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.
This week, President Donald Trump’s sycophants and loyalists in the right-wing media have been going after former National Security Adviser John Bolton with a vengeance. They are furious over a bombshell New York Times report that Bolton, in his forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” alleges that Trump made an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, a condition of military aid to Ukraine. But one conservative who isn’t bashing Bolton this week is Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin, who asserts in a January 30 column that Bolton is badly needed to help rein in Trump.
The Never Trump conservative sets up her column as a “Dear John Bolton” letter addressing the former national security adviser. And she tells Bolton why his insights are so important at this point.
“The president asserts that he is king, and the spineless Republicans — who smear and insult you and mouth Russian propaganda — are too cowardly to oppose him,” Rubin tells Bolton. “Meanwhile, your First Amendment rights to publish your account are being trampled on by a vague, overly broad and baseless assertion that your manuscript contain ‘top secret’ materials.”
Rubin goes on to describe some “options” that Bolton has.
“First, you could hold a news conference Thursday or agree to an interview, perhaps with Chris Wallace so that his Fox News audience would have a front-row seat,” Rubin advises. And she notes, “You can explain without revealing anything remotely classified that Trump tied aid to opening bogus investigations into the Bidens; that Trump never pursued burden-sharing or anti-corruption efforts more generally before the scandal broke; and that Trump knew that the conspiracy theories justifying such bogus investigations were being advanced by Russian-connected stooges. Let the public know; do not allow the Senate to ignore damning evidence.”
Second, Rubin writes, Bolton could contact the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee and “ask to appear immediately in an open hearing. You can then, under oath, lay out what you know.”
A third option, according to Rubin: Bolton “can do nothing, meekly accepting prior restraint on your free speech and remaining silent so that the Senate can escape confronting what it knows would be damning evidence of the president’s impeachable conduct. You can watch the party to which you belonged your entire adult life incinerate the constitutional system of checks and balances, separation of powers and limited government. You can become a silent accomplice in this assault on democracy.”
But that isn’t the option Rubin recommends.
The conservative journalist wraps up her column by stressing that although Bolton is now hated by so many Trump devotees, he can have the satisfaction of doing the right thing by speaking out.
“Whatever sense of disappointment and alienation you must feel from your former friends and colleagues,” Rubin tells Bolton, “I can assure you it is temporary. You can now relish in the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to display true courage and patriotism, to go down in history with others who interposed themselves between wanna-be dictators and absolute power. But first, you have to do the right thing.”
To defend against Democratic allegations of an illicit cover-up, President Donald Trump’s lawyers have argued fervently that the second article of impeachment in the Senate trial charging him with obstructing Congress is completely unwarranted. Instead of charging Trump with obstructing Congress, they’ve argued, Democrats should have taken the president to court to enforce subpoenas of his aides and requests for documents.
But on Thursday, a Justice Department attorney — who, ostensibly, works for the president — completely contradicted this argument.
There’s long been a tension in the president’s impeachment defense and his administration’s position in court, as many have pointed out. Trump’s impeachment attorneys have argued that Congress shouldn’t have charged Trump with obstructing their investigation but instead worked out disputes in the judicial branch. But when Congress has taken the administration to court to enforce its subpoenas, Justice Department attorneys have argued that judges can’t resolve the dispute between the legislative branch and the executive.
Basically, combining these two arguments, Trump’s lawyers are saying Congress should go to court to enforce its subpoenas, and then it should lose in court — essentially implying that lawmakers should have no power at all to compel evidence from the executive branch. If this were true, the power of impeachment would essentially be nullified.
Previously, some Trump administration lawyers have been reluctant to say in court whether Congress could or should use the impeachment to enforce its subpoenas, instead urging that lawmakers could withhold funds from the administration to exert pressure for compliance. But on Thursday, in an ongoing fight over the 2020 Census, Justice Department lawyer James Burnham said that the House can legitimately use its impeachment powers to respond to a president who defies subpoenas, as CNN reported.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow has argued, however, that the proper place to resolve the dispute over subpoenas is courts and not impeachment, according to Politico.
“The president’s opponents, in their rush to impeach, have refused to wait for judicial review,” Sekulow argued to the Senate.
And legal scholar John Turley, who testified on behalf of Republicans in the House impeachment proceedings, warned against “making a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts.”
House impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-CA) pointed out the glaring inconsistency and hypocrisy on Thursday in his remarks to the Senate, drawing laughter from the audience.
“Today, while we’ve been debating whether a president can be impeached for essentially bogus claims of privilege, for attempting to use the courts to cover up misconduct, the Justice Department in resisting subpoenas is in court today … because, as we know, they’re in here arguing Congress must go to court to enforce its subpoenas, but they’re in the court saying ‘Congress, thou shalt not do that,'” he explained. “So the judge says: ‘If the Congress can’t enforce its subpoenas in court, then what remedy is there?’ And the Justice Department lawyer’s response is ‘Impeachment! Impeachment!'”
At that, the Senate chamber burst into laughter.
“You can’t make it up!” Schiff said. “What more evidence do we need of the bad faith of this effort to cover up?”
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Trump’s lawyers have tried to suggest that the House manager’s position is itself similarly contradictory because they’ve tried to enforce their subpoenas through both the courts and through impeachment. But there’s nothing incongruous about believing that House subpoenas can be enforced through two different avenues.
What’s so duplicitous about the Trump lawyers’ position is that it means that House subpoenas would be entirely unenforceable, not even worth the paper they’re printed on — but they refuse to admit this outright.
So, the impeachment process is all done but for the final, predictable votes.
It has been a cringe-worthy process that almost certainly has deepened deep divisions in the country, and that has showcases a Republican Senate majority willing to follow party loyalty right out the window, throwing out a truckload of traditional American values. Do we believe in fairness, in truth, in fact?
It has been a process that put forth zany legal arguments seemingly spun of whole cloth to protect Donald Trump, even at the expense of radical reinterpretation of the Constitution’s division of governmental responsibilities and the simple understanding that doing bad is something to be excised and punished. Do we really accept that a president, particularly Trump, who has made self-aggrandizement a feature of his presidency, can do anything towards reelection because he thinks it is “in the public interest,” as outlined by presidential defender Alan Dershowitz?
It has been a process that often bordered more on personal rudeness and chest-bumping between the feuding lawyers than on any understandable search for what happened between Trump and the Ukraine. It became a trial turning its back on witnesses, even as we are hearing from leaks to journalists about the John Bolton’s new book or more tapes and emails from Rudy Giuliani’s henchmen acting on behalf of Trump, and on stopping obstruction of Congress.
Finally, after days of presentation, followed by two days of Senate questions, we reached the bottom line in the arguments of Team Trump’s lawyers:
--There are no limits on Trump’s powers, he does not need to meet requests, demands, even subpoenas from Congress. At the same time, there apparently is no reason to settle any of these refusals to acknowledge Congress in the courts, where Team Trump is arguing that the appropriate response to access complaints incongruously is impeachment.
--There is nothing impeachable about anything that a president does in pursuit of re-election, because seeking reelection might be “in the public interest” and including seeking “information” from foreign countries, because “information” has no valued.
--And, apparently, there is nothing wrong with running a rogue campaign to trade held military aid for dirt on Joe Biden, as a prime political opponent. Per Team Trump, there was no quid pro quo, unless there was, in which case, it was perfectly reasonable either because Trump cared so deeply about corruption in the Ukraine over years or because it was in the public interest rather than his own.
--The House managers relied on law, for the most part; by contrast, Team Trump’s arguments were largely political.
--Along the way, Democratic prosecutors made enough mistakes to leave themselves vulnerable to counter-arguments, however illogical.
*
Listening to the proceedings was often difficult. The twisted logic of the president’s team was outdone only by its disdain for anything I would associate with truth-finding. As I have said all along, I can understand a debate over whether these acts rise to the level of impeachment; but treating American voters like chumps who are blind and deaf to the outpouring of information about Trump wrong-doing is simply dismissive.
It is difficult to pick out the worst of what we have heard, and where it leaves us.
--We have been moving steadily since November, 2016, towards a presidency that undercuts democracy, hastened by Democratic advances in 2018 elections that have prompted Trump into making more and more policy through executive order, the refusal to cooperate with Congress over general government oversight as well as impeachment, and now, in big gulps of power-swallowing towards an autocratic, authoritarian government.
--The evidence that was collected, mostly from the mouths of Trump appointees in diplomatic and national security service, showed that we are willing to host a government replete with Cabinet members and departmental overseers who are willing to bend budget, justice, environment, education and energy safeguards upside-down to make Trump look good. Despite the 200 Senate questions, there are piles of head-scratchers out there that were never asked: Why was Giuliani ever dispatched to the Ukraine rather than the State Department, if this was in the public interest? What are we to make of the unasked questions about the roles of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, the White House lawyers who stuck the Ukraine phone tapes in a White House secure, classified safe?
--As soon as the Senate votes against impeachment, we can expect Trump to come out in full boast, having learned nothing of anything close to humility. Instead, we can predict a full volley of vindictive behaviors personally aimed at anyone with the audacity of questioning the new American monarch.
Senators will soon decide whether to dismiss the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump without hearing any witnesses. In making this decision, I believe they should consider words spoken at the Constitutional Convention, when the Founders decided that an impeachment process was needed to provide a “regular examination,” to quote Benjamin Franklin.
A critical debate took place on July 20, 1787, which resulted in adding the impeachment clause to the U.S. Constitution. Franklin, the oldest and probably wisest delegate at the Constitutional Convention, said that when the president falls under suspicion, a “regular and peaceable inquiry” is needed.
In my work as a law professor studying original texts about the U.S. Constitution, I’ve read statements made at the Constitutional Convention that demonstrate the Founders viewed impeachment as a regular practice, with three purposes:
To provide a fair and reliable method to resolve suspicions about misconduct;
To remind both the country and the president that he is not above the law;
To deter abuses of power.
Good for the president and the country
Franklin persuasively argued that impeachment was a process that could be “favorable” to the president, saying it is the best way to provide for “the regular punishment of the executive when his misconduct should deserve it and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.”
Franklin may have carried the debate when he told his fellow delegates the story of a recent dispute that had greatly troubled the Dutch Republic.
One of the Dutch leaders, William V, the prince of Orange, was suspected to have secretly sabotaged a critical alliance with France. The Dutch had no impeachment process and thus no way to conduct “a regular examination” of these allegations. These suspicions mounted, giving rise “to the most violent animosities & contentions.”
Many Constitutional Convention delegates agreed with the assertion by George Mason of Virginia that “no point is of more importance … than the right of impeachment” because no one is “above justice.”
In the discussions leading to the decision to add the impeachment clause to the Constitution, a recurrent reason was raised: concern that the president would abuse his power. George Mason described the president as the “man who can commit the most extensive injustice.” James Madison thought the president might “pervert his administration into a scheme of [stealing public funds] or oppression or betray his trust to foreign powers.” Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, said the president “will have great opportunitys of abusing his power; particularly in time of war when the military force, and in some respects the public money will be in his hands.”
Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts pointed out that a good president will not worry about impeachment, but a “bad one ought to be kept in fear.”
A final word from the founding that has special resonance to the Senate’s current discussions: William R. Davie of North Carolina argued that impeachment was “an essential security for the good behaviour” of the president; otherwise, “he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.”
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published Sept. 26, 2019.
Not that there was any doubt before, but it's still stunning to see how the mainstream media's addiction to false equivalences in the name of "balance" has withstood even the mightiest of trials, namely the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump.
On Wednesday, America's dumbest pundit, who is also among its most highly-paid, CNN's Chris Cillizza, ejected this remarkably lazy tweet:
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The "analysis" in his article was no better, accusing both parties of "reflexive partisanship" with no interest in "any sort of thoughtful conversation or debate."
That analysis was only possible because Cillizza's lack of self-awareness is so staggering that it can only be rivaled by that of Donald Trump himself. Nowhere does Cillizza actually note the content of the arguments, the persuasiveness of the arguments, or even any understanding of what those arguments might be. Physician, heal thyself — before accusing others of not being able to listen.
Of course, it's screamingly obvious why Cillizza is ignoring all the actual content from Wednesday, in which senators were tasked with asking written questions of the House managers and Trump's legal team on the question of whether to remove Trump from office. Any perusal of the actual content makes it hard, even for the mightiest of hacks, to maintain the illusion that "both sides" are morally equivalent.
The reality is that, barring a few genuinely interesting questions from a couple of the shakier Republicans, what was truly remarkable about the first day of questions was the stark, black-and-white nature of the differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Meanwhile, Democrats focused on asking questions about whether or not witnesses should be called at the trial — since it's a trial, after all. Republicans, of course, are fighting witnesses, since they've decided it's easier or more palatable to play ignorant than just admit they plan to acquit a guilty man.
The main witness being contested is former national security adviser John Bolton, whose recently-leaked book manuscript apparently attests that he personally heard Trump demand that military aid be withheld from Ukraine until its leaders agreed to help him cheat in the 2020 election. Bolton, a notorious war-mongering villain long beloved by Republicans and hated by most Democrats, is now being called on to testify by Democrats and demonized by his former Republican allies.
Peter Baker of the New York Times, desperate as always for any opportunity to draw a false equivalence between the two parties, pounced, published an article Wednesday framing "both sides" as hypocrites doing an about-face on Bolton. His lead, in fact, focused on the Democrats, apparently implying that they were worst.
But as Salon's Press Watch columnist Dan Froomkin pointed out, what Baker is implying about Democrats — that they've somehow changed their minds about Bolton — is flat-out untrue. Democrats still think Bolton is dangerous and extremist in his war-mongering ways. But they also believe that "Bolton's testimony could help them arrive at the truth about Donald Trump's conduct in office."
This isn't complicated. Anyone who watched "Goodfellas" or has heard of the witness protection program is clear on the concept that criminals often testify against each other, either out of self-preservation or to settle scores. Trump surrounds himself with sleaze, so sleaze is who has the goods on him. Baker is probably not stupid, and is no doubt aware of the terms "rat" and "snitch," as well as Trump's long-standing habit of threatening people who have rat-and-snitch impulses. So his choice to embrace this false equivalence should be understood as dishonesty — which is a bad trait in anyone, but especially in a journalist.
This impulse to find some excuse, no matter how misleading, to accuse "both sides" of some malfeaseance runs deep at the New York Times. For instance, media analyst Eric Boehlert flagged a particularly egregious example from David Sanger on Sunday, in which Sanger wrote that "as the Republicans focus on Ukraine and the Democrats focus on Russia, both are bending the facts to fit their case."
Sanger's "evidence" that Democrats are bending the facts is to quote one of Trump's routinely mendacious lawyers, Jay Sekulow, accusing Democrats of ignoring previous aid sent to Ukraine by the Trump administration. But Democrats have done no such thing. On the contrary, Democrats have repeatedly pointed out that Trump didn't have a problem sending aid to Ukraine until he realized he could leverage it to force the Ukrainian government to help him cheat in the 2020 election. Previous aid strengthens the Democratic case that Trump had no interest in internal Ukrainian corruption, and that his only purpose in suddenly withholding aid was part of his extortion scheme.
In this perpetual chase to find some kind of "both sides" spin, far too many journalists are overlooking the real story: That Trump is demanding a cover-up of his crimes, and Republicans in Congress are fully cooperating with this demand.
"Media accounts are not clearly conveying that a Senate vote against new witnesses is a vote to complete *Trump's* coverup," Greg Sargent of the Washington Post tweeted in frustration Wednesday, linking an article he wrote detailing the Republican pressure campaign to hold the party line on covering up for Trump.
Sargent's piece is classified as "opinion," but it does a much better job than the supposedly objective journalists are doing at the basic job of reporting, which is informing the public about what's really going on. To cling to a "both sides" narrative is to misinform people, at best, if not to tell them outright lies.
"Both sides" are not the same. They aren't equal. Democrats, however imperfect they may be outside this impeachment battle, have been clear, consistent and morally upright in their efforts to expose Trump's conspiracy to cheat in the 2020 elections by blackmailing Ukraine's president into helping him. Despite occasional moments of wavering, Republicans have been equally consistent in their willingness to cover up the truth, lie or otherwise defend Trump, even though he's clearly guilty. Any "news" story that fails to convey these facts shouldn't be considered legitimate journalism.
On Monday, we learned that John Bolton witnessed the president’s bribing of a foreign leader into interfering with the 2020 election. The former head of the National Security Council, in a forthcoming book, says he saw Donald Trump cheating.
That seemed like “a smoking gun.” Four Republicans, who had been vacillating between calling and not calling witnesses for the president’s trial, seemed to be tipping to one side. The Democrats had the advantage. Witnesses appeared inevitable.
Today feels quite different. Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he did not have 51 votes block of effect to call witnesses, but the Senate majority leader was not admitting defeat. He and others were admitting they had more work to do. No one, not even the four holdouts, wanted to hear from witnesses. They just needed reasons to say no.
I don’t know what those reasons are, but it looks like they found them. Witnesses now seem unlikely. If so, the president’s trial will conclude Friday. By acquitting Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress, the Republicans will be saying the president can do anything he wants as long as he can hold more than a third of the Senate. By clearing him of wrongdoing, they will be making Richard Nixon’s dream finally come true: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
In other words, the president is above the law.
Not all presidents, of course.
Some of the same Republicans protecting Donald Trump from the consequences of conspiracy, bribery, and election-rigging are the same Republicans who supported Bill Clinton’s removal from office for perjury, a vastly less serious crime. Indeed, no one should expect the Republicans to give future Democratic presidents the imperial powers they are giving the current president. Make no mistake: They will hold the next Democrat to impossible standards, and prosecute brutally with the thinnest rationale.
That looks like it would be hypocrisy, and indeed, that’s what it would be. But if we are going to stop the Republicans from behaving treacherously, we need to look deeper. Indeed, if we stop at hypocrisy, we will be giving the Republicans too much credit.
To act hypocritically, one must genuinely believe in the civic, moral and legal virtue of acting in good faith. One must believe there is a shared set of laws, rules, values, institutions and norms applicable to all of us equally. If we believes this but act in a contrary manner, we are then hypocritical. That is not what the Republicans are doing.
The best way to understand Republican behavior is to imagine two sets of values systems. There’s one for them. There’s one for everyone else. Republicans are the exception to the rule, because they do not believe in rules having equal application. “Justice,” therefore, may or may not be equal justice. It depends. It’s conditional.
If a Democratic president breaks the law, even a minor one, then that president deserves the full force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal. But if a Republican president breaks the law, even with corrupt and treasonous intent, then that president deserves protection from accountability, the Constitution and the law.
The first outcome is just. So is the other.
Republican virtue is moreover conditioned on the opposition’s virtue. If the Democrats act out of bounds, it’s not occasion, from the Republican point of view, to demand the Democrats act in accordance with the values applicable equally to all. It is occasion, instead, to allege the Democrats don’t mean it when they say values are applicable to all. They believe this, because the Republican can’t believe the Democrats can act morally. And they believe that, because they believe the Democrats are the enemy.
The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Donald Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.
I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate and unequal.
Dershowitz need only read the transcript to see that he did in fact say what is being reported.
He disagrees.
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Here’s are Dershowitz’s comments on tape:
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“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,” Dershowitz told Senators, stunning many across the nation.
“The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were in some way illegal,” he added. “And it cannot be a corrupt motive if you have a mixed motive.”
Legal and constitutional experts have already weighed in and strongly, vehemently disagree.
