Each morning when I get up, my husband’s first question is: any news? (That comes right after his opening observation that “growing old is not for sissies.”) Yesterday, boy was there news! And for the first time in what seems like forever, that news was ALL good.
As usual, Heather Cox Richardson said it best:
Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).
Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.
Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.
California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.
And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.
Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Those of us who care deeply about this country–whose patriotism is rooted in allegiance to the philosophy of the Declaration and fidelity to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those of us who work to achieve a society reflective of what I’ve called “the American Idea”– turned out in force.
If yesterday’s elections proved anything, they proved that real Americans can do this. We outnumber the haters–the racists, anti-Semites, homophobes and misogynists who are the face (and base) of today’s Republican Party. More importantly, yesterday demonstrated that We the real American People will come out to defend the real America.
Obviously, gratifying as Tuesday’s election turnout and results were, now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to return this country to the path laid out by its founders–both the original founders and those responsible for the post-Civil War “second founding“–a nation committed to both individual liberty and civic equality.
The enormous turnout for No Kings Day was an indication that Americans were up to the task; yesterday’s blowout victories confirmed it. We aren’t out of the woods by any means, but we are on the way.
There’s an old TV ad that has one person asking another “How do you spell relief?” The answer isn’t “rolaids,” as in the ad. It’s the growing, impressive evidence that resistance is–forgive the Borg reference– anything but futile.
A line from an essay I read a few weeks ago in the Bulwark has remained with me, growing in resonance as we approach November 5th. The author wrote that “there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.” Beneath everything–the pundits insisting that Harris do X or Y rather than whatever she’s doing at the time, the armies of lawyers preparing to do battle over the next “Big Lie,” the GOP’s increasing efforts to suppress votes–America has to grapple with that reality.
Some forty-seven percent of our fellow Americans support a mentally-ill, profoundly ignorant narcissist who tells them that they are the only “real” Americans. Forty-seven percent of us want to hand control of the nuclear codes to a misogynistic, homophobic, racist felon who has no comprehension of foreign policy–or for that matter, no understanding of how American government works.
It really is incomprehensible.
As the Bulwark essayist noted, that fact is the ugly truth this campaign has laid bare. If, when the votes are counted, Donald Trump garners forty percent or more–or, God help us, wins– we will no longer be able to take refuge in the comforting (and obviously inaccurate) belief that a large majority of Americans are people of good will and common sense. Even more than the pivotal choice we face–a choice between continuation of the American experiment and a country remade to conform to Project 2025’s theocratic and autocratic principles–the vote will be a referendum on that comforting belief.
The November 5th election will not be a choice based on policy differences–or on policy at all. It will be a twenty-first century replay of the Civil War–a challenge to the most fundamental bases of what I frequently refer to as “The American Idea.”
What the MAGA “patriots” don’t understand, what they actively reject, is the actual American exceptionalism that was baked into this country’s origin: the notion that one wouldn’t be an American by virtue of status or identity, but by embracing the philosophy of the new nation, by the willingness to “pledge allegiance” to an entirely new concept of governance.
It was–as anyone who has read any history will acknowledge–mostly aspirational. But with fits and starts (granted, lots more fits than most of us learned in our high school history classes), we’ve tried to follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion. We extended the franchise, welcoming non-landowners, freed slaves and women into the ranks of “We the People.” Our courts (again, with fits and starts) protected the rule of law against efforts to subvert it in favor of the greedy and unscrupulous and the efforts of racial and religious bigots.
What has so many of us worried sick right now isn’t simply the realization that many of our fellow citizens are credulous, racist and mean-spirited. There have always been folks like that (although not as vocal or empowered by rampant disinformation and the reinforcement of a semi-fascist cult).
We are worried to discover that there are so many of them, and terrified that we are losing that aspirational America, that “American Idea,” to frightened and angry people who never understood or embraced it.
Like so many other Americans, I live in a bubble. My friends and family and neighbors (including a number who’ve been life-long Republicans) are inclusive and welcoming–and equally appalled by polling that (correctly or not) tells us that the upcoming election–between a senile, certifiable lunatic who wants to be a dictator and a sane, experienced woman who has spent her entire adult life in public service–is “too close to call.”
Back in 2021, I quoted a Leonard Pitts column in which he wrote:
I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.
Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.
In a few days, we’ll know whether we will hang on to those ideals for at least the time being–and we’ll know just how many voters reject Pitts’ (and my) definition of “American.”
Last week, I spoke to the Shepherd’s Center at North United Methodist Church. I had been asked to address the differences between capitalism and socialism. Here’s what I said. (Warning: it’s longer than my usual posts.)
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We are in a hot and heavy political season, facing an extraordinarily important election. The outcome of that election will depend, in large part, on the ability of voters to understand the foundational premises of American government –to have what I define as a minimum level of civic literacy—and an understanding of the essential elements of America’s economic system.
Why is agreement on definitions and documented facts important? Look at the interminable debates about the Affordable Care Act—aka “Obamacare”—as an example. People may have very different opinions about the wisdom of the policy choices involved, but a decision to repeal, implement or amend the Act depends upon understanding what it actually says and does—not on hysterical accusations that it constitutes a “socialism,” that is always, and presumably self-evidently, a bad thing.
Or take the ongoing battles over religion in the nation’s schools. There are genuine arguments to be made about the proper application of the Establishment Clause in the context of public education. But we can’t have those reasoned disputes with people who insist that the First Amendment doesn’t require separation of church and state.
Basing our arguments on verifiable fact and accepted history actually helps people make more persuasive cases for their own points of view. We all encounter people who have a legitimate point worth considering, but who—because they are basing their argument on erroneous facts or demonstrating a lack of understanding of important basic concepts—get dismissed out of hand. Credibility requires verifiable evidence. You might want to use that perfect quote from Thomas Jefferson that you saw on the Internet, but if it is bogus, you’ve just undermined your own position. Defending alternate realities is like arguing about whether a fork is a spoon—it doesn’t get you any closer to a useful resolution.
A few years ago, I wrote a brief pamphlet called “Talking Politics” that contained basic facts about the U.S. Constitution, economic concepts and systems, and the nature of science and the scientific method—basic facts that every citizen should know, and that should serve as solid starting points for reasoned arguments. Among other things, that booklet defined government, the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and the major differences between economic systems. It was the elements of those economic systems that I was asked to address today—especially what we mean when we talk about the differences between capitalism and socialism.
Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are primarily controlled by private owners for profit. It is characterized by free markets, where the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand, rather than set by government. Economists often define the ideal free trade as a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller, both of whom are in possession of all information relevant to that transaction.
Understanding the importance of free trade to capitalism is important, because it defines the proper role of government in a capitalist system—as an “umpire” or referee, ensuring that everyone plays by the rules. For example, Teddy Roosevelt reminded us that monopolies distort markets; if one company can dominate a market, that company can dictate prices and other terms with the result that those transactions will no longer be truly voluntary. If Manufacturer A can avoid the cost of disposing of the waste produced by his factory, by dumping it into the nearest river, he will be able to compete unfairly with Manufacturer B, who is following the rules governing proper waste disposal. If Chicken Farmer A is able to control his costs and gain market share by failing to keep his coops clean and his chickens free of disease, unwary consumers will become ill. Most economists agree that if markets are to operate properly, government must act as an “umpire,” assuring a level playing field.
This need for government regulation is a response to what is called “market failure.” There are three primary situations in which Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t work: when monopolies or corrupt practices replace competition; when so-called “externalities” like pollution harm people who aren’t party to the transaction (who are neither buyer nor seller); and when there are what we call “information asymmetries,” that is, situations where buyers don’t have access to information they need to bargain in their own interest. Since markets don’t have built-in mechanisms for dealing with these situations, most economists—conservative and liberal alike– argue that regulation is needed.
Economists and others will often disagree about the need for particular regulations, but most agree that an absence of necessary regulatory activity undermines capitalism. Unregulated markets can lead to a different system, sometimes called corporatism. In corporatist systems, government regulations favoring powerful corporate interests are the result of lobbying by the corporate and monied special interests that stand to benefit from them. You might think of it as a football game where one side has paid the umpire to make calls favorable to that team.
The word socialism, on the other hand, simply means the collective provision of goods and services. The decision whether to pay for certain services collectively rather than leaving their production and consumption to the free market is based upon a number of factors. First, there are some goods that free markets simply cannot produce. Economists call them public goods and define them as both “non-excludable” –meaning that individuals who haven’t paid for them cannot be effectively kept from using them—and “non-rivalrous,” meaning that use by one person does not reduce the availability of that good to others. Some examples of public goods include things like fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defense, flood control systems and street lighting. If we are going to have these things, they have to be supplied by the whole society, usually through government, and paid for with tax dollars.
Of course, not all goods and services that we socialize—that we provide collectively– are public goods. Policymakers often base decisions to socialize services on other considerations: we socialize police and fire protection because doing so is generally more efficient and cost-effective, and because most of us believe that limiting such services only to people who can afford to pay for them would be immoral. We socialize garbage collection in more densely populated urban areas in order to prevent disease transmission.
Getting the “mix” right between goods that we provide collectively and those we leave to the free market is important, because too much socialism hampers economic health. Just as unrestrained capitalism can become corporatism, socializing the provision of goods that the market can supply reduces innovation and incentives to produce. During the 20th Century, many countries experimented with efforts to socialize major areas of their economies, and even implement socialism’s extreme, communism, with uniformly poor results. Not only did economic productivity suffer, so did political freedom, because when governments have too much control over the means of production and distribution, they can easily become authoritarian.
Virtually all countries today—including the United States– have mixed economies. The challenge is getting the right balance between socialized and free market provision of goods and services.
In our highly polarized politics today, words like Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism and Communism are used more as insulting labels than descriptions. There are numerous disagreements about the essential characteristics of these systems, probably because the theories underlying them were so different from the actual experiences of the countries that tried them.
Socialism is probably the least precise of these terms. It is generally applied to mixed economies where the social safety net is much broader and the tax burden somewhat higher than in the U.S.—Scandinavian countries are an example.
Communism begins with the belief that equality is defined by equal results; this is summed up in the well-known adage “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” All property is owned communally, by everyone (hence the term “communism”). In practice, this meant that all property was owned by the government, ostensibly on behalf of the people. In theory, communism erases all class distinctions, and wealth is redistributed so that everyone gets the same share. In practice, the government controls the means of production and most individual decisions are made by the state. Since the quality and quantity of work is divorced from reward, there is less incentive to innovate or produce, and ultimately, countries that have tried to create a communist system, like the USSR, have collapsed or, like China, moved toward a more mixed economy.
Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” which is confusing, especially because people throwing these terms around rather clearly don’t understand them. Actually, fascism differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. There is a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, government controls business decisions. Fascist regimes tend to be focused upon a ( supposedly glorious) past, and on the upholding of traditional class structures and gender roles, which are thought to be necessary to maintain the social order.
Understanding the differences among these different political philosophies is important for two reasons: first, we cannot have productive discussions or draw appropriate historical analogies if we don’t have common understandings of the words we are using. Second, we cannot learn from history and the mistakes of the past if the terms we are using are unconnected to any substantive content.
When activists accuse an American President of being a Fascist or a Communist simply because they disagree with a position that President is taking, it trivializes the crimes committed by the Nazis and the Soviets and it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in reasoned discussion about—or persuasive criticism of—whatever the President is doing that led to the charge.
On the other hand, when we fail to see very real analogies between American political actors and the fascists who ushered in very dark historical eras, we run the risk of falling into a similar abyss. I believe it was Santayana who said “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
As I said in my opening remarks, we live in a pivotal time. We can choose to educate ourselves and choose to embrace the philosophy of America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights. We can continue to fine-tune our mixed economy in response to the evolution of new technologies, or we can do what so many seem to do: forego fact-checking and education, and just find sites on the Internet that confirm our existing biases.
That’s the thing about liberty and democracy. We have a choice. I’m not usually a praying person, but I’m praying that Americans choose the Constitution and democracy when they go to the polls next month.
I often refer to Talking Points Memo, one of the most credible and professional online sources of information. But the other day, the site’s Morning Memo blew me away–it was as if David Kurtz, the author, was describing my own fears and moods as we count down to November 5th.
The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.
It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.
Kurtz writes that everything seems “frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.” Frozen in place is precisely the way I’ve been feeling–as though I am in suspended animation until I know whether the world I will leave to my grandchildren will be habitable and governable–whether I will leave them an admittedly imperfet society that is nevertheless working toward greater fairness, or one hurtling into another Dark Ages.
Because that concern isn’t hyperbole. That is the choice we face. As Kurtz put it,
Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.
He conveyed his “unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.”
It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.
As the essay repeatedly reminds us, Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to American democratic institutions–but the reality and immediacy of that threat tends to obscure what we have already lost–what the last 8 years have cost us, the “vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.”
The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.
The essay mourns the multiple ways that the persistence of older journalistic constructs has operated to normalize Trump–how it has created false equivalencies, and allowed anti-democratic forces to denigrate, undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions.
What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.
The other day, a judge whom I greatly admire recommended that I watch a new documentary.
Talk about drawing back the curtain! That documentary, “From Russia With Lev” may be the tell-all of all time, and–assuming there are still uncommitted voters–the timing of its disclosures couldn’t be better. For those who haven’t yet seen it, don’t walk–run to your television and watch it on MSNBC.
The documentary tells the complete story behind the events that precipitated Trump’s first impeachment, and it does so from the perspective of Lev Parnas, one of the main characters in that travesty, who has clearly come to regret his participation in what can only be described as a Mafia-like enterprise.
In the process of telling the story behind Trump’s effort to blackmail the President of Ukraine, we learn a lot of things that I, for one, would rather I didn’t know.
What we learn about Trump isn’t surprising (although much of what we already did know was supplemented with data amply confirming his unfitness for any office, let alone the Presidency), but the film revealed an extent of rot in the upper echelons of the GOP that shocked me. Despite my distaste for several of the people shown to be “on the take” in one way or another, I would not have predicted the depths to which they fell, morally and legally. The documentary reinforced the mendacity of Bill Barr’s “summary” of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation of Trump’s acquiescence into widespread Russian meddling in the election; it focused, in passing, on Kevin McCarthy’s money-grubbing, and on the equally dishonorable actions of several others. And it confirmed the knowing mendacity of Fox “News.”
Most of all, the documentary displayed the pathetic, grasping, total degeneracy of Rudy Giuliani.
It would be a disservice to offer a Cliff Notes version of the film. You really, really need to see it, to understand–intellectually and viscerally–that for a period of four years, the United States was run by a gang of thuggish con men and Mafiosas who cared nothing about the security or honor of the United States and everything about personal wealth and power.
What I do want to emphasize are the reasons to believe Lev Parnas and his recitation of these events. Rachel Maddow, the executive producer, was asked that question in an interview, and her answer was convincing.
First of all, Parnas was forthcoming about his own life. He was admittedly a con man who ran around with hoodlums and wheeler-dealers, a man who knowingly and enthusiastically took part of a variety of illegal activities. It was thanks to those prior contacts that he eventually fell into a relationship that took him into the inner precincts of Trump’s White House. He forthrightly admits that being welcomed into these powerful circles went to his head. In his narratives, he doesn’t try to excuse or whitewash either his very checkered past or his role in Trump and Giuliani’s effort to withhold the weapons that Congress had authorized for Ukraine–weapons desperately needed to fight the Russian invasion– unless Zelensky announced a bogus investigation into Hunter Biden.
But even if you discount his accuracy or sincerity, Parnas provided the producer and director of the film (as well as the prosecutors who eventually sent him to prison) with extensive documentary evidence. His cellphone contained thousands of emails, texts and photographs confirming his version of events–evidence that simply could not have been manufactured, and that is not capable of being explained away. (There were also numerous photos of him with Trump, who continues to claim he never met Lev.)
Ordinarily, a film offering the bombshells that this one does would destroy a Presidential candidate. But we occupy a weird time. The MAGA cult, Christian Nationalists and racists who stubbornly support a demented criminal are not open to persuasion, and I seriously doubt that there are, at this point in the electoral cycle, any truly “uncommitted” voters. As David Sedaris has noted (his language), to be undecided between these two candidates is like having the stewardess on a plane offer you a meal choice between chicken and shit with broken glass in it–and, after a pause, to ask how the chicken was cooked.
Those of us who reside in the “reality-based community” already had ample reason to reject Donald Trump. “From Russia with Lev” makes the prospect of a Trump victory even more terrifying.
Watch it. And if you know anyone who really is trying to decide between the chicken and the shit with broken glass, make sure they see it too.
