A couple of months back, the Major League Baseball All-Star game was played. As part of the overwrought hoopla, MLB designed special uniforms for the players to wear. Until this year, players wore their own team uniforms for the game.
Whatever the branding wisdom of the move, at least some players weren’t impressed with the design. When asked about the uniforms, Chicago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson said, “We can do better. We can do better, man.”
He is, of course, correct. We can do better.
But not just about baseball uniforms. His quote is actually applicable to enormous swaths of American life.
Health care? “We can do better, man.”
Public education? “We can do better, man.”
Foreign policy? “We can do better, man.”
Criminal justice? “We can do better, man.”
Race relations? “We can do better, man.”
Politics? “We can do better, man.”
Crime and gun violence? “We can do better, man.”
Cleanliness of my office? “We can do better, man.”
There is scarcely any aspect of American life where we can’t do better. And we should constantly be looking for ways to do so. It’s up to us to fulfill the promise of this nation.
“We can do better, man,” should be carved above the front doors of the U.S. Capitol and every state capitol building in the country. It should be printed on each page of letterhead paper used at the White House, and every federal, state, and local government agency. It should be painted on the doors of every police car in America and it should replace “In God We Trust” as our national motto.
God helps those who help themselves, and its past time that we got to work. All of us. Together. We can do better, man.
Six years after Ohioans overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to change the way Ohio’s house and senate districts are drawn, the process of preparing new districts has begun.
On Monday, the Ohio Redistricting Commission held the first two of ten scheduled public hearings to listen to comments from the public. A Monday morning hearing at Cleveland State University was followed by a Monday afternoon hearing at Youngstown State University.
In Cleveland, more than 120 people jammed a meeting room at the CSU Student Center to offer comments, suggestions, and advice to the seven commissioners.
The intent of the new redistricting process is to eliminate gerrymandering – the drawing of legislative districts that favor one political party over another. While a long-standing practice in American democracy, gerrymandering has become more efficient in recent years as computer programs and high-quality data on voting patterns enabled political partisans to craft districts that were highly favorable to their party.
In Ohio, following the 2010 census, Republican lawmakers used a narrow lead in representation to create state and congressional districts that magnified their advantage. As a result, in 2012, Republican Congressional candidates state-wide earned 52 percent of the vote, but ended up with 75 percent of the Congressional seats. That pattern has remained the same in each election since. Republicans gained and maintained similar advantages in the Ohio House and Senate.
Ohio voters of both parties responded in 2015 by amending the Ohio constitution to create a bi-partisan redistricting commission and establish a set of stringent requirements for newly-drawn statehouse districts. In 2018, voters approved a similar amendment to manage redrawing of Congressional districts.
With the release of 2020 census data, the redistricting commission is now beginning the redrawing process. But the deadline for new state legislative maps is September 1.
The ten public hearings are intended to give the public a chance to contribute their ideas about the redistricting process to the commissioners.
Members of the public attend Ohio Redistricting Commission public hearing at Cleveland State University photo by Jeffrey Crossman
Catherine LaCroix, co-president of the Greater Cleveland branch of the League of Woman Voters, reminded commissioners that more than 700 volunteers worked with the League to pass the amendments and that the amendments each received more than 71 percent of the vote.
“The commission owes Ohioans faithful adherence to the intent of the voters,” LaCroix said.
Numerous speakers described gerrymandering as a threat to democracy, noting that by creating legislative seats that are safe for a particular party, voters of both parties will believe that their vote doesn’t count, reducing voter turnout and citizen participation in the electoral process.
CSU professor Brian Glassman noted that gerrymandering discourages potential candidates and reduces new and potentially better ideas in the legislature. “Gerrymandering removes us farther from the principle that every vote should count equally,” he added.
Elizabeth Rader, a former Congressional candidate from Geauga County, said that gerrymandering in Ohio is creating a one-party state, leading to no choice at all for many voters. Non-competitive districts favor extreme candidates who are unresponsive to constituents because they are certain to be re-elected.
“Competitive districts are good for everyone,” Rader said. She urged commissioners to “support democracy.”
Several speakers brought their own maps to provide options for commissioners. But some speakers complained that commissioners should have released draft maps before public hearings, so that the public could respond to what the commissioners are proposing.
Many speakers criticized the commission for waiting until the census data was released before holding public hearings; for only announcing the hearings a week before they were held; and for scheduling all hearings during the work day on week days, limiting opportunities for people who work regular hours to attend. One speaker pointed out that the commission’s website – which is supposed to enable people to submit testimony and maps – was not fully operational until last Friday.
A Cleveland Heights resident said, “I am almost getting the sense that this process is not being taken seriously. How could this be? You had three years to get ready for this.”
“Members of the public have put aside everything to be here today,” she added. “But we are not seeing the same consideration from Republican members of the commission.” Of the five Republicans on the seven-member commission, only one – Ohio Auditor Keith Faber – attended the hearing. The other four Republican members, including commission co-chair Speaker of the House Robert Cupp, sent replacements. Both Democrats on the commission attended the hearing.
A former teacher from North Ridgeville said, “the onus is on Republicans. There are five of you and only two Democrats. This is your opportunity to be courageous. Nobody wants to give up their job, but this is not right. You know this.”
Sherry Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teacher’s Union, told commissioners, “We all know that the way districts are currently drawn is unfair. I implore you today to listen to all that you have heard, take it to heart, take it back to those that should be in this room with us today, and do the right thing.”
“Not only are the voters of Ohio watching, but their children are watching. They deserve better.”
August 23, 2021
To submit written testimony or maps to the Redistricting Commission, or find out the dates and times of future meetings, go to the Redistricting Commission website at https://redistricting.ohio.gov/
Oh, they tried. For forty years they looted it, wrecked it, and vandalized it. They even beheaded it. But somehow, the Anchor-Hocking Glass Company survived. The century-old manufacturer still makes high-quality glass products in their rusting old glassworks in Lancaster, Ohio. But though it escaped destruction, Anchor today is a pale reflection of its former self, and it no longer supports the middle-class aspirations of its workers or the community itself.
Anchor’s story is not unique. What happened to Anchor – and Lancaster – happened to a thousand companies and cities across America’s industrial heartland when a toxic wave of unconstrained greed, unintended consequences, selfishness, and corporate malfeasance swept away a century of corporate diligence and good citizenship.
“The new American economy had come to town like an unwelcome stranger,” wrote journalist Brian Alexander, “leaving Lancaster broken.”
Alexander chronicled the life and near-death of Anchor-Hocking and the city of Lancaster in his 2017 book: Glass House – The 1 Percent Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town. He traced the damage to Anchor and the corresponding decline of Lancaster as the company and city staggered through a nationwide maelstrom of wrenching economic and social change.
A Sense of Community
For decades Anchor-Hocking was the largest employer and the most important corporate citizen of Lancaster, a tidy manufacturing town of 30,000 residents, located thirty miles from Columbus. Five thousand Lancaster residents worked for Anchor, including unskilled laborers, experienced craftsmen, supervisors, managers, engineers, and executives. Other industries called Lancaster home, but Anchor-Hocking – a nationally-recognized brand – was the pride of Lancaster.
Lancaster, Ohio Photo: Wikipedia
The decades after World War II were a golden age for Anchor and American manufacturers in general. Pent up demand for consumer products and the lack of foreign competition boosted sales and revenue. There was money to go around and labor relations were cordial. By the late 1960’s, Anchor-Hocking was the world’s leading manufacturer of glass tableware and the second-largest maker of glass containers.
The city supported Anchor, and Anchor supported the city. Generations of workers found stable, good-paying jobs with the company. Those that stayed until retirement – and there were many – received a company-funded pension and health insurance. Anchor’s taxes supported the city and schools, while employees and their spouses were active in the community’s life. The business culture of the time fostered a sense of community. Anchor’s senior executives all lived in Lancaster, and they were committed to the city.
Cheap Stuff
In the 1970’s, though, the first signs of trouble appeared. Energy costs rose alarmingly, hurting American manufacturers. Food and beverage producers turned to plastic as a cheaper alternative to glass containers. Pressure from foreign manufacturers grew in the glass industry, as French, Polish, and Turkish companies began importing cheap glass into the U.S.
Anchor responded with traditional business practices – greater efficiency, higher quality, better marketing – and sales remained strong. While challenges remained, the company was well-positioned to continue as a profitable enterprise for years to come.
For years, American manufacturers had valued the quality of their products and their importance in their communities. By the 1980’s, however, the American business environment was changing. Anchor and thousands of other American manufacturing firms found themselves threatened by a devastating combination of foreign competition, relentless pressure to reduce costs, and sudden attacks by corporate raiders.
The consolidation of the retail sector into fewer, much larger companies reduced competition. Nationwide retailers began pressing manufacturers like Anchor-Hocking to reduce the price of their products. As the focus of retailers and consumers shifted to low-cost products, the pressure on American manufacturers to reduce costs grew.
“Americans wanted cheap stuff,” wrote Alexander. “And the harder they shopped for the cheapest stuff, the more they helped drive down the wages of people who made stuff. And the lower those wages dropped, the more a desire for cheap morphed into the self-fulfilling necessity of cheap.”
The growing demand for low, low prices inevitably drove American jobs overseas. No matter how efficient and cost-conscious Anchor-Hocking might be, no matter how low they drove the wages of their own workers, there would always be people somewhere else who could do the work for less.
“The knowledge of craftsmen was lost in order to make a product a little bit cheaper,” wrote Alexander. There was no room in the new business culture for concern about the workers that used to make the products that built the manufacturing companies in the first place, or for the communities where they lived.
A Duty
Pressure to cut costs didn’t come only from consumers. By the 1980’s, American business leaders had widely embraced “shareholder capitalism” – the idea that corporations existed solely to maximize shareholder profit. Previously, most corporate executives had practiced “stakeholder capitalism,” through which companies attempted to optimize the well-being of customers, employees, shareholders, and the nation.
Most prominently endorsed by economist Milton Friedman, ‘shareholder capitalism’ became Republican party orthodoxy in the 1980’s.
In a 1970 essay for the New York Times, Friedman rejected the idea that corporations had any responsibility to workers, their communities, or the nation. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote. “To use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”
Alexander wrote, “The Friedman doctrine told every executive, financier and shareholder not only that it was okay to make a profit, but that making as much profit as possible, without regard to some broader social responsibility, was a duty.”
If a company could increase profits by shifting work overseas, by closing plants, by firing workers, by reducing the remaining workers’ pay or benefits, by halting research and development, by deferring maintenance, by forgoing needed upgrades, by neglecting safety, by using a lower grade of raw materials, by refusing to implement pollution control measures, or by declining to support community organizations, it had an actual duty to do so, according to Friedman.
“For generations, through both periods of harmony and episodes of friction, workers and management understood that their interests were aligned,” wrote Alexander. “Now they weren’t.”
Friedman served as a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Board, and his views were adopted by the federal government.
The government also supported the growing numbers of acquisitions, mergers, and corporate takeovers being conducted by large companies and private equity firms. It was a series of takeovers and purchases that crippled Anchor-Hocking and Lancaster.
It Was Being Killed
The first attempt to take over Anchor-Hocking was made by Carl Icahn, one of America’s most prominent corporate raiders and a firm believer in the Friedman doctrine. Icahn believed that American corporations had become inefficient and lax in their ability to provide dividends and profits to investors.
Icahn and other ‘raiders’ of the era gained control of companies through stealthy stock purchases using borrowed money, then used their ownership stake to obtain seats on corporate boards and impose savage “reforms” to maximize the short-term value of the company’s stock. Once the value of the company had been inflated at the expense of the firm’s long-term stability, raiders would sell their shares, pocketing large profits.
Icahn’s attempt to gain a seat on Anchor Hocking’s board ultimately failed. The company bought him off by repurchasing his stock at a premium – an attempt at self-preservation called, fittingly, greenmail. Icahn scored a $3 million profit and Anchor-Hocking escaped his clutches. But that was $3 million that the company could not use to pay workers, improve products, or update equipment.
“It was,” said one of Icahn’s analysts, “like taking candy from a baby.”
Worse, Icahn’s attack signaled to other raiders that Anchor-Hocking was a viable target. While Anchor was able to fend off Icahn, they could not protect themselves from follow-on attacks by ownership groups that hoped only to boost the value of the company and sell it, pocketing the profits.
Over the next thirty years, a succession of absentee owners would sell off portions of Anchor-Hocking, drive the company into bankruptcy, slash employment in Lancaster from 5,000 to 1,000, move the corporate headquarters with its hundreds of well-paid executive jobs out of the city, reduce pay for workers, stop contributions to the workers’ 401K accounts, drastically raise health insurance premiums paid by workers, drop health insurance for retirees, defer critical maintenance, and destroy the company’s relationship with Lancaster. Yet each change in ownership resulted in additional profits for investors.
“Anchor Hocking wasn’t dying a natural death,” wrote Alexander. “It was being killed.”
As out-of-town ownership stripped the company of assets, fired workers, and drained the company’s coffers, city officials responded by offering incentives to the company – in effect, bribes – to stay open in Lancaster. City officials offered a series of tax abatements that reduced funding for public schools, the city, and the county. They also gave the owners a 55 percent tax credit and $100,000 to train fifty new workers, after the company had shut down its own apprenticeship program that had been providing skilled laborers for decades
The decline of Anchor was devastating for Lancaster. The city seemed to lose confidence in its future – the citizens seemed to pull back. In 1988 a school property levy was defeated. In 1989, the school board tried to pass a small income tax increase to fund schools. That failed, too, so did road improvement taxes and bond levies. Drug use rose, then skyrocketed.
It was a scenario replayed in thousands of American cities.
Catastrophic for America
The impact of ‘shareholder capitalism’ has been catastrophic for America, said Peter Georgescu, former chairman of Young and Rubicon, a global marketing and communications company. Profits have soared at the expense of worker pay, he wrote in his 2017 book, Capitalists Arise!
Wealth of the median American family is lower today than two decades ago while life expectancy has actually fallen, he wrote. While real wages have been flat for decades, American productivity has increased by 80 percent. Before the 1970’s wages and productivity had always risen in tandem, as workers shared in the rewards of greater productivity. Now, however, most gains from productivity flow to shareholders, not workers.
As distant ownership of countless American manufacturers broke labor contracts and reneged on long-standing promises regarding pensions, health care, benefits, and the future of the company, workers and the communities around them lost faith and trust in the companies, wrote Steven Pearlstein in his 2018 book, Can American Capitalism Survive? Disheartened workers became less productive, less efficient, and less innovative.
A growing number of business leaders, like Georgescu, are calling for a return to stakeholder capitalism and a rejection of the shareholder-profits-above-all philosophy of Friedman and others. In 2019, nearly 200 senior American business executives, including the leaders of Apple and JPMorgan, signed a statement pledging to shift their business focus from maximizing shareholder value to providing value to all stakeholders, including investors, workers, customers, and suppliers.
But investors are resistant, and the future of American capitalism is unclear.
Ribbons of Glass
For millions of American workers who have lost their jobs, and thousands of American cities that have been hollowed out by greed, any reversion to a more socially-responsible form of capitalism will be too little, too late.
The collapse of American manufacturing wasn’t caused by local politicians, or the national media, or by a failure of work ethic among young workers, wrote Alexander. “It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of ‘returns.’ America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.”
What’s remarkable about Anchor-Hocking is that it somehow still survives. Despite decades of neglect, asset-stripping, and corporate malfeasance, ribbons of molten glass still flow from furnaces where the temperatures reach 2700 degrees F; glassmakers still run massive stamping machines in the 120-degree heat of the factory; and the company still produces tumblers, bowls, pitchers, and other glassware for customers across the nation. More than 1,000 workers still have jobs at Anchor-Hocking, though their wages are low and benefits are limited.
And Lancaster? While the city’s industrial base has been decimated, more and more residents are commuting to jobs in the Columbus area. Much of the work that remains in the city is low-wage, and city efforts to attract new industries have largely failed, but the population is stable and the city’s transition to a bedroom community has protected it from the worst ravages of de-industrialization.
February 25, 2021
For more information, see also:
Alexander, Brian; Glass House: The 1 Percent Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town; St. Martin’s Press, NY; 2017.
Enshrined in the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934, redlining – the practice of denying loans to property owners within designated districts – fueled a deadly cycle of disinvestment, decay, depopulation, and decline in urban neighborhoods across the nation. The effects of redlining and other forms of institutionalized racism have been deep-seated and persistent and have continued despite the practice being outlawed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Enacted in the depths of the Depression, the NHA was intended to stimulate housing construction to create jobs and improve the nation’s housing stock. But the benefits were intended for white Americans only, and the law encouraged lenders to deny loans to black, Hispanic, Asian, and foreign-born Americans.
Lenders weren’t required to evaluate loan applications based on the financial resources of individual applicants. Instead, federal officials rated city neighborhoods in a subjective and manifestly unfair manner, assigning each district one of four ratings: Best, Still Desirable, Definitely Declining, or Hazardous. Loan applications from areas rated ‘hazardous’ were automatically denied, regardless of the particular circumstances of the applicant or the condition of the property.
To help lenders, the government prepared color-coded maps of each of 239 American cities, showing the boundaries of each type of district. Zones rated ‘hazardous’ were outlined in red – hence the term ‘redlining’ – and no loans would be issued in those neighborhoods.
The ratings were based on a number of district-wide attributes, including the general condition, age, or state of repair of buildings as well as demographic data including population, class or occupation of residents, percentage of foreign-born residents, percentage of black, Hispanic, or Asian residents, and trends in economic or racial makeup of the population. A neighborhood with a growing black population, or a neighborhood that seemed likely to experience an increase in black residents, was said to be experiencing “Negro Infiltration.” That would ensure a hazardous rating and would virtually guarantee that no loans would be approved for purchase or upkeep of properties in the district.
The goal was to preserve property values and safeguard federal investments, as the government was guaranteeing the loans, said Brandon Crooks, co-founder of a New York City design studio that works at reversing the effects of redlining. Crooks was a panelist on a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland virtual forum on redlining this week. Racism was literally baked into federal housing policies from the beginning, said Crooks.
Many neighborhoods that were rated hazardous were, in fact, stable, with occupied housing, thriving commercial districts, and strong local institutions. Yet they found themselves cut off from financing for repairs or mortgages. The results were catastrophic. Property values plummeted, neighborhoods declined, white flight accelerated, and housing segregation became entrenched.
Property owners in neighborhoods not redlined quickly understood that to preserve the value of their own properties they needed to keep black, Asian, and Hispanic residents out of their neighborhoods. Racial discrimination was already widespread in America – precisely the reason that integrated neighborhoods were redlined – but the explicit linkage of integration and declining property values ignited a cycle of rigid segregation that denied homeownership to millions of black Americans.
The closing of America’s housing market to black Americans – regardless of their level of education, employment status, and financial resources – has been a major contributor to the staggering gap in wealth between white and black Americans. In 2016, the net worth of a typical white family in America was $171,000 while the typical wealth for black families was $17,150.
That huge disparity cannot be attributed solely to redlining – 240 years of slavery, 150 years of housing and job discrimination, and 100 years of Jim Crow segregation all contributed. But since the Great Depression, homeownership has been the primary way that middle class American families have accumulated wealth. And that path was closed to black Americans for decades.
In 2019, 73.3 percent of white households owned their homes — compared to 42.1 percent of Black households, 47.5 percent of Hispanic households, and 57.7 percent of Asian or Pacific islander households that owned theirs.
In addition to the racial wealth gap, redlining has contributed to a host of ills that continue to afflict black Americans disproportionately, including worse health outcomes, predatory lending practices, higher rates of evictions, housing segregation, and problematic policing practices.
“Redlining was the original sin that so many of these impacts stem from,” said Jeniece Jones, executive director of Cincinnati’s Housing Opportunity Made Equal (HOME) organization.
The persistence of the wealth gap, despite many years of effort to close it, is a strong argument for some form of reparation payments for black Americans, said Cleveland State University professor Ronnie Dunn. “Reparations are the only way we will address the long-term harm of racially exclusionary and discriminatory practices,” he said.
Oh, we’re not referring to that impeachment thing.
Impeachment is a political process with political consequences and it should not be confused with an attempt to hold someone accountable for potentially criminal actions. The fact that dozens of senators – people who have clawed their way to the top of the political pyramid – voted to protect their personal political futures as opposed to, say, protecting American democracy, should not surprise anyone.
It will be up to the rest of us in the coming years to convince them that their political calculations were wrong. If they were wrong.
So, what else happened this week to warm the hearts of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and other thoughtful, truth-seeking Republicans?
How about an international commission of public health and medical experts releasing a report that concludes that Donald Trump’s presidency “jeopardized the health of the world and its people.”
This week, the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era published a chilling report that describes the devastating impacts of four years of Trump – and forty years of Republican policies – on the health and well-being of Americans and American democracy.
The Lancet Commission is an international group of American, British, and Canadian commissioners from a variety of disciplines, including public health, law, economics, politics, epidemiology, and medicine. The commission has been studying the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on public health and American society since 2017.
The report notes that Republican-favored policies enacted since the 1970’s have resulted in:
Greater inequality
An actual decline in US life expectancy
Mass incarceration characterized by stark racial inequities
An epidemic of drug overdose deaths among working-class people driven by efforts of drug firms to maximize profits through promotion of unconstrained use of opioids
Implementation of market-oriented health policies that shifted medical resources towards higher-income people while burdening middle class Americans with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs
The use of public money to stimulate the corporate takeover of vital health resources
Funding cuts that have led to a 20 percent reduction in the front-line public health workforce
But while Republican policies have been degrading American health in measurable ways for decades, the commission found that Trump’s presidency was especially destructive.
Trump, they wrote, “exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilize racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.”
“His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection.”
In the conclusion of their report, they wrote:
“During the Trump era the USA was led by a president whose disdain for science and manipulation of hatred jeopardize the health of the world and its people. President Trump’s denunciations of the status quo ante and promises to return the USA to greatness, camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy and gave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain.“
“He halted progress in almost every domain (table 4), undermined care for low-income people and the middle class, weakened pandemic preparedness; withheld food and shelter from those in need, and persecuted those who were vulnerable and oppressed.”
Well, they’re just doctors and lawyers and public health experts from multiple countries, so what do they know? We should find out what Sean Hannity thinks.
And to top off the week, yesterday evening – after the Senate declined to convict Trump of insurrection – the Washington Post published a searing commentary by columnist Greg Sargent, in which he called out the Republican Party’s “ongoing and intensifying radicalization.”
Sargent quoted a frighteningly-prescient 2012 essay co-authored by Norman J. Ornstein of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Thomas E. Mann of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute which called the Republican Party an “insurgent outlier in American politics.”
Now that Republicans have openly embraced actual insurgency, this essay, though nine years old, seems tragically relevant.
Ornstein and Mann rejected the both-sides-do-it argument and concluded that the source of the most bitter partisanship in current American politics is the Republican Party. “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years,” they wrote, “and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
The party, they wrote, is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Ornstein and Mann quoted Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican staffer who wrote, “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”
The party of Lincoln, I am sure.
The Lancet Commission’s report is 49 pages of data, charts, analysis, and footnotes, so you probably won’t see it mentioned on Fox News. But every American should read it. There is a link below.
The Washington Post essays, sadly, are behind the newspaper’s pay wall (I think), so if you don’t have a subscription you might not be able to see them. Still, here are the links.
When Republican senators make their decision at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, it is not Trump’s future that they will be deciding, said two former Republican operatives.
Instead, senators will be deciding the future of the Republican party itself, said Sarah Longwell, former Republican strategist and leader of an anti-Trump organization. Longwell and Tim Miller – former Republican campaign advisor – spoke Friday at a Cleveland City Club virtual forum titled “The Republican Reckoning: The Future of the Party Post-Trump.”
“This week, Republican senators will determine their party’s future,” said Longwell. “If senators acquit Trump, he will remain the leader of the party for the foreseeable future.”
Yet, if Trump is convicted – an outcome that seems ever-more unlikely – it is not at all certain that the Republican party can move in a new direction, said Longwell. There is no obvious leader for the party if Trump loses his place.
At this point, however, the choice is not up to Republican senators, said Miller. Regardless of the outcome of the impeachment trial, “the voters have chosen Donald Trump for them.”
Miller and Longwell are co-founders of Republican Voters Against Trump, a coalition of Republicans, former Republicans, conservatives, and former Trump voters who did not support Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
While Trump’s character defects render him unfit for the presidency, said Longwell, his committed supporters now comprise as much as thirty percent of Republican voters. The problem for non-Trump Republicans – the traditional business wing of the party – is how to dissociate themselves from Trump while holding on to his voters, especially the ten million or so voters who had not been Republican voters previously.
“These voters are not true Republicans,” said Longwell. “They are low-propensity voters – voters who never voted before.”
Republican leaders fear the loss of those voters, especially now since Trump’s character and performance have driven away more moderate Republicans. There is no real risk to disappointing moderate Republicans, said Miller, because for the most part they are already gone – the moderates that remain are committed Republicans – these are the voters that rejected Trump but still voted for Republican candidates in down-ballot races.
The political risk of confronting Trump – voting to convict him – is far higher than the political risk of acquitting him. “That’s the political calculus,” said Miller.
Republican leaders believe that the loss of moderate voters is harmful, but not fatal, said Miller. They believe that with the structural advantage the electoral college provides and with the advantages they have seized through aggressive gerrymandering, they can continue to win elections as a minority party.
Which is why Republican state legislators this year have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at restricting voting. That’s the one thing that unites the party, said Miller. “Both wings oppose Democrat efforts to expand voting rights.”
But the traditional wing of the party is less committed to voter suppression than is the Trump wing, said Longwell. “The Trump wing of the party is anti-democratic. They object to free and fair elections. They truly want less voting. They are threat to our democracy.”
It is not just moderate Republican voters who are abandoning the party. Centrist office-holders like Senators Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Robert Portman of Ohio are declining to run for re-election. They are leaving, said Longwell, “because they don’t know how to exist as traditional Republicans when all the voters want is for them to fully support Trump.”
Meanwhile, the Trump wing has gained control of virtually every state Republican party organization. Right now, said Miller, “all fifty state Republican parties are run by crazy people.”
While Trump is the unchallenged leader of the party’s nationalist/populist wing, he did not pull the party away from traditional Republican values like fiscal restraint and international cooperation.
The road to Trump, said Miller, began with Pat Buchanan during the Reagan administration. By 1992, Buchanan was strong enough to challenge an incumbent president – George H. W. Bush – for the party’s nomination. Buchanan lost, but he won nearly 24 percent of the vote. Neo-Nazi David Duke also challenged Bush, but Duke received only about one percent of the votes. Still, the candidacies of the two right-wing challengers and the popularity of Buchanan’s favored issues of economic nationalism, sealing the border, and isolationism marked the start of the Republican party’s shift away from traditional concerns.
Later the Tea Party movement and the popularity of Sarah Palin would provide further evidence of widening divisions within the party. By 2016, the nationalist/populist wing which had coalesced around Trump represented a third of the party.
During this time the establishment wing of the party failed to address the growing popularity of nationalism/populism through a combination of conscious decisions and mistakes, said Miller.
Now, the party is in a bind of its own making.
Whether Trump’s influence wans now or later, the party has no obvious successor. Longwell believes that Nikki Haley, who has been generally supportive of Trump but who has broken with him on some issues might be able to lead a reunified party,
But Miller believes the party can only be led by a person who has not been associated with Trump or the Never-Trump movement.
We are slowly counting down the days until Impeachment Two – The Sequel. Not everyone, of course, is onboard with the idea of another Senate trial.
As a former law enforcement officer, I understand the concerns. On the one hand: holding people accountable for their actions; upholding personal responsibility, law and order, and the rule of law; and making a clear statement about the importance of protecting our democracy. On the other hand: not embarrassing friends, relatives, and accomplices of the accused.
This is quite a conundrum.
We used to have discussions like this all the time back in the old stationhouse.
We’d arrest a guy for some pretty serious offense. People had been hurt, property had been destroyed, the orderly workings of our society had been disturbed. We’d have statements from multiple witnesses, tape recordings, and videos showing the crime in actual progress. We’d have prior admissions from the suspect himself talking about how he was planning to commit the crime. We’d have sworn statements from the victims describing the damage that had been caused, and statements from experts about the likely long-term consequences of the criminal act.
A trial, we figured, would be an open and transparent process where evidence would be publicly presented, everyone’s rights would be protected (except, perhaps, for the victims’…), and an impartial decision would be rendered. It would be, in fact, the exact process we have used for hundreds of years to resolve disputes and promote healing. (Not that those results are always achieved, but though it is imperfect, this is still the process we use…)
But then we would hear that the friends and collaborators of the accused were threatening further criminal acts if we didn’t drop the charges. No need for any of that evidence nonsense they’d say. Sure, he did it, but he’s learned his lesson, and besides, no one really needs to know how this all happened, since, of course, it could never happen again. And we don’t think this court is the right one. Time to move on.
Gosh. What would we do?
Well, it was a long time ago and I don’t recall what we did. But it doesn’t really matter, although, somehow, I can’t recall ever having discussions about dropping the charges when a police officer had been killed.
As for impeachment, it is revealing that few, if any, opponents of the process are claiming that Mr. Trump is not guilty of the acts described in the Articles of Impeachment. Rather, they simply want the entire process aborted because – apparently – they believe that revealing additional details of Mr. Trump’s actions or actually holding him accountable might hurt the feelings (or electoral prospects) of people who actively supported a violent attempt to overturn a lawful election.
I do agree with their concern that impeachment is largely political. No doubt about that. If we really believed in accountability, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and democracy, Mr. Trump would be facing indictment on criminal charges, not mere impeachment.
January 26, 2021
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” – Haile Selassie
As you know, on January 13, the federal government issued an intelligence bulletin warning of a likely increase in political violence motivated largely by the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
This lie follows years of similar lies by Trump regarding various contests, including the 2012 election of Barack Obama, the 2016 Republican primaries, Emmy award selections, and the number of times Melania Trump appeared on the cover of fashion magazines. In 2016 and again in 2020, before the presidential elections, he declared that if he lost either of those contests, it could only be because the election was “rigged” against him.
While many Democrats and media outlets pushed back against these dangerous falsehoods, virtually no Republicans did. As result, the lies gained traction as any argument could easily be dismissed as partisan hackery or Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Having accepted such blatantly undemocratic and ill-conceived behavior for years, Republicans were content to allow the lies to continue during the months after the 2020 election, despite the fact that neither state election officials nor Trump campaign lawyers could find any evidence that the 2020 election was in any way compromised. At least one Republican official told reporters that there was “no harm” in letting Trump vent his frustration by attacking our democracy itself.
On January 6, we saw the harm.
Now, as armed right wing “militias,” extremists, and many thousands of Trump supporters make plans to disrupt the upcoming inauguration and other lawful government activity in Washington DC and in elsewhere, the US intelligence community is warning that the lie about the election will likely spark violence for many months to come.
We are on the very edge of the precipice.
For five Americans – including a Capitol Police Officer – it is too late now to step back. But we must find a way get off this path before we tumble into the abyss.
Once it begins, political violence is extraordinary difficult to stop. Intelligence analysts already believe that political violence through 2021 is all but certain.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
If we are to save ourselves from a prolonged and terrible period of political violence, we must act now. We need leaders – Republican officials, in particular – to step up and forcefully reject the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
No one else can do this. The protestations by Democrats, political independents, media commentators, state election officials, and others have all been dismissed by the majority of Republicans who remain convinced – despite the total lack of evidence – that the election was stolen from them.
A handful of prominent Republicans, including Trump’s own attorney general and the Undersecretary of Homeland Security, have already said that the election was not stolen. But far too many Republican officials are remaining silent, content to let the clock run out on the disastrous Trump presidency while mouthing insincere calls for unity.
But while Trump’s presidency will end, his deceitful, dangerous, and unhinged ravings about a stolen election will not. There will be no healing while he continues to tear at the wounds he has inflicted.
Somehow, we must convince millions of Trump supporters of the truth that the 2020 election was free and fair. Many are impervious to reason and will remain locked in their dysfunctional belief system. The small cadre of extremists will continue to agitate for violence. But, hopefully, others – perhaps millions of others – may be persuaded that our elections are fundamentally fair and that violence to overthrow election results is wrong.
Franklin Roosevelt said that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.” Too many Republicans today are committed to following their most fervent voters, even though they know that those they trail are misguided. Even worse, far too many Republicans are content to encourage their deluded base in the hopes of reaping some future political benefit.
As a United States Senator, it is not too late for you to honor your oath of office and take a leadership role in defending our nation’s democratic processes. We need you to state unequivocally that the election was not stolen and we need you to encourage other Republican officials to do the same.
We are far past the point where this fever will burn itself out.
If you have a better idea for quenching these smoldering embers, please take the necessary steps. But inaction is not an option.
Thank you for your attention.
January 15, 2021
See also:
Intelligence report: Capitol riot has emboldened domestic extremists who now pose ‘greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021’
There is no shortage of articles, posts, tweets, and rants regarding the events of the last week. Many are thoughtful, informative, well-researched, and highly accurate. And some are available on Fox News.
So, I am well aware that no one needs to hear from me about the events in Washington. But I have this page, and I feel like I am supposed to write something every now and then, and writing about anything else right now seems disrespectful to the nation and, especially, to the family of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was killed defending Congress.
So here are four observations from the windswept shores of Lake Erie …
1. The Capitol Police were sold out by the incompetence of their own superiors.
While I am no fan of American law enforcement – having served as a police officer for nine years, I know a little about the field – I am especially no fan of American police management. The Capitol Police were unprofessionally deployed, insufficiently equipped, and vastly outnumbered. From comments by officers and from video and audio recordings of the riot, it is obvious that there was no real plan for managing the widely-anticipated protests and no effective arrangements for back-up by other agencies. While incompetent leadership is the norm in American law enforcement, the failures at the Capitol were so egregious that an observer might plausibly wonder if the Capitol Police Department’s effort was intentionally sabotaged. Well, in a year or so we may find out. As for the rank-and-file officers who were abandoned by their so-called leaders, they mostly performed heroically, and though they were forced to surrender the building, they did protect the legislators and staff members trapped inside. Of course, not all officers performed well – ‘selfies, anyone?’ – and a handful of officers are being investigated. But in the total absence of effective leadership, discipline and professionalism will sometimes succumb.
2. We Are Just Getting Started
We are in a terrible place now, and the path back is unclear. While most of the country is aghast at what we have become, a frightening percentage believes that mob action to subvert democracy is OK. Extremists right now are planning a campaign of armed confrontations at statehouses and in Washington DC. There is nothing anyone can do in the short term to discourage these people and prevent further violence. They have been catered to, emboldened, and lied to for years.
In the meantime, we need to look carefully how we got here to understand how we can get out. Every disaster is the culminating point of a chain of errors, misjudgments, malfeasance, incompetence, bad luck, and malign intent. We need to investigate this disaster the way we would investigate a plane crash. It’s not enough to find out what happened that morning, or that week to precipitate the riot. We need a detailed understanding of the root causes of this incident.
3. They Knew
The most discouraging aspect of this entire disaster was the unspeakable cowardice and deep cynicism displayed by 147 legislators who endorsed the action of the mob, validated Trump’s shameless campaign of lies and distortions, and violated their own oaths of office by voting to reject lawful electoral votes with no evidence whatsoever that anything improper had occurred.
Unlike Trump – who is deeply damaged and mentally unfit for any position of responsibility – these legislators are mostly functioning adults. Mere hours after a violent mob had driven them from the floor of the legislative chamber, forced them and their staffs to take shelter in safe rooms behind barricaded doors, and fatally injured a police officer, they voted to reject the electoral votes of several states that Trump had lost, even though they knew that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.
They knew that in early November the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security had determined that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. They knew that DHS Under Secretary Chris Krebs, who had led a review of the election, had called the 2020 election, “the most secure in the nation’s history.”
They knew this and yet, because it was politically expedient, they persisted for months in encouraging the baseless fiction that the election had been “stolen.” Of course, they were careful not to describe in any detail how that theft had been accomplished, since every crackpot conspiracy theory had been debunked and no actual evidence of fraud had been introduced in any of the dozens and dozens of frivolous lawsuits the Trump campaign had filed and lost. Instead, they made fact-free allegations and when people responded to those allegations by wondering if they might be true, they pointed to that response as proof that their allegations were valid. In effect, they entered a crowded theater and yelled “Fire, fire,” and when the crowd surged towards the exits, they pointed to the pandemonium and said, “There must be a problem here if all these people think there is.”
They saw short-term political gain in questioning the results of an election they knew to be free and fair, and ignored the obvious destructive long-term consequences of their actions. Even when short-term political gain was replaced by immediate in-your-face danger – the mob that had surged through the halls of the Capitol had come equipped with flex-cuffs, metal pipes, bombs, and materials to erect a scaffold, complete with noose – they turned their back on their responsibilities to the nation and sided with the rioters.
In a resignation letter from his position on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Jason Schmid wrote:
“The sad, incontrovertible truth is that the people who laid siege to the Capitol were and continue to be domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States. A poisonous lie that the election was illegitimate and should be overturned inspired so called “patriots” to share common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists to attack the seat of American government. Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms. Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.”
4. The Way Back
There isn’t any chance of “healing” or nationwide “unity” until Republican officeholders – and their enablers in the media and elsewhere – come out and publicly refute the unsubstantiated, fraudulent, irresponsible, and highly inflammatory claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and condemn all attempts to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims. (Which is the textbook definition of terrorism.)
Of course, the poison that is now coursing through our political system will not be drawn out by Republicans admitting that they have been lying to people all along. The damage is too deep, the infection too widespread. By this point, hardly any of the hard-core Trump supporters will accept any actual facts or evidence.
Still, it is a necessary start. “Healing” requires that the perpetrators of the injustice or crime acknowledge their responsibility. You can’t ask to be forgiven if you are unwilling to admit that you did anything wrong.
Distressingly, some Republicans even now are doubling down on their dishonesty. Republicans in several states have already announced their intent to impose additional restrictions on voting because some voters now doubt the security of our elections. Of course, those voter attitudes are not in response to any actual; election insecurity, but are due entirely to Republican efforts to sow distrust and discord.
Oh, sure. In a few weeks Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. It now seems likely that the inauguration – already reduced in scale by the raging pandemic – will be conducted within an armored security bubble. But it will almost certainly take place.
The zealous and utterly misguided “supporters” of Donald Trump – with their overweening sense of entitlement and their delusions of grandeur – aren’t going to be allowed to stop the lawful transition from one administration to another.
But that doesn’t mean that they will accept reality.
And why should they? They have been coddled and babied for years by self-serving officials, media commentators, and pundits. While Trump’s open pandering to their ignorance and bigotry has been singularly destructive, he didn’t start this fire.
Right wing extremism has been a problem in the United States for more than a century. In the 1870’s, President Ulysses S. Grant mobilized federal law enforcement agencies to beat back the rising terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-war south. Throughout the twentieth century, the FBI and local law enforcement penetrated and dismantled dozens of right-wing terrorist groups. Since 2010, the FBI has identified right-wing groups as the greatest domestic threat America faces. No wonder Trump calls the FBI “corrupt.”
But while some law enforcement agencies have taken the right-wing threat seriously, other powerful people and groups have emboldened them, none more so than Donald Trump.
Throughout his presidency, and especially in the fraught months leading up to the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly praised right-wing groups – his “second amendment people” – including self-styled “militias,” for activities ranging from white supremacist marches, to armed invasions of state capitols, to the killing of unarmed demonstrators by vigilantees.
These groups have quickly learned that there are few – if any – consequences for their use of violence or the threat of violence. America’s gun culture, unprofessional local law enforcement, and the craven pandering of politicians hungry for the contributions and votes of committed, if deranged, “patriots” have combined to legitimize and encourage continued acts of intimidation and low-level violence.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol, intended to disrupt the certification of electoral votes and possibly derail Joseph Biden’s lawful installation as president, was simply the next step down a road we have been on for years.
And like earlier steps, this one has been without serious consequences for the people who occupied the Capitol and for the people that abetted them, even though five deaths have been attributed to the incident, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten to death and a demonstrator who was shot by police. In addition, dozens of police officers were injured and several were hospitalized while two explosive devices and a container of Molotov cocktails were found near the Capitol.
A few arrests have been made, more will certainly follow, and a few folks have lost their jobs. But Trump remains, though there are calls for his resignation, impeachment, or removal under the 25th amendment. None of these things are likely to happen, especially in light of the continued support for his clearly false ‘stolen election’ narrative by a significant number of Republican lawmakers and multiple irresponsible media outlets.
Whatever happens to Trump in the final days of his failing presidency, his malign encouragement of his “patriotic” base is certain to continue far beyond Biden’s inauguration. Trump will continue to inflame his supporters with repeated announcements that he – and they – have been betrayed.
Their responses are certain to escalate.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, more than one hundred Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
Hopefully, the blood of the injured officers and of the protestor who was shot and killed while breaking into the building earlier had been cleaned from the floors by then.
Unsurprisingly, a YouGov snap poll today found that 45 percent of Republicans actively support the occupation of the Capitol and the interference with the work of Congress.
We are on a dark and narrow path that will take us to a place we cannot yet see but that we certainly would prefer to avoid.
Yesterday’s clash wasn’t the beginning of our troubles, and it won’t be the end.
