“What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people.”

What did John Adams mean when he wrote this to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, after both had served as president?

Adams was saying that America, the country that took up arms and fought for its independence from the British, was already a nation — before 1775.

America preexisted the Constitution, Adams is saying. America had been conceived and born before he and Jefferson began to write its Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776. America had come into being even before Lexington and Concord in 1775.

A corollary of what Adams wrote is that America, and the republic created by the Constitution, are not the same thing.

While America is a country, a republic is the form of government created for that country in Philadelphia in 1787.

“A republic if you can keep it,” said Ben Franklin to the lady who had asked what kind of government they had created for the already existing nation, when he emerged from that constitutional convention.

What, then, are our elites bewailing when they say that populists, rightists and Trumpists have put “our democracy” at risk?

Answer: It is not America the country or America the nation they are referring to, but our political system as it has evolved.

And what is the nature of the threat they see?

A precondition of democracy is that the results of elections be recognized and respected, and if repeatedly challenged, this is a mortal threat. And this is the present peril.

Yet, there are other preconditions, not only for democracies but for countries, that were enumerated in The Federalist Papers:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs … ”

“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”

John Jay was describing the preconditions of a nation, a country, a people. Do these preconditions still exist in America?

“One united people”? “A band of brethren”? A common ancestry, common religion, common language, common customs and manners?

That may describe the America of 1789. Does it describe the America of 2022? Or does Jay’s phrase, “a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties,” better describe the America of today?

Hillary Clinton once wrote off half of Trump’s supporters, nearly one-fourth of the nation, as “a basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic … bigots,” who are “irredeemable.”

Assume that our elites, who often echo what Hillary Clinton said of the populist Trumpist right, agree with her.

Why would virtuous liberals wish to continue in political association with people like this? Why would they not declare that, if an election again delivers rule to such people, we want no part of the system or polity that produced so intolerable an outcome?

Why would the capture of all three branches of government by people such as Hillary Clinton describes not be cause for dissolving the Union?

How could democracy be a superior form of government, if it could deliver the republic to people such as these, and perhaps twice?

If the progressives’ enemies are “Nazis” and “fascists,” why would progressives not rise in resistance and reject their rule, rather than cooperate with them in the governance of the country?

Why would good people not battle to overturn an election that produced a majority for such “deplorables”?

Do the commands of democracy take precedence over the demands of decency? Rather than govern in concert with people like this, why not get as far removed from them as possible?

The point here: Not only may the preconditions of democracy be disappearing, but the preconditions of nationhood may be disintegrating.

Again, the American right is today routinely compared to Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. Why would good liberal Democrats accept an electoral victory and future rule by Nazis and fascists rather than seek to overturn it, by whatever means necessary?

And how do you hold up American democracy as a model to mankind if, after two centuries, it has produced scores of millions of citizens like those described by Hillary Clinton?

And, again, if the preconditions of democracy are vanishing, and the preconditions of nationhood are disappearing, is not secession of some kind inevitable and even desirable?

Ultimately, the logic of our situation must lead us to consider something like this. Western Maryland’s attempt to secede and join West Virginia, and Eastern Oregon’s attempt to secede and join Idaho, may be harbingers of what is to come.

creators.com

By Paul STREET

Who can ever forget the brilliant oratory of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden two nights after Election Day last November? “Democracy is sometimes messy,” Joe “No Empathy, Give Me a Break” Biden said two months before Donald Trump’s wild-eyed marauders would descend on the US Capitol. “It sometimes requires a little patience. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

What wise counsel! “Patience, underlings, your globally unmatched democracy will hear your cries!” What came over those Hunger Marchers and Sit-Down Strikers in the 1930s? What was Rosa Parks thinking when she refused to get up from that bus seat? Surely the great Black American escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass needed to be more patient and feel more rewarded when he offered these bitter and impetuous reflections on July 4, 1852:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival

Will we ever break the taboo that protects the United States’ absurdly venerated 18th Century United States slaveowners’ charter – the national constitution that William Lloyd Garrison, accompanied by Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau, called “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” and then burned along with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outside Boston on July 4, 1854 – from the radical democratic criticism and replacement it has long deserved?

Blocking a “Marxist” Reform

The examples are endless of why Garrison’s “covenant with death” needs to be transcended if the nation is going to have any chance of achieving popular sovereignty, the US Founders’ ultimate nightmare.

Two among many possible instructive lessons are staring us in the face right now: the blockage or dilution of Biden’s moderate Build Back Better bill (B4) and the likely coming Supreme Court undoing of women’s constitutional right to an abortion (already abolished in the giant state of Texas and seriously rolled back in many other Bible, Lynching, and Gun Belt states) next spring.

A super-majority, 66 percent of the American citizenry supported the original $3.5 trillion B4, which can’t get through the “Tear Down Better” Congress without some major amputations.

The measure’s high popularity made sense. Absurdly denounced by the ridiculous Republifascist Senator Mark Rubio (Rf-FL) as an attempt “to create a socialist, almost Marxist-type economy”[1], the measure may have fallen far short of socialist requirements but even an unabashed Marxist like myself has to admit that it contained many desirable benefits for ordinary Americans: :

+ A large infusion for Pell Grants (federal college tuition grants for low-income Americans).

+ Childcare and universal pre-K, including a provision to keep the cost of childcare at or below 7% of most families’ income.

+ Two years of free community college for all students, regardless of family income

+ Extended child tax credits.

+ Medicare expansion to include coverage of dental, hearing and vision services.

+ Slashing prescription drug prices by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

+Comprehensive paid family and medical leave

+Climate change mitigation, including a “clean electricity performance program” to expand renewable energy, enhanced forest conservation, incentivization of electric vehicles and residential weather-fitting, among other things.

While the corporate media and right-wing and centrist politicians constantly chirped about different dollar figures – Biden’s original $3.5 trillion, $2.3 trillion, Demublican Joe “Party Boat” Manchin’s $1.5 trillion – the truth is that the measure would have cost the public nothing: it was to be paid for with modest increases in taxes on the nation’s absurdly under-taxed rich. And, as few in the “mainstream” imperialist media will mention, the B4’s ten-year so-called price-tag was less than half the vast corporate welfare largesse the federal government grants on a cost-plus basis to opulent high-tech “defense” (war and empire) firms in the form of the giant Pentagon system.

There’s no mystery about why the measure was so popular. It advanced real and desperately needed help for tens of millions of Americans and would have paid for these benefits with an overdue (if historically small) increase in taxes on the nation’s parasitic upper classes in a grotesquely unequal nation where the top thousandth had nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent even before the pandemic increased the insane upward concentration of American net worth.

So NOT a “Democracy”

So why can’t the B4 be enacted in its original and modestly progressive form in “the world’s greatest democracy”? The first thing smart liberals and Democrats who pay attention to the news will tell you is that (nominally” Democratic US Senators Manchin [$-WV] and Kyrsten “What Not to Wear” Sinema [$-AZ] are opposed to the bill’s so-called price tag (unmentionably only for the rich) and the Democrats only have a one-vote margin in the Senate. The second thing such informed Americans will say is that the Manchin (the #1 collector of political money from the coal, oil and gas, and mining industries in the 2021-22 election cycle) and the major Big Pharma funding recipient Sinema garner giant campaign contributions from corporate interests (led by Big Carbon and Big Pharma) opposed to the bill’s “big government” provisions.

Both observations are true. But Manchin’s corruption goes deeper than political finance: a recent report shows that he “earns” $500,000 a year from coal stock dividends. Like many members of the “permanent political class” today [2], he’s not just a whore – he’s an oligarch. (One really must wonder how to calculate the carbon footprint of this planet-cooking parasite’s coming eternal damnation: it promises to be one of the hottest on record.)

At the same time and more to the point of this essay, there’s a deeper historical and institutional problem that rarely receives proper attention from commentators and activists: the nation’s “system of governance” – to use Biden’s phrase – isn’t democratic.

It isn’t democratic at all. And this goes back to the beginning of the country, decades before Frederick Douglass delivered his brilliant and righteous 1852 speech on “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Democracy is not what Biden’s beloved 240-year-old “system of governance” was ever about. And this is not just because the nation’s plutocratic political rulers are corruptly enmeshed with 21^st century corporate and financial lobbyists and bankrollers. Much of the difficulty goes back to the nation’s aristo-republican Founders and their purposefully and brilliantly democracy-crippling slaveowners’ charter.

The Absurd House

Look at the US Congress. Its lower body, the House of Representatives, is so badly gerrymandered rightward that the Republicans have a good shot of becoming the majority there again in 2023 even though the Republican Party is viewed with approval by just a little over a third (37%) of the populace while the Democrats are approved by nearly half (48%).

That’s absurd. Forget for a moment that neither of these capitalist and imperialist parties deserves support from any decent human being. One of the nation’s two major and viable political parties gets a thumbs up from nearly half the citizenry and the other such party is endorsed by just more than a third of the populace and the least popular (by far) of the two organization is poised to take back the House of Representatives in 2022/23. Ridiculous, right? But it cannot be understood without factoring in the anti-democratic role of gerrymandering and racist voter suppression conducted at the state level under the rules of a national charter and government that have long granted states remarkable autonomous power to set state and national district lines and other key election and voting rules.

The Absurd Senate

It gets more pathetically idiotic – from a democratic perspective at least – in the upper branch of Congress. How do the Republicans happen to control half of the extremely powerful US Senate and enjoy a good chance of regaining a majority there in 2023 or 2025 when their party is approved by just a bit more than a third of the populace? And how are the malignant, fossil-fueled reptile Manchin and the sartorial comedian (and onetime Naderite-turned corporatist) Sinema (who had the mind-blowing chutzpah to fly back to her home state for a fundraiser to vacuum up contributions from companies who oppose the B4 even as the measure was being deliberated upon in Washington DC last week) able to become darkly pivotal historical actors in the first place?

It isn’t just about campaign finance, corporate media, and other forms of political class corruption. Almost nobody talks about a big sick historical elephant in the room here: the further extreme violation of the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote by the assignment of two US Senators to every state regardless of population size. This “democratic” absurdity is fully constitutional, for the nation’s revered 18^th Century Covenant with Death grossly exaggerates the Senate voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, evangelical, patriarchal, armed, racist, and proto-fascistic regions. Get this: if bright blue California had the same population-to-US Senator ratio as bright red Wyoming, it would have at least 130 representatives in the upper body of Congress. If progressive Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, the New York City borough would have 9 U.S. Senators.

Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” the brilliant left constitution critic Daniel Lazare noted five years ago, it had by 2018 become mathematically possible to “cobble together a [Republican] Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.” (And, by the way, the bright blue District of Columbia is home to more people of Wyoming.  It is absurdly denied voting representation in either the House or the Senate.)

The US Senate is loaded with giant de facto “rotten boroughs” that abhorrently inflate the power of the nation’s most reactionary sections. If the Senate were apportioned in accord with the nation’s popular geography, a bill far more progressive than the 4B would pass the Senate with ease and “centrist” snakes like Manchin and Sinema would be beside the point.

(Wild iconoclasts might further ask why we have a bicameral legislature, with an “upper house,” in the first place. What is that about? Most at least nominally democratic countries are quite naturally unicameral. The US Senate, like the British House of Lords, functions as originally designed: an aristocratic check on the more plebian lower house of congress/parliament.)

“The Peculiar System That Emerged”: The Absurd Slaveowners’ Electoral College

The absurdity bleeds over into the nation’s preposterous, Monty Python-esque Electoral College method of installing imperial, ruling class presidents. Two hundred and forty-three years into its “envied” experiment in “democracy,” the United States does not elect its chief executive on the basis of a national popular vote! Because it is weighted heavily by the slaveowner constitution’s reactionary Senate apportionment regime, and because it rewards Elector slates on an all-or-nothing state-by state basis (if a candidate wins Texas by a single popular vote he or she gets all of the state’s 38 Electors), this democracy-flunking “college” requires a Democratic presidential candidate (incumbent or not) to significantly out-perform his or her Republican opponent in the popular vote to win (or keep) the presidency. Since it is technically irrelevant to win California by five million instead of five hundred votes under the winner-take-all formula, that candidate must give far more heed to right-wing and “moderate” opinion than would be required if the nation’s presidential elections were based on (imagine!) a popular vote. Along with other factors, including of course political finance and corporate control of the mass media, the undemocratic Electoral College tilts presidential candidates (including incumbents who want a second term) to the right and away from majority progressive public opinion. Demented Republican maniacs who lost the popular vote have occupied the world’s most powerful office for 12 of the last 22 years thanks to this idiotic regime. One of those maniacs was an at least instinctive fascist and a vicious pandemicist. He may come back for a second, potentially terminal reign of destruction in 2025, his re-matriculation coming in no small part thanks in part to the august Founders’ brilliant 18^th Century college.

(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, my fellow US-American – it’s hilarious. “How absurd,” foreign correspondents say: “And they call that democracy? Seriously?” Envy indeed!)

The Electoral College traces back to the holy Founders’ need to keep the early republic’s southern slaveowners on board. As law professor Wilfried Codrington III noted in The Atlantic two years ago:

‘The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.’

As historian Carol Anderson shows in her important new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, “The [slave] South had no problem in walking away from the [1787-88] Constitutional Convention and the United States” if it didn’t get what its ruling slaveowners wanted, including the right to count three-fifths of their slaves’ populations towards the determination of how many representatives they could send to the lower house of Congress and an amendment guaranteeing state militias designed and managed to crush slave rebellions. (Even during the so-called American Revolutionary War, Anderson shows, southern slaveowners were willing to sacrifice national independence if necessary to block the military enlistment of Black Americans for fear that armed Blacks might take up their weapons against slavery.)

Designed to appease southern slaveowners, the US Constitution (William Lloyd Garrison’s “agreement with Hell”) and the rest of the nation’s astonishingly archaic governance structure, inherited from the time of Louis XVI, now helps appease neofascism and is setting us up for a remorseless return of the white nationalist Amerikaner Party of Trump to full national power in 2023 and 2025.

Judicial Review

It is true of course that the morally criminal conduct of reptilian politicos like Joe “Coal Stock” Manchin and Kyrsten “Drug Lobby” Sinema is related to the political dollars they rake in from capital – from corporate interests, business lobbyists, and other deep-pocketed political investors. But this money-politics corruption is inexplicable without reference to Joe MBNA Biden’s treasured 24-decade “system of governance.” Noxious prostituted real or wannabe dollar Dem oligarchs like Manchin and Sinema can only become swing-vote policy royalty and thereby boost their political finance profiles (election investment is all about impacting policy in the funders’ interest) because of the absurd level of disproportionate minority rule power the reactionary Senate apportionment system grants the nation’s rightmost major party.

At the same time, the Slaveowners’ Constitution grants an absurdly high level of Simon Says policymaking (and policy-breaking) “judicial review” power to the US Supreme Court, an aristocratic appointed-for-life body that has ruled in two key decisions (Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United in 2010) that there can be no serious government limits placed on the “free speech” right of concentrated wealth to influence (purchase) American elections and thereby shape (dominate) US policy. What current House member Jamin Raskin (D-MD) and his onetime fellow Harvard Law student John Bonifaz once cleverly labeled “the wealth primary” – the requirement that one either possess great wealth or access to it to run a viable campaign for higher office – is not an act of God. It’s an act of policy enforced by the absurdly powerful US Supreme Court, invented by the US Founders as one of many aristocratic checks on the menace posed by their ultimate enemy, democracy.

The Supreme Court, endowed with God-like powers of judicial review – the sacred high temple of democracy that ruled in 1857 that African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States. What a glorious and sage example of benevolent wisdom that was, clear proof that Joe “Come on, Man” Biden is right about the wonderful rewards that accrue to those who patiently let the glorious American “system of governance” work its egalitarian wonders. Just what was it about that marvelous system of popular self-rule that Frederick Douglass couldn’t wrap his mind around five years before the Dred Scott decision?!

So What if 62% Percent Support Roe?

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it seems likely that it will soon reverse Roe v. Wade and thereby eliminate women’s constitutional right to receive abortions. This will impose forced motherhood and de facto female slavery across the United States (The ridiculously powerful high court has recently signed off on the full abrogation of Roe in Texas by refusing to intervene against a toxic Christian fascist bill with national mercenary and vigilante reach analogous to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act). So what if 62% of Americans want to keep Roe intact? The Supreme Court has an absurd 6-3 Republican majority, far to the right of the US populace, achieved through fully constitutional means: the appointment of high court justices (including three selected by the malignant pandemo-fascist beast Donald Trump) by right-wing Republican US presidents who were installed by the Slaveowner Constitution’s anti-democratic Electoral College system and approval by a US Senate that badly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states. Constitutional Simon Says! Yet more reward for patient faith in a glorious democratic “system of governance” that has made the world green with envy for 240 years!

Still Slaves to the Constitution

The US Founders’ holy Covenant With Death was only passed through a grotesque series of bargains struck with the South’s merciless, arch-racist owners, exploiters, and torturers of Black slaves: the putrid Three-Fifths Compromise (letting the slaveowners count three-fifths of their slave populations towards the size of their delegation in the US House of Representatives), the Fugitive Slave Clause (granting slavery extra-territoriality by stating that fugitives from slavery must be sent back to the South if captured in the North), continuation of international slave trading for two decades, the Senate apportionment regime (which significantly over-represented slave states relative to the nation’s free population and electorate), the Electoral College, and the Second Amendment, upon which slaveholders insisted to assure themselves of a fighting force willing and ready to suppress slave insurrections.

Two hundred and thirty-three years after its ratification, we are still slaves to the undemocratic US Constitution in a very concrete institutional sense, with disastrous outcomes for ordinary people and livable ecology at home and abroad. The story of how and why this crippling aristo-republican slaveholders’ document has survived as the nation has moved from merchant capitalism to industrial and corporate capitalism, through America’s rise to global hegemony, and into the current neoliberal (and perhaps neofascist) era is a topic worthy of further investigation. The astonishing, highly atypical durability of this 18^th Century charter has yet to find its critically inclined historian, but it seems clear that the nation’s underlying class dictatorship of capital has seen fit to retain this horse and buggy era deed with the Devil since it is still paying dividends.

Don’t get me wrong. The class dictatorship of capital compromises and indeed crushes genuine popular sovereignty in all “bourgeois democracies” (an arguably oxymoronic phrase unless it is understood to mean democracy for capital), regardless of form. But the American constitutional order –Joe Biden’s “system of governance” that has supposedly been “the envy of the world” for 240 years (89 of which were marked by Black chattel slavery) – is quite distinctively reactionary, canceling even modest reforms considered mainstream and centrist in other rich capitalist nations. It ought to be considered long past its expiration date. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema richly deserves the worst imaginable earthly and spiritual punishments and capitalism must be radically replaced with ecosocialism on the path to communism, but national charters and governance structures matter and the US-American charter and structure is now and has long been an indefensible and authoritarian atrocity leading us to disaster in numerous ways I have only partially touched upon here.

Special Nullification Measures Still Required for Republifascists

And yet all this is not enough for the Nazified Republicans of 2021. Future US historians, should they exist, may someday marvel at how determined the nation’s rightmost major party, the neofascist Republicans, are to rig the constitutional game even further in their own favor through next generation gerrymandering, voter suppression, and (now) blunt election denial and nullification. The forefront of the Trump party’s current assault on bourgeois electoral democracy is the constitutional art and science of not counting votes, throwing out votes, overthrowing elections, and preventing the certification of Electoral College slates that don’t go Republikaners’ way. Red states are currently and all-too constitutionally moving not just to suppress and gerrymander Democratic votes but to cancel, deny, de-certify, and nullify them. It’s all meant to be done “constitutionally” with no street thugs, repression, and bloodshed required – at least not until people take to the streets to protest the coming theft of the 2024 presidential election.

Republican plotters see January 6^th and the broader multi-pronged attack on the 2020 election (the Capitol Riot was a last-ditch Hail Mary in this assault) as an exhibition game, a practice run, and a warm-up. It’s just a prologue to something far more sophisticated and serious in 2024-25. No more Beer Hall Putsches for these openly authoritarian white nationalists. They are getting all their legal and constitutional ducks in a row, coordinating election-theft and vote-nullification strategies between the state and federal levels. The table is being set for a new shot at fascist consolidation, American style, all quite “constitutional” in design. The fascist mob and gendarme violence will come after the election is expertly pinched by red state governments, the US Congress (which should be back in Republican hands), and perhaps the disproportionately right-wing federal courts.

Clearly the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republican Party) does not see the Founders’ charter as sufficient to guarantee the final solution they crave. Extra vote-suppressing and (worse) election-nullifying measures are required in their view because of demographic changes underscored by the 2020 Census – non-Hispanic white Americans’ declining share of the US population on the road to become a minority of the nation by 2050 if not before. Having moved from the neo-Nazi margins to the mainstream center of Republican media-politics culture, Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT) [3] is intimately linked to the Big 2020 Election Lie in fueling the coming right-wing coup of 2024-25.

“We Need the Storm”

Slavery was ended and basic civil and voting were first constitutionally (and inadequately) extended to Black Americans only through the revolutionary war and southern reconstruction that southern slaveowners’ intransigence forced on Abraham Lincoln, 180,000 Black Union Army soldiers, Ulysses S. Grant, and Congressional Republicans between 1861 and 1877. Frederick Douglass’s 1852 words were born out: “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” It took a Civil War that claimed 750,000 lives to amend the Founder’s holy slaveowners’ charter in some all too historically incomplete and transient accord with democratic principles. Here we are now on the precipice of final societal and ecological collapse being inflicted on the nation and world by capitalism-imperialism, a system with no single greater national headquarters than the imperial United States. Calm patience with “our” (their) 240-year-old “system of governance” should be the very last thing on our political and moral agendas

There are no non-radical resolutions of the dilemmas facing this fatally unequal nation. The current trajectory is toward the radical right path of constitutionally consolidated and then repressively enforced and ecologically disastrous neofascism that imposes ruinous capitalist oppression. The only viable alternative is a radical people’s eco-socialist revolution that fully confronts the underlying class dictatorship of capital and struggles to put humanity on the path to many-sided liberation from all forms of oppression other than those imposed by natural existence itself.

We don’t need kayak-paddling beggars trying to speak truth up to Manchin’s power yacht. We need the storm that sinks his vessel in the turbulent seas of an actual revolution. We need the whirlwind. We need the earthquake. We need “the radical reconstruction of society itself” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., identified as “the real issue to be faced” shortly before his execution. Maybe the attempted imposition of neofascist female slavery (forced motherhood) in the world’s most powerful state can be a spark.

Endnotes

+1. This led Paul Krugman to cleverly quip that the Communist Manifesto called for “Workers of the world [to] unite to spend 1.2% of GDP on popular programs over the next decade!”

+2. University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo’s latest book is titled American Oligarchy: The Permanence of the Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017). By Formisamo’s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions. This “permanent political class,” Formisamo warns, is taking the nation “beyond [mere] plutocracy” to “the hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.”  It: “drives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent …[It engages in] the direct creation of inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites [while]… its self-aggrandizement creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society and that induces many to abuse positions of power to emulate or rise into the One Percent …[and as it] contributes to continuing high levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.”

+3. Special thanks to the clever English professor Clark Iverson for this play on the white nationalist right’s bogeyman “CRT” (Critical Race Theory).

counterpunch.org

Happy Fourth of July! Falls Church in Northern Virginia just renamed two public schools, George Mason High School and Thomas Jefferson Elementary, to cancel the men who gave us this day.

The namesake George Mason was a Founder, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the basis for the Bill of Rights. Nearby George Mason University is still named after him, but Falls Church is stripping his name from its schools because in addition to all he did to create the United States, he was a slaveholder. Same for Thomas Jefferson, Founder, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, first secretary of State, third president of the United States, and famously, rapist and slaveholder, Joker without the makeup.

The people of Falls Church who made these changes probably mean well in a 2021-ish kind of way. The city is 72 percent white (and only 4.5 percent black.) An amazing 78 percent of adults in Falls Church have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and most work for the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C. (George Washington and six other presidents held slaves.) The city has an energetic farmer’s market with a proposal pending to add an “informational booth about how communities of color have less access to healthy foods” and votes solidly Democrat.

The process of canceling the Founders was deliberate, with 13 meetings stretching over a year to come up with final school name candidates. For the high school, only one name candidate related to history at all, a local spot where the first rural branch of the NAACP was located. The other choices were could-be-anywhere Meridian (the eventual winner), Metropolitan High School, Metro View, and West End.

Same for deleting Jefferson. The same local historical site came up, as did the name of a local white historical figure who started a special needs school. The winner, Oak Street Elementary, “recognizes how trees are important natural elements.”

What stands out is a devotion to keeping the point out of the renaming. As political as the motivation was, no one wanted an MLK high school, or a Rosa Parks elementary. Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s rape victim and slave, did not make the cut. Truth and Justice Elementary School was seen as a “nod” to Jefferson and thus truth and justice were rejected.

Left undiscussed is how the renamed Thomas Jefferson Elementary School still abuts George Mason Road. The renamed George Mason High School itself is located on Leesburg Pike, near Custis Parkway, named for the slave owning daughter of George Washington’s adopted son and the wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It is hard to get away from history.

At this point it is tempting to drive over to Whole Foods, park among the herd of Priuses and smite the too-earnest people of Falls Church with their own PBS tote bags. A wealthy, nearly all white community making a splash about renaming two schools to cancel a couple of Founding Fathers while carefully avoiding any teachable moment. Everyone’s white liberal guilt is assuaged with few feathers ruffled. And did you see the new artisanal cheeses in aisle eleven? Carol sent another $50 to the ACLU for us after George Floyd, you know.

The thing is as hard as it is to take these people seriously, it is equally hard to not take them seriously. They really believe themselves. And that poses 2021’s question.

America did not invent slavery, racism, or discrimination. We can point to a moral struggle hundreds of years in process including a civil war that remains the most costly conflict to Americans in body count and brutality. The Founders struggled over how to deal with a system most knew was unsustainable, Jefferson among them.

Yet alone in history we haven’t figured this out. South Africa, with an apartheid system designed to be as plainly racist as possible, found a way to untangle itself. The ancient world was built on slave labor and made the transition. The Germans dealt with their relatively recent attempt not just at enslavement but industrial scale genocide.

We fail because we refuse to admit crying racism, and making faux-fixes as in Falls Church, is as profitable politically as doing racist things is. Getting yourself elected calling out racism with manufactured rage is not far away from using racist voting laws to get yourself elected. There is too much to gain by maintaining and then exploiting a racist system. If you heal the patient, what’s left for the doctors to do?

There is also what we’ll now call the Falls Church myth, this near-idiotic belief insignificant changes add up to something. Changing the name of a school, or tearing down a statue, does not change history. That is why everyone is still “raising awareness” about the same problems after decades. It feels good, though.

Same for the “first…” people, the ones who celebrate the first black this or the first woman that. That we chased that idea all the way into the Oval Office and two consecutive black attorneys general and a black V.P. to see nothing much come of it answers the question of what it is worth as a change tool.

We thrive on polarization, thinking somehow calling someone a white supremacist based on little more than his skin color or political party is going to…help? The critical catechism of MLK and the civil rights movement—that race should not matter—is turned on itself to humiliate those who struggled. Sorry folks, it turns out it is all about the color after all, except that we mean black people should get stuff for being black.

Alongside are the scorekeepers. These people point out since about 13 percent of us are black, anything that has less than that (colleges, jobs) or more than that (prisons, poverty) is racist. The simplicity is attractive but the reality of ignoring the complexity of every other factor is where the argument fails hard. At the risk of offense, it is not just black and white out there.

I used to walk past the statue of Marion Sims in Central Park. When I first looked him up in 2012, he was the father of modern gynecology, the founder of New York’s first women’s hospital, the 19th century surgeon who perfected a technique that today still saves the lives of third-world women.

When I checked his biography again in 2018, he had become a racist misogynist who conducted medical experiments without anesthesia on enslaved women. His statue was removed from Central Park while protesters chanted their “ancestors can rest” and “believe black women.” I’m glad they just got rid of the statue instead of putting up a modern plaque “explaining” it in woke-talk.

The thing is Sims did all that he was said to have done. He developed surgical tools and techniques still used today. He did surgeries on both free white women and enslaved black women, mostly without anesthesia in part because anesthesia was not in wide use at the time and in part because he subscribed to the racist theory of his time that blacks did not suffer pain the same way whites did. His often life-saving surgeries (on blacks) have been relabeled “medical experiments” to connect them to Nazi horrors, purposefully ignoring the difference between non-therapeutic and therapeutic procedure and leaving his white patients who died out of the story altogether. Easier that way.

Also left out of the ranting is primary documentation suggesting Sims’ original patients—black and white—were willing participants in his attempts to cure vesicovaginal fistula, a condition for which no other viable therapy existed until Sims invented it. That meant they would have died without his surgery.

I’ll confess there are times that I, too, struggle with Jefferson. No one is anyone but a beginner on the road to Galilee, but Jefferson’s gifts contrasted with his cruelty make him among the hardest to understand. Yet Jefferson the slave owner did not pass that portion of his ideas to our future. He, Mason, and the other Founders created a system which would eventually correct itself and eliminate slavery. Evil was defeated at great cost but we seem unable to let it die.

We crave simplicity in our history when there is only complexity. It is ridiculous to ignore world-changing accomplishments thinking that will somehow fix our racial problems. We just don’t want to grapple with the questions of personal responsibility and the problem of inter-generational lifestyle victimhood.

We instead want the simplicity of reparations, imagining we can buy our way out of racial troubles. We do not question the value of changing a school’s name or knocking down a statue because that promises a simplistic fix that protects us from hard questions. We like it that way and it is unlikely anything that needs fixing will get fixed until that changes.

theamericanconservative.com

When the so-called war on domestic terrorism was declared quite early on in the Joe Biden Administration it provoked a wave of dissent from those who recognized that it would inevitably be used to stifle free speech and target constituencies that do not agree with the White House’s plans for sweeping changes in how the country is governed. Some rightly pointed out that every time the Federal government declares war on anyone or anything, to include drugs, poverty, or even Afghanistan, the results are generally counter-productive. But others noted that once fundamental liberties are taken away they will likely never return.

At first there were reports that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were increasing their investigations, many centered on the so-called U.S. Capitol “insurrection” of January 6th, which it now appears might have been in part incited by the FBI itself. The scope of the inquiries into how perfectly legal opposition groups operate and proliferate in the U.S. soon broadened to include opponents of much of the social engineering that the Democrats have brought with them to change the face of America. “Hate” or “extremist” groups and individuals became the targets with “hate” and “extremism” liberally defined as anyone whose identity or agenda did not coincide with that of the Democratic Party.

This effort to root out “domestic terrorism” needed a focus and that came with what was claimed to be an intelligence community joint assessment in March which labeled “white supremacists” and “anti-government extremists” as “the two most lethal elements of today’s domestic terrorism threat.” The White House echoed that judgement, claiming that the report’s conclusions had identified “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.”

The report’s conclusions were somewhat odd and it would be interesting to know who wrote it and whether there was any dissent over what it included. Presumably, no one was empowered to suggest that surging black violence over the past year is a major “domestic terror” issue. The conclusion therefore was skewed – while no one would deny that there have been violent incidents involving white racist group and individuals, they are far outnumbered by the deaths that have taken place due to the black lives matter movement, which both government and corporate America have embraced. Given that, the targeting of “white” groups must be considered to be essentially political, particularly insofar as the White House and Attorney General Merrick Garland have made every effort to link the “racist-extremists” to the Republican Party and more particularly to Donald Trump.

All of this came together last Tuesday when Garland released the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which had been a work in progress ordered by President Biden on his very first day in office. The plan is a curious mixture of enhancement of traditional law enforcement measures, to include calls for increased information-sharing between governments and technology sectors, as well as an infusion of over $100 million to hire more focused prosecutors, investigators, and intelligence specialists. Ominously, it also supports setting up mechanisms for screening government employees for ties to “extremist” and hate groups, meaning that anyone belonging to a group that praises the virtues of European nations or the white race will quickly become unemployed. Such screening is already taking place in the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department. The overall strategic objective is to attempt to prevent recruitment by extremist groups by, inter alia, increasing the law enforcement penetration and investigation of such entities while also marginalizing and punishing those individuals who do become members.

Biden’s war on domestic terrorism is so far lacking new legislation that will enable the authorities “to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists” just because they have been generically labeled extreme, but presumably that is coming. Interestingly, one would expect a Justice Department document to be race and gender neutral, but it is anything but that, again reenforcing that it is a political statement. It sees as a major objective for the government to directly confront “racism and bigotry as drivers of domestic terrorism.”

Merrick Garland spoke briefly to the media when he was releasing the document. He claimed that the robust government approach would not infringe on First and Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights, the rights of free speech and assembly and freedom from searches without due process. But then he oddly enough added that “The only way to find sustainable solutions is not only to disrupt and deter, but also to address the root causes of violence.” If one follows that line of reasoning and accepts that white supremacists are the major problem, then the assumption is that available resources will go to where the problem is: white people who oppose government policies, which might presumably include anyone who voted for Donald Trump.

Garland then added that the new strategy would be “focused on violence, not on ideology,” as “We do not prosecute people for their beliefs.” One might argue with that assertion as the policy clearly targets individuals for their beliefs, including that they have a constitutional right to be left alone by a meddling federal government. Ironically, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) responded to the document by complaining that its tactics employ “abusive counterterrorism tools that result in unfair and unjustified surveillance and targeting of Black and Brown people, particularly Muslims.” ACLU has it wrong and should have read the document more carefully: it actually targets white people.

Inevitably such a report that is seeking to pursue and transform most of the U.S. population produced a reaction. One of the most ridiculous came from Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who heads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University,  writing for The Atlantic,  who believes it is a “public health problem, not a security issue.” She wrote “The extremism we’re now seeing in the U.S. is ‘post-organizational,’ characterized by fluid online boundaries and a breakdown of formal groups and movements …. To fight this amorphous kind of radicalization, the federal government needs to see the problem as a whole-of-society, public-health issue.”

So if it is a public health issue the government will no doubt order development of a vaccine at great expense that will be mandatory for all Americans above the age of twelve. As Biden has identified the threat in racial terms, even though it is being claimed that no one’s rights will be violated, how will a law enforcement let off the leash to pursue the target of choice respond? What to do about the numerous white ethnic societies that exist in the United States to celebrate their heritage? Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and German-Americans watch out! And wait a minute, aren’t organizations like black lives matter already supporting a certain level of violence to bring about change? But presumably only “whites” will be surveilled because the government has identified them as the problem. Looking at the issues being raised and the solutions being suggested one might conclude that the real problem in America is not necessarily extremism among the people but rather extremism in the government. We have been taught undesired and quite frankly hypocritical lessons by four presidents in a row and perhaps it is now time that we be left alone! 

In his latest book, David French is worried we’re a divided nation in danger of splitting. Maybe that’s right.

By Micah MEADOWCROFT

Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, by David French (St. Martin’s Press: 2021), 288 pages.

David French should write TV shows. He’d be good at it. And I think he’d like it. His work is full of references to popular television and movies, from Game of Thrones to the Marvel franchise. He writes about pop culture as a fan, and for fans. The middle section of his latest book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore our Nation, is made up of two pieces of speculative fiction—“Calexit” and “Texit,”—that beg for the prestige streaming service treatment. I’d watch them with great enjoyment. I hope he sells the options.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

Two bad answers, those, so we are stuck with faction, and must control its effects. So far, so Madisonian. Control of effects, then and now, means federalism. This being a polemical book, French can be aspirational, so we’re talking about healthy federalism here.

Healthy federalism means that if Americans will fix what ails them, they could have “guaranteed civil liberties that didn’t waver or vary from state to state and they would enjoy a much greater degree of local control.” Sounds pretty good. That means a Texas for (self-identified) Texans and a California for (self-identified) Californians, but all of us Americans, so that “[t]he fundamental social compact would remain intact for all citizens, but public policy would be variable, customized for local interests and local values.” What stands in the way is a “quest for ultimate ideological victory” by America’s factions, left and right (but not the center, as suggested by a John Rawls epigraph and generous sprinkling of “reasonable person” throughout). French fears we’re forgetting we are “a pluralistic, liberal republic,” necessarily, as a national project. If you want to keep it up, “you need to defend the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself—even when others seek to use those rights to advance ideas you may dislike or even find repugnant,” and you also need to “defend the rights of communities and associations to govern themselves according to their values and their beliefs—so long as they don’t violate the fundamental rights of their dissenting members.” There’s your medicine.

French is concerned that if we don’t take our medicine then the fever pitch of our politics will continue higher and higher, until the United States of America as we know it passes away, victim, to brutally mix my metaphors, of a national divorce. But for a game participant in the long conservative tradition of Jeremiads—French mentions his pessimism and the unlikeliness of reconciliation regularly throughout—the book left me surprisingly uplifted and optimistic. Most of the first part of Divided We Fall is an enumeration of how much bitterly divides us and how likely secession seems, and leads up to that aforementioned middle section, sketching out two scenarios for the split. They’re both very compelling stories; they sound like reasonable speculation; and best of all they’re not too bad. Neither includes a protracted, bloody civil war. In our sickness, we’ll get sick enough of each other to let the other side go; our bureaucratic sclerosis and various legal complexities, as well as nuclear weapons, making it impossible for anything more devastatingly decisive to occur.

The American Revolution, French reminds us, “was an effort at cultural preservation, with the colonists’ rights grounded in their understanding of the rights of English citizens and their rage rooted in the denial of those rights.” It’s along similar lines a near-future California or Texas might decide to pack it up, according to French, inviting whomever wants to join them to come along. French is evenhanded enough to show us how both sides could be fulfilling parts of the liberal creed of the Founding in pursuing separation. He describes roads to dissolution that are full of high politics and moral intensity; it’s exciting and grand. Indeed, it seems as if the only objection possible to mostly peaceful secession of this kind would be that there is an organic historical continuity that should be maintained out of obligation to our ancestors. But if we do not all in fact share those American ancestors, and if America is really an idea anyway, an essentially liberal project, then putting a particularly Texan or Californian spin on that idea, in pursuit of fuller expression of that liberalism as red-staters or blue-staters understand it, seems not just understandable but perhaps even noble. The real spirit of the Founding could be made alive again in the creation of new republics, liberal and pluralistic in a way that might be more similar in their limits to the 18th-century colonies.

But, French asks, if we do eventually, sort-of amicably, file the divorce papers, then who will be the world police? No one. This seems to be the real motivation for objecting to secession. We’d be resigning ourselves and everyone else to a multipolar globe, a nuclear power among others: Russia and Germany will seek to balance each other in Europe; Japan, Taiwan, and Korea will have to hem China in themselves, with Australian and Indian help; Israel will have to bomb Iran all alone. And nuclear peace theory will apparently prevail, proliferation proving stabilizing as no one will risk mutually assured destruction. Like I said before, for prophecies of doom and gloom it all left me pretty cheered. After all, we’ve entered a multipolar world already; establishment incompetence and selfishness over the last 30 years bungled our chance at sustainable domination and bogged us down in stupid attempts to deny human nature, geography, and history (our hubris in Iraq has left its ancient Christian community nearly exterminated). As far as returns to normal or imperial declines go, the one French describes isn’t half bad. He anticipates this response, writing:

Truth be told, there were Americans who liked the new world. They had always resented international dependence on American arms and American lives. They were glad to pull back to their new borders and had little interest in crises overseas. They saw the new nations as more in keeping with the intentions of the original Founders of the old United States, avoiding foreign entanglements and staying out of foreign wars. Freed from the burden of defending the world, the new nations believed they could pour their resources into their own people.

To which all I can say is, yes. I’d like that new world just fine.

* * *

What does it mean that we are polarized? Like many Americans, French feels politically homeless now. Also like many Americans, he has a narrative of his eviction that blames one party more than the other. As he puts it, “Republicans don’t embrace Republican policies so much as they despise Democrats and Democratic policies. Democrats don’t embrace Democratic policies as much as they vote to defend themselves from Republicans.” There’s more social science for this in the concept of the Overton window. The frame, French says, has been expanded on both sides by these cascades of self-reinforcing group extremism. But it hasn’t. As a National Review alumnus he should know conservatives yell stop, as the left unspools the thread of progress. The left side of the window moves; those on the right are called reactionaries for a reason. But if you are glued, by disposition or by choice, to being in the center, the leftward march would make it look like the right is moving, too, a kind of redshift. Perhaps it’s best not to think of a window at all, but a sliding door; while one side wants to open it, the other side knows—though not with experts or studies to back up instinct and tradition—that it should stay closed against whatever is outside.

The American right is not driving this supposed group polarization. A clown extremist like Richard Spencer is functionally an employee of Mother Jones and the New York Times. Conservatives are trying to hold their ground, making an appeal to heaven. Some means are being reconsidered—there’s that old line about insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results—but the ends have stayed the same: a commitment to human nature and human order. That rhetoric from parts of the right can be cruel and vile is undeniable, and I can’t and won’t condone the abuse the French family has received, but it was ever thus—the Founding generation had abominable things to say to each other, too, and politics is not a TV show—and these are cruel and vile times. The issues are substantive and the stakes matter. Policies are not just ideas to be talked about. Children are dying, or being maimed for life.

About a third of the way through Divided We Fall, French describes a secret bipartisan discussion he was invited to participate in, one of those classic establishment ones that sets out to chat its way to a saved republic. He writes, “To preserve the peace, we left the substantive issues by the wayside—there were no debates about abortion, LGBT rights, or gun control. Instead, we asked if there was a way to fight about those issues without the nature of the debate itself further fracturing the country.” They got nowhere, and realized it when he brought up transgenderism. Yet gun control is the only one of those three French explores in any depth in his book; to preserve the possibility of peace, it seems, he leaves the substantive issues, debates about abortion and transgenderism, largely by the wayside.

As French reminds his readers, “Adams famously wrote that ‘our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’” Everyone involved in American public life agrees, whether they would use that language or not; the question is what religion and what morality will form the common people capable of being governed by our Constitution. These substantive issues are religious questions. It is a religious question, a fundamental one, to ask whether a child can be killed licitly, sacrificed on an altar to autonomy. It is a religious question, a fundamental one, to ask whether someone can be denied the full expression of who they are, can have their humanity diminished, constrained by old ignorance and bigotry and custom or even biology, when technology and progress make the affirmation and celebration of their true self possible. These religious questions meet in another one, whether a child can consent to puberty blockers that may well sterilize him or her, a gelded, consecrated acolyte to liberty. “I am deprived of my fundamental rights if that state squelches my ability to practice my faith, speak about my deepest beliefs, or enjoy the most basic rights of due process,” French writes. “Breaching the Bill of Rights breaks the compact between citizen and state.” It seems it’s hard to see, from the careful center, that this is exactly the claim being made on all sides; the left and right of “group polarization” believe this is exactly the threat, exactly the violation—they do not use the language of abolition and civil rights by accident.

Most voices crying in the wilderness are just a guy. The voice of reason, an adult in the room, can be wrong. French isn’t wrong that we are a bitterly factious country, or that Madison anticipated this. He isn’t wrong when he writes, “A nation with a strong common culture could perhaps survive a crisis like this. More accurately, a nation with a strong common culture likely wouldn’t reach such a crisis.” He is wrong, though, when he suggests proceduralism and discussion can itself be “a strong common culture” that can guide us through a fundamentally religious crisis. And because of that, he is wrong to think his proposal that “Google should be welcoming for dragonkin and conservatives—so long as the dragonkin and conservative do their jobs well and treat colleagues with dignity and respect,” has legs, or that moderation will restore healthy federalism. The federalism French wants is actively undermined by the very global dominance he believes America must maintain and stay united to maintain; the three losers in federalism are D.C. bureaucracy, the military industrial complex, and national and multinational corporations who want consistent regulation and convenient access for lobbying. Against power such as that, left or right, red or blue, we must indeed, as Ben Franklin said, “all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

I want federalism, too. I don’t want America to break up. But if we do go through a national divorce, I hope David French is right about it. It doesn’t sound too bad.

theamericanconservative.com

By Robert HAYDEN

As befits a successful peace agreement, the November 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war were marked on their twenty-fifth anniversary with a flurry of international conferences. Oddly enough, even though a general acknowledgment that the accords have kept the peace, most recommendations call for radically “revising Dayton,” on the grounds that Bosnia’s institutions are too cumbersome, prone to corruption and politically unfair to minorities. Even more oddly, many proposals have been made to address these problems by dismantling the very structures that have brought and maintained peace. Instead, NATO forces are supposed to impose upon the Croats and Serbs of Bosnia, half the population and majorities in 60 percent of its territory, the centralized state that they went to war to prevent. Since there are no indications that many Croats and Serbs will accept this, NATO troops would likely be regarded by them as an occupying force, a role that has not worked well in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The constitution of Bosnia & Herzegovina (B&H) that was included as annex 4 of the Dayton agreement is certainly complex. It divided the country into sub-territories, almost all of them dominated by only one of the country’s three main ethno-national communities: Bosniaks (known until 1993 as Muslims), Croats and Serbs.  These ethno-polities are linked in a confederal structure, with the central government holding very little authority, and even that conditioned on rarely achieved consensus from the representatives of the three communities.  Almost all governmental power resides at the levels of the ethno-territorial “entities”, one Serb, the other Bosniak and Croat, and within this last, among ten cantons, five Bosniak, three Croat, and two mixed.

Yet constitutionalizing the ethno-territorial separation of these three communities was the key not only to ending the war but to keeping the peace. The year 2020 was also the thirtieth anniversary of the free and fair elections at the end of communism, when the population of B&H partitioned itself into three mutually exclusive constituencies, Bosniak, Croat and Serb. A single party of each won almost all votes from that community, while those promising a social democracy of equal citizens did very poorly.  Since Bosniaks comprised 43 percent of the population, Serbs 34 percent and Croats 17 percent, forming a joint state would only be possible if the members of these communities agreed to it. Tragically, but not surprisingly, they did not: while Bosniaks wanted a strong central government, Croats and Serbs fought the war in order to avoid having such a centralized state imposed upon them. They accepted inclusion in B&H at Dayton only because the central government has very little authority over them.

Critics argue that this system of ethno-territorial power-sharing is undemocratic because it blocks citizens from forming non-ethnic majorities and makes it impossible for minority members to run for some offices. They also argue that corrupt ethno-national elites exploit the weakness of the central state in order to enrich themselves. And finally, they assert that the ease of blocking consensus prevents the central government from taking supposedly necessary decisions, notably joining NATO.

Bosnia’s many problems, however,  are not due to the Dayton constitution, or to its lack of accession to NATO. On Transparency International’s 2109 Corruption Perceptions Index, BiH scored better than NATO members Albania and North Macedonia, only slightly worse than Serbia and NATO founding member Turkey, and far better than Iraq and Afghanistan, where the long-term U.S. occupations have led to less viable states than B&H. None of these other countries has the Dayton system, though perhaps Iraq would have done better if then-Senator Joe Biden’s 2006 proposal to use Dayton as a model for its restructuring had been implemented.

And those putative anti-nationalist citizens who are disenfranchised by Dayton’s ethno-confederalism are very rarely found outside of debates in policy circles.  In the 2013 census, nearly 97 percent of the population declared themselves Bosniak, Croat, or Serb. Only 1 percent declared themselves to be ethno-nationally neutral “Bosnians.” The three mutually exclusive ethnonational constituencies thus accurately reflect the social divisions of the society.

The war that was ended at Dayton was fought by three ethnoreligious armies and for three different countries: the overwhelmingly Muslim Army of B&H for all of Bosnia, including those places with few Muslims; the Army of Republika Srpska for a Serbian Fatherland composed of only parts of B&H, and the Croatian Defense Council for a Croatian Homeland that included only other parts of B&H. The territorial divisions at Dayton mainly followed the front lines between these forces, whose dead are now commemorated separately, and rarely in the same town, as Muslim “martyrs” (šehidi, from Arabic), or Croat “defenders,” or Serb “fighters.”

The Dayton constitution essentially proclaimed this house divided to be a condominium, despite two of three tenants rejecting co-ownership. The condominium can be continued only if those two tenants, the Croats and Serbs of B&H, are satisfied that the third one will not try to take over their parts of the house. Most of the proposals being made by denizens of U.S. think tanks to “fix Bosnia” are to have NATO help the Bosniaks in such a takeover, by imposing a centralized government on the Croats and Serbs. It is difficult to imagine a better way to destabilize Bosnia. It is even more difficult to find a defensible reason for such proposals.

Bosnia isn’t the way it is because of Dayton; rather, Dayton is the way it is because of the nature of Bosnian society. The Dayton system has kept the peace for twenty-five years. Why destabilize Bosnia now?

nationalinterest.org

President Joe Biden has already made it clear that legislation that will be used to combat what he refers to as “domestic terrorism” will be a top priority. That means that his inaugural speech pledge to be the president for “all Americans” appears to apply except for those who don’t agree with him. Former Barack Obama CIA Chief John Brennan, who is clearly in the loop on developments, puts it this way in a tweet where he describes how the new Administration’s spooks “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about [the] insurgency” [that includes] “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

The United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which includes freedom of speech and association, has been under siege for some time now. Government has always used its assumed powers conferred by a claimed state of emergency to deprive citizens of their rights. During the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln imprisoned critics of the conflict. Woodrow Wilson’s First World War administration brought in the Espionage Act, which has since been used to convict whistleblowers without having to present the level of evidence that would be required in a normal civil trial. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt erected concentration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans whose only crime consisted of being Japanese.

But perhaps the greatest attack on the Bill of Rights is more recent, the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts that were passed into law as a consequence of the “Global War on Terror” launched by President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Together with the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which includes a court designed to speed up the warrant approval process, ordinary citizens found themselves on the receiving end of surveillance for which there was little or no justification in terms of probable cause. The FISA process was even notoriously abused in the national security apparatus attempt to derail the campaign of Donald Trump. The tools are in place for ever more government mischief and no one should doubt that the Democrats are just as capable of ignoring constitutional safeguards as the Republicans have been.

What makes the current state of war against “terrorism” so dangerous is that the national security apparatus has been politicized while the government has learned that labeling someone or some entity terrorist or even a “material supporter of terrorism” is infinitely elastic. That is precisely why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has frequently called out opponents and attached to them the terrorist label, since it then permits other steps that might otherwise be challenged.

And there is also the fact that the playing field has changed since the First and Second World Wars. The government has technical capabilities that were never dreamed of in most of the twentieth century. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers have demonstrated how the government routinely ignores constitutional limits on its ability to interfere in the lives of ordinary citizens. Not only that, it can monitor the lives of millions of Americans simultaneously, giving the police and intelligence agencies the power to mount “fishing expeditions” that literally invade the phones, computers and conversations of people who have not been guilty of any crime.

The authorizations that already exist will be further weaponized to go after dissidents as identified by the new regime. A bill introduced by House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff “would take existing War on Terror legislation and simply amend it to say we can now do that within the U.S.” It would be combined with previous legislation, including former president Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of terrorism without a trial. Obama and Brennan also assumed an illegal and unconstitutional right to act as judge, jury and executioner-by-drone of American citizens overseas. Given those precedents, a bill like Schiff’s would free the national security community’s hands even more.

The new body of legislation would mean increased secret legal surveillance, suppression of free speech, indefinite incarceration without charges, torture, and even perhaps assassination. If it sounds like totalitarianism it should. There ought to be particular concern that the plan of the Biden Administration to go after so-called domestic terrorists will be this generation’s version of either Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The incident that took place at the Capitol Building on January 6^th (already being referred to as 1/6 in some circles) has been exaggerated beyond all recognition and is now being regularly referred to as an “insurrection,” which it was not, by both politicians and the mainstream media. The language used to vilify what are alleged to be “right wing” and “white supremacist” enemies of the state is astonishing and the technology is keeping pace to turn the United States and other countries into police states to ensure that citizens will do the bidding of government.

To cite only one example of how technology can drive the process, Biden has several times threatened to initiate and enforce something like a nationwide lockdown to defeat the coronavirus. Can he do it? Yes, the tools are already in place. Facial recognition technology is highly developed and deployable in the numerous surveillance cameras that are being installed. Wrist bands are being developed overseas that are designed to compel compliance with government dictates on pandemic measures enforcement. If you have been told to stay home and are instead walking the dog your wrist band will tell the police and they will find and arrest you.

And, as the old saying goes, the Revolution is already beginning to devour its own children. Universities and schools are insisting that teachers actively support both publicly and privately the new “equity and diversity” order while police departments are purging themselves of officers suspected of being associated with conservative groups, meaning that something like a loyalty test might soon become common. Recently the Defense Department has begun intensive monitoring of the social media of military personnel to identify dissenters, as is already done in some large companies with their employees. The new Director of National Intelligence hardliner Avril Haines has already confirmed that her agency will participate in a public threat assessment of QAnon, which she has described as America’s Greatest Threat.

Haines has also suggested that intelligence agencies will “look at connections between folks in the U.S. and externally and foreign” while Biden on his first full day in office has pledged to thoroughly investigate claims about Russian hacking of U.S. infrastructure and government sites, the poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, and the story that Russia offered the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It could be Russiagate all over again, with a claimed foreign threat being used to conceal civil rights violations being committed by the federal government at home.

And, of course, the new policies will reflect the biases of the new rulers. Right wing “terror” will be targeted even though the list of actual right-wing driven outrages is embarassingly short. Groups like Black Lives Matter will be untouchable in spite of their major role in last year’s rioting, arson, looting and violence that caused $2 billion damage and killed as many as thirty because they are in all but name part of the Democratic Party. Antifa, which rioted in Portland last week, will also get a pass – the media routinely describes leftist violence as “mainly peaceful” and only sometimes concedes that some “property damage” occurred.

It is Trump supporters and conservatives in general who are being shown the exit door, to include calls for “deprogramming them”. The Washington Post’s Zionist harpy Jennifer Rubin recently declared that “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.” She also echoed calls for making them unemployable, “I think it’s absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning, any news organization, or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people.”

As the notably clueless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in 2006 while Lebanon was getting bombed and shelled by Israel, “We are seeing the birth pangs of a new Middle East…” so too are we Americans seeing something new and strange emerging from the ruins of Trumpdom. It will not be pretty and after it is over Americans will enjoy a lot fewer liberties, that is for sure.

Today, the Republican Party has taken up the banner of the Know Nothings. Rather than maintain secrecy about their policies and intentions, the modern-day “Know Nothings” are quite bold in avowing their beliefs in racism, anti-democracy, support for political terrorism and assassinations, and other far-out ideas. The only reason they can share the name “Know Nothings” with their 19^th century forebearers is that the neo-Republicans actually “know nothing.” They know nothing about the U.S. Constitution, as witnessed by their attempt to upend the 2020 presidential election. Additionally, they know nothing about U.S. history, including the anti-fascist policies of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which led the United States and its allies to victory over fascism in World War II.

What is most lost on the modern-day Know Nothings is the concept of the loyal opposition. The loyal opposition is a cornerstone of democratic government, the United States having adopted the concept from British parliamentary government. A loyal opposition has proven absolutely necessary during times of war and international crisis. The precept that “politics ends at the water’s edge” marked many administrations, including that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.

In matters dealing with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, President Roosevelt found that he could count on the support of not only Senate Republican Minority Leader Charles McNary, but also Roosevelt’s 1940 Republican presidential opponent, Wendell Willkie. McNary was Willkie’s vice-presidential running mate. The idea that either Willkie or McNary would side with the seditionist “American Firsters,” led by Charles Lindbergh, was preposterous. Willkie and McNary understood that politics did end at the water’s edge when it came to the fight against fascism. Similarly, President Johnson was able to count on the support – misguided as it was – of Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen on foreign policy matters, including the increasingly controversial war in Southeast Asia. It was generally the same situation between President Jimmy Carter and Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker, Jr., President Reagan and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Robert Byrd and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and President George W. Bush and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid.

It was the rise of House of Representatives Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich, a current advocate for the policies of Donald Trump, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who did everything he could to block President Barack Obama – within and outside the water’s edge – that led the way for the resurgence of the Know Nothings as a potent and dangerous political force in the United States.

Throughout the former British Commonwealth there are Leaders of the Loyal Opposition. “Loyal” is inserted because these opposition political parties and leaders do not want to be seen as disloyal to the nation, whether the nation is in the form of a monarch (or governor-general representing the monarch), constitution, or constitutional head of state.

While the United States does not have a formal position of loyal opposition leader, the concept of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution by political leaders representing the majority or minority parties in the Congress has only been tested a few times in American history. One of those times was in 1861, when ten U.S. senators and three House members were expelled from the Congress after the states they represented seceded from the United States. In February 1862, an additional three senators were expelled for supporting the secessionist Confederacy. Their names live in infamy in the annals of American history: Former Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, Charles Mitchel and William Sebastian of Arkansas, John Hemphill and Louis Wigfall of Texas, James Mason and Robert Hunter of Virginia, Thomas Clingman and Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, James Chestnut of South Carolina, Alfred Nicholson of Tennessee, Trusten Polk and Waldo Johnson of Missouri, and Jesse Bright of Indiana. Joining them is expulsion were House members John Bullock Clark and John Reid of Missouri and Henry Burnett of Kentucky.

Although Republican Senate Majority Leader McConnell has recognized Joe Biden’s electoral victory, at least twelve members of his caucus decided to vote against Biden’s electoral certification as president-elect. These seditionist Republican senators richly deserve the very same humiliation brought down on their Civil War counterparts and their names should forever be linked to treachery: Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Braun of Indiana, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Not only do these Senate insurrectionists against the Constitution largely represent the same bastion of sedition of the Old Confederacy but they are joined in the U.S. House by some 120 other neo-Know Nothings led by such notable intellectual lightweights as Matt Gaetz of Florida, Mo Brooks of Alabama Louis Gohmert of Florida, and the Adolf Hitler-admiring Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

In recent times, there has not been a single instance of an official leader of the loyal opposition in a parliamentary democracy advocating the overthrow of a duly elected government. By challenging the Electoral College and Constitution, the Republican renegades in the Senate and House are moving the United States in the direction of an unstable regime incapable of constitutional government.

Such is the case with Papua New Guinea, a nation governed under parliamentary democratic rules but descending over the past several years into tribal conflict. Prime Minister James Marape has called opposition Members of Parliament “constitutional rapists” and the leader of the opposition, Belden Namah, a “political scumbag.” Namah, for his part, has proclaimed himself a “Huli chief” and challenged the prime minister to a fight to the death on the battlegrounds of Waigani, the location of the National Parliament. Namah is anything but a member of the “loyal opposition.” He would find himself completely at home with the seditionists of the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate and House, whose own political tribal politics match the actual tribal political intrigues of Papua New Guinea.

With Donald Trump calling for far-right neo-Nazi and white supremacists to converge on Washington to overturn a democratic election, he is no better than the self-proclaimed Huli chief in Papua New Guinea. The only difference is that Trump is such a coward, he would never endanger his own life. He does feel comfortable in endangering the lives of others in pursuit of his extra-constitutional plots and ploys.

The modern-day “Know Nothings” who comprise the majority in the Republican Party truly define the phrase, for they know nothing about the U.S. Constitution, democracy, the basics of political science and constitutional law, parliamentary procedures of order, or American history. These tattered moronic remnants of what was once the loyal opposition during Democratic administrations of the past are more interested in establishing an undemocratic idiocracy than in maintaining American democracy.

According to a left-wing propaganda narrative that you can read in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and similar outlets, the violence in Congress that occurred in the afternoon of January 6 was the culmination of a long series of outrages by President Donald Trump. When he lost the November election to Joe Biden, he could not accept his loss. He kept making baseless claims that he had won the election and accused Biden supporters of using fake ballots and rigged voting machines to inflate the totals for Biden. He kept filing lawsuits to get parts of the verdict overturned, but the courts rejected all his claims. He thought he still had a chance on January 6, when the electoral votes are counted in Congress. He wanted Vice President Mike Pence to violate the Constitution. Although Pence has the purely ceremonial role of presiding over the joint session, he wanted Pence to toss out slates of electors who opposed him, or at least send them back to the states for recertification. Pence refused to violate the Constitution. When Trump found out about it, he was so angry that he incited part of a rally supporting him to storm Congress and shut down the session. Because of him, several people were killed. He is a sore loser who should be removed from office immediately and sent to prison for sedition as well.

Every word of this narrative is false. Let’s take one item out of chronological order, because it has gotten so much attention. It’s alleged that Trump became enraged at Pence because Pence wouldn’t violate the Constitution. In fact, there is a good case that what Trump was asking Pence to do was perfectly legitimate. As John Yoo and Robert Delahunty pointed out in an article in the American Mind last October 19,

We suggest that the Vice President’s role is not the merely ministerial one of opening the ballots and then handing them over (to whom?) to be counted. Though the 12th Amendment describes the counting in the passive voice, the language seems to envisage a single, continuous process in which the Vice President both opens and counts the votes.

The check on error or fraud in the count is that the Vice President’s activities are to be done publicly, “in the presence” of Congress. And if “counting” the electors’ votes is the Vice President’s responsibility, then the inextricably intertwined responsibility for judging the validity of those votes must also be his.

If that reading is correct, then the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional. Congress cannot use legislation to dictate how any individual branch of government is to perform its unique duties: Congress could not prescribe how future Senates should conduct an impeachment trial, for example. Similarly, we think the better reading is that Vice President Pence would decide between competing slates of electors chosen by state legislators and governors, or decide whether to count votes that remain in litigation.

Yoo is a controversial person, but there’s no doubt he is a constitutional law scholar in good standing.

Well, you might say, what right did Trump have to blow up on Pence just because Pence disagreed with his understanding of the Constitution? The answer to that is simple. Pence had assured Trump that he accepted his claim that there were irregularities in the voting. He said at a rally in Georgia on January 4, just two days before the count,

that the case for widespread election fraud would be made to the American people when Congress meets this week to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump.

“We’ve all got our doubts about the last election. I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities,” Pence said at an indoor congregation at Rock Springs Church in Milner, Ga., in support of Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in runoff elections there.

Pence, who by law will be tasked with declaring a winner of the Electoral College vote, seemed to leave open the possibility that Trump could still remain in power for a second term.

“Come this Wednesday,” he said, referring to the impending certification of election results, “we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the evidence.”

The election was in fact stolen from him. It’s easy to hack voting machines, such as those made by Dominion, to change vote totals. When I say this, I’m not relying on a source the Left will dismiss as fantasies from conspiracy-theory nuts. According to a story published by NBC News last year,

It was an assurance designed to bolster public confidence in the way America votes: Voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”

Then Acting Undersecretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security Jeanette Manfra said those words in 2017, testifying before Congress while she was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system.

So many government officials like Manfra have said the same thing over the last few years that it is commonly accepted as gospel by most Americans. Behind it is the notion that if voting systems are not online, hackers will have a harder time compromising them.

But that is an overstatement, according to a team of 10 independent cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections. While the voting machines themselves are not designed to be online, the larger voting systems in many states end up there, putting the voting process at risk.

That team of election security experts say[s] that last summer, they discovered some systems are, in fact, online.

“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical advisor at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News.

“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” he said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to to report their results.” …

The three largest voting manufacturing companies—Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic—have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The reason? So that unofficial election results can more quickly be relayed to the public. Those modems connect to cell phone networks, which, in turn, are connected to the internet.

Trump has every right to be suspicious. Shouldn’t there be a full and impartial investigation by recognized experts of whether fraud occurred? If the Biden camp thinks the election was fair and honest, shouldn’t they have welcomed a full investigation? But of course they didn’t. And this type of fraud is just one of many others, such as truckloads of Biden ballots arriving after it looked like Trump was winning, in just the right numbers to give Biden the victory.

When we look at Trump’s complaints, we need to bear one vital fact in mind. As Mike Davis noted in New Left Review, November–December 2020, p. 5, “Biden eked out a slim victory, in some states only by microscopic margins, that won him 306 electoral votes, the same as Trump four years ago. A mere 256,000 vote in five key states purchased 73 of those votes.” This is why Trump is right: because just a few votes could change the outcome, and because there was a lot of apparent fraud, a full investigation was needed.

But, some people might say, this doesn’t excuse Trump. Didn’t he incite people at a rally to invade the sacred halls of Congress? Well, in the first place, the halls of Congress aren’t “sacred”. They belong to the people. And Trump didn’t incite violence. Not at all. He wanted a peaceful protest, and this is what he got, aside from a few antifa activists who crashed the protest. They had been bused into Washington earlier.

According to in the American Thinker published on January 7, January 6th’s events are being seized on as a game-changer, leading to calls to invoke the 25th Amendment; calls to impeach and remove President Trump; and efforts to discredit Trump, his supporters, and conservatism. It has distracted attention from issues around the legitimacy of voting procedures in several key states and guaranteed the Electoral College vote just before 4 A.M. that ratified Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s inauguration as president and vice president.

Applying the classic legal question ‘cui bono?’ (‘who benefits?’), it is clear that Democrats, anti-Trump establishment Republicans, the leftist media, and TDS-sufferers all are victorious.

Disturbing video available (for now) on Twitter shows Capitol Police allowing demonstrators to enter the Capitol grounds. . . Elsewhere at the Capitol, the police sent out to hold a perimeter were unable to hold off mobs.

Why was the United States Capitol left so vulnerable?

After the demonstrators were led in, a policeman killed a young woman at point-blank rage. The police and Secret Service ended the session of Congress, not the peaceful demonstrators. To give themselves cover, they imported a few Antifa agitators.

Why did they do this? I suggest they did this for a reason, which will become clear if we ask, What was going on just before the demonstration? The members of Congress were about to hear a debate on the objections raised against the votes in the swing states. The American people would have been able to hear the evidence for themselves. This had to be stopped. By stopping the session for about six hours, the debate was shifted to the very late evening hours of January 6 and early morning hours of January 7, when very few people were watching. Besides, all the attention was now on the protest rather than the fraudulent voting.

What can be done now? President Trump should not urge us all to “come together.” Instead, he should support secession. States and communities that support Trump are too far apart from supporters of the Biden-Harris BLM camorra to live in a united country. “Bear not the yoke with unbelievers. For what participation hath justice with injustice? Or what fellowship hath light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14 [Douay-Rheims Bible])

lewrockwell.com

Interview

Question: The last US presidential election seems to have been unprecedented in its controversy and bipartisan bitterness. In your long view of American history, has there been anything like the turmoil that has swept over the US in recent months?

Colin Cavell: Yes, the election of 2020 is, perhaps, as bitter and divisive as the presidential campaign of 1860 where the Republican Party platform argued against the expansion of slavery into the territories of the United States. Presaging the impending rupture of the Union, the Democratic Party ended up holding three different conventions, one in Charleston, South Carolina – which adjourned due to its inability to reconcile the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that the Constitution protected slavery in all United States territories, with the more moderate position of presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas who had advocated in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act his doctrine of “popular sovereignty” allowing settlers in each territory to decide whether to allow slavery or not. A pro-slavery southern delegation walked out of the Convention when the party refused to include in its platform a plank stipulating that no government had the power to outlaw slavery in the territories.  Douglas ended up garnering the presidential nomination in the reconvened Democratic Convention further north in Baltimore, Maryland three weeks later only to have the more pro-slavery delegates bolt from this second convention and meet in a third Democratic Convention, also in Baltimore, to put forward the presidential candidacy of John C. Breckinridge while proclaiming in its platform to defend the right of United States citizens “to settle with their property” in United States territories, “without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation”. Thus, while the continuation or abolishment of slavery stood at the apex of the national debate in the 1860 presidential campaign, Abraham Lincoln rode to the office of the Presidency by proclaiming to preserve the Union.

The 2020 U.S. Presidential election pitted Donald J. Trump – a narcissistic capitalist able to mobilize a cult following against Joe Biden – considered a stable representative of corporate capital.  Though the electoral count favored the ticket of Biden and his vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the Trump-Pence team assailed the vote-count as fraudulent, thus calling into question the democratic foundation of the United States. And while Trump has attempted to overturn the election through over 60 legal court suits, on the premise that the election was fraudulently conducted and votes tallied, all of which were dismissed, he continues this effort as we head towards the inauguration date of January 20, 2021 for the next president. For his part, Biden strives to act as a voice of reason, sanity, stability, and the legitimate president necessary to preserve the union.

Question:  What do you make of claims by incumbent President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters of massive election fraud? In particular, claims that computer systems were rigged to flip votes en masse in favor of Democrat candidate Joe Biden?

Colin Cavell: Almost all newspapers in the US as well as the mainstream media – including networks MSNBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, and, even, Fox – have all proclaimed the legitimacy of the November 3, 2020 election results as favoring the Biden/Harris team with a vote of 81,281,888 to a vote-count of 74,223,251 for the Trump/Pence ticket, a difference of 7,058,637 votes, translating into an Electoral College victory for the Biden/Harris team of 306 to 232 for the Trump/Pence ticket. Evidential claims presented in lawsuits brought by the Trump/Pence campaign have been ruled as lacking substance in nearly every court case brought. What this indicates is that, at this point, most institutional loci within the US political system deems the 2020 election results as legitimate. Nonetheless, Trump has energized his 74 million followers to at least question the election results, with polls indicating that at least half of his base believes Trump’s claims that the results are part of a grand conspiracy on the part of the Democratic Party and their “deep state” (that is, intelligence agency operatives) allies to rig the election against him.

Question:  There seems to be a surge in conspiratorial-type thinking in the U.S., from election fraud, to claims that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, to the QAnon phenomenon, and many other abstract ideas. What explains this tendency for mass delusion in the US?

Colin Cavell: Conspiracy thinking is awash in the U.S. at present, as trust in the political system is at an all-time low. Trust is a quality that is earned, and the class-divided system of the United States has failed tremendously to engender such in the body politique. When average folks cannot even agree on what are the prevailing facts, it is a logical defense mechanism for them to seek other explanations for why events happen as they do. Each side projects onto the other as suffering from delusional thinking, and each side derides the rational capacity of the other to logically differentiate cause from effect and the relationship between the two.

Question:  Do you think Trump can succeed in overturning the election result? The next constitutional stage in the electoral process is for the Congress to preside over tallying Electoral College votes on January 6. It is reported that Republican politicians are suing Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the Electoral College votes favoring Biden. Is that legally feasible?

Colin Cavell: Trump has, so far, indicated that he is determined to overturn the November 3, 2020 election results and the subsequent December 14, 2020 actual Electoral College vote. On January 6, 2021, Congress must certify the Electoral College vote, and this is Trump’s next step in his attempt to overturn the vote. He has called for a massive political rally in Washington, D.C. to coincide with this vote on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. To date, a number of House and Senate Republicans have announced that they will challenge the vote during the certification process, with the latest statement calling for the setting up of a commission to conduct a ten-day audit of the election results in disputed states.  If this occurs, then the Trump attempt to overturn the election result will gain new life.

Question:  Some observers would say that what Trump and his supporters have endeavored to do is stage a coup against the democratic will. Would you agree with that description? It seems a remarkably dangerous development whereby the United States is flirting with fascism.

Colin Cavell: From the perspective of the Democratic Party, the courts, the mainstream media, and other institutions in the U.S., Trump’s efforts represent an attempt at a coup d’état. From the Trump and supporters’ perspective, they are acting to “save democracy” by ensuring that Trump be declared the victor in the 2020 presidential election. The ruling capitalist class has long been at war with democracy in the U.S., and their emplacement of Trump into the office of the presidency in 2016 was a clear slap in the face of whatever democratic veneer the U.S. had previously displayed, for Trump, at best, is a proto-fascist.

Question:  Assuming Joe Biden is inaugurated as president this week on January 6 as per the custom in the US, how do you see his domestic policies for the economy impacting? He seems to have promptly ditched more progressive Democrats from his incoming cabinet, suggesting a conservative economic policy is in store.

Colin Cavell: The inauguration date for the next president, as per the U.S. Constitution, is January 20, 2021, a change enacted with the Twentieth Amendment in 1933.  Should Biden take office on January 20, 2021, it appears, at present, that his administration policies will resemble those of the Obama administration and reflect centrist, corporate-approved programs and initiatives to attempt to unify the divided country by claiming to represent reason, stability, and good manners – that is, with few if any references to racist tropes, xenophobic incitements, the denigration of feminine pulchritude or actions, and a plethora of incendiary and outrageous tweets throughout the night as Trump was prone to do for the past four years.

Question:  It has been said that if Biden does not address the fundamental economic and social problems in the U.S. from endemic poverty, unemployment and inequality, his next four years could result in the comeback of Trump or a similar demagogic figure. How do you see it?

Colin Cavell: Failing to address the massive problems of unemployment and lack of jobs, failing to address the massive wealth gap between rich and poor, failing to ensure adequate healthcare to millions, failing to protect the American public during the course of the current Covid-19 pandemic, failing to address the festering racial divisions, especially with regards to the criminal justice system, and failing to instill a unified trust in the governing apparatus and ruling economic class, then, yes, Biden will preside over a collapsing economy, a divided country, and a distrustful citizenry, and thus open the door to either another term for an older Trump or some other demagogue or outright fascist to “restore order”.

Question:  On foreign policy and international relations, what do you expect to see from a Biden administration regarding: Russia, China, Iran and US militarism more generally?

Colin Cavell: Biden is bringing into his cabinet imperialist adventurers from the prior Obama administration; thus, this indicates that the Biden administration will likely restart new or reinvigorate regime-change wars in the Middle East, pit Russia as the primeval foreign boogeyman to fear in an attempt to unify the country, and return to a Pax Americana “civilization” coalition foreign policy built upon multilateral agreements which advance U.S. hegemonic interests and the empire. There will likely be less hostile rhetoric towards China, though Hong Kong, Taiwan, and North Korea will remain foci of criticism. As regards Iran, all will be watching whether Biden attempts to reinvigorate the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord or sides with Saudi Arabia and Israel to continue U.S. efforts to undermine the Iranian government.

NOTE: Colin S. Cavell is a tenured Full Professor of Political Science at Bluefield State College, West Virginia. He earned his Doctorate of Philosophy degree in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2001. He has previously taught at several academic institutions across the US and internationally.