Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It seemed
weirdly appropriate that when I first heard the name Christine Blasey Ford and
the basics of her sexual assault allegations against then-U.S. Supreme Court
nominee, and now duly confirmed and sworn associate justice, Brett Kavanaugh, I
was in the middle of reading a novel called The Murderer’s Daughter by well-known mystery writer and former child
psychiatrist Jonathan Kellerman. It was appropriate because the essence of
Blasey Ford’s story sounded like something Kellerman could have made up: a
high-school girl goes to a drunken party, gets hit on and nearly raped by a
prep-school kid from a family of power and privilege, manages to put the
incident behind her and go on to a brilliant academic career — only to have it
all brought back to her when the name of her assailant is revealed as a
potential appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the same time
I had my doubts about whether the Blasey Ford revelations, or the accounts of
other alleged victims of Kavanaugh’s wanton ways in his heavy-drinking teen
years, would derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation and eventual service on the
Supreme Court. The Democrats had tried the same tactic 27 years ago against
Clarence Thomas: unable to defeat a Republican nominee on the ideological and
judicial grounds on which he deserved
defeat, they dredged up a sexual-harassment allegation against him at the last
minute and tried to knock him off the court that way. I remember that my
reaction when Anita Hill came forward with her bizarre accusations against
Thomas — including laying pubic hairs across her Coke can and boasting about
the on-screen exploits of porn star “Long Dong Silver” (who, it turned out,
made only two movies, both of which were Gay) — was I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t disbelieve her, either. Frankly, I didn’t know what to think. I had thought that male bosses who
sexually exploited women working for them did so in more obvious, blatant ways,
waving motel keys in their faces and saying, “Meet me at the No-Tell Motel at 9
o’clock tonight or don’t bother coming in to work tomorrow morning.” Like most
of the rest of America, I know a lot
more about sexual harassment in the workplace now than I did then. I’ve heard
stories that seemed even weirder than the ones Hill told about Thomas. I’ve
read about the ludicrous exploits of people like Harvey Weinstein, Leslie
Moonves and the other big-name executives in the entertainment industry who’ve
been brought down low after decades in which they seem to have been running
their enterprises just to attract women they could sexually exploit and demean.
And I’ve seen
the downfall of political figures I used to admire — including former
Congressmember and San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who was driven out of office by
his fellow Democrats in 2013 — four years before the so-called “#MeToo” movement started. I’ve learned terms like
“creating a hostile work environment” and come to understand that women can be
made to feel unwelcome in an office even if they aren’t the targets of overt,
unprofessional and decidedly unwanted advances from the men they work for.
Indeed, it occurs to me that, just as Susan Brownmiller wrote in the 1970’s
that rapists were “the shock troops of the patriarchy” — they enforce the
social restrictions on where women can go, what they can wear and whom they can
associate with, especially after dark, by subjecting them to the fear of rape at all times — much of what’s come to be
called “sexual harassment” in work environments isn’t so much one man hitting
on one woman as all men using
their sexuality to stake out a claim of superiority over all women.
So when
Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegation that 36 years ago Brett
Kavanaugh, then a 17-year-old student at the exclusive and all-male Georgetown
Preparatory School, sexually assaulted and nearly raped her at a party in a
private home in Maryland while she was a 15-year-old student at a nearby
all-women’s high school, I believed her. I believed her because her story had
the ring of truth about it. She remembered the incident quite vividly, and
while there were a few details she didn’t recall, those actually added to her
credibility because they made it far less likely that she was making up the
story to discredit Kavanaugh. I particularly believed her because of one detail
she did remember in her story, one that
showed who Brett Kavanaugh was at 17 and who he still is 36 years later.
Throughout the
assault, Blasey Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh and his
friend Mark Judge, whom she says didn’t participate in it but was present,
laughed. They laughed at the predicament they had put her in. They laughed at
her pathetic attempts to fight off Kavanaugh. They laughed as Kavanaugh put his
arm across her neck with such force she thought he would accidentally strangle
her. They laughed as Blasey Ford was likely saved from a near-certain rape only
because she’d come to that party from a swimming practice, she still had her
one-piece bathing suit on under her other clothes, and the drunken, fumbling
Kavanaugh couldn’t get it off her.
That laughter
was the laughter of privilege. It was the laughter of boys belonging to what
the late sociologist C. Wright Mills called “the power elite,” the sons of rich
men trained from birth to rule over the rest of us. They didn’t have to
articulate in words their utter contempt for Christine Blasey Ford’s humanity,
autonomy or independence. They told it to her by laughing while Kavanaugh
assaulted her and Judge looked on and cheered from the sidelines. Their
laughter said, “We are the power elite. We are destined to run the country. We
can pick out any woman we want and treat her as a piece of meat, and not only
can she not do anything about it, neither can anyone else. We have complete
impunity. We can do whatever we like, and no one can or will derail us from the
position of power that is our destiny from birth.”
And, judging
from Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice and the likelihood
that for the next 20, 30, 40 or 50 years he will be one of the nine people who
decide what the Constitution of the United States means and which individuals
(and which racial, ethnic, gender and social classes) it protects, he was right
when he laughed.
A Referendum on “#MeToo”
It’s a matter of
how fast the news cycle flies that as of this writing (October 18, 2018, 12
days after I wrote the first four paragraphs of this article), Brett
Kavanaugh’s confirmation amid the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct
against him already seems like ancient history. He hasn’t even heard an actual
case as a Supreme Court justice yet, and already the moving finger of the media
have moved on to another child of privilege with a last name beginning with “K”
— Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian expatriate and dissident journalist who two
weeks ago was allegedly lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey and
tortured, murdered and dismembered by a 15-person hit squad including Saudi Arabia’s
leading forensic surgeon, who came armed with a bone saw.
The Khashoggi
incident has shocked the world, not only because it’s ripped off the “reformer”
façade from Saudi Arabia’s de facto
ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known colloquially by his initials
MBS, which makes him sound like a bank rather than a person) but because it’s
been yet another exposé of President Donald Trump’s utter moral bankruptcy.
Other Presidents at least pretended
to believe in a world of equal justice and human rights, and in America’s
unique standing as the country that would call repressive dictators out on
their abuses against their citizens. They didn’t always do that — the U.S.
participated in covert operations that brought down democratically elected
governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973,
and other countries as well, and during the Cold War the U.S. was often quick
to blast Left-wing dictators while coddling Right-wing ones — but at least they
played the game.
Trump is wide-open
about what his priorities are. He wants a world in which leaders are free to
rule over their countries’ populations whatever the people might want. He wants U.S. foreign policy to be guided by
what will be good for America’s richest individuals and corporations in
general, and Donald Trump in particular. From the moment the authorities in
Turkey started selectively releasing the evidence that Khashoggi was murdered
in their country by 15 assassins on the orders of the government of his country
of origin, Trump has said that his real priority is maintaining the $120 billion arms deal the Saudis have
promised America and in particular its biggest defense contractors, Boeing,
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Indeed, it was
Donald Trump who first linked Khashoggi with Kavanaugh when he was interviewed
by Associated Press reporters Catherine Lucey, Zeke
Miller and Jonathan Lemire on October 16. Asked about the Turkish allegations
that Khashoggi was killed by a 15-member hit squad sent by the Saudi government,
Trump said, “You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until
proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice
Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way. So I was unconcerned.”
“Guilty until proven innocent” has become a mantra for Republicans in dismissing the allegations against
Kavanaugh. It’s a strange thing to come out of the mouth of Donald Trump, who
in every public statement he’s made on the so-called “Central Park Five” — five
young African-Americans who were accused and convicted of beating a white
jogger in Central Park on April 19, 1989 — insisted that they were guilty and
deserved the death penalty even after they were proven innocent by DNA evidence. But then Donald Trump
has always behaved like the ruling Inner Party of George Orwell’s 1984, choosing what “facts” he wishes to believe and showing
the same dexterity in performing what Orwell called doublethink — holding two contradictory positions in his mind at
once and believing both of them.
Trump told the Associated Press reporters and also 60
Minutes interviewer Lesley Stahl that
his toughness on the Kavanaugh nomination, and particularly his sneering
mockery of Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony in his rallies, turned the midterm
elections around for the Republicans and energized their voter base. “That
fight has had an impact on energy, and it’s had an impact on the Republican
Party, a very positive one in terms of getting out and voting. I think,” he
told the AP. He told Stahl that his attack on Blasey Ford turned the tide and
got Kavanaugh approved, and in his public comments not only in these interviews
but his speeches Trump seems to be carrying the torch for male privilege
against the so-called “#MeToo” movement and its call to end the social tolerance
of sexual harassments and assaults against women (and men too!) by powerful
males.
For Donald Trump, as for Brett Kavanaugh, being able to
treat women’s bodies like meat is just one of the perks of wealth and power. He
said so himself when he told Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tape in 2006 that he could “grab ’em by the pussy”
because “when you’re a star, they let you do anything.” When Trump owned the
Miss Universe contest, he reportedly strolled into the women’s dressing room
any time he pleased to catch glimpses of the contestants in various stages of
undress. He’s been personally accused of sexual harassment or assault by at
least 16 women — whom he’s called liars and participants in a plot to embarrass
him and bring him down politically — and when Kavanaugh was publicly denounced
by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez as having sexually assaulted them, Trump identified with Kavanaugh and they bonded even
more closely than they had before because Trump saw Kavanaugh as a fellow
victim of predatory women out to bring down powerful men.
In this, as in virtually every other aspect of his
politics, Trump is a reactionary in the most literal sense. He reaches out to
an embattled and shrinking white majority by proclaiming himself anti-immigrant,
anti-Mexican, anti-Black and anxious to put women back in their “place” as the
homemakers, child rearers and sexual outlets for their men. Trump has become
the latest avatar of the Republican Party’s racial and cultural politics that
emerged in 1968 when Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond cooked up the so-called
“Southern Strategy” to neutralize the Right-wing third-party campaign of racist
Alabama Governor George Wallace.
What was originally a short-term expedient has become a
bulwark of Republicans’ hold on power as what political scientist Walter
DeVries called the “sun party” of American politics. DeVries argued that
throughout American history one of the two major parties was the “sun party”
whose supporters dominated the electorate and whose ideology was the main force
in political policymaking, while the other was the “moon party” which
occasionally won elections but mostly played a subservient role. From 1800 to
1860 the Democrats were the “sun party.” Then after the Lincoln presidency, the
Civil War, the end of slavery and the change in America’s ruling class from a
landed aristocracy to a tightly integrated network of corporations, the
Republicans became the “sun party” and remained so until the Great Depression
of the 1930’s brought the Democrats to power.
The Democrats remained the “sun party” until 1968, when
Republicans seized on racial resentments from white Democratic voters,
especially working-class ethnics, to pull apart the New Deal coalition on which
the Democratic “sun party” period had been based. If the Democrats,
historically the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, were
reinventing themselves as the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, and in general the inclusion of people of color, women and
(eventually) Queers as equals in American life, the Republicans essentially
said, “Fine. Then we’ll take over as
the party of racial, gender, sexual and cultural resentment, and that will make
us the majority party.”
Donald Trump, the Republicans in the Senate and GOP
candidates generally have ridden these resentments to victory in election after
election. Not every election, of
course, but enough that the ideas of the Republican Party — slashing taxes on
wealthy individuals and corporations; ending government protections of workers,
consumers and the environment; wiping out organized labor as a social and
political force; putting brakes on the civil rights of people of color;
supporting law enforcement and actively repressing minority communities; and reversing
the relatively liberal immigration policies put in place in the 1960’s in order
to Make America White Again — have continued to dominate American political
discourse. Trump is waving Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the nation’s — and
especially his political base’s — faces not only as someone who will use his
power as a Supreme Court justice to enforce his party’s anti-people of color,
anti-woman, anti-Queer, anti-worker, anti-consumer and anti-environment
ideology, but as someone who personally symbolizes the fight to discredit the
“#MeToo” movement and return men to their “natural right” to dominate women and
exploit them sexually.
And Trump’s transformation of Brett Kavanaugh into a
symbol of male power and privilege got a major boost from an unexpected source:
Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine). Through a nauseating, schoolmarmish
45-minute performance on the Senate floor, Collins proclaimed herself a
supporter of the “presumption of innocence” — as if Kavanaugh were being
prosecuted for attempted rape instead of given what amounted to a job interview
for the Supreme Court. (If someone were tried for embezzlement, even if they
were acquitted, that would be a legitimate reason for the personnel director of
a bank not to hire them.) She said there was “no corroboration” of Blasey
Ford’s allegations — based on a five-day sham “investigation” conducted by FBI
agents constrained by orders from the White House to limit both the number of
people they could interview and the scope of questions they could ask.
Collins said she couldn’t even say it was “more likely
than not” that Kavanaugh assaulted Blasey Ford as she claimed — and in a 60
Minutes interview she twisted the knife
in further by endorsing the preposterous Republican propaganda machine theory
that Blasey Ford was indeed assaulted, but by someone other than Kavanaugh.
Whatever her motivation for this eruption of gaseous rhetoric, the message
Collins sent was a direct assault on every woman who makes a claim of sexual
harassment or assault against a powerful man. In blunt terms, Susan Collins
told the people of America — both the men who want to keep the sexist status
quo the way it is and the women who have
experienced sexual harassment and assault and kept quiet about it because of
the intense pressure on them to do so — “I’m a woman, and I don’t ‘believe
the women’ either!”
Kavanaugh On the Court
The extent to which Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court
confirmation became a battle in the culture war over America’s attitude towards
women and the ability of powerful men to keep treating women as sexual
conveniences took the attention away from where it should have been: just what will Brett Kavanaugh do on the
Supreme Court? He offered some chilling hints during his appearance before the
Senate Judiciary Committee on the same day as Blasey Ford’s testimony, when he
said, “What goes around comes around” and told the committee’s Democrats, “You
have sown the wind … ”
Certainly Donald Trump was hardly likely to appoint a
progressive, a liberal or even a thoughtful, independent conservative like the
justice Kavanaugh will replace, Anthony Kennedy, to the Supreme Court. In my
lifetime some of the most progressive Supreme Court justices have been the
appointees of Republican Presidents — Earl Warren and William Brennan by Dwight
Eisenhower, Harry Blackmun by Richard Nixon, John Paul Stevens by Gerald Ford,
David Souter by George H. W. Bush — but that ended when an increasingly
ideological Republican Party outsourced its judicial appointments, not only for
the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary, to the Heritage Foundation
and the Federalist Society.
In his Associated Press interview, Trump boasted that he
has got more federal judges nominated and confirmed than any President since
George Washington — and he may be right. The person he has the most to thank
for that is the Senate President pro tempore and Senate Republican Party leader, Mitch McConnell
(R-Kentucky). During Barack Obama’s presidency McConnell cooked up a scheme to
keep as many federal judgeships vacant as possible so the next Republican
President, whoever that may be, could fill them with cookie-cutter clones of
the Federalist Society’s judicial ideal: judges who would give businesses
unfettered power over workers, consumers and the environment; who would put
strict limitations on the ability of women, people of color, Queers and other
traditionally disadvantaged groups to achieve justice through the court system;
who would grant Republican Presidents broad power to govern by executive orders
without congressional action (while denying the same power to Democratic
Presidents!); and who would enforce the odd but surprisingly durable ideology
of the current Republican Party, which is to get government out of the
boardrooms and into the bedrooms.
Thanks to the efforts of Trump, McConnell and a
Republican Senate delegation that has ruthlessly used its power to ram through
Trump’s nominees by sheer force of their majority, the American judicial system
is reverting to what it was between the 1880’s and the 1930’s: a bulwark for
corporations and the rich, an upholder and enforcer of growing economic
inequality, and a weapon against civil rights. The likelihood that even if
someday the Democratic Party regains the Presidency and both houses of
Congress, the Supreme Court will put huge constraints on their actions — just
as Franklin Roosevelt was bedeviled in his first term by a Supreme Court which
threw out just about everything he got through Congress to try to help end the
Depression. Indeed, Roosevelt got so frustrated with the Court he launched a
failed attempt to expand it from nine to 15 members, and though Congress voted
it down Roosevelt eventually got the court he wanted simply by attrition: he
served over 12 years (longer than any other President has, or ever will unless
the 22nd Amendment is repealed) and the Nine Old Men who had
torpedoed his economic agenda either retired or died.
One of the big issues liberal America in general and the
Democratic Party in particular has been concerned about with Kavanaugh on the
court is the fate of abortion rights and women’s control over reproduction in
general. Reportedly Susan Collins extracted from Kavanaugh a promise that he
would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Court decision (written by Nixon
appointee Harry Blackmun!) upholding women’s right to reproductive choice. The
dark secret — though it’s really not that secret at all — is that Kavanaugh
doesn’t need to vote to overturn Roe. The Court’s current majority has already started the
process of gutting it. It began when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote an
opinion that said states could
regulate women’s access to abortion as long as they didn’t put “undue
restrictions” on the procedure.
This ruling begat a joke around the legal community:
“What’s an ‘undue restriction’ on abortion?” “Whatever Sandra Day O’Connor says
it is.” After O’Connor retired, that became, “Whatever Anthony Kennedy says it
is.” Now it will be, “Whatever Brett Kavanaugh says it is” — and Brett Kavanaugh,
a hard-core Roman Catholic as well as an ideological Right-winger, is likely to
uphold just about any state
restriction on abortion as not “undue.” In his last year on the court Kennedy
cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision striking down a series of elaborate
restrictions the Texas state government had passed to make it virtually
impossible for a woman in Texas to get a safe, legal abortion. If the Texas
legislature tries it again, it’s likely Kavanaugh will cast the deciding vote
to uphold their restrictions —
continuing the “death of a thousand cuts” the abortion rights supposedly
guaranteed by Roe have been suggested
to by decades of Republican Court majorities.
The situation for Queer people is likely even more dire.
While the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to so dramatically reverse Roe as to make abortion illegal nationwide — liberal “blue”
states will still be able to guarantee their women safe, legal access to the
procedure — Kavanaugh is likely to expand the Court’s recent trend towards
granting government officials, business owners and individual private-sector
workers the power to refuse service to Queers on the basis of “deeply held
religious objections” to homosexuality and Queer civil rights. One can expect
Kavanaugh to build on the precedent of the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, which upheld the right of a baker to refuse to
bake a wedding cake for a Gay male couple, and effectively nullify all legal protections for Queer people by saying that the
right of a baker, a government clerk, a pharmacist or anyone else to refuse to
serve Queers on the basis of religious “free exercise” under the First
Amendment trumps any state legal protections against anti-Queer discrimination.
States won’t be able to protect their own Queer populations from this sort of
“constitutionally protected” religiously-based discrimination!
Perhaps an even more dire consequence of Kavanaugh on the
Supreme Court will be the destruction of the regulatory state. Since Congress
passed the Railway Act of 1908 (signed into law by progressive Republican
Theodore Roosevelt), administrative agencies of the federal government have had
the power to issue so-called “rules” that, though they aren’t voted into law by
Congress, have the power of law. Most of the advances in protecting workers’
health and safety, protecting consumers from unsafe products or deceptive sales
and advertising practices, and protecting the environment from exploitation and
destruction, have occurred because federal agencies had this rule-making power.
But Brett Kavanaugh, in his previous gig as a justice on
the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is on record as saying the entire
“rule-making” process is unconstitutional and agencies shouldn’t be able to
enact rules until Congress approves them. Congress already has the power to veto a rule within 120 days after an agency enacted — which
Trump and the Republican leaders in both houses of Congress used to wipe out
rules enacted in the waning days of the Obama administration — but Kavanaugh is
likely to provide the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to render the entire
“rule-making” process unconstitutional and leave the rights of workers,
consumers and the environment to the untender mercies of a
corporate-controlled, Republican-dominated Congress.
One other issue on which Kavanaugh has staked out a
far-Right position — and one which has been widely rumored to be the reason
Trump appointed him rather than one of the others on his short list — is
Presidential accountability. Though Kavanaugh served on special counsel Kenneth
Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton — which began as a probe of a
failed Arkansas real-estate development and ended with Clinton’s impeachment
for lying about a sexual affair — he has since changed his mind and decided
that Presidents should be immune from all
legal proceedings while they are in office. This means that Donald Trump has at
least one sure vote on the Court to keep him from being indicted by Robert
Mueller if Mueller finds he was part of a conspiracy with Trump campaign
officials and Russian government operatives to influence the 2016 Presidential
election in Trump’s favor.
The issue of whether Presidents have to respond to
subpoenas for evidence from special prosecutors investigating them was
supposedly settled in the 1974 case U.S.
v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court
(by an 8-0 vote, including three of Richard Nixon’s own appointees) ruled that
he had to turn over the recordings of Presidential meetings sought by special
prosecutor Leon Jaworski. The recordings revealed that Nixon had directly
intervened to cover up his campaign’s involvement in the 1972 break-in at
Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office-hotel complex by telling
the CIA to order the FBI to back off its investigation on false grounds of
“national security.” Overnight Nixon’s remaining support in Congress evaporated
and he resigned a week later.
But Brett Kavanaugh is on record as saying that U.S. v. Nixon was
“wrongly decided” and he would have
ruled that Nixon had a right to keep his recordings secret at least until the
end of his Presidential term, and possibly forever. It’s likely that if Mueller
attempts to subpoena Trump to testify before his investigation, Kavanaugh will
draw some sort of specious distinction between what Nixon was ordered to do
(turn over physical evidence) and what Trump would be ordered to do (testify
personally to a grand jury under oath). He’d be working around not only the U.S.
v. Nixon case but also the ruling Starr got against Clinton that he had to give testimony in the lawsuit filed by Paula
Jones against him, which ultimately led to his impeachment and narrow escape
from being removed from office in disgrace when Republicans couldn’t muster the
two-thirds Senate majority needed for conviction on an impeachment.
But Kavanaugh’s fertile mind will no doubt come up with
some specious reasoning that even though previous Supreme Court decisions have
required Presidents to submit physical evidence in a criminal trial, and
provide personal testimony in a civil lawsuit against them, requiring a
President to provide personal testimony in a criminal prosecution against his current or former staff — and
possibly against the President himself — would be unconstitutional because it
would divert the President’s attention when he needs to be fully focused on the
task of running the country.
As long as Republicans remain in control of both houses
of Congress as well as the Presidency and the Supreme Court — and Kavanaugh’s
appointment has ensured them likely dominance of the Court for the next 25 to
50 years — Trump will have nothing to fear from Robert Mueller or any other
investigator with actual subpoena power. Indeed, I’m convinced that Trump is
only waiting for the midterm elections to fire attorney general Jeff Sessions
and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and replace them with officials who
will in turn fire Mueller and end the special counsel’s investigation of his
campaign’s alleged ties to Russia once and for all.
Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the United States Supreme
Court is a disaster for the country — for workers, consumers, the environment,
people of color, women, Queers and everyone else in the cross-hairs of
Republican orthodoxy. If there’s a silver lining in it, one would hope that it
would be the final straw that convinces the idiots in what I’ve taken to
calling the “alt-Left” — those who still insist, against all evidence and
reason, that there is “no difference” between the Republican and Democratic
parties. Kavanaugh is yet one more piece of living proof that, even they are
both committed to maintaining the capitalist system and are influenced by the
priorities of the corporate elite (I think Bernie Sanders got the distinction
right when he said the Republicans are “controlled” by the 1 percent and the
Democrats are “influenced” by it), there are still profound differences between the Republican and Democratic
parties and the only way to restore America’s democracy (however limited) and
protect it against the authoritarian agenda of Trump and the modern-day
Republicans is to vote for Democrats for every elective office.
