Does it matter to you whether or not justices are politically motivated?
Analysis by WP's Philip Bump
Bill Barr doesn’t mind a little autocracy if your politics are right...
“We’re not enforcing our borders, we have open borders,” he continued a bit later. “We have lawlessness in our cities. We have regulations coming fast and furious. So, telling people what kind of stoves they can use, and what kinds of cars they have to drive, and eliminating cars and so forth. Yes, those are the threats to democracy.”
This is patter straight out of the right-wing media bubble. The stove thing, the crime thing, the border thing.
In December 2020, when the pandemic illustrated the extraordinary disadvantage created by the inability of those in low-income households to communicate online with schools and medical professionals, then-president Trump signed into law an emergency program to provide funding to make internet access affordable. In 2021, Congress turned that idea into the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made it part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law).
The program has enabled 23 million American households to afford high-speed internet. Those benefiting from it are primarily military families, older Americans, and Black, Latino, and Indigenous households. In February, the Brookings Institution cited economics studies that said each dollar invested in the ACP increases the nation’s gross domestic product by $3.89 and that the program has led to increased employment and higher wages. It also cuts the costs of healthcare by replacing some in-person emergency room visits with telehealth.
Slightly more of the money in the program goes to districts represented by Republicans than to those represented by Democrats, which might explain why 79% of voters want to continue the program: 96% of Democrats, 78% of Independents, and 62% of Republicans.
But the ACP is running out of money. Back in October 2023, President Joe Biden asked Congress to fund it until the end of 2024, and a bipartisan bill that would extend the program has been introduced in both chambers of Congress. Each remains in an appropriation committee. As of today, the House bill has 228 co-sponsors, the Senate bill has 5.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said he supports the measure, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has not commented. Judd Legum pointed out in Popular Information today that the 2025 budget of the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC) calls for allowing the ACP to expire, saying the RSC “stands against corporate welfare and government handouts that disincentivize prosperity.” More than four fifths of House Republicans belong to the RSC.
The differences between the parties’ apparent positions on the ACP illustrates the difference in their political ideology. Republicans object to government investment in society and believe market forces should be left to operate without interference in order to promote prosperity. Democrats believe that economic prosperity comes from the hard work of ordinary people and that government investment in society clears the way for those people to succeed.
Wealth growth for young Americans was stagnant for decades before the pandemic, but it has suddenly experienced a historic rise. In Axios, Emily Peck reported that household wealth for Americans under 40 has risen an astonishing 49% from where it was before the pandemic. Wealth doubled for those born between 1981 and 1996. This increase in household wealth comes in part from rising home prices and more financial assets, as well as less debt, which fell by $5,000 per household. Households of those under 35 have shown a 140% increase in median wealth in the same time period.
Brendan Duke and Christian E. Weller, the authors of the Center for American Progress study from which Peck’s information came, say this wealth growth is not tied to a few super-high earners, but rather reflects broad based improvement. “A simple reason for the strong wealth growth is that younger Americans are experiencing an especially low unemployment rate and especially strong wage growth,” Duke and Weller note, “making it easier for them to accumulate wealth.”
In honor of National Small Business Week, Vice President Kamala Harris today launched an “economic opportunity tour” in Atlanta, where she highlighted the federal government’s $158 million investment in “The Stitch,” a project to reconnect midtown to downtown Atlanta. This project is an initial attempt to reconnect the communities that were severed by the construction of highways, often cutting minority or poor neighborhoods off from jobs and driving away businesses while saddling the neighborhoods with pollution.
While some advocates wanted to use the $3.3 billion available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to take down highways altogether, the administration has shied away from such a dramatic revision and has instead focused on creating new public green spaces, bike paths, access to public transportation, safety features, and so on, to link and improve neighborhoods. More than 40 states so far have received funding under this program.
The administration says that projects like The Stitch will promote economic growth in neighborhoods that have borne the burden of past infrastructure projects. Today it touted the extraordinary growth of small businesses since Biden and Harris took office, noting that their economic agenda “has driven the first, second and third strongest years of new business application rates on record—and is on pace for the fourth—with Americans filing a record 17.2 million new business applications.”
Small businesses owned by historically underserved populations “are growing at near-historic rates, with Black business ownership growing at the fastest pace in 30 years and Latino business ownership growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade,” the White House said. The administration has invested in small businesses, working to level the playing field between them and their larger counterparts by making capital and information available, while working to reform the tax code so that corporations pay as much in taxes as small businesses do.
“Small businesses are the engines of the economy,” the White House said today. “As President Biden says, every time someone starts a new small business, it’s an act of hope and confidence in our economy.”
In place of economic growth, Republicans have focused on whipping up supporters by insisting that Democrats are corrupt and are cheating to take over the government. Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted in February that “Fox News host Sean Hannity and his House Republican allies spent 2023 trying to manufacture an impeachable offense against President Joe Biden out of their fact-free obsession with the president’s son, Hunter.” At least 325 segments about Hunter Biden appeared on Hannity’s show in 2023; 220 had at least one false or misleading claim. The most frequent purveyor of that disinformation was Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, who went onto the show 43 times to talk about the president’s son.
The House impeachment inquiry was really designed to salt right-wing media channels with lies about the president and, in the end, turned up nothing other than witnesses who said President Biden was not involved in his son’s businesses. Then the Republicans’ key witness, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted for lying about the Bidens, and then he turned out to be in contact with Russian spies.
Comer has been quietly backing away from impeaching the president until today, when he popped back into the spotlight after news broke that Hunter Biden’s lawyer has threatened to sue the Fox News Channel (FNC) for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” His lawyer’s letter calls out FNC’s promotion of Smirnov’s false allegations.
Last year, FNC paid almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Legal pressure on companies lying for profit has proved successful. Two weeks ago, the far-right media channel One America News Network (OAN) settled a defamation lawsuit with the voting technology company Smartmatic. Today, OAN retracted a false story about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, apparently made to discredit the testimony of Stormy Daniels about her sexual encounters with Trump. OAN suggested that it was Cohen rather than Trump who had a relationship with Daniels, and that Cohen had extorted Trump over the story.
“OAN apologizes to Mr. Cohen for any harm the publication may have caused him,” the network wrote in a statement. “To be clear, no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels were having an affair and no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen ‘cooked up’ the scheme to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election.”
People close to Mr. Trump have said he likes Mr. Blanche, although they acknowledge that the warmth will probably cool if there is a guilty verdict.
This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again.
Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.”
“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.”
Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.
Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective.
Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time.
President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign.
In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States.
By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”
In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative.
News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series.
Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts.
For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.
Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.”
Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.”
What would Trump’s Israel-Gaza policy be if he were re-elected?
The ex-president unambiguously favored Israel while in office but recent statements have been inconsistent and evasive
At a windy rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, earlier this month, Donald Trump began his hour-long address by sending prayers and support to Israel as it withstood Iran’s aerial assault.
“They’re under attack right now,” the former president and presumptive Republican nominee said. “That’s because we show great weakness.”
Trump, who often describes himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had”, blamed Tehran’s bombardment – and the entire bloody crisis – on Joe Biden, claiming it “would not have happened” if he had been president.
Yet moments later, he appeared to agree with his supporters when they began chanting “Genocide Joe” – a term more commonly invoked by activists protesting against Biden’s abiding support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians and pushed the territory to the brink of famine.
“They’re not wrong,” the former president said, as he stepped away from the lectern and let them chant. (His campaign did not respond to a request for clarification on the remark.)
More than six months into the ruinous Middle East conflict, amid fears of a wider regional war, Trump has offered plenty of criticism – of Biden, his successor and all-but-certain rival for the White House, and of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – but few details on what he might have done differently.
Trump’s relative silence leaves major questions about how he would act if he were to inherit the conflict in January.
His campaign did not directly respond to a list of policy questions, among them whether he supports a ceasefire, how he would handle hostage negotiations, whether there are any circumstances under which he would consider conditioning aid to Israel and whether he supports a two-state solution, an idea some of his former advisers categorically reject.
Yet in his muddled commentary, observers see the same motivations that shaped his first-term foreign policy: personal grievance and political opportunism, as discontent with Biden’s management of the conflict threatens to hurt the president’s re-election bid.
Trump v Netanyahu
When Trump was president, he forged a close, mutually beneficial relationship with Netanyahu. But his feelings for the prime minister reportedly soured after Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory, which Trump baselessly claims to have won.
Days after the deadly Hamas attack on 7 October, Trump criticized Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence for failing to anticipate and stop the invasion. He also referred to Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon that Israel has been clashing with on its northern border, as “very smart”.
The former president’s rebuke of Netanyahu, as his country reeled from what the prime minister said was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, drew unusually sharp denunciations from fellow Republicans, including many of his challengers for the party’s presidential nomination.
Trump quickly retreated, writing on his social media platform that he stood with Netanyahu and Israel. Hours later, he posted again, declaring in a video: “I kept Israel safe, remember that. I kept Israel safe. Nobody else will, nobody else can.”
Since then, as public perceptions of the war shift amid a soaring Palestinian death toll and a deepening humanitarian crisis, Trump has surprised some of his allies on the right by exhorting Israel to “finish up your war”.
“Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support,” Trump said in a March interview with the conservative Israeli publication Israel Hayom. “You have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace.”
Asked in a later interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt whether his comments had been misconstrued, Trump again implored Israel to “get it over with”, warning that the country was “absolutely losing the PR war”. Biden has similarly expressed concern that Israel’s tactics in Gaza are hurting its international standing.
“Let’s get back to peace and stop killing people,” Trump told Hewitt.
Calling for peace, but little regard for Palestinians
Trump has not outlined how he believes peace might be achieved or what he envisions for the region after the conflict ends. When pressed on his position, Trump mostly repeats his claim that the war wouldn’t have happened if he were in power.
“I just think Trump is delusional on this point,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said in a recent appearance on CNN. “It’s a point that nobody can refute or confirm one way or the other. He doesn’t have any idea what to do in the Middle East in this situation.”
But Trump’s outreach to Jewish voters, a wide majority of whom tend to support Democrats, has faced accusations of antisemitism.
Earlier this month, Trump told reporters in Georgia that “any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined”. In a March interview with his former aide Sebastian Gorka, Trump claimed that any Jewish American who backs the Democrats “hates their religion” and “everything about Israel”.
The comments, which echoed previous statements he has made, were widely condemned for invoking an antisemitic trope that Jewish citizens hold “dual loyalty” to both the US and Israel.
But Trump has also honed a sharp-edged pitch aimed at evangelical Christians, a crucial part of his base whose fierce support of Israel has helped shape Republican foreign policy.
Casting himself as the great protector of the world’s only Jewish state, Trump vowed in an October speech to “defend western civilization from the barbarians and savages and fascists that you see now trying to do harm to our beautiful Israel”.
Lessons from Trump’s presidency
Though Trump has sent mixed signals about his views of the war, his policies as president unambiguously favored Israel.
During his presidency, Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in a reversal of longstanding US policy. He also slashed funding to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees and closed the Palestinians’ diplomatic mission in Washington.
In 2018, he withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal, a move cheered by Republicans and Netanyahu. The following year, the Trump administration again broke with decades of precedent to declare that the US no longer considered Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law. The Biden administration reversed this policy in February.
Late in his presidency, Trump unveiled a Middle East “peace” plan that granted most of Israel’s long-held demands, ensuring its swift rejection by Palestinian leaders.
The former president’s biggest accomplishment in the region was the so-called Abraham accords, clinched in 2020, which normalized diplomatic relations among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In remarks to Jewish donors and activists, Trump claimed he had been on the verge of bringing Iran into the deal, even though he spent much of his presidency antagonizing Tehran, most notably by ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
While Israel and Iran appear to have pulled back from the brink of a spiraling regional war, tensions in the region remain high. Meanwhile, Trump has been isolated in a New York courtroom, where the former president faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first of his criminal trials.
Israel and a second Trump term
Trump has yet to provide any substantive details on how he views the role of the US in resolving the current conflict, and his campaign did not respond to questions about his postwar plans for Gaza or whether he supported a two-state solution.
But recent comments from Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom helped set his first-term Middle East policy, reflect Netanyahu’s rightwing, nationalist vision for the region.
Playing critic, rather than prospective commander-in-chief, has seemingly worked in Trump’s favor: voters gave him far better marks than Biden on his handling of foreign conflicts as president, according to an April New York Times and Siena College survey.
And by mostly remaining on the sidelines, some analysts say, he is better positioned to exploit the deep division in the Democratic coalition over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war, one of the president’s biggest perceived vulnerabilities before the election.
Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said a future Trump administration was unlikely to show much sympathy to the Palestinian cause.
“He could care less, frankly, about how the Israelis are treating the Palestinians,” said Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Forget any kind of rehabilitation or reconstruction for Gaza,” he added, unless rebuilding the territory was a condition for achieving “some historic something” in the region, such as a normalization of ties between Israeli and Saudi Arabia.
In statements since the war began, Trump has promised, if elected, to cut off all US aid to Palestinians and urged other nations to follow suit if he returns to the Oval Office.
The former president also pledged to bar refugees from Gaza under an expansion of his first-term travel ban on Muslim-majority countries; expel immigrants who sympathize with Hamas; revoke the visas of foreign students deemed “anti-American” or “antisemitic”; and impose “strong ideological screening” to keep out foreign nationals who “want to abolish Israel”.
Trump’s pitch to Jewish voters
In a statement, Trump’s campaign accused Biden and Democrats of supporting Israel’s enemies and said leftwing criticism of Netanyahu’s government was pushing American Jews into the former president’s camp.
“Jewish Americans are realizing that the Democrat party has turned into a full-blown anti-Israel, antisemitic, pro-terrorist cabal, and that’s why more and more Jewish Americans are supporting President Trump,” said a campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.
Friedman recently unveiled a proposal for Israel to annex the West Bank based on the country’s biblical claims to the occupied land. In an interview last month, Trump did not say whether he supported the plan but said he planned to meet with Friedman to discuss it. (His campaign declined to say whether the meeting had taken place.)
In a February interview with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University, Kushner, a real estate scion married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. He also suggested Israel could move civilians out of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, to Israel’s Negev desert while Israeli forces “finish the job” there. Asked about fears that Palestinians who flee Gaza may not be allowed to return, he said: “I am not sure there is much left of Gaza at this point.”
At another point, Kushner described proposals to give the Palestinians their own state as a “super bad idea” that “would essentially be rewarding an act of terror”.
Miller recalled a 2017 conversation with Kushner in which Kushner outlined three key pillars of Trump’s Middle East policy that Miller believes would extend to a second term.
They were, according to Miller, to make it “impossible” for an Israeli prime minister to say no to Trump, develop “strategic partnerships” with the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia; and to create a “whole new paradigm for how to deal with the Palestinian issue”.
If Trump returns to the White House next year, Miller expects little change in his approach: “I think that his foreign policy will continue to be chaotic, transactional and opportunistic.”
Is Biden Going to Lose the Election Because of Young People?
So. By now, people—pundits, columnists, journalists, lots, maybe even you—are beginning to ask: is Gaza going to cost Biden the election? Not what’s happening in Gaza, per se, but what’s happening in America, over Gaza.
That’d be an incredibly heavy-handed…”response”…police-state style…to…student protests. Waves of protests erupted, and, as you know by now, those young people were met with almost sadistically, comically disproportionate response. Like the NYPD posting a picture of a... bike lock... and calling it the kind of stuff terrorists use, much to the amusement of Twitter.
Let me be frank with you. All this is 100% going to cost Biden the election, probably. This is an incredibly foolish thing to do—Biden’s silence speaks volumes. First, it gave the impression that certain lives didn’t matter, and now, it gives the impression, even worse, that protesting that sort of callousness is going to be met with the kind of heavy-handed reaction we might expect from a…
Trump.
Is that unfair to say? Am I being “controversial” again? Come on now. Student protests. Being met with everything from mass arrests to snipers to military style police. It’s more than a little ridiculous. This was described in one of America’s newspapers as a “revolt”—one that still describes Jan 6th as a “riot.” Maybe you see my point. No, this isn’t a revolt, and the Democrats badly need to get some perspective here. Do they…care…about…anything…anymore? Forget the basic ideals of peace, justice, truth, and equality—those went out the nearest window, and shattered it, when they went silent on Gaza. Now, do they even care about losing?
Or do you think young people being pepper-sprayed and frog-marched are going to happily turn around and vote for them?
The Brutal Political Reality of the 2024 Election
Look. The political reality of the upcoming election is very simple. Biden won by razor-thin margins in swing states, and that is what…swung…the election his way. Those margins were less than a hundred thousand people in many places. Yet more than that have already declared themselves as “uncommitted” voters in certain States recently, because of all the above. So the calculus is as simple as it is lethal.
• The Democrats are breaking their fragile coalition. Young people didn’t exactly vote for them enthusiastically last time around. They had to sort of hold their noses and do it, despite being suspicious that the Democrats were going to betray them in the end. And how did that turn out? Just as they suspected.
Young people are different these days. They’re incredibly cynical about politics, even to the point of losing confidence in democracy itself. They’re hostile to institutions, and they could care less, really, about “brands,” money, or power. In that context? To a social group with those attitudes? Betraying them is the kiss of death. I say that with my bona fide Don Draper hat on. You can’t treat your customers like this…and expect them to happily come back for more.
Is This Another Vietnam Moment for America? Or, Why America Never Became a Modern Society
So what’s really happening here? People have raised, too, the specter of another 1968 moment for America. They say that because of the obvious parallels between war and student protests. But I think that analogy is much, much truer for even deeper reasons.
Let’s think back in American history. What was the greatest mistake it made in the modern era? To this day, we’re not really supposed to, allowed to, say it out loud but it was the Vietnam War. I don’t say that for political reasons. But if you don’t already know, let me explain—and Ken Burns magisterial documentary series, by the way, tells the story pretty well.
Lyndon Johnson, that rarest of things, a Democrat from the South, had a revolutionary idea. One that would’ve changed America, and the world, forever—if only history had turned out differently. It was called the Great Society. And it was the inheritor to the New Deal.
• The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and 1965. The term was first referenced during a 1964 speech by Johnson at Ohio University, then later formally presented at the University of Michigan, and came to represent his domestic agenda. The main goal was the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice.
New major federal programs that addressed civil rights, education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were launched during this period. The program and its initiatives were subsequently promoted by LBJ and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the 1930s New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
So. The Great Society was sort of the forerunner, or parallel, to what we’d later call modern social democracy. Which would emerge, proper, in Europe and Canada—places where, if you’re lucky enough to be, you have a dizzying array of the most advanced human rights in human history, from healthcare to dignity itself.
The Great Society hoped to reinvent what a society was. It had pretty revolutionary goals, even for that age, which was a revolutionary one—think of how radical it would be today, to speak of “the elimination of poverty and racial injustice.” Biden and the Democrats don’t even speak that language anymore, let alone aspire to really build a society like that. The Great Society would have made an America much more like modern Europe or Canada—place where modern institutions guarantee advanced rights to all, and thus, have stayed relatively insulated from the severe shocks that have buffeted America.
Think of what eliminating poverty and injustice then would have done, after all, to prevent Trumpism now.
But history didn’t turn out like that. The Great Society never came to be. That America was stillborn. Why? The Vietnam War. Johnson ended up spending all his—and America’s—capital on it. His own political capital—after bruising defeats and setbacks, guess what? Young people turned against him, and his credibility and legitimacy was gone. He blew a hole through America’s finances, which made actually investing in the Great Society more or less impossible. And all that paved the way for…Richard Nixon.
Whose malign influence persists to this very day. It was under Nixon, after all, that modern conservatism was really born, with it’s sort of obsessive focus on “dirty tricks,” like Watergate, or demonizing and scapegoating, or dividing and polarizing. Trump’s truest political forefather is Nixon, and in Trump, we see the apotheosis of Nixonism write large.
That’s how much the Vietnam war’s fatal folly echoes through history. It put America on a completely different set of trajectories. Politically—young people turned away from the Democrats in disgust, and the Republicans began a series of victories that persist to this day. That’s largely because America was placed on a much lower economic trajectory, never having invested in functioning, modern social systems, all of which would unravel the working and lower middle class, and lead directly to Trumpism. And of course it sort of put America on a very different sociocultural trajectory, too: today, European and Canadian style social democracy can easily be demonized and tarred as “communism” in America, because America never had a formative encounter with modernity in the form of a Great Society.
See how much damage that did?
How Turning Points Shape Historical Trajectories, or, Why Being the Lesser Evil Isn’t Always Good Enough
All of that brings us back to now. Is this another Vietnam War moment, a 1968? It is, and in a way much, much deeper than student protests and an ugly, sordid war.
It’s another moment in which America’s trajectory changes, dramatically, for the worse, all over again. Just as then, young people are turning away disgusted, from a party which seems to value bullets and bombs over…peace, prosperity, justice, equality. And even though, as then, the better angels of the Democratic Party still remain interested in an America that makes progress…the party as a whole is squandering its credibility and legitimacy for the sake of conflict people, those on its side, don’t want.
Think of what happens next? Just as then, a fanatic and lunatic…and crook…ends up in the White House. He undoes decades of progress in one fell swoop, just as Nixon worked hard to erase civil rights and any sense of American unity or equality. The chance for a Great Society is lost, for another several generations.
It’s true to say that of course there’s one way this parallel doesn’t quite work. The Democrats are hardly offering a Great Society now. That’s true, but in a way that harks back to the 1960s, too. Then, they spent the money they should have spent on building better lives for Americans on war, and destroyed their political capital in the process. Today, they don’t even seem to be interested in doing that much, just mostly on the war part.
That’s a fatal equation. It tells us this is like 1968, but in a way, worse. Because back then, as many will be right to point out, Johnson was serious was about the Great Society. He really wanted to do it, and we know that from various forms of his personal correspondence and so forth. But he was immensely frustrated, and in a way, confused and bewildered. He just couldn’t give up on the war, because he felt he’d lose the most political capital that way, not to mention, maybe the Cold War, too. And so he grew sort of fixated on it, at all costs, including his own political undoing.
Today, the Democrats seem to have forgotten all of that. They don’t have a New Deal or Great Society. They make sort of overtures, once in a while, towards programs and projects of social reinvention. But opening a few chip factories—yes, it’s a good idea—is a far cry from a new social contract.
And so this is worse than 1968 in the sense that young people have little to believe in. There’s little reason for them to back the Democrats, apart from: they’re the lesser evil. Unlike back then, they’re not remotely offering any form of social reinvention—maybe just less regress.
But being the lesser evil has a fatal flaw. There’s a point at which it just becomes a distinction without a difference. If the evil over there is like five hundred, and the evil over here is like four hundred and ninety seven, but what you want is…no evil…what do you do? Maybe you just give up, out of sheer despair, and say, I can’t back this, because I can’t stomach it. It’s a violation of my morality, and I do myself too much moral injury by saying this lesser evil is OK, because it’s still a lot of evil.
Part of Being a Grown Up is Not Repeating the Same Old Mistakes
I’m not saying that’s how I feel. But it is pretty clearly how a lot of young folks feel. How a lot of minorities feel. How a lot of people feel. People who are critical, because they make up the parts of the coalition the Democrats need to win.
Nixon, famously, sabotaged peace talks in Vietnam so he could win the election. How Trumpian is that?
And yet this is what history is. It’s a tale of folly, ugliness, stupidity, and a whole lot of violence, hate, spite, and evil. Once in a while, a bit of good triumphs, and those moments we should cherish, remember, and treasure. It’s not enough to just say “young people are making a mistake by not backing the lesser evil!” It’s up to us, the elders, to be the ones who learn from history’s mistakes. Instead of repeating them, and wondering why things never seem to go our way. Repeating history’s mistakes is the province of the far right. When the side of democracy, my friends, falls into that abyss, we should all shudder.
Today, Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks—earlier than most women know they’re pregnant—went into effect. The Florida legislature passed the law and Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed it a little more than a year ago, on April 13, 2023, but the new law was on hold while the Florida Supreme Court reviewed it. On April 1 the court permitted the law to go into operation today.
The new Florida law is possible because two years ago, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the modern court decided that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.
Immediately, Republican-dominated states began to restrict abortion rights. Now, one out of three American women of childbearing age lives in one of the more than 20 states with abortion bans. This means, as Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, put it in The Daily Beast today, “child rape victims forced to give birth, miscarrying patients turned away from emergency rooms and told to return when they’re in sepsis.” It means recognizing that the state has claimed the right to make a person’s most personal health decisions.
Until today, Florida’s law was less stringent than that of other southern states, making it a destination for women of other states to obtain the abortions they could not get at home. In the Washington Post today, Caroline Kitchener noted that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year obtained abortions in Florida. Now, receiving that reproductive care will mean a trip to Virginia, Illinois, or North Carolina, where the procedure is still legal, putting it out of reach for many women.
This November, voters in Florida will weigh in on a proposed amendment to the Florida constitution to establish the right to abortion. The proposed amendment reads: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Even if the amendment receives the 60% support it will need to be added to the constitution, it will come too late for tens of thousands of women.
It is not unrelated that this week Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, along with other Republican attorneys general, has twice sued the Biden administration, challenging its authority to impose policy on states. One lawsuit objects to the government’s civil rights protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The other lawsuit seeks to stop a federal rule that closes a loophole that, according to Texas Tribune reporter Alejandro Serrano, lets people sell guns online or at gun shows without conducting background checks.
In both cases, according to law professor and legal analyst Steve Vladeck, Paxton has filed the suit in the Amarillo Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where it will be assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee who suspended the use of mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, in order to stop abortions nationally.
Last month the Judicial Conference, which oversees the federal judiciary, tried to end this practice of judge-shopping by calling for cases to be randomly assigned to any judge in a district; the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas says it will not comply.
And so the cases go to Kacsmaryk, who will almost certainly agree with the Republican states’ position.
Republicans are engaged in the process of dismantling the federal government, working to get rid of its regulation of business, basic social welfare laws and the taxes needed to pay for such measures, the promotion of infrastructure, and the protection of civil rights. To do so, they have increasingly argued that the states, rather than the federal government, are the centerpiece of our democratic system.
That democracy belonged to the states was the argument of the southern Democrats before the Civil War, who insisted that the federal government could not legitimately intervene in state affairs out of their concern that the overwhelming popular majority in the North would demand an end to human enslavement. Challenged to defend their enslavement of their neighbors in a country that boasted “all men are created equal,” southern enslavers argued that enslavement was secondary to the fact that voters had chosen to impose it.
At the same time, though, state lawmakers limited the vote in their state, so the popular vote did not reflect the will of the majority. It reflected the interests of those few who could vote. In 1857, enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia explained that there were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote. “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.” State legislatures, dominated by such men, wrote laws reinforcing the power of a few wealthy, white men.
Crucially, white southerners insisted that the federal government must use its power not to enforce the will of the majority, but rather to protect their state systems. In 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Act, they demanded that federal officials, including those in free states, return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black Americans could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a “runaway” could be imprisoned for six months and fined $1,000, which was about three years’ income. A decade later, enslavers insisted that it was “the duty of the Federal Government, in all its departments, to protect…[slavery]…in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends.”
After the Civil War, Republicans in charge of the federal government set out to end discriminatory state legislation by adding to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing that states could not deny to any person the equal protection of the laws and giving Congress the power to enforce that amendment. That, together with the Fifteenth Amendment providing that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Republicans thought, would stop state legislatures from passing discriminatory legislation.
But in 1875, just five years after Americans added the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that states could keep certain people from voting so long as that discrimination wasn’t based on race. This barred women from the polls and flung the door open for voter suppression measures that would undermine minority voting for almost a century. Jim and Juan Crow laws, as well as abortion bans, went onto the books.
In the 1950s the Supreme Court began to use the Fourteenth Amendment to end those discriminatory state laws—in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision that prohibited racial segregation in public schools, for example, and in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Opponents complained bitterly about what they called “judicial activism,” insisting that unelected judges were undermining the will of the voters in the states.
Beginning in the 1980s, as Republicans packed the courts with so-called originalists who weakened federal power in favor of state power, Republican-dominated state governments carefully chose their voters and then imposed their own values on everyone.
Just a decade ago, reproductive rights scholar Elizabeth Dias told Jess Bidgood of the New York Times, a six-week abortion ban was seen even by many antiabortion activists as too radical, but after Trump appointed first Neil Gorsuch and then Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the balance of power shifted enough to make such a ban obtainable. Power over abortion rights went back to the states, where Republicans could restrict them.
Trump has said he would leave the issue of abortion to the states, even if states begin to monitor women’s pregnancies to keep them from obtaining abortions or to prosecute them if they have one.
Vice President Kamala Harris was in Jacksonville, Florida, today to talk about reproductive rights. She put the fight over abortion in the larger context of the discriminatory state laws that have, historically, constructed a world in which some people have more rights than others. “This is a fight for freedom,” she said, “the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do.”
