What Were We  Celebrating on the Fourth?

Posted on July 5, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 5, 2021

For me, something about the Fourth of July was off this year. I felt like the country was desperate to celebrate something, but not sure what it was. The legacy of the last five years has changed us. We knew the post-COVID “new normal” would be different, but yesterday was a not too subtle reminder of how different it might look.

Americans are desperate for something to celebrate, to feel like life is normal again. It wasn’t long ago that the sight of lawns festooned with American flags on the Fourth was a source of pride. I’ve always been embarrassingly patriotic, and all those flags were inspirational. But not so much this year.

The sharp divisions in our country, symbolized in part by the fight over confederate flags and monuments made the sight of all those stars and stripes feel like a political statement, and there seemed to be far fewer of them than in previous years. I attribute that entirely to Donald Trump’s MAGA bullshit. He single-handedly made patriotism synonymous with right-wing, gun-toting extremists, whose version of patriotism was storming the Capitol in insurrection.

The media and sponsors like Macy*s did their best. Like action filmmakers using computer imagery to enhance the performances of mere humans, they put on spectacular displays of fireworks and entertainment all over the country. It looked great, and our television hosts did everything they could to make it festive. But as I watched the spectacular pyrotechnics from New York and Washington, I couldn’t help feeling that there were millions of angry people who saw only socialist-leaning blue states putting on a Hollywood-style show.

I had the surreal feeling that I was living in two different worlds. While Washington celebrated all day long – the Nationals and Dodgers played at 11:00 am to begin a capital-wide party that lasted twelve hours – its neighbor forty miles to the northeast felt like a tomb. Baltimore, which also usually puts on a spectacular event that mimics the British bombardment of the city in 1812, canceled its celebration this year because of lingering fears of COVID and a depleted treasury without a deep pocket sponsor.

I dined at one of the best restaurants in the city amid what should have been teeming crowds. Instead of crowds, there were mostly empty streets and businesses that depend on those crowds struggling to survive. That particular tale of two cities was downright creepy, and a far more accurate portrait of America.

The Fourth brought a heartfelt warning from Dr. Anthony Fauci that we’re not out of the COVID woods yet. It was a specific reminder of 600,000 lives lost, most of which could have been averted if Trump hadn’t politicized the pandemic. It was also a stark warning that the 150 million Americans who are not yet vaccinated are very much at risk from the “delta” variant of the virus, which is far more contagious and likely deadlier than the strains we dealt with in 2020. It’s simply insane that the decision to accept a life-saving vaccine has also become a red state-blue state issue, instead of a sign of red, white, and blue solidarity. While Trump wants to claim credit for the incredible accomplishments of medical researchers who developed the vaccines, the refusal to take them which is very much a red state phenomenon is another part of his horrific legacy. Recognizing that made the noise and flashing lights of celebration seem hollow.

“America the Beautiful” means a lot to me. That’s why I purchased it as a domain name and used it to try defend America against Trumpism. When a military choir sang the song during New York’s fireworks last night, I listened to the words for the millionth time, especially, “God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” A voice inside me responded, “Not this year.” Mass shootings, thousands dead from gun violence, continued police brutality against minorities, closing our doors to refugees, right-wing militias, QAnon, Antifa, and red states attempting to curtail their citizens’ right to vote don’t sound much like brotherhood to me. So I have to ask, exactly what were we celebrating on July 4, 2021? Surely not the 245th anniversary of the codification of American values.

If that sounds too cynical and pessimistic, I apologize. I didn’t mean to rain on your parade, but reality is what it is, and burying our heads in the sand always makes things worse. I’m glad many Americans had a chance to celebrate and feel normal for a few hours, but we have a lot of work to do in this country if America the Beautiful is to be preserved. In Joe Biden, we have a president who cares, but he can’t do it alone.

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Saving Our Future

Posted on June 30, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 30, 2021

If it wasn’t obvious before last week, it should be now. Our country and the planet of which it is a small part are in trouble. The problem is more serious than petty politics, huge egos, and fossil fuel industry lobbyists. Our infrastructure and ecosystems are dying, and eight billion humans will likely die with them if we don’t act. There’s still time to fix what’s broken and reverse the processes of decay and degradation that cause highways to crumble, bridges to collapse, and buildings to lose their integrity, and we can still offset many of the effects of climate change, but time is running out.

We’ve been ignoring wake-up calls and warnings far too long. I was shocked to realize that it’s been ten years since the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota collapsed. That’s ten years in which highways, bridges, and tunnels all over the country continued to deteriorate while Congress demonstrated its impotence in dealing with real problems. What should have been an urgent national 911 call has been largely ignored, the issues kicked down the road.

NPR reported that like the recent building collapse in South Florida, “the interstate highway bridge had been classified as structurally deficient, meaning that it was aging and in need of repair … and the bridge was also rated as fracture critical, meaning the failure of just one vital component could cause the whole bridge to collapse.” Subsequent engineering studies showed similar results for thousands of critical structures around the country. Yet, we are still watching the spectacle of Republicans caring more about stifling a Biden presidency and upsetting a megalomaniacal former president who still thinks he’s running things than acting to fix them.

The infrastructure bill also recognizes that almost ten percent of our population doesn’t have internet access. That’s not only about not being connected to social media or playing online games – it’s about not being able to participate in e-commerce and having access to sources of mind-broadening information that aren’t available any other way. We laugh at scenes of crowds of people scrolling through websites on their phones, but for people who can’t, the inability to do so isn’t a laughing matter.

The compromise infrastructure bill is a positive development, but it ignores a number of critical public health emergencies: tens of millions of Americans without health care, half the population still not vaccinated against COVID, and the ever-worsening impact of climate change. These things affect the long-term survival of our economy, our ability to feed our people, and how future generations will live with droughts, wildfires, excessive heat, and rising sea levels and water tables. Hundreds of people have died during the current heat wave, and that number could soar into the millions during our lifetimes if we do not act now.

Forty years ago, people living in the Pacific Northwest (western Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) rarely saw summer temperatures above the mid-eighties. Most people lived in unair-conditioned homes and drove unair-conditioned cars. Even places like San Diego rarely experienced temperatures that high, except for a couple of weeks each summer when the Santa Ana winds blew desert air back through the mountains passes of the Sierra. All that changed in just a few decades.

The entire west coast of North America has seen temperatures rise steadily, drought conditions worsen, reservoirs dry up, and millions of acres of forest lost to wildfires. The last few days have seen temperatures in the northwest that were inconceivable when I raised my family there. 115 degrees in Portland, 109 in Seattle, and 120 in Linton, BC, temperatures that used to be typical only of the Mojave Desert. Even Las Vegas has never recorded a temperature of 120 degrees.

This is neither a joke nor a temporary phenomenon. It’s a reflection of a constantly evolving jet stream reacting to consistently rising levels of heat in our atmosphere. It’s going to get worse, and the rate at which things worsen will likely accelerate. This is about survival. Humans cannot live in 120-degree heat. Yet, more than a dozen states, the latest being Florida, recently passed legislation to support the fossil fuel industry at the cost of retarding conversion to renewable sources of energy.

That’s why it’s essential not only that the Congress pass its watered-down infrastructure bill, but that Democrats force through a reconciliation package that finally implements a plan to remediate the effects of climate change. If we don’t, future generations, assuming they are still around to look back on our foolishness, will marvel at how we could have engaged in decades of slow-motion societal suicide.

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Living in Interesting Times

Posted on June 29, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 29, 2021

The phrase, “We live in interesting times” is an ironic warning about coming uncertainty and jeopardy. Whether or not it was originally a Chinese curse, the implication is that war and chaos are a lot more interesting than peace and tranquility. That’s true if you’re the producer of an action film, but for the rest of us, a year or two of boring calm might be just what we need.

What makes the current time “interesting” is the lingering influence of Donald Trump, which is having a paralyzing effect on our government’s ability to move the country forward. If you think of the double whammy of COVID and the Trump presidency as a crippling injury on a national scale, we are presently living through the physical rehabilitation stage of recovery. It’s painful and long, and we hate it, but it’s the reality we have to live with.

Most Americans want an end to the constant airing of personal grievances, the spewing of lies, and the legal loose ends of trying to overthrow a legitimate election and stage an insurrection. A lot of anger remains on all sides, and having to wait months for resolution is widening the divides Trump exacerbated throughout our country. Our legal system moves ponderously, and the gathering of evidence takes time, but those are two things distinguish a democracy from an autocracy.

Trump recently embarked on his “Save America Tour,” which most observers more accurately labeled his “Revenge Tour.” A few thousand people, mostly hard-core supporters who came from far away, showed up for his Ohio rally last Saturday, but it was nothing like his earlier rallies. Time was he could rent an arena and fill it with locals, drawing four to five times as many people. On Saturday, the attendees stood in a fairground outside of Cleveland.

People interviewed before the rally sounded angry and ignorant, their attitude saying, “Don’t annoy us with facts. We have our own truth.” That’s the kind of thing we hear from people who have harbored decades-long grievances based on lies right-wing hate radio has indoctrinated them with for thirty years. It’s mindless anger based on greed, envy, bigotry, and skillful manipulation by political opportunists. Angry people have always been around, but Trump gave them a voice and promised to remedy their grievances.

What Ohio showed more than anything was that Trump’s hard-core base can still make noise, but it is a shrunken shell of what it once was. Many in the crowd got bored and left before the rally ended. Do you think that was because hearing about Trump’s personal grudges again with no evidence of any policies that address the crowd’s real problems had grown tiresome? Were the people who left early saying, “We’ve had enough of this crap?”

Fear of Trump’s base is what paralyzed Republicans in Congress. It’s what enabled Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to hold their caucuses together during Joe Biden’s first five months in office. McConnell based his strategy on the assumption that Trump could cause so much trouble within his party, they would have no chance of winning a majority in either chamber in 2022. But if I can see Trump’s influence waning, surely Republicans in the House and Senate can too.

The recent bipartisan compromise in the Senate on the president’s infrastructure proposal was a rebuke to both Trump and McConnell. Most Republican Senators would prefer that Trump disappear so Congress can try to get back to doing its business. The final shape of the infrastructure bill will speak volumes about how much influence he still has. He’ll never back down voluntarily, and some of his supporters predicted more violence to come as some form of endgame emerges.

I remain optimistic that the country will heal from Trump. In 1966, in the midst of our military buildup in Vietnam and the fight over civil rights and women’s right to choose, Senator Robert Kennedy said, “Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty, but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.” In that, he may have been echoing Charles Dickens a couple of centuries earlier: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, … it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

I believe the worst of times brings out the best in us. The dark times are ending, and there is reason to hope. If Dickens had known about climate change, he might have said the summer of despair, but that would be quibbling.

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Trump’s Sinkng Ship

Posted on June 28, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 28, 2021

Remember Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s last Attorney General? Remember his smug, arrogant smirk, and how he could sound demeaning and sarcastic without uttering a word? Barr loved the power, reveling in the unfettered opportunity to settle old scores, as long as they fit into Trump’s agenda. Remember how, after the election, at Trump’s behest, he used Justice Department Resources to launch an investigation to support Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen because of massive election fraud?

From the day he was appointed Attorney General, Barr gave every appearance of being another Trump lapdog, although it didn’t seem to make much sense in his case. Clearly nearing the end of his political career, (he’s seventy-one,) he was already respected in conservative circles – he didn’t need that job, but he clearly wanted and lobbied for it.

When Trump appointed him, it was widely reported that Barr was very critical of the attempts to impeach Richard Nixon and force him to resign his presidency. He had opined that Nixon had been railroaded and shouldn’t have caved in to pressure – an interesting view of a president who essentially admitted to committing a felony in office. Trump had always wanted to use the DOJ as his own personal legal attack dog, and Barr appeared to be willing to make that happen, especially when he issued a distorted summary of the findings of the Mueller investigation that made Trump look completely exonerated, when in fact, Mueller had cited a dozen instances when Trump’s actions looked prosecutable.

There’s one important difference between Trump and Barr. Trump spent most of his adult life behaving like a raging bull, ignoring laws and rules that didn’t suit him, knowing his highly paid lawyers could usually intimidate his enemies, and when they couldn’t, the worst consequence he would face would be a fine and a slap on the wrists. In the world of business, you have to be Bernie Madoff to wind up in prison.

Barr, on the other hand, understands government, something Trump never cared enough about to learn. Barr understands that there are serious consequences for malfeasance or criminal behavior while serving in office, and unlike his sociopathic boss, there were lines he knew he couldn’t cross. Thus, while Trump was screaming about fraud and a stolen election last November, Barr was putting the final touches on his version of an investigation that found no indication of fraud that might have influenced the outcome of the election. And on December 1, 2020, Barr told that to an Associated Press reporter who published it the same day.

This week, Jonathan Karl published the results of his interviews with Barr and Mitch McConnell in the Atlantic. Karl says McConnell had been pressuring Barr to go public since right after the election. McConnell himself refused to speak out because, he claims, Trump would have gone ballistic and sabotaged the two Senate runoffs elections in Georgia, which he did anyway. You’d think politicians as experienced as McConnell and Barr would have understood the danger of having a tiger by the tail.

That pretty much sums up how Trump has been able to control the Republican party for six years. Having a tiger by the tail is problematic because if the tiger turns on you, you’re dead. And this particular tiger had publicly turned on enough people, particularly Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, that Barr and McConnell had no illusions about who and what they were dealing with. Most Republican politicians had shown themselves to be craven cowards since Trump came on the scene, which made it especially difficult for McConnell to speak out publicly.

Is it a coincidence that the Atlantic article appeared just as the New York District Attorney’s office announced that they are about to indict the Trump organization on charges of tax fraud? Do you find it surprising that Barr now claims he only began the DOJ investigation into election fraud because he knew he’d have to respond to Trump’s lies one day? Ah, the joy of revisionist history. It’s truly amazing how courageous rats become when it’s clear the ship is taking on water with no salvation in sight. Trump hasn’t completely lost his shrinking base, and he probably won’t, but his media presence now centers around a television network (AON) fully invested in crazy conspiracy theories. His attempt to re-establish himself on social networks turned into a lead balloon, and his revenge tour rallies aren’t attracting crowds the way they used to.

Barr is one of the chief rats in this scenario. When he decided to publicly reveal that he had jumped ship, it was a sign that it will all be going down soon.

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The Sinema-Manchin Roadblock

Posted on June 23, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 23, 2021

Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected to represent Arizona in 2018, has been in an unusual position for the past month. The media has characterized her as “the other” Democratic voice opposed to killing the filibuster. That’s because West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has gotten all the attention as the fulcrum on which the slim Democratic majority in the Senate rests. He has steadfastly held out for bipartisan negotiations with Republicans and for keeping the filibuster, donning the mantle of a one-Senator blockade standing in the way of progressive legislation.

Most observers view Manchin as the key to everything this Congress wants to accomplish, and the fact that Sinema quietly stated the same views as Manchin did nothing to discourage the notion that she would simply go along with everything Manchin agreed to. But Senator Sinema has a clear voice of her own, as was evident in her Monday Op-Ed in the Washington Post.

Her situation is quite different from Manchin’s, who has successfully carved out a niche as a Democrat in one of the reddest states in the country. Since 2001, he has won four statewide elections (Secretary of State, Governor, U. S. Senator twice) by the same West Virginians who voted two-to-one for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. At seventy-three, he’ll be seventy-six when he’s up for re-election in 2024. In terms of career longevity, he has little to lose by standing up for bipartisanship and bucking his party’s stands on key legislation.

At forty-five, Sinema still has most of her career ahead of her. Arizona’s Republican-dominated legislature is forcing through some of the most restrictive voting rights legislation in the country, designed to reduce minority (largely Democratic) voting. So when Sinema speaks out for bipartisanship and against killing the filibuster, it’s hard to accuse her of being hypocritical. Those positions could wind up seriously diminishing her re-election chances.

Given that, I read her Post opinion piece with great interest and learned, first of all, that she’s no Joe Manchin clone. In three terms in the House of Representatives, she had a solid record of working across the aisle to pass important legislation. She wants lasting results, which she believes can only be achieved by passing bipartisan laws. She points out that the filibuster was designed to protect against egregious excesses by a party holding a slim majority, and that eliminating it would place democracy in jeopardy and simply open the door for Congress to reverse anything passed without support from the opposition party the next time they’re in the majority. If anything is certain in politics it’s that majorities can be as fleeting as snowflakes in July.

Sinema writes that history proves the filibuster “is needed to protect against attacks on women’s health, clean air and water, or aid to children and families in need,” and that it forces moderation on the part of the extreme wings of both parties. She believes that the “question is less about the immediate results from any … Democratic or Republican goals — it is the likelihood of repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty, deepening divisions and further eroding Americans’ confidence in our government.” It’s difficult to argue with that, since it’s obviously true. Congress’ abysmal approval ratings over the last decade, often well below twenty percent, demonstrate clearly that Americans have lost confidence in that branch of government.

Despite the unarguable truth of her position, it omits two essential factors. One is the question both she and Manchin have refused to answer: what will you do if your best efforts at bipartisan negotiation fail? The other is that all of their highly-principled sentiments only have meaning when people on both sides of the aisle act in good faith, that they remain true to their oaths of office to always put the interest of the nation ahead of their own. The fact that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have the same top priority – regaining control of the Congress at any cost, no matter that post-COVID America has too many critical problems to permit congressional gridlock to continue – makes Sinema’s argument futile.

The critical For the People voting rights bill is at the center of the current storm. Majority Leader Schumer forced the Senate to vote on whether it should debate the measure, and as expected, every Republican voted NO, but both Sinema and Manchin joined their Democratic colleagues and voted YES, despite knowing it can only pass if the filibuster is suspended. Does that suggest they’ll defer the fight over bipartisanship until the bad actors on the other side are replaced by people of principle?

The For the People bill cannot be allowed to fail if we are to save our democracy. Every Democrat must vote to pass it by any means necessary.

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The Decline of Two Would-Be Autocrats

Posted on June 15, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 15, 2021

They’re not exactly two peas in a pod, but there are far more similarities than differences between recently deposed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and recently defeated American President Donald Trump. Their most regrettable similarity is that they pose grave dangers to both their own nations and the world order. That’s remarkable in itself, since one was supposed to be the leader of the Free World – if that term still applies with democracy under attack almost everywhere – while the other was the leader of a tiny, embattled nation surrounded by sworn enemies for its entire existence.

Israel has only existed as an independent nation since 1948. Its creation by the fledgling United Nations was partly a way to offer Jewish people a homeland of their own after the Nazi attempt at genocide reduced their worldwide population by 36 percent, from 16.6 million to 10.6 million. It was also a misguided attempt to create political stability in the Middle East. It’s difficult to see how creating a nearly defenseless nation on land that had been fought over for more than a thousand years surrounded by enemies that outnumbered it by more than 100 to 1 and swore to annihilate it on the first day of its existence was supposed to accomplish that.

Israel survived through toughness and sacrifice. Wealthy Israelis accepted a 50% tax on their income to pay for military aid, largely from the United States and later from France and the UK. Despite significant anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States after the war, hatred of Jews was easily overmatched by fear of Communism, which guaranteed that America would never abandon Israel. The tiny nation became the lynchpin for the western nations’ attempts to contain Soviet expansion.

Our support of Israel wasn’t a one-way street. America’s massive infusion of aid was in our strategic interest as it stymied the Soviet Union’s efforts to attain a beachhead in the Middle East. Israeli engineers improved the warplanes we sent them and shared the upgrades with our military. Moreover, Israeli Intelligence and operatives on the ground became our Middle East front line in the Cold War. But two generations of living under siege caused the next generation of Israelis to long for a negotiated peace with their neighbors. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a majority of young Israelis voted against their right-wing government, only to have the tables turned when the Soviet Union collapsed, and more than three million Jews who had lived under Soviet domination emigrated to Israel. They swung the pendulum away from negotiation toward aggressive expansionism and created the power base of Bibi Netanyahu.

Netanyahu never supported a negotiated peace with his Arab neighbors because he equated compromise with the loss of Israeli power. He used his office to sabotage those efforts, repeatedly violating international law by building settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. His autocratic, my-way-or-no-way approach to government made him a Trump favorite, his disdain for neighboring countries matchng Trump’s, though to be fair, Netanyahu’s had some justification. Mexico, Canada, and Central America never vowed to destroy the United States.

Another thing Trump admired about Netanyahu was his response to being continually hounded by his nation’s justice system. Repeatedly declaring innocence of any wrong-doing despite years of mounting evidence of criminal corruption was something that was right in Trump’s wheelhouse. What really got Trump’s attention was the way Netanyahu clung to power even after being indicted for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust (accepting bribes for political favors.) Trump has been under investigation for racketeering and tax fraud for decades, and he knew that if he failed to be re-elected, he would likely be indicted without his pet Justice Department to protect him.

Trump and Netanyahu both displayed a willingness to retain power by any means necessary, counting on a rabid base of support to keep them in office. But here and in Israel those bases eventually waned, until this week, anger over Netanyahu’s policies and governing style resulted in a coalition of parties so diverse, no one imagined they could ever unite. The one thing that held them together was the need to depose Netanyahu. In like manner, nothing but fear and dislike of Trump could have united Democrats and Independents, enabling them to defeat him in 2020, and prosecutors in New York hint that Trump may soon suffer Netanyahu’s fate.

Both men loudly protested that their defeats were fraudulent, but let’s not take the comparison too far. Netanyahu may be corrupt and wrongheaded about negotiating with his neighbors, but right-wing supporters won’t be marching on Jerusalem in armed insurrection any time soon.

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Centrist Compromise May Be Our Last Hope

Posted on June 11, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 11, 2021

Although it’s been looking grim lately, all hope is not yet lost that the partisan impasse in Congress can be broken. That’s not to say that salvation from congressional gridlock is at hand, but why not bask in a ray of hope while we can?

I have believed for years that only way our democratic system can survive in the long term is if a strong centrist element forced those at the extremes to compromise, and with the war for control of the Republican presently underway between true Conservatives and Trumpers, that task is both more critical and difficult. Take the Senate, for example. What if a block of ten centrist leaning Senators refused to be bullied by tea partiers, Trumpers, progressives, or Ilhan Omar? What if they demanded to be heard and held out until one or both extremes realized that getting part of what they want is better than nothing? What if the loudest, angriest, wealthiest voices weren’t the only ones we heard?

Yesterday, a group of ten Senators, five Democrats and five Republicans announced that they had agreed on a $1.2 trillion compromise infrastructure bill that focused entirely on physical infrastructure. It would leave things like universal internet access for all Americans still just an aspiration, but let’s focus on the positive. If their bill were to pass as is, fewer freeway bridges would collapse and plunge unsuspecting motorists into canyons and rivers, fewer potholes and less crumbling pavement would prevent countless accidents, and several million good jobs would be created throughout the country. Those jobs would be in every region, urban, suburban, and rural, and through the magic of political accounting, the fight over tax rates would be averted or at least kicked down the road.

That would be nice, but it would be only a first step toward fixing what’s wrong in America. It would be an essential first step that demonstrates party leaders’ control over their caucuses is not absolute, something that needs to be true if our system is to be workable again. It might also poke a giant hole in the myth that the phrase “two-party system” is synonymous with American democracy.

There was a time when we mocked nations with parliamentary governments in which as many as ten political parties constantly vied for power. In the turbulent years of the Cold War, countries like Italy couldn’t form governments that were lasted more than a year or two. In those days Americans were smugly confident that our way was superior, that democracy meant getting rid of kings, autocrats, and parliaments, and having a stable two-party system. But we know from experience that you can only sit on a two-legged stool if it’s perfectly balanced in equilibrium. You’re much less likely to break your neck on one with three legs or four.

One result of the pandemic has been that when streaming services ran out of American and British programming content, we experienced television dramas produced in other countries. In several of them we got an up-close look at how multi-party governments actually function. Two excellent ones that come to mind are Borgen, a realistic, look at how parliament works in Denmark, and Occupied, which takes a close look at how Norway’s government might react to simultaneous crises involving Russia and the rest of the EU. Both left me with an enlightened view of multi-party systems, and convinced me that a viable Centrist party in America could be our only salvation. If you need a real-life example, consider what Israel has been going through as its voters tired of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist policies and corruption, and struggled to form a new coalition government. The process has been ugly, but it’s hard to see how the Israeli government could avoid collapse any other way.

Let us hope that the Centrists (they prefer the term Moderates) in the Senate can establish a beachhead in the fight to reset Congress on the road to bipartisanism. Who are they? The usual suspects, the ones we’ve watched with hopeful eyes for years — Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.). It’s by no means certain that Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer will release the reins of control and allow their caucuses to vote their consciences, but as I suggested at the top, let’s bask in this ray of hope while we can.

If this effort fails, the likelihood of getting a fair voting rights bill, a gun rights reform bill, and a tax structure that’s not rigged to favor the wealthy will drop to about zero.

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The Death of Integrity in Politics

Posted on June 8, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 8, 2021

Political leaders have long struggled to balance integrity with self-interest. That’s not new, but what is, is that political integrity now seems to be on its deathbed. There have always been intense disagreements among politicians, on slavery, labor unions, civil rights, immigration, and the often gray line between capitalism and the welfare state. But in the past, when faced with serious threats to the nation, politicians overcame their differences, found grounds for compromise, and had the nerve to act on them. That’s how our system was intended to work. When it ceases to work that way, its days will be numbered.

We’ve always had greedy politicians, crooked politicians, and some who simply lacked the courage to stand up for what they knew was right. They were usually in the minority, but something is radically different today. That third group is growing like a metastasized cancer. Not only do fear and self-interest almost completely dominate the actions of much of Congress, we no longer have a consensus of what “the right thing to do” is.

For this sad change in our politics, we can thank Donald Trump. Like other charismatic leaders who have led their countries down the path to self-destruction, Trump wielded a shocking degree of control over his party because his greatest talents are rooted in contempt for truth, sociopathic disregard for everyone but himself, and a visceral ability to sense weakness and vulnerability in others.

Trump has been remarkably successful in redefining truth for about a third of Americans. He brought his winner-take-all, no-holds-barred approach to business to our government, which, combined with his uncanny ability to identify and isolate the weakest member of every herd and pounce like a lion in the savanna, has shaken our already teetering political system’s foundations. While Trump’s popularity with voters has continued to wane post-January 6th, his hold on Republican legislators at all levels hasn’t. Like all self-indulgent fools who sign a pact the Devil, they forgot that the Devil always gets his due. Only this time, it’s not only they who are screwed. There’s an enormous risk that they will take the rest of us down with them.

The latest example of Congress’ current upside-down value system is Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). I don’t claim to understand the inner workings of his mind, but as a Democrat re-elected in a deeply Republican state, he’s clearly in an unenviable position. It’s impossible to know what’s really in his heart, but his actions and statements in this 50-50 Senate have been demonstrably disingenuous. He’s been accused of reveling in his position as political fulcrum and loving the power serendipity thrust upon him more than party, truth, or country.

Recognizing that most Americans hate the polarization of our politics and the partisanship in Congress, Manchin postured himself as the lone voice of bipartisanship. When Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell vowed to obstruct every attempt to pass legislation, that left Democrats in a position to either force through legislation without Republican support or throw in the towel. Knowing that he is the lynchpin on which this choice depends, Manchin has repeatedly stated that he believes in bipartisanship, that the alternative will eventually destroy our democracy, sentiments most of us support unequivocally.

But there was an unspoken implication in Manchin’s words that his attempts at bipartisanship had a time limit. If after expending every resource at his disposal, it was clear that critical legislation supported by two-thirds of Americans in both parties would die if he didn’t support it, he would accept that he couldn’t achieve Republican support and finally get in line with his party. His op-ed in Sunday’s Charleston Gazette-Mail put the lie to that hope.

Manchin stated without reservation that he would not support either the For The People Voting Rights bill or any attempt to weaken the filibuster. His argument that continuing to act in a partisan manner would only make things worse, resulting in more bipartisan retaliation by Republicans is at best foolish and at worst a bald-faced lie to appeal to his West Virginia voting base. I wonder if British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain used those same words to argue against resisting the Nazis’ occupation of Czechoslovakia.

We all get the point. No one likes tit-for-tat politics. But even worse is rolling over in the face of tyranny. Someone has to break the deadlock if our system is to become functional again.

A cynic I knew once said turning the other cheek is only likely to get that cheek smacked too. Since there’s no evidence that Congress has any use for Christian values, pacifism and generosity on the part of Democrats will result only in failure to produce meaningful results on things voters clearly need and want, leaving the field open for the most unscrupulous to work their will.

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A Deadly Game of Brinksmanship

Posted on June 4, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 4, 2021

Brinksmanship is like poker. You may be holding a winning hand. You may be bluffing. More than one player may believe he has a winning hand, and some players may behave irrationally. If that happens you have is an unpredictable outcome. In poker, unpredictability is what makes the game fun – the worst thing that might happen is losing a hand.

In brinksmanship the worst case is completely open-ended. All players could lose everything. We survived half a century of cold war, in which brinksmanship was thought to be the best way to maintain the peace. The idea was that the possibility that everyone could be devastated, known as mutually assured destruction, would in a rational world assure that no one took any action that set off an uncontrollable chain reaction of events. We survived the terror of nuclear holocaust for two generations. Were we right or just lucky?

Why would world leaders play such a deadly game? Because they believed had no other option. The problem is human nature. The only way to avoid brinksmanship is for everyone to submit to a higher authority, an objective arbiter of disputes. The League of Nations and the United Nations were idealized attempts to create such an authority. But when superpowers cannot agree, the result is either stalemate or war. It’s a truly terrifying situation that depends on world leaders all being basically sane. What might have happened if Nikita Khrushchev hadn’t backed down during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Khrushchev was the ultimate poker player who knew how far he could bluff before he (and we) lost everything.

The Trump faction of today’s Republican Party is presently involved in an equally risky game of brinksmanship. As with world leaders, it’s an act of desperation – they believe they have no other option. If they played by the rules while insisting that their policies and goals for the nation were non-negotiable, the evolving demographics of the country would almost certainly destroy their viability as a party. They could have modified their policies and messaging, but they chose to bluff it out in a power play.

Trump has always preferred intimidation to negotiation. That’s always been the centerpiece of his business philosophy. His narcissistic personality makes him incapable of accepting anything but a victory that completely vanquishes the enemy, and the enemy is everyone who hasn’t sworn fealty to him. Whether he wins or loses this fight, American democracy will be the ultimate loser.

This is not about traditional politics; words like liberal, progressive, and conservative have no meaning here. It’s completely about whether our constitutional guarantees of the rights and privileges of citizenship will survive. As we have repeatedly seen for the last six years, Trumpism is about whites dominating non-whites, regardless of who’s in the majority. It’s about whether the wealthy have a limitless right to protect their fortunes through any means and about the limits on personal freedoms like gun ownership that are required to protect society.

Those three issues are not a political philosophy. They are simply a collection of ideas calculated to win the loyalty of enough people to retain power, with no regard for the well-being of the nation. Thus, Trump is about to engage in a potentially deadly game of brinksmanship that will place everything at risk, a high-stakes, winner-take-all poker game in which winning is the only thing that matters. In doing so he will create a scenario in which the single thing that prevented nuclear war in the brinksmanship of the Cold War is removed from the game. Gone is the assurance that both sides with behave rationally. Trump believes in the Madman approach to diplomacy – intimidate the other side by making it believe that he’s crazy enough to destroy everything if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Why would that change now? He has demonstrated that he’s willing to build a movement on lies and fantasies. He has violated all the constitutional norms of fair elections and peaceful transfer of power. He has gleefully sparked an insurrection that could have had disastrous consequences beyond the lives lost and the hundreds of injuries to law enforcement personnel. And he’s moved on from Fox News to the entirely right-wing conspiracy-driven America One network for his ideas and support.

The faction of the Republican Party and its voting base that supports Trumps from this point forward care nothing about the future of America and everything about accumulating as much power as they can. They are single-minded and will stop at nothing, even if they blow it all up. An irrational leader who respects no authority but his own is the most dangerous threat this country will ever face.

Only Republicans driven by principle and conscience can fix this, and now may be their last chance.

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Democracy Under Attack

Posted on June 2, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 2, 2021

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the country was more divided than at any time in its history. Racist philosophies and policies were considered politically correct by millions of Americans, many of whom served in Congress and publicly argued that Negroes were and always would be inferior to whites and could thus not be entrusted with the sacred responsibility of voting. Alas, that responsibility seems to be losing its sanctity in the minds of Trump-dominated Republicans.

The Thirteenth Amendment declared slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude illegal except in certain cases as punishment for criminal acts. But those were just words as long as White Supremacists had as loud a voice as those who believed in the principle of equality. Could a nation as terribly divided over race as it was in 1866 fix that when arguments that would shock us today even in light of Charlottesville and the Capitol Insurrection were commonplace? Looking back, it seems remarkable that there were enough people of good faith among our leaders to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which explicitly granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States. It further declared that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens.”

You don’t need a law degree or even a high school diploma to understand what those words mean. They are unequivocal and absolute. There is no doubt that they were intended to include the right to vote, free of any other qualifying tests. Yet, almost every state dominated by a Republican legislature is presently trying to restrict that right under the most transparently hypocritical guise of protecting against fraud. Among the ironies of a Trump-dominated Republican Party is accusing President Biden of being an anti-democratic socialist while in a very real sense placing him in the extremely Conservative position of defending the Constitution against those who would trash our democracy.

Signaling that the gloves are about to come off, Biden went to Tulsa yesterday to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and elucidate his administration’s position on race and voting rights. The massacre was a White Supremacist terrorist attack against a prosperous part of the city known as the Black Wall Street. As the New York Times reported, “The [result was] a staggering portrait of loss: 35 blocks burned to the ground; as many as 300 dead; hundreds injured; 8,000 to 10,000 left homeless; more than 1,470 homes burned or looted; and eventually, 6,000 detained in internment camps.” If you have a child studying American history in school, pick up his or her textbook and look up what happened exactly one hundred years ago. Does it make any mention of the Tulsa Massacre?

President Biden understands that changing the minds of committed racists and people who put political opportunism above the Constitution is an uphill battle he probably can’t win, especially if we permit history to be erased or re-written when it’s convenient. But ever the optimist, Biden believes he doesn’t have to. Instead, he is convinced that the voices of hate and divisiveness do not represent the majority, even in deeply red states. He intends to reach out to that majority, who he believes are decent and fair-minded, shining a light on what his opponents would rather keep in the shadows.

In Tulsa, Biden drew a clear line between attempts to whitewash history and the Trump-led efforts to suppress voting rights. Governors like Brian Kemp (R-GA) and Greg Abbott (R-TX) couldn’t be more transparent about their attempts to restrict minority voting in their states, and Biden wants to assure that everyone understands what is at stake. He fervently believes that legislators who act to preserve their political hold on power rather than to defend democracy as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment do not represent the will of the majority of their citizens. I hope he’s right, because as we draw closer to the 2022 and 2024 elections, it appears that only a groundswell of support from that previously silent majority can preserve our democracy.

If Republicans in the Senate are allowed to scuttle passage of HR-1, The Voting Rights Act, and new state laws restricting voting go unchallenged in the courts, we may not recognize our own country ten years from now. I believe these laws are clear violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, but I’ll leave that argument to the lawyers. Democracy only works when the majority, tempered by constitutional limits on its ability to tyrannize minorities, are allowed to be heard. When we forget that, we might as well throw in the towel.

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