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Rightwingers Urge Parents to “Defy the FBI” By Showing Up for School Board Meetings

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2021 //
56

School boards across the nation have complained about members of the public who create chaos at school board meetings: screaming, threatening violence, disrupting the proceedings. The National School Boards Association lodged a complaint with Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking for an investigation.

A large group of prominent rightwingers sent out a notice to parents and other allies, urging them to attend school board meetings. The leading voice who signed the letter is 89-year-old Ed Meese, former attorney general for Ronald Reagan.

Their letter begins:

Conservatives are deeply disturbed by the efforts of the Department of Justice to criminalize parental dissent at school board meetings. This is a dangerous and anti-democratic attempt at intimidation that should be vigorously opposed.

The DOJ has recently announced it will direct the FBI to investigate “threats of violence” at school board meetings. The announcement came just days after the National School Boards Association urged the Biden administration to invoke the Patriot Act against concerned parents, as they might be engaged in “domestic terrorism.”

This level of outright authoritarianism must be opposed. Parents not only pay for the instruction taking place in public schools, but as parents, have the right to know how and in what manner their children are being instructed. Those expressions of disagreement and demands for accountability are not only appropriate in a democratic society, but protected under the Constitution.

If Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden administration are going to make it their business to ban, demean, and belittle parents and citizens for engaging in protected speech in the institutions funded by their tax dollars, the response from concerned parents must be more speech, not less.

Categories Democracy, Republicans, Shame

Peter Greene Responds to the WSJ Attack on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2021 //
22

The Wall Street Journal, owned by billionaire RupertMurdoch (who also owns Fox News), runs a steady diet of anti-public school editorials. Sometimes they bash public schools. Sometimes they praise charter schools and vouchers. Sometimes they do all of this in the same editorial. While an opinion piece that expresses a dissenting opinion occasionally gets published, it’s fair to say that the WSJ does not like public schools. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I praised retired Austin librarian Sara Stevenson for responding to every WSJ vilification of public schools.

Peter Greene responded to the opinion piece by law professor Philip Hamburger, who claimed that public schools are not “constitutional” because they suppress parents’ freedom of speech, that is, their ability to ensure that their children hear, read, and learn only what their parents want them to learn.

Greene begins:

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal (Fox News’ upscale sibling) published an op-ed from Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded pro bono firm that takes cases primarily to defend against the “administrative state.” It’s a hit job on public education with some pretty bold arguments, some of which are pretty insulting. But he sure says a lot of the quiet part out loud, and that makes this worth a look. Let me walk you through this. (Warning–it’s a little rambly, and you can skip to the last section if you want to get the basic layout)

Hamburger signals where he’s headed with the very first paragraph: The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

Hamburger offers no particular evidence for any of this catalog of arguable points. Various surveys repeatedly show that the majority of parents approve of their child’s public school. The rest is a litany of conservative complaints with no particular evidence, but Hamburger needs the premise to power the rest of his argument.

So here comes Hamburger’s bold assertion:

Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination. Conservative talking points about public education routinely assert and assume that public education is a service provided to parents, rather than to the students or society at large. It’s case I’ve never seen them successfully make. At the same time, society’s stake in educated members is clear and the entire rationale behind having non-parent taxpayers help pay the cost of public education. In any other instance where the taxpayers subsidize a private individual’s purchase of goods or service (e.g. food stamps, housing), some conservatives say the social safety net is a Bad Thing, so it’s uncharacteristic for them to champion public education as, basically, a welfare program for parents when they want to dramatically reduce all other such programs to bathtub-drowning size (spoiler alert: they’d like to do that with public education, too).

But Hamburger has taken another step here, arguing that speech to children somehow belongs to their parents. It’s a bold notion–do parents somehow have a First Amendment right to control every sound that enters their children’s ears? Where are the children’s rights in this? Or does Hamburger’s argument (as some angry Twitter respondents claim) reduce children to chattel?

Hamburger follows his assertion with some arguments that don’t help. He argues that public education has always attempted to “homogenize and mold the identity of children,” which is a huge claim and, like much of his argument, assumes that schools somehow have the power to overwrite or erase everything that parents have inculcated at home. But then, for the whole argument currently raging, it’s necessary to paint public schools as huge threat in order to justify taking dramatic major action against them….

But “education is speech” is not the really bold part of his argument. That really bold part is where he goes on to say “therefor, parents should have total control over it.” I have so many questions. Should parents have total control over all speech directed at or in the vicinity of their children, including books, and so would I be violating a parent’s First Amendment rights if I gave their child an book for Christmas? And where are the child’s rights in this? Would this mean that a parent is allowed to lock their child in the basement in order to protect that parent’s First Amendment right to control what the child is exposed to?

Hamburger’s argument has implications that he doesn’t get into in his rush to get to “do away with them and give everyone vouchers.” The biggest perhaps is that he has made an argument that non-parent taxpayers should not have to subsidize an education system. I’m betting he’s not unaware of that.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Deregulation, Education Industry, Librarians, Parents, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: The”Proud Boys” Are Coming for the Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2021 //
18

Jeff Bryant reports on a frightening phenomenon: the notorious and violent Proud Boys are targeting public schools.

He begins:

When violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, some of the rioters were members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group prone to street brawling and pro-Western, anti-Muslim, and misogynistic rhetoric.

The insurrectionists were thwarted, but now extremist groups—including the Proud Boys—are aiming their threats and violence at a new target: public schools.

In Orange County, North Carolina, the Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups have begun showing up at high school football games and school board meetings, “protesting the district’s COVID-19 and LGBTQ+ policies.” Their intimidating language, apparel, and physical gestures prompted officials to hire extra security and pass a resolution opposing “incidents of hostile and racist behavior,” according to a report in the News and Observer.

The resolution charged that the rightwing agitators had “shouted racist and homophobic slurs at students” and included “emails from teachers and students who describe how unsafe they feel being around the Proud Boys.”

A local radio station quoted Orange County board chairwoman Hillary MacKenzie describing a recent meeting of the board where “there were two men in Proud Boys shirts and hats . . . one wore a stocking over his face . . . the other one told our board during public comment that someone should tie rocks around our necks, and we should throw ourselves in a river.”

Similar occurrences from around the country seem to indicate that the Proud Boys’ targeting of public schools is a coordinated, nationwide effort, suggesting a direct line from the group’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection to its current participation in the wave of protests at public schools and school board meetings.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Democracy, Racism, Trump

Maryland Creates “Shadow” State Education Department, But Why?

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2021 //
80

In this opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun, Kalman R. Hettleman describes the creation in Maryland of a new state agency that has the same functions as the Maryland State Department of Education and the power to override local control. This agency is supposed to guarantee “accountability,” but it’s limitless power leaves many unanswered questions.

A bombshell, with uncertain force, is about to land on school reform in Maryland. It’s the startup in the next several weeks of the Accountability and Implementation Board (AIB) created under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. More than any other part of the blueprint, the AIB is a radical experiment in school governance — untested anywhere in the U.S. — with virtually limitless authority to make or break school reform for generations to come.

The AIB’s super-muscle comes from its unambiguous power to fully govern public schools. This means it can usurp the functions of the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) and control local school policies.

As a member of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education (known as the Kirwan Commission) that drafted the blueprint, I favored the concept of the AIB. I still do. But I recognized that opponents, though some were overwrought, had a point. The seven-member board, to be appointed by the governor from a list of nine persons just selected by the AIB nominating committee, could actually cause more bureaucracy and less accountability, unless it acts wisely.

Predictably, formidable political groups opposed such a drastic departure from current law and practice. The MSDE board, state superintendent and local school district boards and superintendents argued that they would be micromanaged; in the process, they said, local control — so sacrosanct for so long — would be emasculated.

In addition, Maryland just appointed a State Superintendent with impeccable reform credentials.

Read the article. If you understand why the state is creating a powerful new agency to run its schools, please let me know.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Maryland

Jim Sleeper: How Yale Molded the Cold War Mentality and Leadership

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2021 //
17

Jim Sleeper is a journalist and alumnus of Yale, as well as a lecturer there. He published an enlightening article about the role of Yale University in forging the Grand Strategy, a strategy of American imperial power to safeguard the world (and American interests). For those of us who came of age in the 1950s, it seemed like the American Colossus was invincible and profoundly moral. But since the debacles in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the Grand Strategy no longer looks so grand, and America’s role as the “world’s policeman” appears to be a fruitless enterprise. To understand the Grand Strategy and Yale’s role in shaping it, read Sleeper’s article.

Sleeper urged me to post a larger portion of his excellent essay. Here it is.

When a new leader of the Grand Strategy program tied to change its focus, she was forced out.

Sleeper begins:

Yale history professor Beverly Gage has been praised widely for defending academic freedom from donors’ meddling by announcing her resignation (effective in December) from the directorship of Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which she took over in 2017 from Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. But there are more politically urgent, and arguably profound, questions at issue here beyond professors’ right to design their courses free of outside interference.

Since the program’s inception more than two decades ago, Grand Strategy’s intensive seminars have engaged undergraduate as well as graduate students with close readings of classical works on strategy, stressful crisis decision-making simulations, and meetings with accomplished policymakers. In 2010, David Petraeus, at the time the four-star Army general commanding U.S. military operations in the Middle East (and later to become director of the CIA), visited the seminar, as did former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, observers from the CIA, and U.S. Military Academy cadets.

That the program, prior to Gage’s arrival, nudged students toward embracing the U.S. military and national security state was hardly a secret. “A Yale Class Seeks to Change the World … Before Graduation,” read a headline on a Columbia News Service report in 2004, when Grand Strategy was directed by Gaddis. “We are looking for leaders,” the late Charles Hill, a program co-founder, career Foreign Service officer, and Yale’s diplomat-in-residence, told the reporter. “This course gives us a great opportunity to get our hooks into them early. We are not … looking for the kind of person who would be protesting the [World Trade Organization] at Davos,” the World Economic Forum.

But Gage wanted students to scrutinize foreign-policy elites, not elevate them. She welcomed social movement activists in civil rights, environmental, and other domestic causes, expanding Grand Strategy’s horizons to include people who challenge the dominant world arrangements that other visitors defend. Soon she was “second guessed and undermined,” as she put it, by the Yale administration’s failure to resist a demand for a conservative board of program overseers made by Grand Strategy’s benefactors: former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, a former director of the Mitre Corporation and manager of federally funded research and development projects for the Defense Department; and Brady’s billionaire business associate Charles B. Johnson, an overseer of the conservative Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. The two had endowed Grand Strategy with $17.5 million in 2006.

In an essay for the recently published anthology Rethinking American Grand Strategy, Gage writes that “as a citizen, I have, for better or worse, been as likely to be a protester as a policy maker,” and she urges anyone drawn to the latter “to pay more attention to voices bubbling up from below.” To Grand Strategy’s emphasis on foreign-policy decision-making, she added “the art of … channeling collective grievances into effective action.”

Gaddis, Hill, and other original faculty had sided generally with the powerful. “We hauled the entire Grand Strategy class down to New York to meet Henry Kissinger and hear about his sense of the great deficit that exists in grand-strategic thinking,” Gaddis told a large assembly of Yale alumni (including me) at a reunion in 2004. “A student was outraged by Christopher Hitchens’s book accusing Henry of war crimes. So I said, ‘Why not do a senior essay on Kissinger’s ethics?’ I saw a draft, called Henry, and he said ‘Bring him in.’ He hired him on the spot, … to fact check Christopher Hitchens.”

Many alumni swooned, not least over Gaddis’s exhibition of first-name familiarity with the famous and powerful. This was how things had been done at Yale in their time, and by God, Gaddis was bringing back the old elan! But nobody stopped to ask how that fits with a college education for undergrads, or whether intermingling national security professionalism with liberal education prematurely narrows their intellectual and moral development.

Yale College has often been a crucible of U.S. national statesmanship and espionage: Nathan Hale, class of 1773, was hanged for spying on British-colonial troop movements; the CIA was founded at Yale during World War II; and the State Department and its diplomatic corps have been instructed and advised by Yale professors for decades. Yale’s president from 1951 to 1963, A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of colonial Connecticut governors and an “establishment” figure par excellence, abolished Yale’s Institute for International Studies, which had been funneling students into murky foreign missions with help from conservative alumni, but even then the university continued to serve as a recruitment grounds for the foreign-policy establishment.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Democracy, History, International

Ashley Parker: A Worst-Case Scenario for Democracy

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2021 //
15

Ashley Parker writes for the Washington Post. She wrote this ominous article.

A year before the 2020 election, about two dozen constitutional scholars and democracy advocates traveled to Washington to work through a range of scenarios where something goes awry on Election Day.

The country’s political system was being tested by a campaign like no other in modern history, with an incumbent president, Donald Trump, who showed little regard for the democratic traditions and constitutional norms that had guided his predecessors — and who repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through rampant fraud.

So the group considered a slew of hypothetical catastrophes: “What do we do if a vigilante group takes over a major county tabulation facility and burns it to the ground? What do we do if there is a military coup?” But, as Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund tells it, the experts were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States.

“Either we were not creative enough or the norms of civility our nation has seen over centuries were not reliable enough,” said Patrick, a former elections official in Maricopa County, Ariz.

The challenges for American democracy were on stark display almost exactly two months after Election Day, on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters mounted a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. And the challenges have been clear in the eight months since the riot, as Trump and his allies have intensified false claims of election fraud and the former president has remained the Republican Party’s most popular leader.

Now, as Trump looks and sounds increasingly like he intends to mount a presidential campaign rerun, Democrats and democracy experts are grappling with what such a campaign — and a potential second Trump presidency — would mean for the country.

In recent weeks, Trump has maneuvered to firmly establish himself as the predominant and most powerful figure in Republican politics. He has injected his voice into federal and state campaigns, endorsing several secretary of state candidates who embraced his false fraud claims and worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And while still banned from Twitter, he has issued a flurry of angry tweet-like statements through his political action committee.

He has also reemerged at rallies, appearing last Saturday in Perry, Ga., with another rally planned for Oct. 9, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines. Speaking in Perry, the former president promised to “make America great again” and called for “an earth-shattering win in November 2022,” before looking ahead to the next presidential election.

“We’re not forgetting 2020,” Trump said. “The most corrupt election in the history of our country. Most corrupt election in the history of most countries, to be followed by an even more glorious victory in November of 2024.”

In some ways, the concerns among Democrats, constitutional scholars and democracy advocates about what the return of Trump could mean are simply one side of a coin, with Trump supporters representing the flip side.

A majority of Republicans still support Trump leading their party, according to polls. A CNN poll released in September found that 68 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican say democracy is under attack, with about 7 in 10 of them believing that President Biden didn’t win the 2020 election. One side’s nightmare scenario — Trump running in 2024 and reclaiming the presidency — represents to the other side simply the democratic system working as it should.

The threats to democracy that Trump critics envision are largely twofold.

One real risk, they say, is that four years after the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters emerge in 2024 more sophisticated and successful in their efforts to steal an election.
“For me, the scary part is, in 2020, this was not a particularly sophisticated misinformation or disinformation campaign,” said Matt Masterson, who ran election security at the Department of Homeland Security between 2018 to 2020. Referring to some of the outlandish conspiracy theories of ballot fraud posited in the wake of the 2020 election by Trump’s allies, he added: “We’re talking about bamboo ballots and Italian satellites and dead dictators.”

In the future, Masterson said, these sorts of falsehoods are going to become more advanced and nuanced — exploiting genuine areas of confusion in the electoral system — and thus harder to combat.

Masterson pointed to the recall election in California earlier this month, in which Trump and the leading Republican candidate, who ultimately lost, both baselessly claimed fraud before the election even took place. The very existence of these false allegations of rigged and stolen elections erode trust in the democratic process and are also likely to become the norm going forward, he added, because of a growing “cottage industry of election delegitimization and pre-delegitimization.”

Newly revealed details of a memo written by John Eastman, a prominent conservative lawyer who worked with Trump in the weeks before the Jan. 6 insurrection, show that efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election were more brazen than previously known. In the memo, first disclosed in “Peril,” the new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Eastman described the vice president as “the ultimate arbiter” of election results and argued that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to simply toss out the electoral college votes of certain states, thereby clearing the way for a Trump victory. “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected,” Eastman wrote.

The second possible scenario experts envision is more insidious, they say, a sort of slow-boiling frog of American democracy. In this case, Trump — or an acolyte with similarly anti-democratic sensibilities — runs and wins legitimately in 2024, emerging newly emboldened and focused on retribution. Then, the new president, intent on strengthening his own position and punishing critics, begins remaking the political and electoral system, using legal means to consolidate power and erode democratic institutions.

“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” who is working on a successive volume. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”

Perhaps the most relevant modern example, several democracy experts said, is Hungary under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who returned to power in 2010 after a previous stint as Hungary’s leader about a decade before.
Tucker Carlson — who regularly articulates the intellectual heart of Trumpism — traveled to Hungary in August to broadcast his prime-time Fox News show from there, at one point lauding Hungary as “a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”

Upon taking power in 2010, Orbán “has steadily chipped away at the linchpins of a liberal democratic system,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy organization.

“He stacked the courts, he engaged in gerrymandering, he had friends and allies take over the media,” Abramowitz said, referring to Orbán. “So while he has elections, they start from a very, very stacked deck. While it’s not impossible, it’s going to be very, very difficult for him to be dislodged in the normal democratic system.”

The U.S. Constitution, with its protections of free speech and a free press, as well as its prohibition on anyone winning the presidency more than twice, offers a guiding document for preserving democracy. But Trump, during his four years in office, made clear that he wished he had the powers of a monarch or a strongman, repeatedly flouting the nation’s long-held rules and norms.
And he exposed the limits of the system.

Trump, for instance, installed a number of acting Cabinet secretaries when he could not win Senate confirmation for his picks; made clear he expected the attorney general to act as his own personal lawyer rather than represent the interests of the United States; implied that the Supreme Court justices he nominated should rule in his favor out of personal loyalty; and tried to leverage U.S. foreign policy to influence his own political fortunes — resulting in the first of his two impeachments.

A number of traditionally apolitical and nonpartisan federal agencies, too, became embroiled in politics and controversy during Trump’s tenure, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Tim Snyder, a history and public affairs professor at Yale University, agreed that the modern parallels between the United States and Hungary are striking.

“What we’re looking at is actually the typical way that democracies are undone,” said Snyder, who is working on an updated graphic edition of his book, “On Tyranny.”

Asked to respond to the notion that Trump represented a threat to democracy, Trump’s spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, sought to level the same allegation against the current president. “Biden has thrown away our sovereignty at his open border, issued unconstitutional decrees to private companies, and humiliated the United States in Afghanistan,” she said, reiterating Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged to say that Biden and his party “continue to threaten our very constitutional republic.”

Indeed, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2021 report gave the United States a score of 83 — alongside countries such as Mongolia and Ghana — marking an 11-point decline from its score of 94 a decade ago, when it appeared alongside established democracies like France and Germany. Freedom House’s scores are on a scale of 0 to 100.

But Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), whose own state has been on the front lines of post-election fights spurred on by Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen, said that Trump’s behavior while in office — from potentially using the presidency to enrich his own family to smashing through other traditional guardrails — raises concerns that a 2024 Trump victory could lead to a newly fortified and shameless president, eager to further upend democratic norms.

“All these other things that are just not the normal ways that we operate as a country, that are parameters that elected officials are held to — he never was,” Hobbs said. “And the fact that there’s been a lack of accountability for any of that and then, in fact, potentially rewarded by being reelected is highly, highly problematic.”

Experts said that perhaps the most precipitous recent threat to American democracy, however, remains Trump’s election claims.

“Democracy depends on the belief of losers in a given election to trust the process, and to marshal support so they can win another day,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. “If we have entered a phase where the process is simply not trusted, that is a dangerous situation to be in, where people do not trust elections as being the way that we replace authority.”

A number of Republicans have used Trump’s false claim as a catalyst for overhauling election and voting laws, even in states where the 2020 election ran smoothly. At least 250 laws being proposed in at least 43 states would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting, changes that Democrats say could especially disenfranchise minority voters. There are also some Republican-led efforts pushing to allow state legislatures to overturn election results.

“I do hear from the community and faith leaders the concern that we’re losing the ground we gained through literal blood and tears and death during the civil rights movement and so many struggles, that we’re backtracking,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Texas’s largest county.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said she is ultimately “optimistic” because despite “extreme pressure in 2020,” the efforts of elected officials such as herself to protect democracy and ensure free and fair elections ultimately prevailed. Yet she, too, said that the future “effort to undermine democracy” is likely to “be back in a way that is smarter, stronger, probably more organized, perhaps even more intense and better funded than ever before,” and pointed to the new voting laws as one of the challenges.

Unlike after Watergate, however, no clear or sustained effort exists to broadly protect democratic institutions as the nation hurtles toward the uncertainty of the 2024 presidential election. Ziblatt, the co-author of “How Democracies Die” — a book Biden carried around in 2018, scrawling notes in the margins and dog-earring favorite passages — suggested that some reforms are probably necessary to protect U.S. democracy going forward.

“These are soft guardrails that have constrained politicians in the past, and what the Trump administration has made clear is that we need to harden those guardrails,” Ziblatt said.
But, he added, he worries that some are still too squeamish to come to terms with the potential threat U.S. democracy faces if Trump attempts to regain power.

“If you look at how democracies get in trouble in other places, it’s how executives once in office abuse their office, and I think people just don’t want to think that Trump could get back into the presidency,” Ziblatt said. “There’s a way in which we’re not trying to think of the worst-case scenario, which is Trump gets reelected, but I think what we’ve learned is you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”


Scott Clement contributed to this report.

Categories Democracy

Spencer Bokat-Lindell: Will Our Democracy Die in 2024?

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2021 //
30

Spencer Bokat-Lindell, a staff writer at the New York Times, echoes growing fear that democracy in America is at risk.

He writes:

Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place it in history: Were the events of Jan. 6 the doomed conclusion of an unusually anti-democratic moment in American political life, or a preview of where the country is still heading?

Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an expert in election law, believes the second possibility shouldn’t be ruled out. In a paper published this month, he wrote that “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”

It could be a bloodless coup, he warns, executed not by rioters with nooses but “lawyers in fine suits”: Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.

How much danger is American democracy really in, and what can be done to safeguard it? Here’s what people are saying.

How democracy could collapse in 2024

In Hasen’s view, there are three mechanisms by which the 2024 election could be overturned:

  • State legislatures, purporting to exercise the authority of either the Constitution or an 1887 federal law called the Electoral Count Act, swapping in their own slate of electors for president, potentially with the blessing of a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress.
  • Fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by norm- or law-breaking officials.
  • Vigilante action that prevents voting, interferes with ballot counting or interrupts the legitimate transfer of power.

These mechanisms are not outside the realm of possibility:

  • Recent reporting from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward revealed that the previous administration had a plan, hatched by the prominent conservative lawyer John Eastman, for former Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes of key swing states on the basis that they had competing slates of electors. Next time around, “with the right pieces in place, (President Donald) Trump could succeed,” the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.”
  • On top of passing voting administration laws, Republicans have also recruited candidates who espouse election conspiracy theories to run for positions like secretary of state and county clerk. According to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded its invalidation or investigation.
  • Skepticism of or hostility toward election administration is widespread among Republican voters as well, 78 percent of whom still say that President Biden did not win in November. That conviction, Reuters reported in June, has sparked a nationwide intimidation campaign against election officials and their families, who continue to face threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts with vanishingly little help from law enforcement. One in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern, according to an April survey from the Brennan Center.

“The stage is thus being set for chaos,” Robert Kagan argues in The Washington Post. Given a more strategically contested election, “Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.”

Some experts worry about democratic backsliding even in the event of a legitimate Republican victory in 2024, Ashley Parker reports for The Washington Post. In such a scenario, Trump or a similarly anti-democratic figure might set about remaking the political and electoral system to consolidate power.

“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”

Experts told Parker that perhaps the most proximate example is Hungary under Viktor Orban, who returned to power in 2010 after being ousted in 2002 and over the past decade has transformed the country into a soft autocracy. Admirers of the country’s government include Tucker Carlson, who in August extolled it as a model for the United States, and the high-profile Conservative Political Action Committee, which will host its next gathering in Budapest.

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, believes there are many reasons — the threat of primary challenges against Republicans who defy “Stop the Steal” orthodoxy, gerrymandering, the influence of social media — that the Republican Party’s anti-democratic turn might not just continue but accelerate: “There are no countervailing forces. There’s nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus.”

Categories Democracy, Republicans

Good News from Oklahoma!

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2021 //
8

Joy Hofmeister, a lifelong Republican and Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma, has decided to join the Democratic Party and run for Governor against incumbent Kevin Stitt. Stitt is a devotee of Trump, and Oklahoma is a deep-red state. Hofmeister is a strong supporter of public schools and a very brave person. She was interviewed by Erin Burnett on CNN.

I met Joy a few years ago when I was invited to speak to the state’s superintendents. We had a chance to talk, and I was very impressed by her candor, her thoughtfulness, and her strength of character.

If you are reading this and you live in Oklahoma, get involved and help her. If, like me, you don’t live in Oklahoma, send money to her campaign. As soon as I have a link to her campaign, I will post it.

Thank you, Joy, for taking on this formidable challenge. We need more people like you in public life: principled, honest, intelligent, devoted to the common good.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Hope, Oklahoma

New Hampshire: Rabid Protestors Attack Democracy

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2021 //
21

It’s happening across the nation: Angry anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are undermining democracy, science, and civil society. They are disrupting school board meetings, town council meetings, any gathering where a loud minority can shout down elected officials.

What’s happening in New Hampshire is emblematic of a frightening national trend. Garry Rayno of indepthnh.com writes here about the collapse of civility in the Granite State.

He writes:

Anyone who follows politics in New Hampshire had to be disturbed by what happened at the Executive Council meeting last week at Saint Anselm College.

To have the workings of government halted by a small group of aggressive and vocal mobsters is new for New Hampshire and a sad day for state government.

The meeting was halted after Department of Health and Human Services employees felt threatened and left the building under State Police escort, not something that has happened in New Hampshire before.

The state has long been known as fiscally conservative, but socially moderate or tolerant. That has changed in recent years, largely over abortion or reproductive rights for women.

But what happened last week is far more than the erosion of the state’s moderate views on social issues and that is also apparent in this year’s legislative session, when bills passed that never would have in the past.

New Hampshire’s political discourse can be heated and passionate, but it has always been essentially civil.

A new group of activists is creating foundational change to the political playing field.

The anarchistic outburst that halted the Executive Council meeting, was not the first and it surely will not be the last.

Traditional political philosophy is not the driving force for Free Staters, Libertarians, Rebuild NH or Liberty 603, individual freedom at all costs is and the consequences are monumental.

The goal of the uproar was ostensibly to prevent the Executive Council from approving $27 million in contracts to expand the state’s lagging COVID-19 vaccination programs to protect more people from the virus.

The COVID-19 pandemic and government actions to stop its spread have been the target of the groups, some that even propose the state secede from the union.

This movement does not follow the usual political processes to achieve its goal, but instead uses intimidation, threats and other tactics best described as bullying.

What they want to achieve is minority rule, because the vast majority of the state’s citizens do not agree with them.

The insurrectionists have had help along the way, as they have been allowed to drive the “Republican agenda” in the legislature and Gov. Chris Sununu, who was one of their main targets at the council meeting, tried to placate the near anarchists and signed a budget largely dictated by the Free Staters and Libertarians.

What happened at the Executive Council meeting was a significant victory for a couple hundred protesters who achieved far more than stopping the approval of a couple of contracts.

And that is the real problem New Hampshire faces going forward.

With about 50 law enforcement officers at the meeting, a number of particularly vocal, abrasive and threatening activists were allowed to “do their thing” to shut down the meeting and not one was arrested.

The next time there is no reason to stop going a little further and a little further.

Many of the same people picketed Sununu’s Newfields home after he instigated a mask mandate, the last one in New England and the first to be rescinded.

Protests at the State House or where a governor is making an appearance are acceptable behavior, but a governor’s or senator’s or official’s home has always been off limits, but not any more.

The anti-maskers planned to disrupt Sununu’s outdoor inauguration ceremony in January, but Sununu cancelled the event.

Instead he was sworn in with few present at the State House and gave his inauguration speech remotely.

Several weeks ago, a public hearing on proposed rules for the state’s vaccination registry had to be cancelled when the same groups turned out protestors and overflowed a hearing room in Concord.

And last month, they shouted down Republican legislative leaders at a press conference called to criticize President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The protesters told GOP leaders they and the governor had not done enough to protect them.

At a press conference after the council meeting Sununu downplayed the council protest and said it was a few unruly aggressive actors who crossed the line and that there was passion on both sides.

That sounded similar to President Trump saying there are good people on both sides after white supremacists’ violent protest in Charlottesville that claimed one life and injured many more.

And while Sununu, the Executive Council and state employees had a couple of dozen police to protect them, many school boards and selectmen do not and face the same aggressive behavior and unruly people objecting to whatever the boards decide.

People need to understand what the protesters and some politicians want. They want to stop the state from spending federal money on programs to increase vaccinations to stop the spread of COVID-19.

They do not want to be vaccinated, which is short-sighted in itself as they are willing to infect others for their “personal freedom,” and they are trying to stop anyone else from being vaccinated.

It is not enough for them not to be vaccinated, they don’t want you to be either and they don’t want you to wear a mask.

That is not freedom, that is tyranny. And it is just as tyrannical as they claim Biden’s mandates are.

While the state has fallen behind others in the percentage of citizens fully vaccinated, still almost 60 percent of the state’s residents are showing at least that many people do not agree with the anti-vaccers and maskers.

What is happening with disruptions like the one at the Executive Council meeting and at school boards around the state is tribalism and not democracy. It is mob rule by intimidation and threats. How civilized is that?

The real target here is not masks and mandates, it is government and their hate for it or anyone they perceive to be telling them what to do.

Please open the link and read the rest of this important article.

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Disruption, Insane

Nancy MacLean: “School Choice” Was Created to Protect Segregation

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2021 //
13

Duke historian Nancy MacLean, author of the superb Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, wrote recently in The Washington Post about the sinister origins of school choice. Its true purpose was to protect segregation and abolish public schools. (For my view, see this article in The New York Review of Books.)

MacLean writes:

The year 2021 has proved a landmark for the “school choice” cause — a movement committed to the idea of providing public money for parents to use to pay for private schooling.

Republican control of a majority of state legislatures, combined with pandemic learning disruptions, set the stage for multiple victories. Seven states have created new school choice programs, and 11 others have expanded current programs through laws that offer taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling and authorize tax credits and educational savings accounts that incentivize parents moving their children out of public schools.

On its face, this new legislation may sound like a win for families seeking more school options. But the roots of the school choice movement are more sinister.

White Southerners first fought for “freedom of choice” in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for White families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration.

Prominent libertarians then took advantage of this idea, seeing it not only as a means of providing private options, but also as a tool in their crusade to dismantle public schools altogether. This history reveals that rather than giving families more school options, school choice became a tool intended to give most families far fewer in the end.

School choice had its roots in a crucial detail of the Brown decision: The ruling only applied to public schools. White Southerners viewed this as a loophole for evading desegregated schools.

In 1955 and 1956, conservative White leaders in Virginia devised a regionwide strategy of “massive resistance” to the high court’s desegregation mandate that hinged on state-funded school vouchers. The State Board of Education provided vouchers, then called tuition grants, of $250 ($2,514 in 2021 dollars) to parents who wanted to keep their children from attending integrated schools. The resistance leaders understood that most Southern White families could not afford private school tuition — and many who could afford it lacked the ideological commitment to segregation to justify the cost. The vouchers, combined with private donations to the new schools in counties facing desegregation mandates, would enable all but a handful of the poorest Whites to evade compliance.


Other Southern states soon adopted voucher programs like the one in Virginia to facilitate the creation of private schools called “segregation academies,” despite opposition from Black families and civil rights leaders. Oliver Hill, an NAACP attorney key to the Virginia case against “separate but equal” education that was folded into Brown, explained their position this way: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”


Despite such objections, key conservative and libertarian thinkers and foundations, including economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, Human Events editor Felix Morley and publisher Henry Regnery, backed the White Southern cause. They recognized that White Southerners’ push for “freedom of choice” presented an opportunity to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources, starting with primary and secondary education. They barely, if ever, addressed racism and segregation; instead, they spoke of freedom (implicitly, White freedom).


Friedman began promoting “educational freedom” in 1955, just as Southern states prepared to resist Brown. And he praised the Virginia voucher plan in his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” holding it up as a model for school choice everywhere. “Whether the school is integrated or not,” he wrote, should have no bearing on eligibility for the vouchers. In other words, he knew the program was designed to fund segregation academies and saw it as no barrier to receiving state financing.


Friedman was far from alone. His fellow libertarians, including those on the staff of the William Volker Fund, a leading funder on the right, saw no problem with state governments providing tax subsidies to White families who chose segregation academies, even as these states disenfranchised Black voters, blocking them from having a say in these policies.


Libertarians understood that while abolishing the social safety net and other policies constructed during the Progressive era and the New Deal was wildly unpopular, even among White Southerners, school choice could win converts.


These conservative and libertarian thinkers offered up ostensibly race-neutral arguments in favor of the tax subsidies for private schooling sought by white supremacists. In doing so, they taught defenders of segregation a crucial new tactic — abandon overtly racist rationales and instead tout liberty, competition and market choice while embracing an anti-government stance. These race-neutral rationales for private school subsidies gave segregationists a justification that could survive court review — and did, for more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

When challenged, Friedman and his allies denied that they were motivated by racial bigotry. Yet, they had enough in common ideologically with the segregationists for the partnership to work. Both groups placed a premium on the liberty of those who had long profited from white-supremacist policies and sought to shield their freedom of action from the courts, liberal government policies and civil rights activists.

Crucially, freedom wasn’t the ultimate goal for either group of voucher supporters. White Southerners wielded colorblind language about freedom of choice to help preserve racial segregation and to keep Black children from schools with more resources.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Today, the ultrawealthy backers of school choice are cagey about this long-term goal, knowing that care is required to win the support of parents who want the best for their children. Indeed, in a sad irony, decades after helping to impede Brown’s implementation, school choice advocates on the right targeted families of color for what one libertarian legal strategist called “forging nontraditional alliances.” They won over some parents of color, who came to see vouchers and charter schools as a way to escape the racial and class inequalities that stemmed from White flight out of urban centers and the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow White Americans to avoid integrating schools.

But the history behind vouchers reveals that the rhetoric of “choice” and “freedom” stands in stark contrast to the real goals sought by conservative and libertarian advocates. The system they dream of would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families would have their pick of schools, while those with far fewer resources — disproportionately families of color — might struggle to pay to educate their children, leaving them with far fewer options or dependent on private charity. Instead of offering an improvement over underfunded schools, school choice might lead to something far worse.

As Maya Angelou wisely counseled in another context, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” If we fail to recognize the right’s true end game for public education, it could soon be too late to reverse course.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, History, Lies, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers
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