Archives for category: Democracy

Greg Olear is a novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. He has a long memory and thinks clearly. When I read his work, I hear echoes of what I’m thinking.

We are a few days removed from an orange guillotine slicing through the neck of American democracy. The chicken that is our body politic, already dead but in denial, is running around with its head cut off, and will continue to do so until January 20, when Donald the Conqueror picks up that severed head with his tiny hands and holds it up for all the bewildered world to behold, in triumph. Trump and triumph have the same Latin root word, the English major in me is compelled to point out.

This year, post-election pieces that use the word “autopsy” and “post-mortem” will not be doing so metaphorically—although most of the pundits writing those pieces have not come to terms with this yet. I haven’t, not really, and unlike the legacy media pundits, I wrote a book this year covering all of the horrible things the new regime has promised to do, will try to do, will do.

(JD Vance—who I’ve been warning for months is an actual fascist—is among the numerous Dark Enlightenment thought leaders who use the word “regime” to mean the Deep State, so it is not without irony that these same Nazis will be replacing the bureaucracy that is the lifeblood of our country with an actual regime—regime, from rex, for king.)

Already the Trump Reich is licking its chops (literally as well as figuratively, one imagines), preparing to implement its ugly mass deportation program. That this idea polled well with Americans, and was supported enthusiastically by Latino men in particular, boggles the mind. Mass deportation is a quaint euphemism for genocide. If the new regime has its way, this will be more of a pogrom than a program. The suffering will be unimaginable; the effect on the economy Trump voters claim to care so much about, devastating.

And the new regime will seek vengeance upon its enemies. The loyalists who will actually be running the country after the professional civil servants are purged—angry, sadistic men like Mike Davis and Stephen Miller and Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon and Kash Patel—have been promising this for months. Trump’s perceived enemies, everyone from Jack Smith to Adam Schiff to Taylor Swift, are potentially in real danger. The generals who tried to warn us about him, the leaders of the intelligence community who know what he really is, his political rivals—these stalwarts of democracy may well end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I am not exaggerating. Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s Renfield, fancies himself the Minister of Retribution. Vengeance, more than anything, is what the new king wants, and vengeance he will have.

President Biden, for all the good he’s done, has failed for four years to fully grasp the dire threat we face from the despotic MAGA forces and their allies in Moscow, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and legacy and social media. Putin has been openly waging war on the West since 2014, when he invaded and occupied the Crimea—a violation of the international order President Obama essentially chose to ignore. Like Neville Chamberlain, Obama did not want a war, and like Neville Chamberlain, he did not understand the nature of the psychopath he was up against; unlike Neville Chamberlain, he was not leading a country recently removed from four years of brutal war, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, he had the precedent of Neville Chamberlain to learn from. It’s only gotten worse from there.

The real tragedy is: We didn’t need to send in troops to beat the Russians. All we needed to do was treat the information war Moscow was waging on us as an actual front in an actual war, and give Ukraine as many weapons as it needed to do the dirty work for us. Biden did neither, and his entire legacy, all the good work he’s done, may wind up meaningless because of these failures.

Unless he’s working behind the scenes with the DOJ to clean up the mess—and nothing the somnambulant Merrick Garland has done, or rather not done, these past four years gives me any confidence that he is—Biden has already waved the white flag.

“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory,” Biden said yesterday. “And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.” That’s what we deserve, you see—our elected officials to lead us into the abattoir while assuring us, as Biden also did, that “[t]he American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay” as long as we “keep going” and “keep the faith.”

Even worse is this: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up. Remember, a defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle.” A transition to permanent Nazi rule looms, and Biden wants us to jam to “Tubthumping.”

Jim Stewartson, who has been shouting from the rooftops about the threat of Trump’s muscle for years now—and who is certainly in the crosshairs of Flynn and Raiklin—articulated this perfectly, in his open letter to Biden:

You had the power to fix this. You should have had the information to understand the threat that we were facing. Instead you treated it like just another Democratic presidency, hoping that if the economy were good enough it would fix the problem with all the “MAGA extremists.”

You were wrong. You didn’t listen to those of us who told you who tried to steal the election from you in 2020. You let your DOJ and FBI drag their feet with the perfect timing to let Donald Trump and his co-conspirators go free. You prosecuted all the foot soldiers and never went after the “generals.” You prioritized “norms” and the “independence” of the DOJ over us. You failed to lead, to demand accountability — from Merrick Garland, Chris Wray and the others who let this happen on your watch.

I hear you talking now about “all that we accomplished” in your “historic administration” as if that will have any impact on the psychopaths who will destroy everything that you have done. You could have been the inflection point to preserve our world and make it better, instead you presided over a transition into an authoritarian global nightmare.

Sadly, Biden did not, as Stewartson laments, understand the threat we were, and are, facing—even though he is old enough that he was alive during World War II, and thus should be able to recognize Nazis when he sees them. What was done to counter Russian propaganda? To stop Elon Musk, Putin’s buddy and an enemy of democracy, from buying and destroying Twitter? From eradicating the cancer that is Fox News from its position of journalistic authority?

The historian Heather Cox Richardson had this to say about the election in her own post-partem piece:

But my own conclusion is that both of those things [inflation and racism/sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Trump admires Hitler, but he’s not Hitler—not even America’s Hitler, as the VP-Elect once called him. He is more Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling: the nominal head of a Nazi puppet regime. As I explained a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin is Hitler. Trump’s return to the White House is, among other things, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of American hegemony, the end of the Pax Americana. You know—setbacks.

Cue up the “U-S-A” chants, we are soon to become a Kremlin vassal state! Maybe the idea that the United States is better than everyone else, that the moral arc of the American universe always bends towards justice, is an obvious myth we choose to believe in despite ample evidence to the contrary—kind of like how the media doesn’t dispute that the woman who went to the polls with Trump on Election Day wearing dark oversized sunglasses was the real Melania.

Ken White, aka Popehat, in his superb piece on Wednesday, suggests that we “reconsider any belief in innate American goodness,” writing:

Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.

Not a setback, you see. Fatal. Fatal. Nazis are destroyers, and the new regime is here to destroy, just like their Uncle Ted wanted:

It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society.

That’s Ted as in Ted Kaczynski. These people worship at the altar of the Unabomber!

The best time to defeat Nazis is before they gain any power, as any cursory glance at the history of 20th century Europe makes clear. From Warsaw, in a country that was ravaged by the Third Reich like no other, Dustin Du Cane points out an awful truth in his piece today, “Four Wasted Years”: “Hitler wasn’t defeated by voting, ground roots campaigning, sanctions or sending Poland a tank a week,” he writes. “He was defeated by propaganda, curtailing the free speech of Nazis, by a war machine and by millions of men in boots with rifles, tanks and bombers.”

And as I’m not the first to point out—someone else tweeted this, and I can’t remember who—the Germans at least had the good sense to put Hitler in jail after his failed coup attempt, before handing him the keys to the kingdom. Us? We threw the book at some Proud Boys and let Trump, Flynn, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the rest of the coup plotters continue to strut around broadcasting their hate, rubbing our noses in their stinky MAGA shit. As documented indefatigably by Stewartson, my friend Gal Suburban, and very few members of the legacy media, the coup plotters spent four years telling us what they planned to do, like the bad Bond villains they are, while the DOJ basically ignored them. But hey, at least Merrick Garland went after Ticketmaster.

In terms of analyzing why Kamala Harris lost, Noah Berlatsky wrote the best post-mortem piece I came across, for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice. There was a lot in his piece to be optimistic about—if not for the fact that we are capitulating to a vengeful sexual predator who has been granted full immunity by his fellow fascists on the Supreme Court for any “official act,” up to and including siccing the military on civilians and executing his perceived enemies. Berlatsky says:

Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.

Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.

To have a free election, candidates have to be free to run without fear of reprisal from the ruling party. Even if the Orange Grover Cleveland vouchsafes us midterm elections in 2026—and we cannot assume that he will—how comfortable will the opposition party be in exercising its free speech as it campaigns against him?

If we continue on this path, and Biden sits back and watches as Trump dismantles the federal regulatory agencies, and the FBI, and the CIA, we do have a few things working in our favor:

First, unlike Russia and other states where dictatorships have arisen, the United States has a long history of democratic rule (aspirational democratic rule, but still). We have that to fall back on.

Second, Trump is old and uninterested in governance and unlikely to last long in office, because of retirement, death, or the 25th Amendment. Vance is worse, because he’s younger and smarter and more ideological, but he lacks the political “rizz” necessary to maintain a cult of personality. This is a guy who plausibly fucks couches. Even when enabled by Peter Thiel and Musk, can he really hold onto power?

Third, most Americans—not many; most—will hate the stuff the new regime will roll out, including the mass deportations they once cheered on. As my friend Nina Burleigh, whom no one ever accused of peddling “hopium,” wrote on Wednesday, we Americans

are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all, it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright—HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.

The question is whether enough Americans will rise up to do so, or if they will just blame all the failures on Biden, as Fox News and Facebook will instruct them to do, and go back to watching football. Me, I like to think even the gun-toting MAGA won’t like it when the jackboots come for their friends and family members.

For me, the real glimmer of hope is that the leaders of the Blue States seem prepared for the fight ahead, and, unlike Biden, willing to take it on. Kathy Hochul and Leticia James, the governor and attorney general of my state of New York, were particularly reassuring about this. The latter, no fan of Trump, said this:

As Attorney General, I will always stand up to protect New Yorkers and fight for our rights and values. My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”

The governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, issued similar sentiments, vowing not to allow state police to participate in federal mass deportation programs. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are also being proactive, as the New York Times reports:

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”

In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”

That is the kind of leadership we need—not platitudes about setbacks and “we’ll get ‘em next time.”

There is no commandment etched in stone and delivered from the Almighty that says the American experiment will forever endure—nor is the union of all 50 states immutable and unbreakable. The Balkanization of the United States is a long-term goal of the Kremlin, I’m well aware, but I would argue that turning into Yugoslavia is preferable to turning into Hungary, which is just the first step in turning into Russia.

The time to take on the Kremlin was four years ago. Unless Biden does something unexpected in the next 70-whatever days—a Jayden Daniels “Hail Maryland” completion to save democracy—that moment has passed. Putin will soon have his puppet back in the White House, this time with the backing of the Supreme Court, the Senate, probably the House, and a staff of bloodthirsty fascist true believers; that is a far bigger victory for Moscow than the U.S. making like the USSR and disbanding. Sorry, Abe Lincoln, but I would rather live in a smaller democracy than a Trump dictatorship.

And as much as I’d like to think otherwise—and I assure you, I’ve spent the last few days trying—it’s foolhardy to believe that the immediate future will be anything but a Trump-branded sneaker stomping on a human face. Nazis don’t stop being Nazis because you show them decency and respect, as Biden and Harris have both stupidly chosen to do. We cannot expect that Trump or anyone in his regime will be anything other than what they are, or will do anything other than what they’ve told us they plan to do.

Again this week, I quote the German poet Kurt Tucholsky: “My life is too precious to put myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Gender, Trump

Adam Kinzinger: I Am Not Afraid of Trump. He Is a Coward.

By dianeravitch

November 9, 2024 //

Adam Kinzinger is a military veteran and was a Republican member of Congress. He voted to impeach Trump, then served on the J6 Commission. His was a reliable Republican vote until January 6, 2021.

He wrote on his blog:

When I decided to stand against Donald Trump, I knew exactly what was coming: backlash, threats, smear campaigns, even the occasional call to “watch my back.” These are the predictable tactics of a bully who’s cornered and desperate to regain control. But here’s the truth — I’m absolutely, resolutely unafraid of Donald Trump. Even after his win. Because I know how this all ends, and it won’t be pretty.

You see, Trump depends on fear. He builds his whole image around being “strong,” “tough,” a supposed champion of the “common man.” But strength doesn’t come from endless bullying, degrading insults, or an ability to throw temper tantrums every time he doesn’t get his way. That’s not strength; it’s weakness. Real strength means standing up for the truth even when it’s hard, even when it costs you. Trump has never had the courage to do that. I have.

Some people might assume I should worry about Trump or fear his so-called “retaliation.” Let’s be honest — what would that even look like? Mean posts on his social media platform? Outrageous nicknames? Maybe a mob of his most ardent supporters trying to intimidate me or my family? Been there, seen it. And I’m still here. Trump’s tactics are predictable, tired, and, frankly, more sad than threatening.

What Trump and his enablers don’t seem to understand is that I’m free from the shackles of political expediency. I didn’t get into this line of work to serve a political cult or bend the knee to any one person. I serve the Constitution and the country I swore an oath to protect. My loyalty is to the principles that make America strong, not to a man who’s turned our democracy into his personal grievance project.

Trump is, at his core, a coward. When things get tough, he runs. He ran from the military, despite claiming he could take on foreign leaders; he’s spent years hiding behind lawyers, attacking the justice system rather than standing tall and defending his actions in court. Time and again, he’s shown that he’s all bark, no backbone.

Contrast that with what I and others in the military have done. We sign up knowing the risks, knowing we could face life-threatening situations, all in the service of a cause greater than ourselves. Trump has never faced a risk he didn’t try to dodge or an obligation he didn’t shirk. I’m proud to stand up against him because he embodies everything I oppose: cowardice, corruption, a complete lack of respect for the rule of law.

I’m not backing down, not because I’m trying to make a name for myself, but because it’s simply the right thing to do. America deserves leaders who aren’t afraid of bullies, who don’t bend to the winds of political fortune, and who don’t take the easy way out. America will reject him again, in due time. It’s a process, but the long memory of history will remember his influence as a flash in a pan. And that starts by showing him, and anyone like him, that fear-mongering is no match for true courage.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Peter Greene: This Election Taught Us a Lesson: Teach Truth

By dianeravitch

November 8, 2024 //

Peter Greene asks how teachers can insist on honesty and evidence when the new president exemplifies the success of their opposites. Please open the link and read the article in full.

He writes:

We are already talking about the worst, ugliest, most misogynistic and racist impulses that will be boosted by Trump’s election. But for all of us in general and teachers in particular, I’m concerned about one other feature that will be super-charged by this administration.

We are now fully entered into a post-truth society. Folks voted for a Trump who doesn’t exist to solve problems that aren’t happening.

Yes, I’m solidly on record arguing that there is no such thing as One Truth, but there are truths that have a basis in reality and evidence, and there are views that are based on nothing but fabrication divorced from reality. There’s point of view, and there’s spin, and then there’s just utter reality-divorced bullshit.

Yes, Democrats made all sorts of mistakes; Bernie Sanders pointing out the failure to reach working class people may be on the mark. But to think Trump is the working man’s friend requires a head stuffed firmly in an alternate reality. Treasonous Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and to believe otherwise is to accept a big lie. To think he’s some kind of genius requires a stretch of miles and miles and miles. Trump stole classified documents and tried to weasel out of giving them back. He’s a felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a serial grifter, a misogynist, a racist, a man whose character so lacking in character and honor that the notion of him as a Christian champion makes no more sense than the idea of a great dane teaching advanced calculus.

I get that some of his support is transactional, that he is such a weak man that he attracts people who figure he can be used by them for their own gains (e.g. I’d bet that much of his right-wingnut christianist support comes from people who see him as a brick that will open the door for True Believers). It’s a dangerous game, because Trump is in it for Trump, but at least these grifters have a reality-based picture of who Trump is.

But the vast majority of voters appear to have settled for the lies. Exit polls show they decided on issues like the economy, as if Trump’s universally-panned-by-experts plan will “rescue” a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. They worried about trans athletes (because who wants to live in a country where you can’t harass young trans persons). And they believe in his victimhood, the idea that all these court cases and charges and all the rest are just Democrats “persecuting” the man who has “give up so much for this country.”

Trump voters could overlook his flaws because they were standing atop a mountain of lies.

And one lesson from the campaign is that disinformation works, that alternate facts work. And yes, I understand that this is not exactly news, but given our hyper-powered media and communications world, I think we’ve entered another level. This is a level where folks can decide that consensus reality, facts, standards, science–none of it– requires even lip service.

I worried about this in 2016. Never mind the public examples being set about propriety and basic kindness– how do you teach when the nation’s leaders demonstrate that facts are for suckers. Make up your own and just keep repeating them. And it was bad back then, but it feels so much worse this time. The first Trump administration felt like a trial balloon, a first shot at pushing the limits of anti-factualism. But now they can look back at some of the biggest lies ever pushed on the country and see that not only were there no negative consequences, they have been rewarded for it.

There is no need to even try to be tethered to reality. Just pick what you wish was true, and sell it. It’s an epistemological collapse, a suspension of any need to have a path to knowledge, because there is nothing to know except what you (or dear leader) wants to know.

Also, these are a lot of fancy ways to describe a simple thing– a lie.

In this context, teaching about things like finding text evidence to support an opinion seems quaint. Why discuss whether or not a body of Core Knowledge matters when knowledge itself has been cut loose? Why have reading wars about how to decode and define words when only suckers believe that words have meanings? Why worry about teaching scientific method and how to support an idea when it’s obviously simpler to just make up whatever you want to make up?

The answer of course is that all these things are doubly necessary in times like these, that society needs people raised and taught to function in reality based on real things. The Work of educators is now more important than ever.

To read more, open here.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Racism, Trump

Did Putin Rig Our Election?

By dianeravitch

November 8, 2024 //

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I realize this is a dangerous question to raise but I can’t help but raise it. I expect I’ll be swamped with vicious comments by Trumpers. I can live with that.

Did Putin rig the election??

I don’t have a smoking gun. I don’t have evidence.

I have questions and concerns. For now, I still have free speech.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article about Russia’s interference in the election to help Trump, and it said that they don’t bother anymore to cover their tracks. Putin “joked” that he endorsed Kamala but he was all in for his good friend Trump.

In the final days before Tuesday’s vote, Russia abandoned any pretense that it was not trying to interfere in the American presidential election.

The Kremlin’s information warriors not only produced a late wave of fabricated videos that targeted the electoral process and the Democratic presidential ticket but also no longer bothered to hide their role in producing them.

Writing in The Intercept, James Risen warned that Putin would pull out all the stops in his efforts to help elect Trump. Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire, and Trump won’t stand in his way. Risen wrote a few days before the election:

Putin’s ambitions require that he makes certain that the United States doesn’t try to stop him from rebuilding his empire. So he has sought to aid Trump, who has created damaging political chaos in America and who opposes U.S. involvement in NATO and Ukraine and who has proven to be easily manipulated by the Russian dictator.

Leading Russian ideologues have crowed about “their” victory, according to the Washington Post:

“We have won,” said Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue who has long pushed an imperialist agenda for Russia and supported disinformation efforts against Kamala Harris’s campaign. “ … The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat,” he wrote on X.

Trump warned repeatedly that the election would be rigged.

Was it?

We know that Putin wanted Trump to win.

We know that Russia was helping Trump before the election.

We know that Putin had more riding on the outcome of this election than anyone in the world, including Trump.

We know that Putin is ruthless.

We know that Putin’s biggest headache is Ukraine.

We know that Trump has promised to abandon Ukraine.

We can expect that Trump will lift the economic sanctions on Russia.

We know that Russia has highly advanced technological capacity.

Does it make sense that Trump’s rabid base is now a majority of voters?

Does it make sense that Kamala Harris received 10-15 million fewer votes than Biden?

Does it make sense that the gender gap shrank this year, post-Dobbs?

Does 2+2=4?

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Fake, Fraud, Trump

The New York Times Editorial Board Reacts to the Election

By dianeravitch

November 6, 2024 //

Everyone knew it would be a close election. Few anticipated Trump’s sweeping victory over Kamala Harris. The New York Times editorial board endorsed Kamala Harris. This is their next-day reaction.

By The Editorial Board

American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.

The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.

Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.

It can’t be ignored that millions of Americans voted for a candidate even some of his closest supporters acknowledge to be deeply flawed — convinced that he was more likely to change and fix what they regarded as the nation’s urgent problems: high prices, an infusion of immigrants, a porous southern border and economic policies that have flowed unequally through society. Some cast their votes out of a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, politics or the state of American institutions more broadly.

Whatever drove this decision among these voters, however, all Americans should now be wary of an incoming Trump administration that is likely to put a top priority on amassing unchecked power and punishing its perceived enemies, both of which Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to do. All Americans, regardless of their party or politics, should insist that the fundamental pillars of the nation’s democracy — including constitutional checks and balances, fair-minded federal prosecutors and judges, an impartial election system and basic civil rights — be preserved against an assault that he has already begun and has said he would continue.

At this point, there can be no illusions about who Donald Trump is and how he intends to govern. He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy. As he takes charge of the world’s most powerful state, he is transparently motivated only by the pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he has built around himself. These stark assessments are striking in part because they are held not just by his critics but also by those who served most closely with him.

We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened. The institutions of our government, hardened by nearly 250 years of disputation, turmoil, assassinations and wars, held firm when Mr. Trump assailed them four years ago. And Americans know how to counter Mr. Trump’s worst instincts — actions that were unjust, immoral or illegal — because they did so, over and over, during his first administration. Civil servants, members of Congress, members of his own party and people he appointed to high office often stood in the way of the former president’s plans, and other institutions of our society, including the free press and independent law enforcement agencies, held him accountable to the public.

Mr. Trump and his movement have all but taken over the Republican Party. Yet it is also important to remember that Mr. Trump can’t run for another term. From the day he enters the White House, he will be, in effect, a lame-duck president. The Constitution limits him to two terms. Congress has the power — and for some ambitious Republicans, perhaps the political incentive — to set a course away from Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic agenda, if it chooses to pursue it.

Governors and legislatures across the nation have spent months shoring up their state laws and Constitutions to protect civil rights and liberties, including access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. Even states that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, including Kentucky, Ohio and Kansas, have rejected the most extreme positions on abortion. Other institutions of American civil society will play a crucial role in challenging the Trump administration in the courts, in our communities and in the protests that are sure to return.

The rest of the world, too, has no illusions about the leader who will soon again represent the United States on the world stage. The countries of the NATO alliance were shocked, during the first Trump administration, by his willingness to undermine that long and valuable partnership. But European nations, defying Mr. Trump’s predictions, not only came together with the United States in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also expanded their ranks right up to Russia’s border.

For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough. The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

The test for members of this new Congress will begin soon after they take their oath. The president-elect has promised to surround himself in his second term with enablers prepared to pledge loyalty to him, who will be willing to do whatever he commands. But a president needs the Senate to approve many of those appointments. Senators can stop the most extreme or unqualified candidates from taking cabinet positions like defense secretary and attorney general, as well as seats on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. They can act to keep clearly unfit candidates from holding any powerful position. The Senate did that in 2020, when it blocked Mr. Trump’s attempts to seat unqualified people on the board of the Federal Reserve, and the chamber should not hesitate to do so again.

Perhaps the most important responsibility lies with all of those who will serve in a second Trump administration. Those he appoints as attorney general, as secretary of defense and to other top leadership roles should expect that he may ask them to carry out illegal acts or violate their oaths to the Constitution on his behalf, as he did in his first term. We urge them to recognize that whatever pledge of loyalty he may demand, their first loyalty is to their country. Standing up to Mr. Trump is possible, and it is the duty of every American public servant when appropriate.

But the final responsibility for ensuring the continuity of America’s enduring values lies with its voters. Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course. Those who opposed him should not hesitate to raise alarms when he abuses his power, and if he attempts to use government power to retaliate against critics, the world will be watching.

Benjamin Franklin famously admonished the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to that republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people. It is the work of the next four

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Molly Jong-Fast: Women Can’t Risk Another Trump Term

By dianeravitch

November 5, 2024 //

Wtiting on the MSNBC website, experienced journalist Molly Jong-Fast says that women can’t risk another Trump term. The issue that will be decisive, she believes, is reproductive rights. Women had them for 50 years, then Trump’s Supreme Court abolished them. Never before has the Supreme Court taken rights away.

She writes:

In 2016, in her presidential campaign against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton prophesied, “In a single term, the Supreme Court could demolish pillars of the progressive movement, and as someone who has worked on every single one of these issues for decades, I see this as a make-or-break moment.” Trump, of course, was elected and proceeded to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, thus positioning a conservative-majority Supreme Court to rubber-stamp the most arrant conservative nonsense. And top of that Republican wish list was overturning the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

Now, in 2024, we’re seeing what happens when women’s bodily autonomy is threatened and stripped away. We’re seeing a striking gender gap when it comes to support for Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump, with early voting polls showing a 10-percentage-point gender gap. And when we look at the policies Trump has helped enact versus the promises Harris has pledged, it’s no mystery why.

Before Roe was struck down, and seemingly as a trial run, in 2021 Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which made abortion after six weeks illegal in Texas. The Supreme Court had a chance to stop the law on the shadow docket. The justices declined, a harbinger of things to come. A year later, the Supreme Court overturned the law that codified abortion.

A sea of trigger laws written for this eventuality followed; some red states banned abortion as quickly as they could. Republicans wrote bills that banned abortion broadly, with little or no cutout for the life of the woman. The idea was simple: make doctors afraid to treat. Texas courts have several times rejected requests to provide specificity about the health exception.

In Louisiana not only can you not get an abortion; you may struggle just to get first-trimester pregnancy care. “We were stunned by just how much regular medical practice for pregnant people has been disrupted,” Michele Heisler, the medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, told NPR. Elsewhere in the country, things are looking similarly bleak. According to a 2023 report from The New York Times, “All told, more than a dozen labor and delivery doctors — including five of Idaho’s nine longtime maternal-fetal experts — will have either left or retired by the end of this year.” Medical care for women is under threat, and it extends far beyond what’s traditionally discussed as abortion, especially by Republicans who demonize an entire category of lifesaving health care.

After Roe was overturned, a lot of us were sure this would mean women would die. We were told we were being hysterical. But “the SB 8 effect” was real.According to Nancy L. Cohen, president of the Gender Equity Policy Institute, “There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality. All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.” And it wasn’t just pregnant women who died. Infant mortality also increased by about 13%, according to a study from Johns Hopkins, which also stated, “This suggests that SB 8 was driving this increase in infant mortality.” It’s now three years later. Women have died.

In the one election since the fall of Roe, the 2022 midterm election, there was warning of a red wave, projecting that Republicans planned to compensate for Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

But Republicans underperformed, and Democrats kept the Senate and almost kept the House. Two years later, conservative pundits wishcasted that women have gotten over losing that constitutional right. But evidence supports the theory that if anything, women are more enraged than ever.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Health, Trump

Brian Stelter: What Was the Most Memorable Event of the Campaign?

By dianeravitch

November 5, 2024 //

Brian Stelter was CNN’s media critic for many years. He had a regular show called “Reliable Sources.” CNN went through a period of reorganization, and he was fired. The reorganization was a failure, CNN leadership changed. Brian was rehired. He now again writes and reports for CNN.

He wrote today:

Quick – choose a memorable moment from this presidential election year. What did you pick? Maybe Jake Tapper and Dana Bash‘s CNN presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Maybe Kamala Harris‘s DNC convention speech, or Trump’s sit-down with Joe Rogan, or his garbage truck photo op? This campaign has been chock full of made-for-TV spectacles and surprises.

But if I had to pick just one moment, I’d choose the day in August when Trump claimed that the VP’s very real crowd was faked. “She ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump falsely shouted on Truth Social.

The episode encapsulated so much about this election. Trump’s use of social media to spread conspiracy theories; an insistence on creating his own reality; a disbelief that his Democratic rival could draw a big crowd at all; a disregard for the fact-checkers who debunked his post.

Plus, I bet many of you have already forgotten about AI-crowd-size-gate. That’s been another trademark feature of this campaign: exhaustion!

Reality itself has been contested during this election year. “The refusal to accept basic, verifiable facts has some observers concerned about a repeat of 2020 false claims of a stolen election if Trump loses,” NPR wrote while debunking Trump’s crowd size lie. It can be incredibly dispiriting for journalists. Imagine trying to convince a skeptic that the Harris rally you covered did, in fact, have a crowd. But it also reaffirms the importance of journalism to vet and verify information.

>> One last point: Trump was scratching at something deep when he said the Harris crowd “didn’t exist.” On this Election Day, some Trump fans find it unfathomable that Harris could win. Frankly, it’s also true that some Harris fans find it hard to believe that Trump could regain power. But someone is about to win. This week, America’s TV networks and newswires are like mediators, helping the country accept whatever the result will be.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Trump

A Last Word from the New York Times Editorial Board

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2024 //

This editorial appeared on November 2.

You already know Donald Trump.
He is unfit to lead. Watch him.
Listen to those who know him best.
He tried to subvert an election
and remains a threat to democracy.
He helped overturn Roe, with
terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s
corruption and lawlessness go
beyond elections: It’s his whole
ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-
elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain
him. Mr. Trump will use the
government to go after opponents.
He will pursue a cruel policy of mass
deportations. He will wreak havoc
on the poor, the middle class and
employers. Another Trump term will
damage the climate, shatter alliances
and strengthen autocrats. Americans
should demand better. Vote.

The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Lies, Trump

The New York Times Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2024 //

The New York Times editorial board published its endorsement of Kamala Harris on September 30. Its editorial says plainly that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. Since the editorial appeared, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post announced that they would not endorse anyone in this crucial election. Thank you to The Times for speaking up against a showman who has promised to destroy our democracy and who has behaved like a carnival barker during the campaign. These are dangerous times. We need a thoughtful intelligent President. We need Kamala Harris.

The editorial is titled “The Only Patriotic Choice for President”: :

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debatewith Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instancesduring his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.