In case you were wondering what our government would be like under Republican control, consider this: last month 19 GOP state attorneys general signed on to a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, seeking the power to access private medical records of its citizens who seek reproductive procedures (translation: they might choose to get an abortion in a state that allows it). Yes, these attorney generals want the power to take the medical records of their state’s citizens, for possible investigations of crimes, even from a different state! Does anybody remember when Republicans called themselves the party of small government?
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
Mr. Trump and his advisers are openly discussing their plans to reshape the federal government if he wins the election in 2024.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.
“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
Equal Rights Amendment: Democrats in Congress are making a fresh push for the nearly century-old amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution.
U.F.O. Records: Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, is pushing legislation to create a commission with broad authority to declassify government documents about U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial matters.
Assailing the F.B.I.: HouseRepublicans bombarded Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, with criticisms during a contentious hearing. Stoked by Donald Trump, Republicans have been trying to undermine the bureau’s legitimacy with the public.
The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”
The agenda being pursued by Mr. Trump and his associates has deep roots in a longstanding effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut the so-called administrative state.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.
Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.
“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.
Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
Mr. Trump and his allies have been laying out an expansive vision of power for a potential second term.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times
“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”
Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.
Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.
Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.
Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)
Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.
Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.
Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”
Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.
The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit…John Tully for The New York Times
The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.
Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.
“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.
Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.
Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.
“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”
Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.
On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.
Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.
The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.
Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.
Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.
“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”
Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.
“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
Right now, with millions of people busily shifting their alliance from the online home of of one egotistical, unchecked billionaire to that of the otheregotistical, unchecked billionaire, there seems to be hope that the shift will, at least for awhile, throw off the accumulated cruft of trolls and Nazis, allowing some sign of a vaguely remembered golden age to be restored. Good luck with that.
We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few.
Social media plays the same role with attention that a corporation does with money. Since the long-departed site Six Degrees first appeared in 1997, social media has been iterated with the speed that only online activity has made possible. Each one of those generations has resulted in a better machine for taking the interest generated by millions of users and turning it into fame for a handful of “thought leaders” or “influencers” or other labels which have passed as quickly as the sites that spawned them.
And the result is the outrage economy.
Just as late-stage capitalism is engrossed in wiping away every benefit workers gained over centuries of negotiating the relationship between labor and reward, the outrage economy has risen up to guarantee that, no matter the intention, every venture into social media trends toward disaster.
Within the past few decades, big-box stores sucked up the profits that once went to small businesses, while returning lower pay and fewer jobs. Then online retail consumed many of the big-box stores, returning even fewer jobs and even worse pay.
Social media has done the same with both “news,” in terms of news once shared over picket fences or among those waiting for a trim at the barbershop, and News in terms of what was once printed in things called “newspapers” or broadcast in a compact half-hour format at 6 and 10 PM.
Within that news there was always a strong pull toward what was once called “yellow journalism,” also known as juicy gossip, tabloid news, and more recently as clickbait. Reasonable news about reasonable people doing reasonable things has always generated boredom. A good WTF? reaction has always been valuable, whether that was in print, on the screen, or online.
As social media has evolved, it has trended toward a system that rewards those able to gain and hold public attention, with prizes that can range from a satisfying emotional pat on the back to a lucrative contract to continue spreading f-ckery in prime time on Fox News.
And for those who thought that Threads, the newest social media network, was going to offer some kind of break from the awfulness, The Washington Post has news for you.
Meta is done moderating … As it builds out Threads, Meta will probably offer users control over what kind of content they see—including the diciest and most controversial posts—rather than the company making those decisions on its own, Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg told The Washington Post. That’s a strategy that Meta has already embraced on Facebook, where the company has increasingly given users more ways to shape what appears in their news feeds.
Meta isn’t going to slow the roll of the outrage economy: It’s going to accelerate it. Which means that things will absolutely become worse.
“A wretched hive of scum and villainy” might not seem like a guarantee in a system designed around the unmoderated hunt for eyeballs, but that’s what it is. It’s almost as certain and mathematically definable as the relationship between entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the outrage economy, there are several ways to win the hunt for more gigaseconds of attention. You can be outrageously funny. Outrageously sweet. Outrageously talented. Even outrageously brilliant. All those things will capture at least some of the internet’s limited attention for some brief period. But in an unregulated system, none of them can compete with outrageously vile (link intentionally omitted).
The reason is simple enough: Anyone can do it. To detail some point of history or science takes knowledge. To produce a moment of humor requires both empathy and serendipity. To take some musical instrument and drive it into the human heart takes years of practice and unflagging dedication. But to insult people based on their race, their gender, their sexuality, their religion, their ability, or any of another score of deeply held attributes simply takes setting aside morality for the span of 280 characters.
Anyone can be a troll. It doesn’t take years of training or research: It just takes a willingness to take joy from causing pain. The more pain, the better.
Here’s how it works, in one simple lesson:
Say something nasty. Say something mean. Dip down into the monsters of the id and let them rage. If your rant happens to involve a few misspelled words, historical mistakes, or scientific principles turned on their heads, that only makes it better. Because even people who were willing to overlook racism, misogyny, and bigotry of all kinds will step in to correct your use of a preposition or the date of Bunker Hill. Anytime you get a response that starts with, “Well actually…”—give yourself bonus points.
Other forms of outrage may take work, but to be outrageously stupid or outrageously cruel—and those are often the same thing—can be as simple as taking a crap on the sidewalk.
Just look at the list of the first people who Twitter is paying under its new program to pay “creators.”
“Wow. Elon Musk wasn’t kidding. Content monetization is real,” tweeted an anonymous account called End Wokeness, with 1.4 million followers, accompanied by a screenshot showing earnings of over $10,400. …
“This is a nice turnaround from being banned by Twitter 1.0 for almost 2 years to now being paid to post Thank you @elonmusk,” tweeted far-right influencer Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino.
This is a system in which cruelty, intolerance, and a disdain for truth aren’t just tolerated; they’re profitable—both for Twitter and for the most vile of its users.
There are so many ways to work this scheme. Outrageously racist. Outrageously misogynistic. Outrageously bigoted. The outrage economy holds niches for every way in which people can be hurt, and offers up an incentive to find more.
Like a bloody traffic accident, outrage seldom fails to gather attention. In the outrage economy, that attention can be translated into a kind of fame, and even into wealth. And if an outrageous claim draws outraged replies, that only increases the payout.
That’s it. That’s why things get worse. Because outrageously hard takes work, while outrageously evil is simple. The ease with which the outrage economy rewards low-effort hate, vs. the bar it sets for reward for accomplishment, drags social media—and society—inexorably down.
The only thing that can arrest that slide is moderation. That moderation must be done by people who understand the subtleties of meaning, rather than trying to match replies to a set of simplistic rules. But moderation costs money. Good moderation costs a lot of money.
And why should Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk want to moderate in the first place? This is the outrage economy. Bring on the outrage.
by Thom Hartmann/ hartmannreport.com/ July 10, 2023
In addition to stepping up to mitigate climate change & green the world’s economy, the free nations must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence & hate-based political movements…
The government of the Netherlands fell last week. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change.
If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU.
The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.
The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.
The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.
On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.
The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.
Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.
Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.
Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.
Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.
He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.
Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.
Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.
As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:
“By the end of 2016, nearly 5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores, undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”
This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.
The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.
When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.
While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”
Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.
Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.
Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).
The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:
“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …
“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”
So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.
But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.
Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.
As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.
It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.
In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.
That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.
We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.
To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.
But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.
Mr. Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
The Biden administration recently made two grim announcements: Iran is helping to manufacture drones for Russia. China operates a spy base in Cuba.
The message is clear: America’s foes are joining forces. They now constitute what Washington’s influential Center for a New American Security recently called a new “axis of authoritarians,” which threatens U.S. interests from East Asia to the Caribbean and Eastern Europe to the Persian Gulf. The phrase implies that what binds the governments of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba is their common aversion to democracy. For a Washington foreign-policy class that often depicts America’s geopolitical struggles as contests between freedom and tyranny, it’s an appealing narrative.
But there’s a problem. Only a few years ago, the governments of Cuba and Iran — which had the same authoritarian political systems back then — were pursuing closer ties to Washington. They didn’t swerve toward Russia and China because they realized they hate democracy. They swerved because the United States spurned those overtures and drove them into the arms of America’s great-power foes. Under both former President Donald Trump and President Biden, Washington has helped create the very anti-American partnerships it now bemoans, which is exactly what it did during the last Cold War.
Take Cuba. For most of the post-Cold War era, its government’s strategy had been fairly clear: keep its political system closed while opening the economy to foreign investment. That required better relations with Washington, since U.S. sanctions not only barred Cuba from its biggest potential source of tourism and trade but also scared off European companies. William LeoGrande, a Latin America expert at American University, told me, “Every major component of Cuba’s economic strategy in the last two decades had been premised on long-term expectations that the relationship with the U.S. would improve.”
In 2014, that bet began to pay off. The Obama administration announced an end to America’s decades-long enmity with the Cuban government, and soon everyone from Conan O’Brien to Andrew Cuomo to Steve Nash began showing up in Havana. As a University of Miami Cuba expert, Michael J. Bustamante, noted at the time, “the American flag has even become the most stylish national standard, appearing on Cubans’ T-shirts, tights and tank tops.”
Then Mr. Trump entered the White House and it all fell apart. In 2019, he imposed the harshest economic sanctions in more than a half-century. A month later, Cuba began rationing soap, eggs, rice and beans. Around that same time, according to The Wall Street Journal, China’s surveillance network on the island “underwent a significant upgrade” (the Cuban and Chinese foreign ministries have denied reports of a Chinese surveillance facility in Cuba). Evan Ellis, a Latin America analyst at the U.S. Army War College, told The Journal that the deal “is basically Chinese pay-to-play,” adding that “China gives money to Cuba it desperately needs, and China gets access to the listening facility.” Last fall, China agreed to restructure Cuba’s debt and donate $100 million to the island. One reason Cuba still needs Beijing’s money is that the Biden administration has kept key Trump sanctions in place.
U.S.-Iran relations follow a similar pattern. When the two countries signed the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran’s foreign minister at the time, Mohammad Javad Zarif, called it “not a ceiling but a solid foundation. We must now begin to build on it.” Iran’s leaders, like Cuba’s, hoped better relations with the United States would spur Western investment. Although some Iranian hard-liners feared that economic ties to the West would weaken the regime, Mr. Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani gambled that a stronger economy would strengthen Iran’s regional position and defuse popular discontent, thus helping solidify the country’s despotic political system.
It didn’t work out that way. Mr. Trump canceled the nuclear deal and reimposed harsh sanctions. Rather than re-enter the agreement on its first day in office, the Biden administration made additional demands, which helped thwart efforts to revive the deal. And as the prospect of substantial U.S. and European investment disappeared, so did Washington’s leverage over Iran’s relationship with Moscow. Iran now has little to lose by developing what a National Security Council spokesman recently called a “full-scale defense partnership” with Russia.
This isn’t the first time the United States has driven smaller nations into the arms of its superpower adversaries. It did so during the Cold War. In his book “Embers of War,” Fredrik Logevall notes that until the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader, believed the United States “could be the champion of his cause” of independence from France. During World War II, Mr. Ho’s rebel army, the Viet Minh, worked alongside the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the C.I.A., in America’s fight against Japan.
But as Cold War tensions rose, the Truman administration disregarded its Asia experts — many of whom considered the Viet Minh a primarily nationalist rather than Communist movement — and backed French efforts to preserve its empire. By 1950, the Viet Minh were receiving arms from Communist China.
A decade later, the United States did something similar in Cuba. After taking power at the beginning of 1959, Fidel Castro set about redistributing wealth and revising the island’s historically subservient relationship with Washington. But despite Mr. Castro’s leftist inclinations, Mr. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh note in their book, “Back Channel to Cuba,” he “showed no special affinity for the Soviet Union during his first year in power.” It was only after Mr. Castro nationalized large plantations, which led the Eisenhower administration to begin plotting his overthrow, that Havana grew dependent on Moscow for economic and military assistance. U.S. animosity, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev observed, pushed Cuba toward the U.S.S.R. “like an iron filing to a magnet.”
The Cold War should remind us that countries with similar political systems aren’t necessarily allies. During the Cold War, many U.S. policymakers doubted that Communist governments could remain independent of the U.S.S.R. But that’s exactly what happened in Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz Tito split with the Soviet Union in 1948 and later welcomed U.S. aid. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and China became adversaries themselves.
If even governments that shared a common Marxist ideology didn’t always get along, there’s even less reason to believe that the diverse forms of tyranny practiced in China, Russia, Iran and Cuba constitute binding glue today. There’s nothing ideologically predestined about the growing security or military ties between Havana and Beijing or Tehran and Moscow. They stem, in large measure, from Washington’s efforts to starve Cuba and Iran into submission rather than forge working relationships with regimes whose political systems and foreign policy orientations we dislike.
These days, hawks in Washington say the United States cannot lift broad-based sanctions on Iran and Cuba, even though they deny ordinary people food and medicine, because the two countries are partnering with America’s enemies. Maybe the hawks should have thought of that before they brokered those partnerships in the first place.
Letter to the Editor, Monterey Herald, July 3, 2023
Anybody who’s name isn’t Donald Trump would get decades behind bars if convicted of all the present and future crimes the 45th President is accused of. At least that would be true if “no man is above the law” were our standard. But a lot of people think he should get off with a slap on the wrist, and no jail time, because he is a “former president.” The last time I looked “former president” is not considered a king, a God, a dictator, or above the law. Let Trump face the appropriate penalties, like any other American citizen. If the crimes call for a prison sentence, then “lock him up!”
Democracy is difficult and messy, but it’s far better than the alternative.
But to function effectively as a democracy, we need facts, truth and reality. Unfortunately, American democracy is now on the verge of collapse because those traits are not respected or valued by one of our two major political parties. If this trend continues we can expect democracy to be no more than a footnote in history books, (if they’re not banned), and authoritarian rule will be the norm.
To maintain democracy, people must agree on basic facts and a similar reality. We don’t have that anymore. Facts, truth, and reality are not agreed upon by large segments of our population, and therefore, the future of democracy is very much in jeopardy.
As everyone knows, Democrats and Republicans are exceedingly polarized these days. The two parties barely tolerate each other, and see this country and the future in vastly different ways. We are at a perilous impasse, in which one side is considered “woke” or socialist/communist traitors, and the other side is seen as a “cult” trying to destroy democratic norms and take away rights we thought we had already won.
Those perceptions may or may not be accurate, but a great many Americans feel this way and are working to destroy the other side in order to “save” America. The functioning American political system we thought we knew is strained to the limit. Problems are pushed aside or ignored, and the average voter feels that the politicians don’t solve anything or even care about them. Nobody seems to know how we get out of this existential deadlock.
It wasn’t always this way. Several decades ago, Democrats and Republicans were in basic agreement about most political issues, and willing to compromise in order to pass modest and sometimes monumental legislation. Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and Republican President Ronald Reagan were famously good friends during the 1980’s.
Those days of geniality and cooperation have long disappeared. I believe the beginning of our current political dysfunction dates back to the repeal of the “fairness doctrine” in 1987. This Federal Communications Commission directive required radio and television stations to give fair and balanced coverage to all sides of controversial issues. However, deregulation was in vogue at the time, so President Ronald Reagan’s FCC changed the rules and pretty much allowed media companies free rein, unleashing an onslaught of partisan activity that never slowed down.
Rush Limbaugh burst onto the scene one year later with his right-wing politics, showmanship, and demonization of liberals, which quickly became popular and transformed AM talk radio. Limbaugh and his peers offered permission and confirmation to the darker thinking—i.e. anger, hate, and fear– lurking under the conservative beliefs of millions of worried Americans, who saw their traditional world changing much too rapidly.
Media magnate Rupert Murdock saw the potential for this kind of conservative opinion on television, and launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, which soon became the dominant cable news network in the U.S. Imitators, both television and online, followed, seeing how popular and profitable this format could be. Politics was quickly transformed by the partisan right into a passionate messaging battle to capture America’s political soul.
The Democratic Party, naively hoping that fairness and compromise were still possible, was slow to pick up on this trend. Liberals and progressives then and now seem to lack the financial backing and ideological passion needed to compete with the right-wing’s all-out assault. The Democratic Party fights to win political battles while Republicans seem to be plotting to win a long-term ideological war.
After Donald Trump’s election, the Republican Party changed from a traditional political party into a MAGA personality cult, tied to the ego and lies of their charismatic leader. That cult and the remnants of the GOP are based in the Red states of the South, including all the former Confederate states (make of that what you will) and much of middle America. These Red states are reliably Republican and conservative. Progress and diversity are anathema and change is strongly resisted.
The Blue States are mostly found on the Pacific and Northeast coasts, and can be depended on to vote Democratic. They are seen as liberal or progressive, and are comprised of diverse groups and are more tolerant of racial and gender differences than voters in the Red States.
The Red and Blue States are roughly equal in voting strength, but continue to move in opposite directions politically. And something else is happening, the consequences of which could be fatal to democracy.
As the traditional Republican Party morphed into the MAGA Trump cult, all that really mattered to them was winning elections, “owning the libs,” and amassing political power. Lies, cheating and bigotry were permissible if it helped them prevail. In addition, conservative media sources were making profits promoting Trump and his reactionary ideas, and the MAGA base thrived on this alternative media, believing everything they were told.
The catastrophic problem is this: the strong right-wing MAGA cult media, from television to social media, as well as extremist politicians, has disregarded facts, reality and truth, without which democracy cannot exist. Their audience tends to be older, low-information, relatively insulated, and motivated to believe what they are told is the truth, especially if it is critical of “libs” and Democrats, and promotes traditional values.
What makes right-wing MAGA people so much more motivated and passionate than those on the left side of the spectrum? I believe it is because not only are their prejudices and anger confirmed and approved, they are fed a steady diet of distrust, misinformation and division from profit-driven media sources intentionally stoking those emotions.
The Democratic Party is reluctant to challenge their own wealthy donors. They and other liberal and progressive forces seem to lack the inner strength to resist the more motivated and powerful forces of the MAGA right.
And MAGA Republicans will believe all kinds of crazy things if they hear it from Donald Trump and/or his allies. There is more than a bit of ignorance and gullibility in the American electorate. We start with the fact that 74 million Americans voted for a demonstrably mentally unstable, ego-driven con man and handed him the presidency in 2016.
Although Trump was clearly defeated in 2020, but couldn’t accept it, a CNN poll in March this year found that 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe Joe Biden stole the election. Another poll found that a majority of Republicans (55%) say “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it” (George Washington Politics Poll, July, 2021).
Incredibly, a quarter of Republicans bought in to the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, believing government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation (Public Religion Research Institute, 2022).
America is going to go one way or the other: authoritarian with fascist tendencies or the imperfect democracy we have now. Our country can’t be governed successfully with both. We are living a mix of the two now and it just isn’t working.
The solutions: reviving the Fairness Act would be terrific, but the likelihood of that happening is negligible. We need to be aware that Republicans have always relied on contributions from their billionaire mega-donors to win elections. If super-rich Democrats could be persuaded about the danger ahead, their contributions would help a lot.
But most likely, if we truly want democracy, something we’ve been striving for since our country’s independence, aware voters will have to work their asses off and buttonhole voters door to door to get it. Voters will have to be persuaded of the dangers if the MAGA Republicans take charge. Fair elections in the future would be unlikely, with even more gerrymandering and voter suppression.
In an April 21, 2022 speech at Stanford, Barack Obama summed it up well: “People like Putin and Steve Bannon, for that matter, understand it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
The stakes for this country—in fact, for the world, are as high as they’ve ever been. It is not hyperbole to state that if the fascist-like authoritarians gain control here, the rot would spread around the world and the consequences would be devastating. No more
Letter to the Editor, Monterey Herald, June 20, 2023
Does anybody remember when we had a two-party political system? Up until six or seven years ago, we had the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The former is still here, but the Republicans morphed into a personality cult based on the lies and ego of Donald J. Trump. Instead of normal policies and ideas, this cult believes in bizarre thinking such as (1) Trump, with dozens of well-documented felony counts, is innocent because he has been framed by the corrupted Department of Justice and the FBI, (2) the January 6, 2021 Capital insurrection was mostly an enthusiastic political protest, (3) the 2020 presidential election was stolen, even though there is no evidence of such. In addition, quite a few bought into a wacky conspiracy theory (QAnon) that Satan-worshipping Democratic politicians and other well-known liberals were running an anti-Trump, cannibalistic pedophilia ring plotting to take over our country. I shudder to think how the 2024 election will go.
WASHINGTON — It’s shocking how easy it is to imagine Donald Trump campaigning for the presidency from prison.
He’d have the joint wired, like the mob guys in “Goodfellas.” He’d be enjoying all kinds of privileges, DJing Elvis and Pavarotti; getting a steady flow of Viagra, cheeseburgers and conjugal visits (not from Melania). Maybe he’d even be able to smuggle in his special Tang-colored hair bleach.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried for the White House from the Big House. In 1920, after being imprisoned on sedition charges for excoriating American involvement in World War I, which he considered a capitalistic war, Eugene Debs won about 900,000 votes as the Socialist Party nominee.
“I will be a candidate at home in seclusion,” he joked when asked how he would campaign. “It will be much less tiresome, and my managers and opponents can always locate me.” He was allowed to give one bulletin a week to the United Press. With Trump, it will be Newsmax.
Trump wouldn’t be in prison for sticking by his principles, though. He’d be in prison because he has no principles. We’re watching him spiral down to his essence. At bottom, he’s a humongous, dangerous liar and a criminal. As Logan Roy would say, this is not a serious person.
The dramatic unsealing of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is a fitting switch. Until now, it has been Donald J. Trump v. United States of America. He tried to engineer a coup against the government he was running. I bet Jack Smith will be bringing those charges later.
The special counsel made it clear that this isn’t just a “boxes hoax,” as Trump called it. You can’t purloin classified documents; leave them in the gilt-and-crystal glare of the bathroom, shower, bedroom and ballroom at Mar-a-Lago; and show them off to remind people how important you are. Trump’s ego is his greatest weakness. He couldn’t resist self-aggrandizing. Hey, I got these secret documents.
The indictment — charging Trump with violating the Espionage Act and other laws — offered devastating photos of America’s secrets stacked up like something on “Hoarders,” spilling out under the dry cleaning, a guitar case and other items.
“The classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, United States nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” the indictment said. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”Well, that’s bad.
The indictment is based on information from Trump’s own lawyers, staffers, phone records and security cameras. This isn’t the work of some insider or Trump hater who’s out to get him. And it makes clear that there was a very deliberate effort by Trump to hold on to and conceal these documents that he was going to use for heaven knows what and show to God knows whom.
The former president directed his valet, Waltine Nauta (named as a co-conspirator with Trump), to move about 64 boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence and bring about 30 boxes back to the storage room — without informing the Trump attorney who was supposed to be reviewing the material.
On top of that, the attorney said, Trump later encouraged him to go through the documents that he did review and pluck out anything really bad. Trump even made a plucking motion.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump was always boasting about his devotion to protecting classified information, to mock Hillary. The prosecutors thoughtfully included some of his old comments, like this one: “In my administration I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
Those statements obviously carried the same weight as his 2016 comments vowing to be so busy as president that he would never play golf. What an utter phony.
The Republicans who jumped out in front of the indictment to defend Trump should be ashamed. Unfortunately, shame is long gone from the Republican Party, except for a vestigial smidge in Mitt Romney’s office.
Up until now, Trump has managed to slink away from innumerable seamy episodes, from bankruptcies to vile personal misconduct, by proclaiming himself a victim.
I was trepidatious, after watching the lame performances of James Comey and Robert Mueller. But Jack Smith seems to be bringing an impressive skill set and temperament to his prosecution of Trump. Maybe he developed them in his years nailing war criminals at The Hague.
The special counsel Jack Smith.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
In his brief appearance at the Justice Department Friday afternoon, Smith emphasized the risks that this kind of mishandling of sensitive information poses to the people who have volunteered to protect us.
He praised the F.B.I., the agency that Trump and the Republicans have been trying to tear down and defund, saying the agents there work “tirelessly every day, upholding the rule of law in our country.”
Republicans used to embrace the rule of law. Now, many describe the Jan. 6 rioters as martyrs and say Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted. Kevin McCarthy called the indictment “a dark day for the United States of America.”
But Smith is intent on reminding Americans that the rule of law is a fundamental tenet of our country.
Trump ranted on Friday about Smith being “a deranged psycho.” Naturally, he also attacked Smith’s wife, the award-winning documentarian Katy Chevigny, who produced a documentary about Michelle Obama and contributed to Joe Biden’s campaign, as “the biggest Hater of them all.”
But Smith is not likely to be cowed. The guy’s tenacious. In an interview a few years ago, Smith discussed his passion for Ironman competitions. He talked about the time he got hit by a truck while riding his bike and fractured his pelvis. He was back doing a triathlon 10 weeks later.
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