana company in Denver, examines a plant in his grow house.
Ed Andrieski/AP
The perils of banking
The other main burden for marijuana businesses is banking. And unfortunately, there’s even more uncertainty here.
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 prevents federally chartered banks and credit unions from providing financial services to the cannabis industry, which is considered money laundering.
While the Department of Justice and U.S. Treasury have tried to establish some guidelines for financial companies, the CEO of the Colorado Bankers Association warned its members that only “an act of Congress” will allow banks to work with the industry without fear of criminal prosecution.
Preliminary survey results show that fewer than half of cannabis businesses in Colorado are involved in banking, which deprives them access to the normal services companies rely on to grow and operate efficiently. The banks and credit unions working with the industry tend to be small and local and doing business cautiously. In order to navigate working with a marijuana-related enterprise, the individual banks are responsible for making sure that a business is fully compliant with state law. Even then, banks may run afoul of federal regulations.
For example, in January a federal district court ruled against a credit union – set up to provide banking services to cannabis businesses – seeking access to the Federal Reserve banking system. Even though the guidelines suggested marijuana businesses might not be prosecuted by federal officials, the bank necessarily would be involved in illegal activities.
Although sympathetic to the dilemma of marijuana business owners without banking privileges, the judge said that courts couldn’t simply ignore federal law.
“In short, these guidance documents simply suggest that prosecutors and bank regulators might ‘look the other way’ if financial institutions don’t mind violating the law. A federal court cannot look the other way. I regard the situation as untenable and hope that it will soon be addressed and resolved by Congress.”
Congress, of course, has resolved the issue by not resolving it, and looking the “other way” is a poor substitute for policy in any case.
Cannabis businesses lucky enough to find a financial institution willing to work with them end up paying extremely high fees for an account that generally only allows them to issue checks or direct deposits to merchants and employees. They remain unable to apply for loans and access other financial services. This results in a high cost of business capital.
The unlucky ones without a relationship with a financial institution are either entirely cash-based or work with a payment processing company willing to provide services through its networks.
A customer pays cash for retail marijuana at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver.
Brennan Linsley/AP
Building a pro-pot business environment
Given the legal incoherence surrounding marijuana, producers and retailers of the drug are stymied by two related dilemmas: They have no access to legitimate banking channels and they are denied equitable federal tax treatment compared with other businesses.
Despite that, marijuana makes up a substantial and rapidly growing segment of the economy. A single state, Colorado, generated nearly a billion dollars in revenues in 2015 – and US$135 million in states taxes and license fees – up from $669 million in 2014. Revenues of that magnitude should be promoted rather than seriously wounded by tax policy.
The obvious solution to the federal-state conflict is to modify the drug schedules under the Controlled Substances Act by changing cannabis from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule IV or below. Schedule IV states that “the drug or other substance has a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” and may result in “limited physical dependence or psychological dependence.” Under Schedule I, a listed drug has “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”
Federal action is unlikely in the foreseeable future. According to a recent study by pro-pot advocacy group NORML, “support for substantive marijuana law reform is far less pronounced among elected officials than it is among the voters they represent.” About 60 percent of American adults believe that marijuana should be legal, but only four percent of Congressional members received NORML’s “A” grade on the issue.
For the moment, sadly, the 1936 cinematic melodrama “Reefer Madness” – which depicted marijuana use as the pathway to rape, murder and insanity – is still playing at selected theaters inside the Beltway.
Since the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has been largely identified with right-wing politics. Conservative religious values entered the political sphere through movements such as Moral Majority and Focus on the Family that opposed gay rights, abortion, feminism and other liberal issues.
Evangelical leaders have influenced national elections and public policy. They have been instrumental in pushing the Republican Party toward increasingly conservative social policies. They have generally been the most consistent voting bloc within the Republican Party.
My research focus is on vibrant religious congregations. I am seeing the emergence of a new generation of evangelicals that has a very different view of what it means to be a “Jesus follower.”
This generation is abstaining from the political theology of the earlier generation and focusing their attention, instead, on improving the lives of people in their local communities.
History of evangelicals
The groundwork for American-style conservative evangelicalism was laid several decades before the rise of the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family movements. Evangelicals, and their forbears the “fundamentalists,” had long made education and mass communication a centerpiece of their efforts.
In the late 19th century, Bible training schools were set up.
Starting in the late 19th century, they established post-secondary Bible training schools and utilized various mass media outlets, such as their own magazines and radio stations to get their religious message out.
Even though these schools and media outlets were independent from each other, they were unified in a shared theological and moral perspective that served to reproduce evangelical culture and beliefs, and to disseminate the religiously tinged political message of the religious right.
Rifts within
This once-unified movement is now dividing over whether to support Donald Trump in the general election.
Old guard evangelicals such as the founder of the Focus on the Family movement James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Moral Majority founder and current president of Liberty University, are warning of dire consequences for the U.S. if Trump is not elected.
According to Dobson, without a Trump presidency, the U.S. will “see a massive assault on religious liberty,” which would “limit what pastors… can say publicly,” and would “severely restrict the freedoms of Christian schools, nonprofit organizations, businesses, hospitals, charities, and seminaries.”
But not all evangelicals are supporting Trump, even though they remain true to the Republican Party. These evangelicals are alarmed at what they see as the vulgar and immoral lifestyle that Trump exemplifies.
In the past, mobilizing this vast religious and political machinery would have resulted in overwhelming and unquestioning support for the Republican candidate. This was first seen with Ronald Reagan in 1980 who won the White House with widespread support of evangelicals, and has been repeated in each election since.
But this time, a call to support Trump has exposed deep divisions within evangelicals that have gone unnoticed until now.
The point is that Trump represents to many the very antithesis of the kind of moral probity that evangelical leaders have spent their lives defending.
Survey research and election polls have failed to differentiate the differences within the movement between whites, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians who all share the same basic evangelical theology, but who may part company over other social and moral issues.
For example, in most surveys and political polls, “evangelical” is limited to white believers, with others who may be similar theologically being classified into other racial/ethnically identified categories such as “Black Protestant,” “Latino Protestant” or “Other nonwhite Protestant.”
Further, as with all religious groups in the U.S., the evangelical movement began struggling to keep its young people in the fold. Recent research shows that among young adults who were identified as evangelicals as teenagers, only 45 percent can still be identified as such.
A new generation
At its most basic level, American evangelicalism is characterized by a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” encouraging others to be “born again” in Jesus and a lively worship culture.
This definition encompasses many groups that were not historically included in the old religious right. Thus, while Latino evangelicals believe the same thing about the Bible and Jesus as white evangelicals, their particular social context in many cases leads to a different political stance.
Youths sit under a sign at a baseball field during a gathering at dusk outside the Christian Fellowship Church in Benton, Kentucky.
David Goldman/AP
As these new and growing groups find their own voices, they are challenging the dominant evangelical perspective on political issues such as immigration and economic inequality.
In addition, younger evangelicals are increasingly coming of age in more diverse neighborhoods and schools, leading to an openness to other racial and religious groups, LGBT people and social justice issues in ways that older evangelicals strenuously opposed.
Further, while the educational successes of evangelicalism, through its many and varied curricula, have served to socialize young people into the “biblically based” moral world, it has also taught them how to read the Bible critically and to pay attention to biblical themes and narrative through-lines that resonate with their own life experiences.
According to a pastor of a church included in my research, he is seeing young evangelicals apply the interpretive skills they have learned in school and church to a broader range of biblical teachings.
“When you start to examine the teachings of Jesus, you’re going to end up seeing that justice matters, that we have a responsibility to care for the poor. Younger evangelicals are basically using those same hermeneutical tools to study the Bible and are saying, wait a minute, not only is there nothing wrong with caring about justice, there’s something wrong with not [caring].”
Thus, while young evangelicals in some ways still evidence a shared theology with their parents’ generation – for example, on biblical passages that would support a “pro-life” perspective – they part company through their engagement with passages that emphasize the believer’s responsibility for the poor.
View of social justice
The younger evangelicals that I’ve been studying are not taking the expected evangelical position in this election, such as supporting Donald Trump, or supporting a broader agenda as that promoted by evangelical leaders such as James Dobson.
Instead, the political activism that these younger evangelicals tend to engage in usually relates to issues like improving local schools, creating job opportunities, caring for the homeless and other activities that have been largely overlooked by American evangelicalism as it has been practiced over the past several decades.
In my interviews, I’ve asked many of these younger evangelicals how their religious commitments relate to politics. Their responses show a simultaneous distancing from “politics,” and a desire to seek change in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. A good example of this kind of response came from a 20-something African-American young woman who told me,
“I also don’t care much for politics, because it’s so ugly. I just feel like, let’s commit to loving people. When I think about laws that unjustly affect minorities or the poor, that bothers me only because of the Gospel.”
Diverse world view
These evangelicals have staked out a middle ground that is neither Democrat nor Republican, liberal or conservative.
This is not to say that younger evangelicals are all in agreement with how their religious views should be applied in the world. Rather, they are opting out of the political identities and battles that have characterized evangelicalism for the past 40 years.
Their world is more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and religious beliefs. Their friends are as likely to be straight or gay, Christian or Buddhist, or black or Latino.
That has informed the way that they understand their religious beliefs and their political alignments. They are seeking to live out their faith in response to a world that is different from the world that leaders of the old religious right inhabit.
Over the past few weeks, millions of Americans have watched a tape from 2005, featuring Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women:
“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
When asked to explain this conversation, Trump claimed that his comments were just “words” and “locker room talk,” and that the video is “nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we are facing today.”
I would suggest that Trump’s reaction to the video is just as alarming as the conversation itself. His explanation implies that his words are normal and natural — just a way for men to joke around and bond.
Acting as if sexual aggression against women is normal and unimportant can have real and harmful consequences, as I have seen through my previous work with sexual assault survivors as a rape crisis counselor and my scholarship on sexual harassment and sexual assault.
The ways women are harmed
Anti-Trump protesters
AP/Rainmaker Photo
Here are four ways attempts to normalize these behaviors can harm women in very real ways.
1. Trivializes sexual aggression
Trump’s comments minimize the seriousness of sexual harassment and assault – something that affects millions of women in the United States.
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimates that 19.3 percent of American women have been raped and 27.3 percent have experienced unwanted sexual contact, like kissing or groping, in their lifetimes.
Studies estimate that 58 percent of women report having experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Less “severe” forms of sexual harassment happen more frequently. These behaviors can include making crude or lewd comments and questioning a woman’s competence or ability to perform her work – for example, by saying, “This is no job for a woman.” Also included: calling women demeaning or denigrating names, like “bitch” or “Miss Housekeeping.”
Not taking the experiences of these women seriously can have devastating impacts. Not surprisingly, experiencing any type of sexual harassment often results in a woman feeling less satisfied with her job, coworkers and supervisors. Women who are sexually harassed also report lower mental and physical health.
Experiencing rape or sexual assault often has long-lasting consequences for women’s mental health, including post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, drug and alchol abuse, and suicidal thoughts. A women’s physical and sexual health can also suffer.
2. Spreads misinformation about the nature of assault
Following the release of the video, many women have come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Trump. Trump has claimed that these “stories have been largely debunked,” but most of these reports have not been objectively disproven.
Trump has tried to discredit his accusers by questioning their motives. For example, he said, “They get some free fame. It’s a total setup.” He also attacked their attractiveness: “Look at her, look at her words, you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.” and “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.” The message behind such comments is that only an attractive woman could be a victim of sexual harassment or assault.
Feminist scholars have long argued against the myth that physical attractiveness is a main motivation for sexual predators. For instance, in the classic text Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller states: “the rapist chooses his victim with a striking disregard for conventional ‘sex appeal.’”
Recent research on perpetrators of sexual assault supports this idea. Perpetrators’ motivations for sexually assaulting women are often about power, control, and hostility towards women. For instance, one man in this study stated: “I basically used her as my personal f—box…she was just dead weight…she could barely open her eyes.”
3. Makes it harder for victims to report
Making light of sexual aggression against women makes it even more difficult for women who experience it to come forward.
Studies suggest that fewer than 25 percent of women who experience sexual harassment actually file formal complaints. Similarly, research finds that only 5 percent to 20 percent of women report rape to law enforcement. Rates of reporting also vary depending on the behaviors women experience. Seemingly “less severe” forms of sexual harassment and assault (like unwanted sexual contact) are rarely reported. Women are often reluctant to report sexual harassment and assault out of fear: fear of being blamed, not being believed, being ostracized or retaliated against.
In a recent example, former Fox News Host Gretchen Carlson, who filed a sexual harassment suit against Roger Ailes, described feeling hesitant to come forward about her experiences and worrying about the harm it could do to her career.
4. Models problematic behavior
Messages that normalize and trivialize sexual aggression are especially harmful when they are coming from someone who is aspiring to be the president of the United States.
We know that leaders can play an important role in shaping organizational and social culture around sexual assault. Research on bystander intervention programs find that when leaders model positive behaviors – for example, by recognizing the seriousness of sexual violence and stepping in to stop it when it occurs – other people are more likely to intervene as well.
One bystander intervention program trains student leaders on college campuses to act as “Peer Opinion Leaders” – who model positive bystander behavior for other students on campus. A research study, published in 2014, found that a college campus using this program had lower rates of sexual harassment than campuses that did not impliment this program.
On the other hand, leaders’ beliefs and actions that help foster sexist, hostile environments can increase women’s risk of sexual assault. One study examined data collected by the Department of Defense in 2002 and 2006, which assessed experiences of sexual harassment and assault among active duty service women. This research found that found that women who worked in an environment where sexually harassing behaviors were prevalent were 12 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women working in an environment with no harassment.
Words that help to create a culture that tolerates and normalizes sexual harassment and assault can have devastating consequences.
