In the right-wing media bubble, so-called “legal analysis” of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial often involves mindlessly echoing the assertions of Alan Dershowitz, Jay Sekulow or former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (all of whom are part of Trump’s impeachment defense team). But not everyone on the right has been reciting Trumpian talking points on impeachment, and conservative Never Trump attorney George Conway tears some anti-impeachment arguments to pieces in a scathing Washington Post op-ed.
“The president’s lawyers this week floated their catch-all impeachment defense, one tailor-made for President Trump,” Conway explains. “It is, in essence, that a narcissistic president can do no wrong. Like most of the president’s arguments, it’s erroneous.”
Conway takes aim at Dershowitz’ assertion that if Trump believed his actions with Ukraine were “in the public interest,” those actions couldn’t be impeachable. That argument, Conway asserts, is “a lie” and an “example of how Trump corrupts all around him.”
“It’s just not true that good motives, when mixed with bad ones, compel acquittal under the law,” Conway writes. “If a politician takes a bribe to do what he thinks would have been best for the public anyway, he still goes to jail. If he’s president, under a Constitution that refers to impeachment specifically for ‘bribery,’ as well (as) other ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ he should still be removed.”
Another bogus claim of Trump’s attorneys, according to Conway, is that “abuse of power” — one of the two articles of impeachment he is facing — is not impeachable under the U.S. Constitution.
‘It’s not true, as Dershowitz argued Wednesday, that the Framers’ rejection of ‘maladministration’ as a basis for impeachment means that abuse of power isn’t impeachable,” Conway notes. “The Framers rejected the word ‘maladministration’ because it covered mistakes and incompetence, not because it also could mean abuse of power. In fact, they swapped ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ into the final document precisely because it does cover such abuse.”
Conway goes on to explain that while U.S. presidents can certainly promote policies they believe are in the country’s best interests, they cannot do corrupt, unethical things in pursuit of those policies.
If a president, Conway points out, “cuts taxes because he has an agreement with a major backer that, in exchange for tax cuts, the backer will fund a huge super PAC to support his reelection, that’s impeachable — because that’s a corrupt quid pro quo for his personal benefit. So, too, if a president conditions another official act — releasing security assistance to a foreign country — on a requirement that the foreign country smear the president’s political opponent. That’s not politics; that’s corruption.”
Trump, Conway adds, “acted with corrupt intent to damage a political opponent.” That opponent, of course, is former Vice President Joe Biden, who Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate during their now-infamous July 25 phone conservation.
Conway wraps up his op-ed by emphasizing that if Senate Republicans “entertain a false reading of the Constitution,” it would “render the impeachment clause a nullity.”
“Should they do that,” Conway warns, “they will have sacrificed their own oaths to protect their own electoral prospects — and the country and the Constitution will have been saddled with a terrible precedent. The Senate will have told Trump that indeed, he can do whatever he wants.”
On the day it became clear a majority of the Senate would allow the trial of the president to close without hearing from a single witness, Republicans who found themselves protecting Donald Trump started making a surprising admission.
Trump, of all people, might have done something wrong.
The revelations started with Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, whose pending retirement gave him more independence than many of his colleagues to break with the president. But on Thursday night, he revealed that he would join most other Republicans in a vote to block the Senate from hearing witnesses, most notably former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
He offered a perhaps surprising reason for this decision, though: He doesn’t need Bolton’s testimony to know Trump’s guilty.
“There is no need for more evidence to prove that the president asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter; he said this on television on October 3, 2019, and during his July 25, 2019, telephone call with the president of Ukraine,” Alexander said in a statement. “There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a ‘mountain of overwhelming evidence.’”
He dismissed the second charge against the president, obstruction of Congress, as “frivolous.” But he thinks the Ukraine scheme was wrongful.
“It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation,” he continued. “When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”
To be sure, Alexander is too generous to Trump here. He doesn’t explore the reasons that truly make Trump’s actions so egregious, such as the fact that they were based on nonsense conspiracy theories and were clearly intended to influence the 2020 election.
But he was, at least, finally admitting that what Trump did wasn’t right. He just doesn’t want to say the Senate should remove the president over this kind of conduct.
With this admission, others chimed in.
“Long story short, [Alexander] most likely expressed the sentiments of the country as a whole as well as any single Senator possibly could. Those who hate Trump and wish to take the voters[‘] choice away in an unfounded manner, Sen. Alexander rightly rejected their arguments,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of the president, in a tweet.
Graham also sent the mildest possible message to Trump, who has claimed his phone call pushing for the Ukrainian investigations that sparked the impeachment proceedings was “perfect.”
“To those who believe that all was ‘perfect,’ Senator Alexander made reasoned observations and conclusions based on the evidence before him. He called it as he saw it to be,” Graham wrote. “Well done Lamar!”
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska bolstered these sentiments further.
“Let me be clear; Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us,” Sasse told reporters, as CNN’s Manu Raju reported.
Sasse was once a vocal critic of Trump from within his own party. But as his own re-election grew closer, he began minimizing his dissent, and he earned the president’s endorsement in his primary. So it wasn’t surprising that, when Raju followed up to ask Sasse whether Trump behaved inappropriately, the senator refused to answer.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) may have gone even further than Alexander, saying in a Medium post of Trump’s alleged abuse of power: “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”
He later said Democrats have not proven their case, but suggested that if they had, Trump’s conduct might warrant impeachment. But he also said that, even if the conduct does warrant impeachment, he still thinks it would be best for the country to leave Trump in office because “at least half of the country would view his removal as illegitimate.” He blamed the Democrats’ “partisan” impeachment process for this fact, while ignoring that Republicans’ steadfast refusal to seriously consider Trump did anything wrong throughout the proceedings was a necessary condition of this partisanship.
He also said: “I disagree with the House Managers’ argument that, if we find the allegations they have made are true, failing to remove the President leaves us with no remedy to constrain this or future Presidents. Congress and the courts have multiple ways by which to constrain the power of the executive.”
But like the other Republicans who hinted Trump might have done something wrong, he proposed no actual alternative to removal for holding Trump accountable.
And that’s what makes all their admissions so shameful. They’ve let Trump declare for months that he’s done nothing wrong and that the impeachment is an unfair witch hunt. They’ve even let Trump continue to engage in the very scheme he was impeached for. They know he will never admit he did anything wrong, which means without external punishment, he won’t be deterred. But they refused to stand up for the impeachment process, refused to admit that the conduct in question really was worthy of serious investigation, even if they didn’t want to remove Trump in the end. Democrats pushing impeachment were relentlessly attacked by right-wing media, and the elected Republicans officials who knew, actually, that the pro-impeachment crowd might have a point said nothing.
They let the impeachment become a purely partisan affair — with the exception of Michigan’s Rep. Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party because of Trump — and then they blamed the Democrats for not convincing them to join in. Now they say impeachment is too strong a cure for the malady at issue, but they propose no other treatment. They will, undoubtedly, allow Trump to continue thinking that he did nothing wrong and will give him no reason to change his path.
These are clear signs of cowardice and guilt. Not of Trump’s guilt, this time, but their own. They offer their excuses for refusing to challenge Trump, but these paper-thin explanations fail to grapple with the facts and show the lawmakers are lying to themselves. They’re lying to themselves, of course, because they have to. The costs of breaking with the president are far too high — even for Alexander, at the end of his career — and they don’t have the courage to do it.
There are many theories about when it was exactly that Republicans lost their minds. Some will point out, correctly, that the strain of reality-free conspiracy-mongering that defines the Donald Trump presidency dates back at least to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Others will note Richard Nixon's reliance on the "Southern strategy," which helped remake the GOP into a white ethno-nationalist party that was capable of nominating Trump. Still others will point to the Tea Party, which was reported at the time as somehow an anti-tax movement, but now looks clearly like a panicked, racist reaction to the election of Barack Obama, and resulted in a purging of any moderate or reality-based impulses in the Republican ranks.
Even considering how lost to reason and reality Republicans have been for years now, there's something final and official about going on the record to register their collective belief that facts don't matter and that democracy, to them, is little more than an obstacle in the way of their efforts to maintain power.
That Republicans would pull together to turn the Senate trial into a sham aimed at covering up Trump's crimes has been regarded as a foregone conclusion from before the moment that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry months ago. Despite this, I suspect it will be a gut punch all the same when the entire Republican Party comes together to "acquit" Trump despite the inarguable evidence that he is guilty.
They are not voting to declare the president innocent of the charges against him, since that is clearly absurd. They are voting to announce that, in their eyes, there's no limit to what can or should be done to maintain the Republican hold on power.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., all but admitted as much Thursday, in a series of tweets acknowledging that the accusation against Trump — that he withheld military aid and political support for Ukraine in order to force that struggling nation's president to help him cheat in the election — "has already been proven." But Trump's behavior, Alexander claimed, was merely "inappropriate" but "does not meet the U.S. Constitution's high bar for an impeachable offense."
Alexander openly giving his blessing to presidents using their powers of office to cheat in elections — or to Republican presidents, anyway — illustrates why the twin votes to shut down witness testimony and to acquit Trump should be understood as the consummation of the GOP's long courtship with authoritarianism.
Dershowitz is now running around, making incoherent claims that he wasn't arguing what he said he was arguing, but that hardly matters. His case for presidential tyranny was made on the Senate floor, and his attempts to claw it back in the media don't carry anywhere near the same weight.
For those of us who have watched Republicans closely throughout this process, what has been striking is the shamelessness and bad faith on display, as they have competed to be the biggest lickspittle to the wannabe fascist smearing his fake tan all over the White House.
Was it Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky using the trial as an excuse to air the name of the whistleblower who first reported Trump's bribery scheme, a move clearly meant to suggest to intimidate other federal employees out of stepping forward with information about Trump's crimes and corruption?
Was it Sen. Susan Collins of Maine working herself into an outrage over Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accusing Republicans of being a bunch of quislings who let Trump control them, even though the upcoming miscarriage of justice proves Schiff correct?
Perhaps trying to decide who is the worst of them is a little like trying to pick which cat turd in the litter box stinks most. It doesn't much matter at the end of the day. What matters is that the entire basket of Republicans is thoroughly corrupt and divorced from any concern for reality or decency, and this week they're making it official.
Republicans have structural and geographic advantages that allow them to stave off the threat of actual democracy, but they fear that this won't last forever. As never-Trumper Evan McMullin noted on Twitter:
In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned for doing pretty much the same thing Trump did: His goons were running an illegal scheme to help him cheat in the 1972 election, and he was engaged in the cover-up. Nixon resigned not because he wanted to but because congressional Republicans, or enough of them anyway, believed that the rule of law mattered more than maintaining their party's political power. Republicans worked with Democrats to expose evidence that led to Nixon's downfall.
Nowadays, the opposite is true: Republicans are working to conceal evidence, and when they can't conceal it are arguing that it doesn't matter what Trump does anyway. In voting to block witnesses and then to acquit a clearly corrupt and criminal president, they are making it official: Cheating in elections is no crime, so long as you're on their side.
There is no turning back now. Republicans will, of course, continue to pretend they're anything but the party of corruption and cheating, but the veneer of plausible deniability has been stripped away. Their party's last vestiges legitimacy are gone, and they know it. In fact, they're voting on it in the Senate sometime on Friday.
What this means for the rest of us is still not clear. There will be an election in November, and a newly emboldened Trump will probably concoct more criminal conspiracies to cheat in it. He may very well win. If he doesn't win, it's entirely likely that he'll reject the election results and refuse to leave, launching a new and much more dangerous episode in our slow-unfolding constitutional crisis. Senate Republicans, having already signed off on his cheating, may conclude there's no reason to stop now, and find some excuse to back his illegal rejection of the election results.
There is no longer any reason to believe Republicans will balk at anything that allows them to hold onto power. I do mean anything.
How far this goes, and whether our democracy can still be dragged out of this dark pit, is still unknown. But the history books will almost surely mark the end of this sham trial as the day that Republicans, who long ago made a mockery of their historical legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln, reached the point of no return.
It was never in doubt. President Donald Trump was going to be acquitted on both articles of impeachment. But many are feeling stunned today – not because he will “get off” – but because of the craven disregard by Sen. Lamar Alexander, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the entire GOP caucus for a fair trial. Not calling witnesses – actually blocking witnesses – will come back to hurt them.
But what happens next?
Riding what he will say is a victory for the U.S., Trump will be interviewed during Sunday’s Super Bowl. He will declare well before that, and repeatedly after, that he has been exonerated (he will not have been.)
On Tuesday, Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. He will again declare victory and exoneration, however false.
Legal and political experts and activists have some predictions about what else is about to happen and it’s not pretty. They’re also offering suggestions on what Democrats should do as soon as the trial is over, which likely will be Friday afternoon.
Trump defense attorney Alan Dershowitz Friday morning appeared on MSNBC to defend himself against allegations he claimed a president cannot be impeached if he believes what he is doing is in the public interest.
It did not go well.
Dershowitz was feisty and tried from the outset to take over and control the interview. Melber was not having it.
In his attempt to defend himself, Dershowitz proclaimed, “I was brought in not to argue the facts but only to make the constitutional argument that those two charges do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses.”
Dershowitz has been attacked for saying “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Constitutional experts have denounced his analysis.
He also claimed Trump extorting Ukraine was not bribery.
I don't think anyone in the country ever believed that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to remove Donald Trump from office in his impeachment trial. When the president famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, he wasn't kidding, at least when it comes to GOP officials. He has an iron grip on his party.From the first moment of the trial, it's been obvious that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's only organizing principle was to prevent the hearing of witnesses and get the trial over with as soon as possible. John Bolton's announcement that he was willing to testify before the Senate under subpoena presented a slight bump in the road, which McConnell finessed easily with his gambit to put off the issue until the end of the trial. When the New York Times reported that Bolton's testimony would directly implicate the president, McConnell put the squeeze on any wavering GOP senators and as of Thursday night, it appeared clear that there would not be enough votes to allow him to testify.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who is retiring after this term, was considered most likely to be the necessary fourth Republican vote for witnesses. He issued a statement saying that while he believes the House managers had fully proved their case, he believes that the president merely acted "inappropriately." In Alexander's mind, there is no need to hear any other witnesses and the Senate doesn't have the authority to remove Trump from office. That's the closest anyone on the Republican side has come to admitting that the president did something wrong, so it apparently passes for political courage in the Trump era.
House managers have presented a meticulous case showing that the president has abused his power, arguing that to fail to hold him accountable would make him a de facto king. At first, Trump's defense lawyers argued that he didn't do it or that he was just a selfless corruption crusader. But when former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz took the podium he basically stipulated to everything the House managers have said, arguing that nothing can be done about it because abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. Two days later he doubled down on that argument saying, "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." In his mind, a president who believes it's in the nation's interest for him to be the president is free to do whatever will ensure his election.
Trump has said over and over again that he believes this as well. The House managers played a video of him saying that Article II of the Constitution means "I can do whatever I want" several times during the trial. That is hardly the only time he's said such things.
During the Mueller investigation, for instance, Trump said many times that he had "the right" to pull the plug if he chose. Here said this to the New York Times just a year ago:
I've chosen to stay out of it. But I had the right to, as you know, I had the right if I wanted to to end everything. I could've just said, "That's enough." Many people thought that's what I should do.
"Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China including bringing … your companies HOME and making your products in the USA." When leaving the White House for the G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters, "I have the absolute right to do that, but we'll see how it goes."
Or this, after Trump was revealed to have spilled classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office:
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Or this one:
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Donald Trump has been a fierce proponent of an unaccountable imperial presidency since before he took office. He announced during the transition that the president can't have a conflict of interest and he could run his business and the country at the same time if he chose to. Even today he "jokes" about extending his presidency beyond the constitutionally limited eight years.
Like Louis XIV, he routinely suggests, l'état, c'est Donald Trump. Dershowitz was just defending his client, the man who would be king.
This also has loud echoes of the most disgraced president in history (until now), Richard Nixon, and his famous quote from his interviews with David Frost: "When the president does it it's not illegal." It's worthwhile to note the context because while Trump's impeachment concerns manipulation of foreign policy for his personal benefit, Nixon's use of the concept applied to domestic policy.
Frost asked Nixon about the impeachment article relating to his abuse of presidential power, which had concerned a White House plan to use the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to quell dissident activity with "wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups." Nixon had signed off on the plan but was thwarted by objections from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Frost: Would you say that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?
Nixon: When the president does it, it's not illegal.
Frost: By definition.
Nixon: Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.
Frost: The point is: The dividing line is the president's judgment?
Nixon: Yes, and so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate.
He added that the Congress has the power of the purse and that "trusted" members of Congress had been read in on some of the covert activity, as if that made it OK. Sound familiar?
Donald Trump almost certainly knows nothing of Nixon's presidential immunity theory, but he has behaved in almost exactly the same way. Instead of his party stepping up to stop him, they are about to endorse his behavior.
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If Trump wins a second term, can there be any doubt that he will follow even more closely in Nixon's footsteps and go after his political enemies at home? And unfortunately, we don't seem to have leaders in the Department of Justice with the integrity of (checks notes) J. Edgar Hoover anymore.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, Congress enacted many reforms to preclude those abuses from ever happening again. We are now right back where we started, if not worse.
One of the most bizarre characteristics of the Christian Right has been its ability be anti-Semitic and stridently pro-Israel at the same time. On the surface, it seems like a contradiction: how can far-right evangelical groups such as Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition of America and the Family Research Council (FRC) be passionate supporters of Israel and anti-Semites at the same time? But when one delves into the End Times ideology that is so prominent among white evangelicals, it makes perfect sense to them.
Certainly, not all Christians are anti-Semitic; in fact, the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants are not. The Christian Right embraces a severe form of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity that is separate from what non-fundamentalist Christians believe — and in Christian Right ideology, Jews will be condemned to eternal hell unless they convert to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. In contrast, numerous Catholics and Mainline Protestants (non-fundamentalist Protestants such as Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and the African-Methodist Episcopal Church) are happy to join forces with synagogues for charitable events and agree to disagree about some elements of scripture. Catholics and Mainline Protestants, as a rule, aren’t interested in trying to turn Jews into Christians; their bottom line is that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the Ten Commandments.
But to the Christian Right, Judaism is a one-way ticket to eternal hell — and that includes Jews they claim to consider allies, such as White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Far-right white evangelicals will insist that they aren’t anti-Semitic yet claim that President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump (a convert to Judaism) is going to hell unless she returns to Christianity (the president was raised Presbyterian). So why does the Christian Right consider itself supportive of those it believes deserve eternal punishment? They view it as a marriage of convenience, and this marriage underscores their obsession with Armageddon and the End Times.
On January 23, Mother Jones published an excellent, highly informative article by journalist Stephanie Mencimer that described one of the Christian Right’s most disturbing reasons for being so fond of President Trump: they believe he will escalate a catastrophic war in the Middle East (which Israel will be a key part of), and that war will speed up Jesus Christ’s return to the Earth.
Among End Times evangelicals, one book that is considered essential reading is “Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days,” which was published in 1995 and written by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late Rev. Tim LaHaye (a highly influential Christian Right evangelist). According to Mencimer, that 25-year-old book addresses “the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a ‘place in the far north’ that many evangelicals believe is Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with Persia — now Iran — and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful Israel ‘like a cloud that covers the land.’ LaHaye, like many evangelicals, believed this battle would bring on the Rapture, the End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven before unleashing plagues, sickness and other horrors on the unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns supreme.”
The Christian Right views Netanyahu as a hell-bound sinner who deserves eternal punishment because he has refused to bathe himself in the blood of Jesus Christ, who Jews and Muslims don’t consider the Messiah. But if the Israeli prime minister can play a role in the End Times and the Rapture, they’re happy to ally themselves with him.
It’s important to understand that the anti-Semitism of the Christian Right is quite different from the anti-Semitism of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who are bitterly anti-Israel. While groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the Aryan Nations view Israel as an enemy of Aryans, the Christian Right view Israel as an ally that will play a crucial role in the End Times and the Rapture — even though Israeli Jews will go to hell when they are killed in the catastrophic Middle East war that End Times evangelicals long for.
To fully understand just how twisted the Christian Right is, one needs at least a basic understanding of how diverse Christianity is. There are plenty of non-fundamentalist Protestants who flatly reject the Christian Right’s extremist interpretation of Christianity, including the Rev. Al Sharpton (the liberal civil rights activist who hosts “Politics Nation” on MSNBC) and Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg (an openly gay Episcopalian). And the decidedly left-of-center Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, has spent a lot of time explaining why he considers the Christian Right so dangerous. Hedges’ 2007 book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” pulls no punches and describes far-right white evangelicals as the extremist lunatic fringe of Christianity — a fringe that the Republican Party has been embracing for decades.
The Christian Right is not only anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim —
it is also contemptuous of non-fundamentalist Catholics and Mainline Protestants it considers insufficiently radical. But if a Presbyterian like President Trump can support their theocrat agenda, the Christian Right will embrace him. President Trump is wildly popular among far-right white evangelicals even though his daughter, Ivanka Trump, is a convert to a religion they don’t believe offers salvation.
For neo-Nazis, meanwhile, the Christian Right’s support for Israel is a deal breaker. The Christian Identity movement, which is separate from right-wing white evangelicals, believe that only WASPs — an Aryan Anglo Saxon race — are true Christians. The Christian Right will feature token blacks in its megachurches; neo-Nazis and white supremacists won’t even associate with either Jews or African-Americans.
Although End Times evangelicals are likely to hold racist views and applaud President Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric, they won’t be marching with the KKK or the Aryan Nations — as they see it, white supremacists’ contempt for Israel gets in the way of the Rapture. But rejecting the KKK, neo-Nazis and flat-out white supremacists doesn’t make the Christian Right any less anti-Semitic.
On the afternoon of Jan. 26, I was at the Indiana men’s basketball game when a chorus of cellphones in the crowd pinged, alerting them to the news of Kobe Bryant’s death. I was astonished at how quickly fans’ attention switched from the game to utter shock and disbelief at the news of Bryant’s passing.
Soon, it seemed like the entire nation was in mourning.
How can so many be so deeply affected by the death of someone they’ve never even met? Why might some people see Kobe Bryant as a family member?
As a social psychologist, I’m not surprised by these reactions. I see three main reasons, grounded in psychology, that explain why Bryant’s death had such a profound effect on so many people.
1. Feelings formed from afar
Psychologists Shira Gabriel and Melanie Green have written about how many of us form what are called “parasocial bonds” with other people. These tend to be one-way relationships with people whom we’ve never met or interacted with, but nonetheless feel intimately connected to.
But interest in parasocial relationships has exploded in the age of social media. People who follow celebrities on Twitter and Instagram get access to their relationships, emotions, opinions, triumphs and travails.
Still, there was something about Bryant’s death that seemed particularly tragic.
There’s no way to measure whether the outpouring of public grief surpassed that of recent celebrity deaths like Michael Jackson, Prince or Robin Williams. But it’s certainly possible that the unique circumstances surrounding Kobe Bryant’s death evoked stronger emotions.
Bryant died in a helicopter during extremely foggy conditions. This can lead to a lot of “what ifs,” otherwise known as “counterfactual thoughts.” Work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has shown that when we can easily come up with ways to undo an outcome – say, “if it had been a clear day, Kobe would still be alive” – it can intensify the anger, sadness or frustration about a negative event. It makes the death seem that much more random – and make us feel like it never should have happened in the first place.
Furthermore, Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, died in the accident, along with seven others. This broadens Bryant’s identity beyond the basketball court, reminding people of his role as a father of four daughters – three of whom will now have to live without their sister and father.
Students walk beside a mural of Kobe Bryant and daughter Gianna at a basketball court in Taguig, Philippines.
I’d also add that our grief over Kobe’s death may actually be less about him – and more about us.
According to “terror management theory,” reminders of our own mortality evoke an existential terror. In response, we search for ways to give our lives meaning and seek comfort and reassurance by connecting with loved ones. I found it striking that following the news of Bryant’s death, his former teammate Shaquille O’Neal said that he had called up several estranged friends in order to make amends. Bryant’s death was a stark reminder that life’s too short to hold onto petty grudges.
Similarly, after the loss of loved ones, we’ll often hear people suggest hugging those we love tightly, or living every day to the fullest.
Many had felt like they had gotten to know Bryant after watching him play basketball on TV for 20 years. His death was random and tragic, reminding us that we, too, will someday die – and making us wonder what we’ll have to show for our lives.
US President Donald Trump’s “vision” for Israelis and Palestinians is not a realistic peace plan to end a decades-old conflict. Rather, it’s more like a real estate deal in which one side is a recipient of a low-ball offer.
In the meantime, the other side is continuing to expand its hold on property to which it does not have the title deeds under international law. This is not the “deal of the century”, as Trump claims, but an invitation to Israel to assert its sovereignty over swathes of territory seized in the 1967 war.
In return, the Palestinians are being offered a “Swiss cheese” arrangement in which what is left of territory under their nominal control is pock-marked with settlement enclaves that will remain subject to Israeli military occupation.
This does not represent a two-state solution, or even a half-a-state solution. The Trump plan is a recipe for endless occupation of a stunted Palestinian entity with little or no prospect of achieving statehood, or even a basic autonomy free from military occupation.
The latest peace plan will likely join other failed initiatives, like rusting ordnance in the desert after Middle East conflicts.
It will do nothing for regional peace and stability. On the contrary, it will provide a rallying call for extremists across the Middle East who have no interest in reasonable compromise that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in neighbouring entities.
The fact that Palestinian representatives were not involved in negotiations on a future outlined by the president of the United States and accepted with alacrity by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most nationalistic and uncompromising leaders in Israel’s history, tells its own story.
The Palestinian leadership severed official contact with the Trump administration in 2017 when Washington recognised Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem and shifted its embassy there from Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians can reasonably be criticised for pulling back from direct dealings with the administration, but given Washington’s biases towards Israel, this boycott is hardly surprising.
The Trump plan amounts to not much more than a series of talking points, apart from the green light it gives to Israeli supporters of annexation. In addition, the Palestinian leadership is being asked to agree to terms that fall far short of what had been negotiated in previous peace efforts dating back to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Under Oslo, a “Palestinian Self-Governing Authority” would be established for a five-year transitional period, leading to a permanent two-state solution settlement based on United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
These called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in war.
Sadly, the Oslo process was stillborn due to toxic internal politics on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. An opportunity was squandered. That was a quarter of a century ago.
Under the Trump plan, the so-called two-state solution is dead for the foreseeable future given that Israel is allowed to annex territory under its control, including the Jordan Valley.
Israel has said it will move ahead with annexation as soon as this coming Sunday.
The Trump “vision” should also be viewed in the context of the US administration’s unprecedented accommodation of an ultra-nationalist Israeli government’s priorities.
No Palestinian representatives attended the unveiling in Washington of the Trump plan celebrated by a US president under threat of impeachment and an Israeli prime minister charged with corruption.
Arab attendees came from those countries in the Gulf that could be regarded as American clients: Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. Representatives of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were not present. Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries to have peace treaties with Israel.
While Cairo’s response – like that of Riyadh – to the Trump plan has been muted, it is unlikely leaders of these two countries will risk demonstrations that would likely follow overt acceptance of arrangements inimical to Palestinian interests.
In all of this, the year 1995 should be regarded as the reference point for any discussion of what lies ahead for the Palestinians and Israelis. That was the year a Jewish zealot assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The so-called peace process effectively died that day.
Rabin’s death and Netanyahu’s subsequent election effectively stymied efforts to encourage a more constructive atmosphere in which compromise might be possible.
A combination of Netanyahu’s obduracy and a weak and divided Palestinian leadership has meant prospects for peace have gone backwards since Oslo in 1993. The handshake on the White House lawn between Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is a distant memory.
The Trump plan is highly unlikely to reverse a continuing drift away from reasonable compromise. It risks making things worse, if that’s possible.
Donald Trump's white rage politics are normalizing white supremacy and overt racism.
The American right hates the very idea of government (especially in the form multiracial democracy) except as a means of protecting its political power. The basic idea of government as a means of solving common problems through collective action is anathema to today's conservatives. The public commons is being gutted.
The United States is a country built on genocide and violence and racial exclusion. We are a deeply violent culture. When a people lie to themselves — which is what Americans have done collectively — then you don't know who you are. And when you don't know who you are, then you can't respond rationally, and you can't correct the problems.
That inability to face reality means that in a crisis you cannot respond rationally. And this crisis essentially creates a social environment where people do not look for healthy political leaders. They look for cult leaders, and that's what Donald Trump is. Cult leaders always arise from decayed communities and societies where political and social and economic power has been stripped away.
Hedges continues:
The yearning for the cult leader, the political strongman, is a sign of an infantilized country and people…. And this is what makes a figure like Donald Trump so dangerous. The people who follow Trump do not care how crude he is. Trump's followers want him to get more power because they look to the cult leader as a way of healing their own sense of powerlessness…. There is a similar dynamic with the Christian right. A cult is really about the death instinct. Cult leaders cannot create anything positive. All they can do is destroy. They then sell that destruction as a form of creativity. That is exactly what Donald Trump does. But ultimately the cult and the cult leader end up destroying themselves.
The agents of the radical right who have been vomited up by a sick American society are not the only misleading heralds in our society. They are matched in some ways by the peddlers of false hope.
These are the people who tell the public that everything will be OK, that the danger of the Trump regime has been somehow exaggerated, that matters are not as dire or extreme as they appear and that a return to "normalcy" is "inevitable" if we somehow muddle through the present moment.
In the "liberal" mainstream media these voices can be heard on a daily basis. In the Age of Trump the hope peddlers work within the approved limits of public discourse.
Several years ago, the hope peddlers rejected the obvious fact that once elected Donald Trump would be an American fascist. They viewed such statements as hysterical overreactions because Trump's voters in particular, and Republicans in general, are at their core "good people" and "patriots" who "love their country."
The hope peddlers assured us that the history and weight of the presidency would "normalize" and "moderate" Donald Trump's authoritarian inclinations. They said that the "institutions," the rule of law and the Constitution were strong.
The hope peddlers truly believe — or at least claim to believe — that many of Trump's voters are "good people" who were somehow tricked in 2016 but now will vote against him.
The hope peddlers sang the praises of the "adults in the room," the supposedly sober and sagacious leadership class who would somehow restrain the worse impulses of Donald Trump's regime. What did the "adults in the room" do? They became Trump's enablers.
The hope peddlers then pivoted to special counsel Robert Mueller, who would finally bring down Donald Trump for his Russian escapades and his fealty to Vladimir Putin. When Mueller showed himself to be a mere mortal and not a superhero, the hope peddlers were forced to pivot to impeachment and Trump's Ukraine scandal.
The hope peddlers now sing the praises of "centrist" or "moderate" Republicans" and "principled conservatives" who may be persuaded by their conscience to vote Trump out of office. The hope peddlers also spread fictions that Republicans are "embarrassed" or "ashamed" of Trump, and suggest that the Ukraine scandal will be the moment when they rise up against him.
Former national security adviser John Bolton is now the new (anti-) hero of the hope peddlers, the man they dream will finally take down Donald Trump.
The hope peddlers would like the public to believe that somehow the Republicans who worship Trump and support nearly all his policies will now abandon power and victory because of "principle" and the compulsions of "conscience"? Even to articulate the question exposes the absurdity of it. On that matter, and most others related to Trump, the hope peddlers are selling swamp gas to anyone willing to exhale it for a momentary high.
After Donald Trump is acquitted in the Senate, the hope peddlers will seamlessly pivot to another narrative arc, where now the 2020 election will save America. But as they tell this next story, the hope peddlers will ignore any serious or sustained discussion and analysis of the institutional, cultural and societal forces that made Trumpism possible — forces that will remain largely undisturbed even if Donald Trump himself is forced to leave office.
The hope peddlers fulfill an important function in a failing American democracy. They help to legitimate the system by disseminating an alluring if deceptive narrative: America's problems are temporary, and in the end no deep institutional changes are needed.
Much like the right-wing forces of destruction empowered and unleashed by the Age of Trump, the hope peddlers reflect the emotional lives of many Americans.
The therapeutic vocabulary is appropriate. When I wrote "On Tyranny," I was thinking about political hygiene in the sense of brushing your teeth. You do not get excited about brushing your teeth, but it's still a really good thing to do. There are a lot of things in politics that are like that. These are the daily and weekly things that must be done to maintain a healthy democracy. Subscribing to newspapers, making eye contact with people, making sure that you go to a march every so often, those things are partly important because of how they impact our individual and collective mood for the better.
I worry that people get manic because they think it's all on their own shoulders. Everybody's refreshing on their phones to figure out what the latest dramatic thing is that has happened. But if all you do is refresh your phone then you don't actually go out and do anything. The result is that you end up feeling manic or depressive.
If you put the phone down and go out and actually do something, such as attend a small rally in front of the ICE headquarters or write an editorial and get it published or whatever it might be, then you end up feeling better. There are plenty of things that it does not take a lot of courage to do, but if you do them, you will actually feel better. Action is the answer. The way that Trump wins is through inaction, both on the part of people who oppose him and on the part of people who support him. Ironically, if the people who supported Trump actually made demands upon him then he would have a real problem.
In total, the American people are still processing the stages of grief over their failing democracy and the rise of Trump. The hope peddlers are stuck in the stages of denial and bargaining.
How do the hope peddlers convince themselves that what they say is true? What is the story they tell themselves about their identities, relative to America and the world? It could be financial or class privilege that allow the hope peddlers to remain committed to their performance, since they are largely insulated from real-world consequences. Hope peddlers may have forgotten the difference between fact and fiction, sustained by a rich fantasy life where they have convinced themselves that empirical reality is identical to their dreams and wishes.
In a time of crisis such as the Age of Trump, what the American people need the most are "hope warriors." These are journalists, pundits, writers, activists, elected officials and other opinion leaders who will tell the truth about the state of their country and society, and about what must be done to heal it. Empirical reality and context must come together with sustained analysis and critical thinking. A slavish devotion to "both-sides-ism" must be jettisoned. Hope warriors connect institutions and structures to the daily challenges being experienced by real people. Hope warriors explain that power is not neutral or something ineffable. It is real. It works through, by and on individuals, groups and communities.
Ultimately, in the Age of Trump the hope peddlers are almost as dangerous — and in some ways maybe even more so — than the Trump regime's agents, enforcers, minions, mouthpieces, followers and supporters.
The fundamental question remains: Do the American people want to be peddled false hope, or do they want the truth? The answer will determine the future of our nation, well beyond the Trump presidency.
Mitch McConnell's cover-up of Donald Trump's corruption looks like it will soon be complete — but not before a betrayal so big it could blow the GOP's chances of holding the Senate in November.
After 10 days of arguing over whether to allow evidence in Trump's impeachment trial, the Senate is expected to vote Friday on whether to allow witnesses, a vote Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now believes he will win. Republicans are determined to fast-track the end of a trial where the defendant has offered no real denial of what he's accused, has refused to provide any material evidence and has alreadypaid off the jury.
Such a lazy defense is precisely why McConnell wanted to avoid an impeachment process altogether. Public opinion had decidedly turned against Trump and the GOP Senate since the trial began. Hundreds took to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to call for witnesses, as 75% of voters in a new Monmouth University poll say witnesses should be allowed to testify. A straw poll on witnesses among GOP senators earlier this week was tighter than McConnell expected after it was revealed that former White House national security adviser John Bolton has a forthcoming tell-all which reportedly lays bare Trump's plan to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden.
While there is still virtually no chance that the Senate will vote to remove Trump (or that it ever would, on any imaginable evidence), he and his advisers made a huge mistake by not alerting McConnell that the White House had Bolton's manuscript at the end of December. They knew a giant boulder would hit the impeachment trial, yet it appears as though they let McConnell get bowled over right along with the rest of the Republican Party. Now McConnell is left looking like he's lost control of his own caucus. Mitch's woes this week means that the pressure exerted so far is working. The effort to make sure Trump's crimes are elucidated in full public view is paying off.
"They are kicking our ass," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reportedly conceded in a closed GOP meeting this week, referring to Democrats. Despite pulling a record off-year fundraising haul, the National Republican Congressional Committee is being significantly outmatched by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's fundraising. The House Democrats' campaign arm collected $40 million more than its GOP counterpart in 2019. It doesn't help that of the 28 current House members who have announced plans to retire, 22 are Republicans.
Dire numbers like that are why McConnell is eager to try to wrap up this impeachment trial with haste. He wants to protect his vulnerable senators, which include Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona, all of whom must face voters in the fall and could very well lose their seats. Every week these endangered Republicans are forced to answer questions about why key witnesses aren't allowed to testify — something an overwhelming majority of Americans want. Republicans could show a semblance of morality if they voted to hear actual witnesses, as customarily happens in trials. This stonewalling is making the entire party look like a bunch of corrupt protectionists.
As Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the House's lead impeachment manager, pointed out, Trump's own lawyers made an "effective" case for why the Senate should call Bolton as a witness after every single first-hand witness was blocked in the House inquiry. But the president's lawyers did their best this week to make Senate Republicans' job as difficult as possible.
Trump's attorneys touted misdirection and conspiracy theories as facts, proffered ridiculous legal arguments that would effectively turn the executive branch into an imperial palace and argued, confusingly, that the House should enforce its subpoenas in court and that it would be unconstitutional for any court to enforce those subpoenas. It's been a mess.
First Ken Starr, of Clinton impeachment infamy, offered a nonsensical "both sides do this" argument to argue against what he called an era of impeachment. Then lawyer Pat Philbin repeated the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, a Russia-fueled misinformation campaign, as an actual part of the White House defense of Trump's Ukraine pressure campaign. Trump attorney Jay Sekulow then claimed that the revelations from Bolton's manuscript — that Trump tied the withholding of military aid to Ukraine to investigations into his political rivals — were "inadmissible" and that impeachment "is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts." Finally, Alan Dershowitz provided the most laughable, if not most damaging, of all the president's flimsy defenses: If a president does anything untoward with the aim of getting re-elected, he is thereby acting in the national interest as he perceives it, and therefore such action is not impeachable.
Republicans are clearly relying on fatigue at this point. Tire Democrats out by making them fight for a fair trial for a long time. There is a reason why no Republican has actually tried to defend the Trump's actions: It is abundantly clear that he extorted a foreign government for his own personal gain. They started out denying it and are now admitting it, while saying that such an obvious and egregious offense is not "impeachable."
Every Republican understands that at the first hint of a fair trial, the floodgates would open. There is no worse position for a vulnerable GOP senator up for re-election than voting to acquit Trump after John Bolton testifies forcefully against him. The best thing that could possibly happen for Democrats' chances at retaking the Senate — which remain slight, but look less so every day — is for so-called moderate Republican senators to play a willing part in this blatant cover-up. Like a mobster in a Scorsese film, Trump's defense is now making them dig their own graves.
What do we mean when we talk about “socialism”? Here are ten things about its theory, practice, and potential that you need to know.
Over the last 200 years, socialism has spread across the world. In every country, it carries the lessons and scars of its particular history there. Conversely, each country’s socialism is shaped by the global history, rich tradition, and diverse interpretations of a movement that has been the world’s major critical response to capitalism as a system.
This story originally appeared at YES! Magazine.
We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism.
In my latest book, Understanding Socialism (Democracy at Work, 2019), I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know.
1. Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism
Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out.
In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice—exploitation—located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth.
Karl Marx, date unknown. Photo from Bettmann/Getty Images.
Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees). When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell.
The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer.
2. Socialism is not a single, unified theory
People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives.
Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialists supporting the post-revolutionary Soviet Union underscored their commitment to socialism that entailed the government owning and operating industries by adopting the new name “communist.” Those skeptical of Soviet-style socialism tended increasingly to favor state regulation of private capitalists. They kept the name “socialist” and often called themselves social democrats or democratic socialists. For the last century, the two groups debated the merits and flaws of the two alternative notions of socialism as embodied in examples of each (e.g. Soviet versus Scandinavian socialisms).
Early in the 21st century, an old strain of socialism resurfaced and surged. It focuses on transforming the inside of enterprises: from top-down hierarchies, where a capitalist or a state board of directors makes all the key enterprise decisions, to a worker cooperative, where all employees have equal, democratic rights to make those decisions, thereby becoming—collectively—their own employer.
3. The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism
As leader of the Soviet Union, Lenin once said that socialism was a goal, not yet an achieved reality. The Soviet had, instead, achieved “state capitalism.” A socialist party had state power, and the state had become the industrial capitalist displacing the former private capitalists. The Soviet revolution had changed who the employer was; it had not ended the employer/employee relationship. Thus, it was—to a certain extent—capitalist.
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. In effect, he offered Soviet state capitalism as if it were the model for socialism worldwide. Socialism’s enemies have used this identification ever since to equate socialism with political dictatorship. Of course, this required obscuring or denying that (1) dictatorships have often existed in capitalist societies and (2) socialisms have often existed without dictatorships.
After initially copying the Soviet model, China changed its development strategy to embrace instead a state-supervised mix of state and private capitalism focused on exports. China’s powerful government would organize a basic deal with global capitalists, providing cheap labor, government support, and a growing domestic market. In exchange, foreign capitalists would partner with Chinese state or private capitalists, share technology, and integrate Chinese output into global wholesale and retail trade systems. China’s brand of socialism—a hybrid state capitalism that included both communist and social-democratic streams—proved it could grow faster over more years than any capitalist economy had ever done.
4. The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think
As capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it advocated liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. When those promises failed to materialize, many became anti-capitalist and found their way to socialism.
Experiments in constructing post-capitalist, socialist systems in the 20th century (especially in the Soviet Union and China) eventually incurred similar criticisms. Those systems, critics held, had more in common with capitalism than partisans of either system understood.
Self-critical socialists produced a different narrative based on the failures common to both systems. The U.S. and Soviet Union, such socialists argue, represented private and state capitalisms. Their Cold War enmity was misconstrued on both sides as part of the century’s great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Thus, what collapsed in 1989 was Soviet State capitalism, not socialism. Moreover, what soared after 1989 was another kind of state capitalism in China.
5. Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the 1930s New Deal
FDR’s government raised the revenue necessary for Washington to fund massive, expensive increases in public services during the Depression of the 1930s. These included the Social Security system, the first federal unemployment compensation system, the first federal minimum wage, and a mass federal jobs program. FDR’s revenues came from taxing corporations and the rich more than ever before.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, center, and his New Deal administration team on September 12, 1935. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images.
In response to this radical program, FDR was reelected three times. His radical programs were conceived and pushed politically from below by a coalition of communists, socialists, and labor unionists. He had not been a radical Democrat before his election.
Socialists obtained a new degree of social acceptance, stature, and support from FDR’s government. The wartime alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union strengthened that social acceptance and socialist influences.
6. If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led global purge of socialists and communists after WWII
After its 1929 economic crash, capitalism was badly discredited. The unprecedented political power of a surging U.S. left enabled government intervention to redistribute wealth from corporations and the rich to average citizens. Private capitalists and the Republican Party responded with a commitment to undo the New Deal. The end of World War II and FDR’s death in 1945 provided the opportunity to destroy the New Deal coalition.
The strategy hinged on demonizing the coalition’s component groups, above all the communists and socialists. Anti-communism quickly became the strategic battering ram. Overnight, the Soviet Union went from wartime ally to an enemy whose agents aimed “to control the world.” That threat had to be contained, repelled, and eliminated.
U.S. domestic policy focused on anti-communism, reaching hysterical dimensions and the public campaigns of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Communist Party leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and deported in a wave of anti-communism that quickly spread to socialist parties and to socialism in general. Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, and more were blacklisted and barred from working in the industry. McCarthy’s witch hunt ruined thousands of careers while ensuring that mass media, politicians, and academics would be unsympathetic, at least publicly, to socialism.
U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy led a campaign to put prominent government officials and others on trial for alleged “subversive activities” and Communist Party membership during the height of the Cold War. Photo by Corbis/Getty Images.
In other countries revolts from peasants and/or workers against oligarchs in business and/or politics often led the latter to seek U.S. assistance by labeling their challengers as “socialists” or “communists.” Examples include U.S. actions in Guatemala and Iran (1954), Cuba (1959-1961), Vietnam (1954-1975), South Africa (1945-1994), and Venezuela (since 1999). Sometimes the global anti-communism project took the form of regime change. In 1965-6 the mass killings of Indonesian communists cost the lives of between 500,000 to 3 million people.
Once the U.S.—as the world’s largest economy, most dominant political power, and most powerful military—committed itself to total anti-communism, its allies and most of the rest of the world followed suit.
7. Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to those subjected by and opposed to capitalist colonialism
In the first half of the 20th century, socialism spread through the rise of local movements against European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the United States’ informal colonialism in Latin America. Colonized people seeking independence were inspired by and saw the possibility of alliances with workers fighting exploitation in the colonizing countries. These latter workers glimpsed similar possibilities from their side.
This helped create a global socialist tradition. The multiple interpretations of socialism that had evolved in capitalism’s centers thus spawned yet more and further-differentiated interpretations. Diverse streams within the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition interacted with and enriched socialism.
8. Fascism is a capitalist response to socialism
A fascist economic system is capitalist, but with a mixture of very heavy government influence. In fascism, the government reinforces, supports, and sustains private capitalist workplaces. It rigidly enforces the employer/employee dichotomy central to capitalist enterprises. Private capitalists support fascism when they fear losing their position as capitalist employers, especially during social upheavals.
Under fascism, there is a kind of mutually supportive merging of government and private workplaces. Fascist governments tend to “deregulate,” gutting worker protections won earlier by unions or socialist governments. They help private capitalists by destroying trade unions or replacing them with their own organizations which support, rather than challenge, private capitalists.
Frequently, fascism embraces nationalism to rally people to fascist economic objectives, often by using enhanced military expenditures and hostility toward immigrants or foreigners. Fascist governments influence foreign trade to help domestic capitalists sell goods abroad and block imports to help them sell their goods inside national boundaries.
Blackshirts, supporters of Benito Mussolini who founded the National Fascist Party, are about to set fire to portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin in Italy in May 1921. Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images.
Usually, fascists repress socialism. In Europe’s major fascist systems—Spain under Franco, Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini—socialists and communists were arrested, imprisoned, and often tortured and killed.
A similarity between fascism and socialism seems to arise because both seek to strengthen government and its interventions in society. However, they do so in different ways and toward very different ends. Fascism seeks to use government to secure capitalism and national unity, defined often in terms of ethnic or religious purity. Socialism seeks to use government to end capitalism and substitute an alternative socialist economic system, defined traditionally in terms of state-owned and -operated workplaces, state economic planning, employment of dispossessed capitalists, workers’ political control, and internationalism.
9. Socialism has been, and still is, evolving
During the second half of the 20th century, socialism’s diversity of interpretations and proposals for change shrank to two alternative notions: 1.) moving from private to state-owned-and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products like the Soviet Union, or 2.) “welfare-state” governments regulating markets still comprised mostly of private capitalist firms, as in Scandinavia, and providing tax-funded socialized health care, higher education, and so on. As socialism returns to public discussion in the wake of capitalism’s crash in 2008, the first kind of socialism to gain mass attention has been that defined in terms of government-led social programs and wealth redistributions benefitting middle and lower income social groups.
The evolution and diversity of socialism were obscured. Socialists themselves struggled with the mixed results of the experiments in constructing socialist societies (in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.). To be sure, these socialist experiments achieved extraordinary economic growth. In the Global South, socialism arose virtually everywhere as the alternative development model to a capitalism weighed down by its colonialist history and its contemporary inequality, instability, relatively slower economic growth, and injustice.
Socialists also struggled with the emergence of central governments that used excessively concentrated economic power to achieve political dominance in undemocratic ways. They were affected by criticisms from other, emerging left-wing social movements, such as anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism, and began to rethink how a socialist position should integrate the demands of such movements and make alliances.
10. Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future
The focus of the capitalism-versus-socialism debate is now challenged by the changes within socialism. Who the employers are (private citizens or state officials) now matters less than what kind of relationship exists between employers and employees in the workplace. The role of the state is no longer the central issue in dispute.
A growing number of socialists stress that previous socialist experiments inadequately recognized and institutionalized democracy. These self-critical socialists focus on worker cooperatives as a means to institutionalize economic democracy within workplaces as the basis for political democracy. They reject master/slave, lord/serf, and employer/employee relationships because these all preclude real democracy and equality.
Homesteaders, relocated by the U.S. Resettlement Administration, a federal agency under the New Deal, working at a cooperative garment factory in Hightstown, New Jersey, in 1936. The U.S. Resettlement Administration relocated struggling families to provide work relief. Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.
For the most part, 19th and 20th century socialisms downplayed democratized workplaces. But an emerging, 21st century socialism advocates for a change in the internal structure and organization of workplaces. The microeconomic transformation from the employer/employee organization to worker co-ops can ground a bottom-up economic democracy.
The new socialism’s difference from capitalism becomes less a matter of state versus private workplaces, or state planning versus private markets, and more a matter of democratic versus autocratic workplace organization. A new economy based on worker co-ops will find its own democratic way of structuring relationships among co-ops and society as a whole.
Worker co-ops are key to a new socialism’s goals. They criticize socialisms inherited from the past and add a concrete vision of what a more just and humane society would look like. With the new focus on workplace democratization, socialists are in a good position to contest the 21st century’s struggle of economic systems.
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, NYC. He taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris. Over the last 25 years, in collaboration with Stephen Resnick, he has developed a new approach to political economy that appears in several books co-authored by Resnick and Wolff and numerous articles by them separately and together. Professor Wolff's weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated on over 90 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV and other networks.
As Democratic voters prepare to go to the polls, you’d be forgiven for having a feeling of déjà vu. Just as in 2016, Donald Trump is running as the Republican nominee. Just as in 2016, Bernie Sanders is mounting a surprisingly strong bid to win on the Democratic side. And, just as in 2016, much of the mainstream media and Democratic powers-that-be are putting their faith in a longtime establishment “moderate” as the more “electable” choice for the party. Four years on from Trump’s election, both everything and seemingly nothing has changed.
What is different is the identity of the Democratic establishment choice. This time, it’s former Vice President Joe Biden instead of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 was lauded as the sensible, safe choice to take on an erratic and extreme Trump in the same way that newspaper columnists, TV pundits, and some voters themselves now laud Biden as the most electable candidate in the Democratic field.
With the Biden campaign warning voters it’s “no time to take a risk” and urging them to choose “our strongest candidate” and “the Democrat Trump fears the most” (meaning, of course, Biden), it’s worth looking back at 2016 and the reasons that year’s centrist, supposedly non-risky candidate lost.
Throughout the race, Clinton was dogged by the email server scandal that served to regularly remind voters of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy. Her family foundation became an issue as journalists revealed the mixing of her family’s private sector work with her political career—her coziness with Wall Street and corporate interests only further confirming her perception as a tool of big money.
Journalists and the opposition dug into her record, undermining her appeal to key constituencies: her role in Bill Clinton’s mass incarceration policies helped alienate Black voters; her championing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement hurt her standing in the Midwest; her callous 2014 comments about child migrants turned off Latinos; and her history as a hawk turned off key communities affected by endless war. Her previous triangulation on issues like abortion and marriage equality turned off more key voter demographics, while painting her as a phony. Meanwhile, her steadfast refusal to champion longstanding liberal goals like universal health care further depressed enthusiasm among the party’s activist base.
The result is now well-known: not only did Clinton lose swing states like Florida and Ohio, but three dependably blue states in the Midwest flipped unexpectedly red to hand Trump victory. Voter turnout, key to both of Obama’s victories, fell to its lowest level in two decades, with Black voter turnout dropping sharply after twenty years of steady rises. As one African-American non-voter told the New York Times: “Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”
Not only does opposing Trump with another unexciting, supposedly electable, establishment-friendly centrist like Biden mean repeating an experiment that’s already failed disastrously; it means running a candidate who has all of Clinton’s weaknesses and more.
Unlike Clinton, Biden wasn’t simply a bit player in creating the US system of mass incarceration that has brutalized Black and brown communities. He was one of its leading architects, claiming the very 1994 crime bill that was hung around Clinton’s neck four years ago as one of his greatest achievements, and authoring the bill that created the infamous 100-to-1 crack-to-cocaine sentencing disparity. Just as the video of Clinton warning about “superpredators” was circulated far and wide, Trump’s people will make sure Black voters are bombarded with a video of Biden similarly warning about juvenile “predators” who “warrant exceptionally, exceptionally tough treatment.”
Biden is already mired in his own long-running scandal in the form of the Ukrainegate saga, which, though currently engulfing the Trump administration, is also a reminder of the fact that Biden’s family has been cashing in on his political career since the day it began. New stories on the subject periodically emerge, while Biden can only protest his son’s mysterious and lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian gas giant trying to curry favor with the US by insisting the arrangement wasn’t illegal—hardly exonerating in a town where so much of corruption isn’t.
Trump will make hay of Biden’s longstanding fealty to corporate donors, whether as the “senator from MBNA” who made bankruptcy harder for middle-class families at the credit card industry’s request, or his friendliness with wealthy financiers like disgraced savings-and-loan executive David L. Paul. He will hammer on Biden’s support for NAFTA and the TPP every chance he gets. Same with Biden’s long, well-documentedhistory of trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, something Trump ran against in 2016, and which he has so far avoided doing (and will almost certainly do should he win re-election).
Against his best efforts, Trump will go into this election as the first president since Jimmy Carter not to lead the United States into a new war, a remarkable fact even as he’s deepened pre-existing US military involvement in the Middle East. Biden, by contrast, was not only a key ally to the Bush administration in selling the Iraq War—something he continues to lie about when challenged—he’s supported military action in countries as far afield as the former Yugoslavia and Sudan, and was part of the administration that fought the disastrous war in Libya.
A social conservative for much of his career, Biden’s record on gay and abortion rights will further alienate the Democratic base, with his sudden, late-stage “evolutions” on these issues already being viewed as opportunistic. Ditto with Biden’s courting of corporate donors and trashing of Medicare for All during the primary. And Biden still can’t give a good answer to his role in an administration that deported more people than even Trump, telling one immigration activist simply to “vote for Trump.” And that’s all while his role in handing Trump the powers he uses to terrorize immigrant communities goes largely unscrutinized.
We are already seeing signs of a repeat of Clinton’s loss: there is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Biden, who’s drawn lackluster crowds the whole race through. In fact, he’s now drawing smaller crowd sizes in Iowa than he did in 2008, when he won 0.9 percent of the vote. If he loses to Trump, it will hardly be a shock. Uninspiring centrist Democrats have now lost to often extreme right-wing Republicans in seven of the last 10 presidential elections: in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016.
Meanwhile, as for who Trump fears most, let’s hear what the president himself had to say to donors behind closed doors in 2018 about his victory two years earlier:
If Bernie were Hillary’s vice president, it would have been tougher … because he’s a big trade guy, you know he basically says we’re getting screwed on trade, and he’s right. … He was the only one I didn’t want her to pick.
Twelve years ago, it was conventional wisdom that a progressive, Black candidate with the middle name Hussein was a risk to choose as a nominee. But Barack Obama not only won two elections, he remains perhaps the most beloved former president in the country. When the media talks about electability, it’s certainly conventional, but in hindsight it hardly seems wise.
