"Watergate at 50": How Nixon Started the Destruction of U.S. Democracy and Trump Will Finish It

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched the CBS-TV news special on the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in – these shows have been something of a tradition ever since they did the 20th anniversary one in 1992, from which this show took a lot of film clips to represent people who are no longer alive, including former U.S. Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and former Nixon staffer Chuck Colson. “Watergate” became a catch-all term for a series of crimes and “dirty tricks” in which the Nixon campaign indulged to ensure not only that he would win re-election in 1972 but he would win by such an overwhelming and convincing margin there would be no more lingering doubts about his legitimacy. Nixon was well aware that he had won in the first place in 1968 by a narrow margini (similar to that with which he had lost in 1960), and he was obsessed first with establishing Republican control of the United States Senate in 1970 and then, when that didn’t happen, ensuring that he would so totally destroy the reputation of the Democrats who had led the campaign against him in 1970 – particularly U.S. Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine), who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and whose pivotal role in the 1970 Senate campaign had made him the Democratic front-runner in 1972.

Nixon was particularly afraid of Muskie for the same reasons Donald Trump was afraid of Joe Biden, to the point where he sought out the aid of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to get (or manufacture) “dirt” on Biden and his scapegrace son Hunter: he thought Muskie was a nonthreatening centrist and the most likely candidate to beat him in 1972. So the infamous Donald Segretti not only forged the infamous “Canuck letter” that led to Muskie publicly crying over its insult to his wife (which destroyed Muskie’s political career virtually overnight), he also stole official Muskie campaign stationery and used it to forge official-looking press releases attacking other Democratic candidates, including Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington). The objective was to sow so much mistrust among all the Democratic candidates for President that whoever got the nomination against Nixon would be unable to hold the party together. One key to the strategy was to ensure that the Democrats would nominate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota – and it’s an indication of how far our politics have shifted Rightward since 1972 that today it’s inconceivable that South Dakota would ever elect a Democrat to the Senate), the farthest Left of the major Democratic Presidential candidates and for that reason the easiest for Nixon to beat. (As an 18-year-old newly eligible to vote for the first time, I was a McGovern diehard and was too politically naïve to realize that by pushing McGovern we were basically handing Nixon the overwhelming win he wanted and ultimately got.)

During the middle of a campaign that looked like an unstoppable Nixon juggernaut came the weird piece of news that five people had been arrested for attempting to break in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 17, 1972. I remember when I first heard the news: I overheard it on a radio as I was making my way home from a free concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in San Francisco’s Stern Grove, and as I was waiting on the streetcorner for the bus to take me home to Marin County I heard a broadcast with the news and thought, “I wonder if the Republicans had anything to do with this.” It turned out the Republicans had a great deal to do with it, and that this wasn’t even the first attempt to break into the DNC offices and plant listening devices on the DNC chair’s and treasurer’s phones. The first had taken place three weeks previously, and the bing on the DNC chair’s phone had malfunctioned while the one on the treasurer’s phone had worked but mostly recorded him calling various potential girlfriends for dates. So on the morning if June 17 James McCord, security director for Nixon’s official campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (which as the scandal broke almost inevitably got nicknamed CREEP), and four Cuban exiles who had participated in the CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba in 1961 broke into the Watergate again – and were caught by an unusually alert African-American security guard, Frank Wills, who noticed the tape they had put across the office door so it wouldn’t close behind them and lock them in. Nixon and his top aides – including chief of staff H. Robert Haldeman, domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, former Attorney General who had quit that post to run CREEP – instituted a cover-up.

They had a lot more to worry about than just Watergate, including a whole elaborate plan by former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to sabotage the Democratic convention and hire prostitutes to lure promiennt Democrats into compromising positions so they could be photographed and blackmailed, as well as slipping LSD into the water brought by protesters and kidnapping people and holding them on barges off the Florida coast during both the Republican and Democratic conventions. (One would-be protester asked John Mitchell during a break in the 1974 Watergate cover-up trial what would have happened to them on the barges if they had been kidnapped and taken there. “How should I know?” Mitchell testily responded. “It was Liddy’s plan, not mine.”) The Watergate cover-up probably began three days after the break-in and certainly had started six days later, when on June 23, 1972 Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office with Bob Haldeman and others and Nixon said he was going to ask the CIA to ask the FBI to curtail their investigation into Watergate because they might uncover national security secrets, when Nixon and his men knew full well they wouldn’t. Alas, it would be over two years before the tape of this meeting surfaced and doomed Nixon’s Presidency.

In the meantime the nation lived through the constant drip-drip-drip of national scandal, including the unraveling of the first phase of the cover-up when John Sirica, the judge who drew the first assignment to try the Watergate burglars (the five who were actually arrested on site plus G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) and became convinced there was more to the story than just what he was hearing in court; the dogged work of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Lesley Stahl of CBS – all of whom are still alive and were interviewed for this show – and ultimately the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as it was formally called even though it was known as the “Senate Watergate Committee.” One thing about this committee that seems inconceivable today is that, while its members included four Democrats and three Republicans, only one of the Republicans – Edward Gurney of Florida – aggressively took up the cudgels of defending Nixon. Howard Baker of Tennessee, the committee’s ranking Republican member and vice-chair, asked his famous question, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Though a number of Left-wing commentators said Baker had cunningly phrased his question to let the White House off the hook – it’s like asking a bank robber, “What did the head of your gang know, and when did he know it?” And Lowell Weickier of Connecticut was so strong an anti-Nixon voice and so much a member of the now-extinct breed of “liberal Republicans” that in 1988 he lost the Republican primary for re-election to the Senate, though he ultimately ran for and won the governorship of Connecticut as a non-partisan candidate in 1990. (Ironically, the unusually liberal Republican Weicker was defeated in his Senate bid and the seat ultimately went to Joe Lieberman, an unusually Right-wing Democrat.)

The CBS-TV special followed the historical trajectory of Watergate familiar to those of us who were alive and politically aware during the period – though the ins and outs might be confusing to people who just know this as history. Nixon was able to ride the scandal long enough to win the landslide re-election he craved, but then the drip-drip-drip of the scandal emerged and ultimately the Senate Watergate committee’s hearings became must-see TV for millions of Americans (up to 80 million people watched the hearing where former White House counsel John Dean laid out the case against Nixon, compared to just 20 million who watched the recent first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). The CBS special showcased Dean’s testimony and also the revelation from Alexander P. Butterfield that on Nixon’s orders he had installed a tape recording system in the White House so that every conversation that took place in the Oval Office or the President’s office in the Executive Office Building was automatically recorded. The idea that there might be recordings that would either confirm or deny John Dean’s explosive revelations about the cover-up and Nixon’s direct role in it. One of ther people interviewed for the show was former assistant special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, whose memoir Stonewall (written with another former Watergate deputy special prosecutor, George Frampton) is probably the best book ever written about prosecuting Watergate.

In his book Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled the thrill that went through the office when, after a legal battle during which the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been fired by Nixon and his two top officials at the Justice Department, Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both resigned rather than carry out the order, the special prosecutor’s office finally received the tapes and they heard the crucial March 21, 1973 meeting in which Dean had told Nixon Watergate was “a cancer on the Presidency.” Listening to it in light of the statement Nixon had just made publicly in which he had famously declared, “I am not a crook,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled thinking that “he was a crook, and we had the evidence to prove it.” The so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon had to work his way down the hierarchy of the Justice Department to find the third in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, willing to fire Cox, led to the start of an official impeachment inquiry, the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee that in those pre-C-SPAN days were the first glimpses most Americans had had about how Congressional committees actually function. Meanwhile,replacement special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Cox’s old team continued their battle to get their hands on the White House tapes.

Nixon famously released his own selective and heavily edited transcripts of some of the recordings, hoping this would put an end to the legal battle over the tapes. His gesture backfired big-time: not only did the special prosecutor’s office continue their battle for the actual tapes (at least in part under the so-called “best evidence” doctrine, in which in order to be admissible as evidence something has to be as close to the original as possible – so transcripts of tapes did not count as long as the tapes themselves still existed), which led to an 8-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision forcing him to release them, but the transcripts were so damning that a lot of Americans thought, “If this is the stuff Nixon thought it was O.K. to release, imagine what there is in the tapes that got left out of these transcripts.” The revelation of the tapes – particularly the three from June 23, 1972 that preserved Nixon’s voice in so many words ordering the CIA to join the cover-up by telling the FBI to back off their investigation – led to the evaporation of Nixon’s support in Congress.

When Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Senator Barry Goldwater went to meet Nixon, Nixon was convinced that he still had the support of 40 Republican Senators, enough to escape conviction and removal from office in an impeachment trial. Goldwater famously told him, “No, you don’t have 40. You have four, and you don’t have mine.” That was when Nixon got the message that he would have to resign the Presidency to avoid being thrown out of it in an impeachment trial, which he did on August 8, 1974. The last 20 minutes or so of the CBS-TV special went off the rails as far as I’m concerned – they tried to portray Nixon’s resignation as a tragedy and his bizarre farewell speech to the White House staff the morning of the day his resignation went into effect as a moment of self-revelation, especially when he said, “People will hate you, but it only hurts you of you hate them back.” This runs counter to a statement Nixon had made in one of his recorded conversations, in which he had sounded positively Trumpian when he said, “Remember, the press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”

The show also presented Nixonj’s successor Gerald Ford’s awful blanket pardon of Nixon for all crimes he may have committed during his Presidency as a noble gesture of national healing in which Ford sacrificed his own chances to win a Presidential election for the sake of binding the nation’s wounds. Bullshit: the pardon angers me now for the same reasons it did then – it established the tradition in the U.S. that former Presidents will not be held legally accountable for any crimes they commit in office, no matter how heinous or how destructive of the ideal of American self-governance. The show also touched on the similarities and the differences between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, including the one I’ve noted before that Nixon was essentially a Presidential version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Jekyll Nixon signed the major environmental bills into law – the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (all things Trump tried his damnedest to gut during his four years in office), opened the door to détente with the Soviet Union and America’s long-delayed recognition of the Communist regime in China, finally brought an end to the war in Viet Nam (albeit after ordering a last round of bombings of North Viet Nam for no apparent reason), and made serious proposals for universal national health care (a considerably more liberal plan than the one that eventually got passed under President Obama) and seriously supposed a guaranteed annual income (an idea both of America’s major parties consider politically radioactive today).

Meanwhile, the Hyde Nixon either ordered or condoned not only the Watergate break-in itself but a wide range of extra-legal activities to ensure his own re-election, including the burglary of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of getting damaging information and offering the directorship of the FBI to the judge in Ellsberg’s trial. Whereas Nixon was Jekyll and Hyde, Trump is just Hyde, a pure sociopath with no redeeming personal or political qualities, who clearly sought the Presidency (and is seeking to regain it, with a very good chance of succeeding) just to feed the two obsessions that rule his life, his ego and his bankroll. One of the most sensational revelations of the January 6 committee hearings is that Trump’s claim that “voter fraud” stole his re-election from him led him to release a series of fundraising e-mails to his supporters, sometimes as many as 25 ini a day, pleading for donations to something called the “Official Election Defense Fund” which turned out not to exist at all. Nonetheless, Trump raised $250 million – that’s a quarter of a billion dollars – including $100 million just in the first week, for this nonexistent “fund” – a pot of money with which Trump can do whatever he likes, including handing it off to his loyal supporters.

One article posted on the CBS Web site (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/watergate-at-50-the-political-scandal-that-changed-washington/), includes æn interview with Garrett Graff, who has just published a new history of Watergate and was asked the difference between then and now, between Nixon and Trump. "Two things: Fox News, and members of Congress who acted as Republicans first and members of Congress second. That's it," Graff replied. "I think if you had Fox News in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon would have stepped down from office in January 1977 totally unscathed." The transition Graff is allouding to was actually a gradual one initiated when President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undid the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which from 1949 to 1987 had decreed that broadcast stations that aired political coverage at all had to maintain a rough balance between various views. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the end of music on AM radio as music stations switched to the better-sounding FM band, AM radio essentially became a continuous transmission belt for Right-wing propaganda. The advent of Fox News in 1996 brought this sort of programming to TV, and the subsequent rise of the Internet and social media have made it possible for millions of Americans to live in communications bubbles, listening only to programming that already reflects their point of view and never hearing the thoughts or ideas of anyone else.

And contrary to the assertions on this program that Nixon’s actions in Watergate were a threat to the American republic on a scale not seen again until Trump, that’s simply not true. Under Reagan you had the Iran-contra scandal and a President so determined to put in place a policy Congress had specifically disapproved that Congress was treated as a minor inconvenience. Under George W. Bush, a compliant Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks passed the USA PATRIOT Act, another step forward in the American Right’s long-term goal to displace democracy and substitute an authoritarian government. Bush even said once, “I don’t see anything wrong with a dictatorship, as long as I’m the dictator,” and his principal aide, Karl Rove, said it was his goal to give the Republican Party “full-spectrum dominance” over American politics. At present, the Republicans are only two elections away from achieving just that. They are expected to win a landslide sweep of the 2022 midterms, as voters pissed off about inflation in general and high gas and grocery prices in particular get ready to punish the Democrats big-time even though there’s surprisingly little the President or Congress can do to stop inflation. This will move Republicans one step closer to total political dominance, and either the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2024 or the election of a Trump acolyte like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott will complete the process and give the Republican Party, already armed with extensive tools of voter suppression and sabotage the U.S. Supreme Court gave them by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and the current nominal Democratic majority in the Senate refused to reverse, complete, total and likely permanent control of American politics.

Uvalde, Buffalo and the Republican Death Cult

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“America cares more about its guns than it does about its children.”
Michael Moore on All in with Chris Hayes, May 24, 2022 –

“The lesson for today is how to die.” –
– Bob Geldof, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” 1979 –
(Written after a 1979 school shooting in San Diego by an 18-year-old, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08-Ukv_0Sbo, when school shootings by students were still relatively rare and shocking.) –

I could have lived a long and relatively happy life without ever hearing of Uvalde, Texas, just as I could have lived my life without ever hearing of Littleton or Aurora, Colorado; Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; or any of the other localities in the U.S. that have been infamous as the sites of mass shootings. And while I certainly would have heard of El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; or Buffalo, New York even if they hadn’t been the sites of mass shootings, those communities, and all too many others like them, are forever tainted by the actions of crazed gunmen who took advantage of the United States’s insanely lax laws about who can and who can’t have a gun to murder their fellow Americans. –

I’ve spent the last few days, ever since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde (and the mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo less than two weeks before), doing a lot of yelling at my television as I watched the news. Much of my anger has been fueled by despair; when the pious hosts on MS-NBC express optimism that at least something might be done this time to curb the epidemic of mass murder ini this country, I start shouting things like “No” and “Never.” With the eyes of the nation riveted on Uvalde, Buffalo and Laguna Woods, California (where just the next day after the Buffalo shooting, there was another one, this time targeting a church with a mostly Asian-American congregation), people in America on the side of sensible gun regulation are once again daring to hope, against all experience, that this time will be different. –

No, it won’t. America’s continuing obsession with guns and the supposed “right” under the Second Amendment to own virtually any sort of gun you want is as settled an issue as political issues ever get. It has been cemented in place, along with so much else wrong with this country, by the undemocratic features built into the U.S. Constitution: the guarantee that every state has two U.S. Senators regardless of population; the near-total ability of state legislatures to determine who can vote, under what circumstances and what legislative districts will look like; and the Electoral College, which in 2016 allowed a candidate who lost the popular vote to become President and, among other things, appoint one-third of the current U.S. Supreme Court. –

It also has been held in place by the extraordinary political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun lobbying groups (like Gun Owners of America, formed by people who thought the NRA wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in defending gun rights). Though they represent only a minority of the American electorate, they are well positioned in enough states – particularly smaller, more rural ones in which “gun culture” is strong – and they have cultivated a cadre of voters who will vote the way the NRA tells them to. –

If you don’t think the NRA has political power, just ask Al Gore, who didn’t become President in 2000 not because of the Electoral College, the U.S. Supreme Court or Ralph Nader. In 2000 the NRA staged an unofficial but very intense campaign against him in Tennessee and West Virginia. In a razor-close election, Gore became the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won the Presidency and Florida wouldn’t have mattered. –

The message the Democratic Party got loud and clear from the debacle of Gore’s campaign was simple: don’t fuck with the NRA. Democrats spent the next two decades avoiding the gun issue as if it were radioactive. Meanwhile, a 5-4 Republican majority in 2008, in a case called District of Columbia v, Heller, ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment confers on Americans an individual right to own guns. That’s not what the Second Amendment says – it says, ““A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” And a previous Supreme Court had ruled in 1939 that government had every right to regulate guns as long as the guns didn’t have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." –

But the Court majority in Heller, in an opinion by Justice Antoniin Scalia, read the whole idea of “a well-regulated militia” out of the Second Amendment and created a whole new “right” out of constitutional whole cloth – exactly the opposite of the “originalist” reading of the Constitution Scalia publicly proclaimed. In his Heller oinion, Scalia was doing what he always criticized liberals on the Supreme Court and other courts for doing: instead of reading the Cosntitution as its plain text clearly meant, Scalia read it the way he wsnted it to for his own ideologincal reasons. (For more comment see https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/new-gun-restrictions-would-likely-be-undone-supreme-court-n1295799.) –

Since then – as Dean Obeidallah, author of the MS-NBC article cited and linked to above, wrote – federal courts have routinely thrown out virtually all attempts to regulate gun ownership, citing Heller as precedent. Already two Donald Trump-appointed judges on a federal appeals court have voted to invalidate a California law that prohibits people under age 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon Obeidallah said that the current far-Right majority on the Supreme Court – the same five justices that have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and trash the idea that the Constitution protects people’s right to privacy in their sex lives – “based on the questions that were asked in oral arguments, are poised to strike down a New York state law that’s more than a century old that mandates people show ‘proper cause’ to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.” –

The Right’s Ideological Crusade –

No one can understand American politics today without realizing that the Right is on an ideological crusade. Their goals are sometimes self-contradictory – notably when they proclaim themselves believers in “limited government” and then say that government should have every right to regulate the private behavior of individuals in their bedrooms and how they handle the consequences therefrom. But at its heart is a longing for a past America (which is why both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump ran their Presidential campaigns on the slogan “Make America Great Again”) in which white supremacy was an acknowledged and unchangeable truth; Americans of color understood that they were a permanent servant class, here only by the sufferance of the white majority; women mostly accepted their destiny as being (as the Nazis put it) “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – “children, kitchen, church” – and Queers lived their whole lives in the knowledge that they were almost literally the scum of the earth. –

It’s also an America in which government exists mainly to preserve the fortunes of the rich, and the whole purpose of the environment is to be plundered for private gain. It’s an America in which working people have virtually no rights at all – no right to decent pay or fair working conditions or protections to their health and safety, and certainly no right to organize and form unions. When Hillary Clinton asked the rhetorical question during her campaign against Donald Trump, “Just when does he think America was ‘great’ and to which he wants to return us?,” the answer depended on the issue. In terms of the civil rights of people of color, women and Queers, it was the 1950’s. In terms of the economy, it was even earlier – the 1880’s, when corporations literally held sway over the American political system, offices were openly bought and sold, there was no hint of any government obligation to protect the lives of working people or the environment, and organizing a uniou cuold literally get you arrested (if you were lucky) or lynched (if you weren't). –

Americans of other political persuasions – not only the Left but even the center – grossly underestimate the sheer depth of the Right-wing ideological commitment and the success they’ve had in carrying it out. They have successfully packed the U.S. Supreme Court. They have nullified Congress as a legislative body by keeping the Senate filibuster in place (with the aid of so-called “Democrats” like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona). Their political party is far more unified and disciplined than the Democrats are. –

And they have a breathtaking contempt for the very idea of democracy, including free and fair elections in which every adult citizen may vote and have their ballots counted. Not only have Republican legislators passed hundreds of voter suppression and sabotage bills aimed at making sure they stay in power whether the voters want them to or not, they are using their power to draw legislative districts to ensure that they will never lose control, no matter how people vote or want to vote. The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado has even proposed a system that would replace the one-person, one-vote rule with what is essentially the Electoral College in one state, and the object is to ensure that Democrats can never again win a statewide election in Colorado. –

One part of the Republican myth of America’s past is the obsession with guns and gun ownership. Even Texans who are properly horrified at the Uvalde massacre hasten to add that they are not opposed to gun culture. In fact, they loudly proclaim that they own guns themselves and regularly use them for hunting or target practice. One man interviewed on MS-NBC proudly boasted that he owns an AR-15, the semi-automatic machine gun that was the weapon of choice for the shooters in both Buffalo and Uvalde, and he uses it for target practice. Any sensible person would be horrified that this man thinks he wants or needs a weapon of war for target shooting, but that’s how crazy the gun culture is in this country and how viscerally entrenched it is, especially in the small, rural states that thanks to the Constitutional guarantee of equal representation of each state in the Senate and the Senate rule that it requires at least 60 votes to pass virtually anything, have veto power over government action. –

As I’ve noted before in articles about previous mass shootings (and it’s a sign of how crazy this country is that I have written all too many articles about mass shootings), I have no contact with “gun culture.” I have never even held an actual gun (as opposed to the BB guns and toy cap pistols I played with as a kid), much less fired one. I grew up in San Francisco and Marin County, California, about as far away from the loci of “gun culture” as I could have been. My father broke up with my mother when I was 1 ½, and though I saw him fairly regularly after that, the thought of him taking me behind the barn (we never lived in a place that had a barn) or in the backyard and teaching me how to shoot is inconceivable and laughable. And I regard the Second Amendment, especially as rewritten by the Supreme Court in Heller, as a piece of pestilential dung our Constitution would be better off without. In short, I am exactly the kind of voter red-state Republicans keep telling their constituencies they should be afraid of – and that makes me proud.

Uvalde’s Keystone Kops Law Enforcement –

Since I wrote the above nearly two weeks ago – while the Uvalde shootings were still fresh in the minds of many Americans – a lot has happened. Most horrifyingly, there has been an explosion in the sheer number of mass shootings (officially defined as incidents in which at least four people are killed or wounded). During Memorial Day weekend, there were at least 20 in the U.S. In the next weekend, there were at least 13 more, including high-profile incidents in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where the U.S. Constitution was written); and Chattanooga, Tennessee. (For details on the Philadelphia shooting, see https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/us/philadelphia-south-street-shooting/index.html.) –

Another aspect of mass shootings that should frighten us all is the sheer number of sickos who are willing and able to commit them. They’re able to because the U.S. has an entrenched political base of gun owners that ensure our nation has by far the most lax gun laws in the supposedly civilized world. And they are willing to because we’ve grown up in a culture whose entertainments constantly project and reinforce the idea that the solution to virtually every problem is violence. The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups want to turn America into a kind of fantasy world based on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, in which absolutely every American will carry a gun with them whenever they leave their homes. –

The net result of this, as any American with any degree of logic will tell you, will increase, not decrease, the level of gun violence in the U.S. The Philadelphia shooting reportedly began with an argument between two people who ran into each other on the street. In a less well-armed country – or even a less well-armed era in America’s past – those sorts of confrontations would have been settled with words or, at worst, fists. Now, with the same majority of Right-wing crazies on the U.S. Supreme Court who have already decided to reverse Roe v. Wade on the cusp of throwing out a 100-year-old law in New York state saying you need to show a good legal reason for being allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, and with state after state eagerly getting rid of laws restricting people’s “right” to bear firearms virtually anywhere they like, it’s almost certain that some of these guns will be used – and more people will die. –

But in some ways the most frightening aspect of the Uvalde massacre is the horrible response of local law enforcement. It reminded me of reading Helter Skelter, the book about Charles Manson;s mujrder of actress Sharon Tate and her friends co-authored by the man who led the prosecution, Vincent Bugliosi. Both times I read the book I had the same reaction to Bugliosi’s description of the spectacular incompetence of law enforcement; I kept thinking, “They had the highest-profile murder in L.A. in decades, and they assigned it to the Keystone Kops?” Manson and his so-called “Family” of killers were finally busted not because of great or even good police work. They were nailed because one of the women involved in the killings got arrested for something else and boasted to a cellmate, “I did Tate.” –

If anything, the incompetence and zealous stupidity of the police in Uvalde makesthe Manson investigation look like a model by comparison. The police chief of Uvalde and the head of the police force of Uvalde’s school system amassed 19 officers from at least five separate agencies – and had them wait in the hallways of Robb Elementary while the alleged shooter took his own sweet time killing schoolchildren in the classrooms they dared not enter. The local and school police chiefs inexplicably decided that what they had on their hands was a “barricade” situation – a man holding people hostage with a gun but not putting them in any immediate danger – instead of the “active shooter” situation they really had. What’s more, police not only wouldn’t let parents of the at-risk kids come into the school to rescue them, they actually arrested them.

Angeli Rose Gomez, an Uvalde field worker and mother of two boys at Robb Elementary, told New York Post reporter Eileen A. J. Connelly that when she was called to the school and told her two sons were in danger, a U.S. Marshal on the scene handcuffed her to keep her from going in (https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/angeli-gomez-says-she-was-threatened-by-uvalde-texas-cops/). Gomez told Connelly that the marshal “said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to arrest you because you’re being very uncooperative.’” She ultimately got a local police officer to persuade the marshal to take the cuffs off her – and, showing a good deal more courage than the cops on the scene, she immediately went into the school and retrieved both her sons. –

But that wasn’t the end of Gomez’s ordeal. She told Post reporter Connelly that a few days after the incident, she got a call from a local law enforcement official warning her not to talk about the case publicly. The person threatened that if she kept speaking out, her probation on an entirely unrelated case from over a decade ago would be revoked. Fortunately, the judge overseeing her probation not only didn’t revoke it, he publicly praised her heroism. But Gomez remained skeptical of law enforcement’s response. “I was just thinking that they could have saved many more lives,” she told Connelly. “They could have gone into that classroom and maybe two or three would have been gone. They could have done something. Gone through the window, sniped him through the window. I mean, something! But nothing was being done. If anything. they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there.” –

The bizarre shabbiness of Uvalde’s law enforcement response has slowly unraveled since, despite the efforts of local and state officials to cover it up. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, standard protocol in mass-shooting situations in schools has been to rush in as soon as possible with the weapons you have. Uvalde’s city and school police didn’t do that. Instead, they waited in the hallways of Robb Elementary for an hour and 18 minutes. Federal Border Patrol agents finally defied the orders of local law enforcement, stormed the classroom and killed the alleged shooter before he could take the lives of more victims. The Uvalde response was so awful that the police in Tulsa stressed at their press conference that they had responded to their mass shooting in just three minutes. –

The Uvalde cover-up has continued and extended throughout Texas’s state government as well as the local officials. School police chief Pete Arredondo was secretly sworn in as a member of the Uvalde City Council and has hidden himself from reporters ever since the day after the shooting. The local district attorney has slapped a gag order on all participants in law enforcement’s response, citing the need to maintain secrecy to avoid compromising any investigation – which, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on his MS-NBC show June 6, is patently absurd since the only person who could conceivably be prosecuted, the alleged shooter, is dead. No one in state or local law enforcement has been fired, resigned or in any way disciplined for their terrible response. In fact, the Uvalde school board just gave Pete Arredondo a vote of confidence. –

The Republicans’ Death Cult –

The other big thing that’s happened as a result of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings – and the myriad of others that have happened since – is a renewed push on the part of certain members of the House and Senate to negotiate a bill to do something about gun safety. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who’s been involved in this issue since he was a Congressmember representing the district in which Sandy Hook Elementary was located, appeared on Stephanie Ruhle’s MS-NBC show June 6 and shame-facedly admitted that his latest bill does not include the two most important features he would want – a ban on military-style assault weapons and expansion of background checks on would-be purchasers of guns – because he can’t get anything through the Senate without watering it down so much it can get at least 10 Republican votes to overcome the vile filibuster. –

Either one of two things will happen. Either the law Murphy and colleagues are working on will die like all other attempts at sensible gun regulation – which is still by far the most likely outcome – or a bill will pass that will be so watered-down it will do nothing to prevent future mass shootings. Then the gun lobby will come back and say, “You see: You see: We told you gun safety legislation wouldn’t work!” In yet another of the grim ironies of Uvalde, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Houston the weekend after the Uvalde shooting – and some attendees wore T-shirts with images of the AR-15 as if it were a rock star. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that instead of doing anything to control the easy accessibility of guns to Americans, we need to “harden” school sites to keep potential mass shooters out. –

In fact, the Uvalde school district had already done that – and it proved not only useless but counterproductive. While all those cops were waiting outside the classrooms and milling about the hallways of Ross Elementary doing nothing but harassing concerned parents, the alleged shooter used the self-locking impregnable doors to lock himself in the classrooms so he could kill more students. The U.S. Border Patrol agents who finally took him down first had to beg for the key from the school janitor. What does it say about the U.S. as a nation when we need to “harden” every public space – every school, grocery store, church, movie theatre and anywhere else people go for commerce or amusement – to the security level of a prison? And why doesn’t this bother the same people who fought tooth and nail against common-sense restrictions like mask and vaccine requirements to control the spread of COVID-19? –

As Charles Booker, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky who’s challenging incumbent Rand Paul, put it, the Republican Party is a death cult. Over and over again, faced with the choice of acting to protect people’s lives or putting them at risk, the Republicans have chosen death over life. Ironically, they claim to be the “pro-life” party because of their oposition to abortion rights in the name of “the sanctity of the unborn” – though, as the late comedian George Carlin put it, to a Republican, “Once you’re born, you’re on your own.” –

If the Republican Party and its Supreme Court majority overturn Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of real, already born women will die from illegal abortions, either self-administered or underground. The Republicans not only have carried on a jihad against the right of women to end unwanted pregnancies, they blocked an extension of the child tax credit President Joe Biden and the Democrats ini Congress included in one of the COVID-19 relief bills, which would have helped mothers forced to have children by anti-abortion laws to raise them. They have also consistently opposed mask mandates, vaccine mandates and other measures to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They’ve even appropriated the slogan, “My Body, My Choice,” from the movement to give women the right to control their own bodies (which Republicans oppose), to justify their bizarre and insane opposition to COVID vaccines.. –

The Republicans routinely oppose laws to protect workers’ health and safety. They oppose laws to protect the environment. They not only don’t want to address the growing inequality of wealth and income in the U.S., they actively and deliberately pursue policies that would make them even more unequal. They oppose any and all efforts to stop the carnage guns and their easy availability are wreaking on this country and its people. And their undying commitment to maintaining the use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source will lead literally to the extinction of the entire human race as our planet becomes so beset with climate change it will no longer support human life. The lesson is if you vote for a Republican – or a so-called “Democrat” like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema who supports the Republican agenda and the contemptible filibuster that gives a minority of Senators veto power over the entire country – you are voting for policies that will kill people.

Goodbye, Roe v. Wade; Hello, Government Control of People's Private Lives

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved br>
On May 2, 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court decisively overturned U.S. politics and society, anid put the most intimate decisions of Americans’ private lives (and not just for women, either!) on the political chopping block. A draft opinion of the Court by Justice Samuel Alito, leaked (likely) by a Court staffer and published on the Politico.com Web site (

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473

) revealed that there are five justices – a majority of the current Court – willing not only to strike down the Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade but to declare it was “egregiously wrong from the start,” according to Alito’s draft opinion.

In a sweeping 98-page draft, including a 31-page appendix intended to establish that America had a long tradition of restricting or outright banning abortion rights until 1973, Alito called into question the whole idea that the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals a right to privacy in their personal lives, including how they have sex, with whom and how they deal with the consequences therefrom, good and bad. He pointed out that the Constitution itself does not contain the word “abortion,” as if that were enough to argue that Roe was illegitimate.

Nonsense. The Constitution itself says that the naming of individual rights as protected in its text does not bar the recognition of other rights. The last two sections of the Bill of Rights make this crystal clear. The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Tenth Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Legacy of “Originalism”

Justice Alito’s draft ruling on abortion in the case now before the court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – challenging a Mississippi law that bans abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy, typically before a woman even knows she’s pregnant – is an example of the so-called “originalist” school of constitutional interpretation. Originalism is based on the belief that the words of the Constitution should be read exactly the way they were written in 1789, or thereafter in the case of subsequent amendments. Thanks to the long-term domination of the Republican Party in selecting and nominating U.S. Supreme Court justices – since 1981 Republicans have appointed 11 justices and Democrats have appointed five – the originalist doctrine has come to dominate American jurisprudence, especially on the Supreme Court.

Originalism flies in the face of the other school of constitutional interpretation, the so-called “Living Constitution” promoted in the early 20th century by Louis Brandeis first as an attorney appearing before the Supreme Court and then as a justice himself. Brandeis argued that the courts should interpret the Constitution in light of what its overall concepts mean now, not what they meant in 1789. He also argued that justices had a social and moral obligation to consider the effects their rulings would have on the real world. The concept of a “Living Constitution” has allowed the U.S. to have the same constitution for more than 200 years, with only one sweeping revision – the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, adopted after the Civo; War and enshrining the Union’s victory – while other nations have had to revise and throw out their constitutions far more frequently.

But over the last 50 years or so, Republicans have launched a sweeping attack on the whole idea of the “Living Constitution,” to the point where a Supreme Court nominee who proclaimed a belief in it would almost certainly not get confirmed by the Senate. The notion of “Living Constitution” advocates like Brandeis that, for example, in ruling whether a law regulating wages and hours was constitutional one had to acknowledge the gross difference in economic power between the lowly worker and the giant corporation that was hiring him or her has never been popular among conservatives, especially Republicans. In the early 20th century the Supreme Court routinely ruled that minimum-wage laws, laws protecting workers’ health and safety, and laws allowing workiers to form unions were unconstitutional because they violated workers’ so-called “freedom of contract” to agree to work longer hours for less money and under less safe conditions.

Court’s Righ-Wing Role in U.S. History

In fact, one of the most cogent comments on Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs came from a U.S. Congressmember who’s also a constitutional law scholar, Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland). He noted that throughout most of our history the Supreme Court has been a conservative, even a reactionary. Institution. He pointed to such decisions as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which stated that African-Americans had no rights white Americnas were obliged to respect and a slave could not escape bondage simply by moving to a state where slavery was illegal; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation and said that if Blacks felt bad about being segregated, that was their problem; and Korematsu v. United States (1942), upholding the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, ostensibly as a war measure but really out of racism.

Raskin argued that the 16-year tenure of the late Earl Warren as chief justice (1953 to 1969) gave liberal Americans a much more positive feeling about the Supreme Court. Starting with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson and held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Warren court enacted quite a lot of the liberal agenda, from expanding the rights of criminal defendants (the familiar Miranda warnings stating that you have the right to an attorney, and if you cannot afford one an attorney will be provided for you, came from a Warren Court decision) to abolishing mandatory prayer in schools, ending bans on interracial marriage, and, in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, ruling that married couples had the right to use birth control. Griswold was especially significant because it found that the Constitution granted Americans a so-called “penumbral right” of personal privacy, especially in how they chose to lead their sex lives, and it was one of the main precedents Justice Harry Blackmun relied on in writing the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade eight years later.

But, Raskin and others have argued, as more and more Supreme Court appointments have been made by Republican presidents, the Court has in recent years moved back to its original position as a bastion of reaction. In large part that has been due to the increasing polarization of American politics and the extent to which both major parties – the Republicans far more than the Democrats – have become ideologically driven. It used to be that Republican Presidents appointed liberal or even progressive Supreme Court justices. Dwight Eisenhower appointed Warren and William Brennan, Nixon appointed Blackmun, Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens, and George H. W. Bush appointed David Souter.

That doesn’t happen anymore, and a large part of why it doesn’t is due to the influence of Leonard Leo, perhaps the most important modern-day American you’ve never heard of. In the 1980’s Leo and others organized the Federalist Society, whose purpose was to identify law students with strong Right-wing politics and shepherd them through their legal careers, ultimately getting them jobs as high-powered attorneys with major law firms and/or getting them appointments as federal or state judges. Today no Republican President appoints anybody to the Supreme Court, or to virtually any lower federal judgeship, unless he or she has the imprimatur of the Federalist Society. While Democrats have tended to appoint more moderate justices in the hopes of gaining bipartisan support for their Senate confirmationd, Republicans have appointed hard-core Right-wing ideologues from the Federalist Society’s membership, and they come with a solidly “originalist” judicial philosophy and a determination to read the Constitution and other laws strictly in what the words contain, without any cognizance of the effects their rulings will have in the real world.

We see this in Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs, particularly in his withering scorn towards considering the real-world impacts of his decision, While an earlier generation of more moderate conservative justices – Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter – drew back from overturning Roe in the 1992 decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey on the ground that the political effect of overturning Roe would be galvanic, Alito would have none of it. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito writes in his draft opinion. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.”

Alito also reads the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States quite differently from Jamie Raskin. To Alito, those were two previous decisions that were so totally wrong on their face and so badly decided that they serve as precedents for ignoring stare decisis – the rule that courts should decide cases based on what they’ve decided before – in overturning Roe. Aside from the rather obvious point that Plessy and Korematsu were about treating Americans as second-class citizens based on their race, while overturning Roe essentially turns the female (more than) half of the American population into second-class citizens and slaves to their wombs – there is a striking difference between how Earl Warren reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education and what Alito is proposing to do to Roe.

Warren, who came to the job of chief justice from being Governor of California and had never been a judge before, saw Brown in terms of consensus-building. According to historian Richard Kluger, whose book Simple Justice is the definitive history of Brown. Warren lobbied the other justices hard to secure what he thought would be the best result for the country: a unanimous opinion. He particularly worked hard to persuade Stanley Reed, the last holdout who wanted to keep racial segregation constitutional, to sign on to Brown because it would be the best thing for the country.

By contrast, Alito makes clear in his opinion his sheer disdain for anyone who disagrees with him, including other Supreme Court justices both past and present. He cherry-picks the historical record and quotes the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe as people who expressed skepticism about Roe v. Wade. (They did, but their skepticism was over relying on a Supreme Court opinion instead of continuing the battle for reproductive freedom in state legislatures, where the momentum in the early 1970’s was on the pro-choice side.) Rather than trying to build common ground among the justices the way Warren did in overruling Plessy v. Ferguson, Alito’s draft caters to the other members of his bloc – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – and totally ignores the rest of the Court. That includes chief justice John Roberts, who based on his past record would probably have wanted a decision that paid lip service to Roe v. Wade while upholding the Mussussuppi anti-abortion law and giving Roe the death of a thousand cuts.

No, Justice Alito says in the tone of his opinion: we have the votes to do this 5-4 and we don’t care what the other justices (or anybody else) think. To bolster his culture-war arguments, Alito cites the early support of Planned Parenthood’s original founders for eugenics, a 1920’s attempt to “improve” the human race by selective breeding, and he says that Black and Latina women are more likely to have abortions and therefore abortion is a form of genocide against those communities. Nonsense: if Black and Latina women are more likely to have abortions in the U.S. than whites, it’s because of racism, particularly economc racism that relegates them to low-paying jobs that don’t offer enough money or support to raise additional children.

A Salvo in the Culture War

Justice Alito’s draft opinion is yet another salvo in the ongoing American culture wars. In the late President Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, we have become “a house divided against itself” – and the divisions are so extreme that only once, when the Civil War was imminent, were there greater social, cultural and political divisions than there are now. Lincoln’s speech (https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm), delivered in Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858 during Lincoln’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Stephen A. Douglas from the U.S. Senate, directly referenced the Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court had issued a year earlier, and his words were chillingly appropriate for the modern situation:

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.”

Lincoln described the Dred Scott decision and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which his opponent Senator Douglas had sponsored, as part of a long-term plan to extend slavery and ultimately make it nationwide. Likewise Justice Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade is the culmination of almost 50 years of Right-wing planning, strategizing and acting. And despite Justice Alito’s attempt to wall off the effect of his opinion exclusively to abortion because it involves “the potential taking of a human life,” the effect of Alito’s and the four other justices in the majority would be to eviscerate decades of legal rulings guaranteeing individuals a constitutional right to privacy. Alito’s ruling that in order to be protected by the Constitution, it must not only be stated explicitly therein but be “deeply rooted in our nation’s history” – which he argues isn’t the case for abortion because all 50 states prohibited the procedure until California allowed it in the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967 (signed into law by then-governor Ronald Reagan, who 13 years later cut the deal with Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the radcal Right that made Republicans the so-called “pro-life” party).

It also isn’t true of a lot of rights that previous Supreme Courts have ruled are constitutionally protected. Once Roe v. Wade is overruled and states are free to ban abortion, the next target is likely to be Queer rights. Just as all 50 U.S. states banned abortioin until 1967, all 50 states banned sexual activity between same-gender partners until 1961, when the Illinois legislature did a full revision of the state’s criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-Queer sodomy law. And the ruling allowing same-sex couples to marry dates back only to 2015 – and Alito has slgnaied that this, too, is on his chopping block.

In October 2020 – with liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead and her far-Right replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, before the U.S. Senate awaiting confirmation – Alito joined fellow Right-wing justice Clarence Thomas in reading a statement from the bench saying that the ruling allowing same-sex couples to marry threatened “the religious liberty of the many Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman.” (See https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/politics/thomas-alito-obergefell-same-sex-marriage-analysis/index.html.) With Barrett about to be confirmed on a party-line vote, the Thomas/Alito letter essentially was an invitation to anyone who might want to bring a case before the new Court that their “religious liberties” were being violated because the law now allowed same-sex couples to be married.

It’s not only same-sex marriage and, indeed, same-sex sex that are on the post-Roe chopping block. It’s also the right of married heterosexuals to use birth control, which was guaranteed ini the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The court in Griswold found that the Constitution guaranteed what they called a “penumbral right” to privacy, a phrase abortion opponents have ridiculed ever since, and it was one of the key precedents the Court relied on in Roe. Also on the chopping block is the right to marry a person of a different race, since that was guaranteed by the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia also on “privacy” grounds that will be stripped away if Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs, or something close to it, becomes the law of the land.

The current Right-wing Supreme Court majority has become a hopeful sign for all sorts of radical-Right crazies on issues that have nothing to do with either medicine or sex. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe (1982), which guaranteed the right of children of undocumented immigrants – including U.S.-born ones who were automatically citizens under the 14th Amendment, to attend public schools. Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have also threatened prosecuting parents who authorize hormone therapy for their Transgender children – as recommended by the medical establishment for treating gender dysphoria – for “child abuse.”

The modern-day American Right is an uneasy coalition between economic libertarians who wanted to abolish worker health and safety protections, labor unions and all social welfare programs under the guise of “limited government,” and radical Christian Rightists who want a huge government to micromanage people’s personal lives, especially their sex lives. Despite its inherent contradictions, this coalition has stayed together for over 60 years and is on the verge of its biggest success to date. For most of these 60-plus years the economic libertarians have been in the driver’s seat – mainly because it was far more important for the big-noeey donors who support the Republican Party to win huge tax cuts for themselves than to deal with abortion or Queer rights.

But now the balance of power between libertarian and evangelical Rightists in the U.S. is shifting. Bob Chapek, the chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Corporation, found this out when he came out against a severely restrictive bill passed by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that forbids any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school grades one through three, and restricts classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity for older children. It also gives parents the right to sue a school district for alleged violations of the law – which makes opponents fear that cash-strapped Florida school districts will just ban all discussions about Queer people or issues, period.

Chapek originally wanted to keep quiet about the bill, reasoning that buth supporters and opponents of Queer rights spend money at Walt Disney World in Orlando and the company’s other businesses and attractions. Then he faced opposition from Queer and Queer-friendly Disney employees, and he publicly spoke out against the so-called “Don;t Say Gay” bill and pledged that Disney would use lts clout as Florida’s largest private-sector employer to pressure the legislature to get rid of it. Instead, Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature went out of their way to punish Disney for their bill by revoking the special-district status Walt Disney himself had negotiated with the Florida government before his death in 1966 for the land on which Walt Disney World sits.

Called the “Reedy Creek Improvement District,” the Disney World land was allowed to be virtually self-governing. The law was denounced by Leftists at the time as a giant giveaway to a private corporation, but the Florida legislature enthusiastically embraced it because they’d seen the sensational success of Disneyland in California and wanted their own tourist attraction. Now it’s being attacked on the Right by people who ordinarily support corporate giveaways, but in this case their commitment to an anti-Queer culture war has overcome their commitment to corporate freedom. The message to corporate America couldn’t be more clear: companies that toe the radical-Right culture line, like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, will continue to get government benefits and sweetheart deals. Companies like Disney that oppose anti-Queer legislation will have those benefits taken away.

The imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade and the possibility that the federal government will impose a nationwide ban on abortion the next time Republicans have control of the White House and Congress are the latest steps towards the “dictatorship of virtue” the Republican Party and America’s radical Right want to impose on the nation. Both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump ran for President on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and to them and America’s Right in general, America was “great” when Blacks stayed on the back of the bus, women stayed in the kitchen and Queers stayed in the closet.

The Impending Doom of the Democratic Party

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.
– Will Rogers

I don’t care what he has to say,
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, we’re against it!
– Paraphrase of Harry Ruby’s song lyric for Groucho Marx from the movie Horse Feathers (1932)

This time, it was supposed to be different.

This time, the Democratic Party was supposed to have learned its lesson from 1993 and 2009, years in which they took the Presidency and both houses of Congress and then frittered away their majority pushing through a complicated piece of legislation that had to be compromised in advance to appease both “moderate” and “progressive” factions, while the Republicans circled around them like hungry sharks ready to devour them in the next election.

In 1993, the complicated piece of legislation was an attempt to overhaul America’s bizarre mess of a health-care system and get more people access to medical care. In 2009, after the failure of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to do that, it was another attempt to reform American health care – which actually went through Congress but proved, at least early on, to be so savagely unpopular American voters took control of Congress (one house, anyway) away from the Democrats that had loosed this bill upon them.

One of the reasons it was supposed to be different in 2021 was that the new Democratic President, Joe Biden, wasn’t an outsider like Bill Clinton who’d never held a higher office than governor of Arkansas. Nor was he someone like Barack Obama who had run for President while just halfway through his first term in the Senate. Biden was supposed to be an old, experienced legislative hand who’d served nearly 40 years in the Senate before he left it to become Obama’s Vice-President.

Biden was supposed to be the compromise candidate, acceptable to all wings of his party, sort-of progressive but not so progressive he’d scare off moderate voters. He was supposed to be a skilled negotiator who could reach across the aisle and win at least some Republican support for his proposals and thereby claim the magic mantle of “bipartisanship.” And most of all, he was supposed to be an old hand at getting government to work and actually do things – a sharp contrast to his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who with the help of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell got through a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and packed the federal judiciary with Right-wing ideologues but proved both unwilling and unable to do the nuts-and-bolts work of running America.

Only now it’s all happening again, only worse. This time the Democrats in both houses of Congress are battling over a bill – or, rather, two bills – given the vague title of “infrastructure.” One of them passed the U.S. Senate and even got some Republican support because it’s only about the traditional definition of “infrastructure” – building roads, bridges and other big capital projects to help Americans move themselves and their products across this country and elsewhere. The other is a social-democratic wish list being offered by a surprisingly progressive-sounding President that includes expanding Medicare, universal pre-school (an idea I once argued against on the ground that the kids of well-to-do parents don’t need it), free community college and increased pay for health-care workers, including in-home caregivers (which is how I’ve made my living since 1984).

The bill containing the social-democratic wish list also includes programs to fight human-caused climate change – perhaps the most significant issue there is right now, because if we don’t respond to it adequately enough Earth will become literally uninhabitable for humans in the next century or two (or maybe even sooner). It’s also one of the most controversial because at least one of America’s two major political parties outright denies its existence. Whether it’s because they’re economically dependent on energy industries and other capitalists who would suffer big-time under the economic and social readjustments this country, and every other one on earth, would have to do to tackle climate change, or whether they have personal psychological or religious problems with it (like the evangelical Christians who believe it’s blasphemous to claim that humans can render the Earth uninhabitable because only God can do that), there are millions of Americans who outright deny that current human activities, including fossil-fuel consumption, have or can have any effect on the planet’s ability to sustain us.

One of the strongest and longest-term opponents of addressing human-caused climate change in the Democratic Party is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, not coincidentally one of the two Democrats in the Senate who’s holding up the large so-called “budget reconciliation” bill to fund climate-change prevention, social-service programs and much of what’s come to be called “human infrastructure.” A recent review by Charles Kaiser of New Yorker writer Evan Osnos’s new book Wildland – an attempt to explain just how American politics became so vicious (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/19/wildland-review-evan-osnos-america-trump-republicans-billionaires) – includes a link to a TV commercial Manchin ran in his first campaign for U.S. Senate in 2010 in which he literally shoots a rifle at a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system, a so-called “market-based” attempt to address climate change.

The text of the ad, narrated by Manchin himself as he carries a rifle and wears a jacket with a National Rifle Association (NRA) patch on its shoulder, reads, “I’m Joe Manchin. I approve this ad because I’ll always defend West Virginia. As your Senator, I’ll protect your Second Amendment rights. That’s why the NRA endorsed me. I’ll take on Washington and this administration to get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets. I’ll cut federal spending and I’ll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare. I sued EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency], and I’ll take dead aim [fires shot] at the cap-and-trade bill, ’cause it’s bad for West Virginia.”

Even before that, when Manchin was governor of West Virginia in the late 2000’s, he publicly endorsed a study concocted by coal-mining companies operating in the state that supposedly “proved” that miners’ wages would go down if mine operators were forced to make their mines more safe. The study was funded by a foundation with money from Charles and David Koch, well-heeled contributors to Right-wing causes. David Koch originally ran for vice-president in 1972 with the Libertarian Party, which believes government’s only legitimate functions are to maintain a military, a police force and a justice system. It’s particularly opposed to Social Security, Medicare and all other programs to tax the rich to benefit the not-so-rich, and argues that these essentially turn rich people into slaves forced to support their inferiors.

Osnos’s book is largely an account of how the Kochs and other super-rich donors to Right-wing political causes – Lee Hanley, Robert Mercer and Richard Mellon Scaife (who in 1993 underwrote the so-called “Arkansas Project” to flood the state with money for anyone who could come up with derogatory information about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, much of which was made up by Arkansans eager to get their hands on some of Scaife’s money – but just about every nasty thing you think you know about the Clintons came from this source) – have spent the last 50 years dramatically changing how millions of Americans think about themselves, their government and what it can do for – or to – them. “Above all,” Kaiser wrote of Osnos’ book, “this is a story of how mega-rich Americans have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to give themselves the power to pillage the earth, destroy the air and corrupt democracy in a thousand ways without ever being held to account.”

Democrats Box, Republicans Fight Wars

As of this writing (early October) the two major parties are locked in a struggle for the soul and the future of America disguised as a battle over legislation. The Republicans, led by master doublethinker Mitch McConnell in the Senate (“doublethink” was a form of organized and legitimized hypocrisy invented by the Inner Party, rulers of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984) and opportunist apparatchik Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives, announced from the get-go of Biden’s Presidency that they were going to be united in implacable opposition to anything he tried to do. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been fatally disunited, with their ongoing wars between “moderates” and “progressives” sandbagging any chance of getting legislation through that would even begin to satisfy either side.

In order to enact a legislative agenda, one or the other major party has to take advantage of controlling the Presidency and Congress by ending the Senate filibuster, that insane relic of the 1830’s that in its current form requires at least 60 Senators to vote to do practically anything. The only way around the filibuster is an arcane process called “budget reconciliation,” which allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority as long as it somehow relates to the federal budget. The problem with “budget reconciliation” is that it can only be done once a year – though in 2021 the Senate Democrats got special dispensation to do it twice since no reconciliation bill had passed in 2020 – and they used their first crack at reconciliation to pass the big COVID-19 relief bill in March.

In a post on this blog on March 14 (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2021/03/bidens-unrepeatable-victory.html), I called the COVID bill “Biden’s Unrepeatable Victory” and predicted that the Democrats would be unable to enact any more major legislation in the face of implacable opposition not just from Republicans but moderate Democrats as well. I mentioned Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s dramatic vote against raising the federal minimum wage – closely copying the famous gesture of her Republican predecessor, John McCain, in supplying the decisive vote in 2017 to keep the Senate from repealing the Affordable Care Act – as an early warning signal to Democrats that they were acutely vulnerable to any Senator in their caucus who thought the party’s overall agenda was too liberal, too progressive and too expensive.

Sinema and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have emerged as the principal obstructionists in the Senate against the overall agenda of Biden and most of his party. With the staggering power that comes from the even division of the Senate into 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, these two are essentially dictating the course of Democrats’ ability to legislate in the Senate. “I’m not a liberal,” Manchin recently boasted proudly, announcing that he would personally cap the wish-list progressive Democrats had packed into the second reconciliation bill to pay for programs ranging from universal pre-school and free community college to serious efforts to deal with climate change at $1.5 trillion. It had started out as $6 trillion and already been whittled down to $3.5 trillion, and both Manchin and Sinema have been maddeningly reluctant to tell other Democrats exactly what they want to remove from the bill to bring its cost down.

Part of the problem is the reconciliation process itself: since it can only be done once every fiscal year, both Republicans and Democrats have thrown just about everything they want done into reconciliation bills so it can’t be blocked by the 60-vote threshold. That’s why, instead of actually being able to discuss, debate on and vote the individual proposals in the reconciliation bill, Democrats had to advance them as an all-or-nothing package. The result is that what people are talking about when they discuss the legislation isn’t what it’s actually going to do, or why those things would be good or bad for the country, but that intimidating price tag. It also doesn’t help that since the 1970’s the Senate has shackled itself with what I call “the virtual filibuster,” in which, instead of actually debating a bill, the minority only has to file a piece of paper with the Senate clerk to invoke the 60-vote threshold and keep it from a vote.

Manchin – who’s been at least marginally more open and honest about what bothers him about the reconciliation bill than Sinema – has said he doesn’t mind if the process takes weeks to resolve. Unfortunately, the country doesn’t have weeks. The Democrats must pass some sort of budget reconciliation bill by mid-October because otherwise the U.S. faces fiscal Armageddon in the form of the “debt ceiling,” an arbitrary legislative limit on how much the country may borrow. Mitch McConnell has whipped the Senate Republican caucus into total and implacable opposition to raising the debt ceiling, even though the debt ceiling isn’t (as McConnell has portrayed it) an act of fiscal prudence that puts brakes on the government’s ability to borrow in the future. It’s simply a reaffirmation that the government will pay its credit cards for the money it has already borrowed – including the extra debt Republicans loaded onto the U.S. debt to finance their giant tax giveaway to wealthy individuals and corporations in 2017.

The controversy over the debt ceiling is just one more example of how savagely and unscrupulously Republicans are fighting to make sure that their vision of America – in which corporations are free of tax burdens or any obligation to protect the health and safety of workers and consumers, all laws and rules to protect the environment are either repealed or simply forgotten, women and people of color are once again second-class citizens, and the state is barred from protecting public health while it takes on a major role in regulating how people can have sex, with whom, and how they can deal with the consequences therefrom – is the one that will prevail. The Republicans have been able to maintain this unlikely coalition between economic Libertarians who want limited government when it comes to business and the economy, and highly interventionist government when it comes to sex, for over 40 years (at least since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980), and with the utter tone-deafness Republicans have built up to their own hypocrisy, they’ve been able to navigate these contradictions just fine.

A case in point: the “My Body, My Choice” signs Right-wingers have been carrying in demonstrations against vaccine and mask mandates to help prevent COVID-19. They’ve appropriated the pro-choice slogan used by defenders of abortion rights even as a radical-Right legislature in Texas passed the most radical bill to control women’s bodies and their lives since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision – and the current Supreme Court, dominated by radical-Right justices, gave it an A-OK.

What’s more, the current Republican Party has been absolutely unscrupulous about their strategies and tactics. They have shrewdly used the anti-democratic features of the United States Constitution – the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the U.S. Senate regardless of its population, and the near-total control the Constitution gives state legislatures over who can vote, under what circumstances and how the votes will be counted. The Republicans are fighting against demographic changes that are shrinking the percentages of America’s population where they do best and growing the populations where they do worst – people of color, poor people, young people – not by modifying their ideology or their presentation to attract younger, darker people but by passing voter suppression laws to make it as hard as possible for people who don’t usually vote Republicans to vote at all.

The Republicans are taking aim at every unwritten custom they can find that has helped keep the U.S.’s experiment in (small-“r”) republican government together. They’ve weaponized the debt ceiling – threatening the total collapse of America’s and the world’s economy. They turned the normally ceremonial task of counting the electoral votes for President into an attempt at what Latin Americans call an autogolpe (“self-coup”) aimed at keeping Donald Trump in office past the 2020 election even though he lost both the popular and the electoral vote. They’ve mounted a bizarre propaganda onslaught against the whole idea of vaccination against COVID-19 and mask-wearing requirements to keep SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes it, from spreading.

They have not only passed laws making it insanely difficult for generally non-Republican constituencies to vote, they’ve included provisions that will allow state legislatures or partisan officials simply to set aside and reverse any election whose outcome doesn’t go the Republicans’ way. They’ve taken advantage of computer programs that facilitate gerrymandering – the practice of deliberately drawing legislative districts to maintain your own party in power – to a level of precision so great that in 2018, 65 percent of Wisconsin voters voted for Democrats to represent them in the legislature, but Democrats won only 45 percent of the legislative seats. And by continuing to question the legitimacy of every election Democrats win with false claims of “fraud,” the Republicans are deliberately and purposely undercutting Americans’ faith in voting itself.

And, when all else fails, Republicans resort to violence or the threat of violence to maintain power. They did that on January 6, 2021, when thousands of armed vigilantes descended on Washington, D.C. aimed at breaking into the U.S. Capitol and disrupting the electoral count by violence. Their aim was to block the counting of electors and throw the decision of who the next President would be to the House of Representatives, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution votes by states, with each state getting one vote. Since Republicans had majorities in 26 of the 50 state delegations, this would have meant Trump would have been re-elected. Republicans also threatened to assassinate the governor of Michigan over COVID-19 restrictions and are intimidating secretaries of state, local election officials and school board members to skew elections their way and ban anti-COVID mask mandates.

It’s clear that today’s Republican Party will literally stop at nothing to regain and keep power. The gap between the Republicans and the Democrats in this regard has been told in various metaphors – the Democrats bring a soup ladle to a gunfight, the Democrats are student council officials while the Republicans are stone-cold killers, or (my favorite) the Democrats are still trying to play politics by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans see politics as all-out war. It is clear that today’s Republicans see the Biden administration and the temporary razor-thin (but hapless, due to the Democrats’ inner divisions) Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as mere hiccups on the road to what former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove called “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics by the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ goal – ironically, given their ostensible stand against immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in particular – is a situation very much like the one in Mexico in the last two-thirds of the 20th century. Americans are used to a situation in which multiple political parties exist but only two, the Republicans and the Democrats, really matter. What the Republicans are after is a political universe in which multiple parties exist but only one party really matters. They are bound and determined to use any means necessary to make the Democrats a permanent opposition party, tolerated but essentially powerless. And with the likelihood that they will regain both houses of Congress in 2022 – partly because the usual pattern in American politics is the President’s party loses seats in the midterms, partly because the Democrats’ majorities in both houses are so razor-thin Republicans can take them with only one more Senator and three more House members, and partly because the Republicans are thoroughly and industriously suppressing the votes of their opponents – they are well on their way to regaining the White House in 2024 and casting the Democrats into permanent political oblivion.

It Didn’t Start with Trump

The point Evan Osnos is making in Wildland is that Donald Trump, his presidency, his continuing hold on the Republican Party and the ever-growing odds that he may return to the White House in 2024, were not the beginning of the super-rich radical Right’s campaign to reshape American politics. Rather, his election was its culmination and the ultimate badge of its success. According to Osnos, in the last 50 years rich Right-wing Americans have “launched a set of financial philanthropic and political projects that changed American ideas about government, taxes and the legitimacy of the liberal state. … In every element of his commercial and political persona, Trump was a consummation of that project. … Most of all, of course, he stood for a belief in unbridled self-enrichment, and on that basis some of his most genteel supporters were willing to overlook” the tawdrier aspects of Trump’s character and career: his vulgarity, his racism, his open demeaning of women, his lumpen-bourgeois origins and his lousy business record.

Indeed, for most of its history the U.S. has been a center-Right country, exalting wealth and success in a way that goes back to the original Puritans’ concept that material success in this world was God’s way of showing who were the “elect” destined for salvation in the next. There have been brief periods when more progressive forces have gained ascendancy – notably between 1932 and 1964, when the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II made Americans more sympathetic to progressive ideals (and when at least some rich people saw the threats from Communism on the Left and fascism on the Right as indications that they needed to make some compromises instead of grabbing most of America’s wealth and income for themselves) – but for the most part America has been a capitalist nation whose people, as much as they might rail against certain aspects of how it operates, support it overall and regard attempts to alter it as dangerous.

The relatively liberal era that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and ended with Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 unraveled for several reasons. First, the major parties switched their historic positions on civil rights and racial equality in the 1960’s. The Democrats, who had been the party of slavery, secession and segregation, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This left a whole lot of racists, not only Southerners but white working-class Northerners as well, who no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party. The Republicans rushed in to fill the gap and build a national majority on racism and opposition to the counter-culture – which in the 1960’s meant hippies, but later meant “liberated” women and Queers.

Over the last 50 years, ever since Richard Nixon and Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) concocted the so-called “Southern strategy” that turned theirs from the “Party of Lincoln” to the party of American racism, the Right has essentially dominated American politics. Backed by super-rich donors’ money and a whole network of organizations created with it – from “dark money” political action committees to think tanks and national organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes Right-wing bills and offers them to elected legislators at all levels of government; and the Federalist Society, which recruits Right-wing law students to rise through the legal profession and ultimately become judges – the Right has become the dominant force in American politics.

Since 1968 the Republicans have won nine Presidential elections to the Democrats’ six. Since 1994, when they broke the Democrats’ 40-year majority hold on Congress, they have controlled either or both houses for all but five years (the first two years of Clinton’s Presidency, the first two years of Obama’s and the first year, so far, of Biden’s). Even more destructively, the Republicans, their corporate funders and their handmaidens in the media have created an entire Right-wing media ecosystem consisting of Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, Web sites like Newsmax and One America News (for people who think even Fox is too liberal for them) and an entire social-media infrastructure. Its purpose is to keep Right-wing voters in line by making sure either they are never exposed to any information other than Right-wing propaganda; or, if they are, they are trained to dismiss it as “fake news.”

When They Go Low, We Need to Go Lower

Political scientists who studied American elections in the 1950’s and 1960’s – after there was enough scientific polling data to discern American voting patterns and enough computers to crunch all those numbers – classified American Presidential elections into four groups, “maintaining,” “deviating,” “reinstating” and “realigning.” The theory was that one of the two major political parties that have dominated the U.S. through its history as an independent nation would have the larger base of support among the American electorate, and their ideas would be the principal drivers of U.S. politics and decision-making. As American political scientist Samuel Lubell put it in 1951, one would be the “sun party” and the other the “moon party.”

A “maintaining election” was one in which the dominant “sun party” kept the Presidency and, most often, a majority in Congress as well. A “deviating election” would be one in which the less dominant party would win, but for reasons that didn’t change the overall alignment. A “reinstating election” would bring the dominant party back into power after a deviating election. A “realigning election” would be one in which one party accumulated so overwhelming a majority of voters and officeholders that it would become the dominant “sun party.”

Examples of realigning elections included 1860, in which the looming crisis over slavery and secession brought the Republican Party to power in only the second election in which it fielded a Presidential candidate; and 1932, in which the economic collapse of the Great Depression brought the Democratic Party to overwhelming power. I would argue that 1968 was also a realigning election that definitively voted the Democrats’ “New Deal Coalition” out of power and put together a new one. A lot of people were fooled by the narrow margin (less than 1 percent of the popular vote) by which Republican Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey and his failure to win a majority in either the House or the Senate. But the combined vote total of Nixon and arch-Right-wing racist George Wallace was 57 percent to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent – an indication that the American electorate had overwhelmingly rejected the Democrats’ liberalism.

Not that the voters who cast Right-wing ballots for either Nixon or Wallace in 1968 – or the 61 percent who voted to re-elect Nixon in 1972, the most overwhelming Presidential landslide to that point – were all that clear on what they wanted to replace Democratic liberalism. That wouldn’t happen until 1980, when Ronald Reagan won what was more than just a reinstating election; it was a capstone that completed the realignment 1968 had begun. The 1980 election cemented the alliance between economically conservative Libertarians and the radical Christian Right that has essentially dominated American politics ever since. It has given the Republican Party an oddly schizold and self-contradictory internal politics – for “limited government” when it comes to workers’ and consumers’ health and safety, protecting women and people of color against discrimination, and weakening (and ultiamtely eliminating) the social safety net; for highly interventionist “big government” when it comes to dictating people’s private lives, especially their sex lives.

It’s true that some political writers, notably David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, have questioned whether Lubell’s “sun party/moon party” analysis really applies to today’s American political alignment. Goldberg published an article in the December 25, 2019 issues of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times (https://triblive.com/opinion/jonah-goldberg-we-have-2-moon-parties-no-sun-party/) claiming that Democrats and Republicans had both become “moon parties” because neither one is willing to make the compromises between its members to govern effectively as a “sun party.” As Goldberg wrote:

“[T]he most committed members of each party have a decidedly lunar mindset. Progressives and conservatives alike are convinced they are victims of the Powers That Be. One of the main arguments that propelled Trump to the White House and sustains his GOP support today is the feeling that the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years.

“As political consultant Luke Thompson notes, minority parties tend to obsess about unity because without it they are even more powerless. This makes ideological purity a vital source of cohesion. Majority parties have both the luxury and the burden of power. To govern is to make policy choices, and choosing A over B will always disappoint the backers of B.”

The modern-day Democrats are indulging in the luxury of disunity – and putting themselves on the verge of collapse from it – because they don’t have the luxury of defections. Biden came into office with razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, yet he’s trying to push through a sweeping agenda similar to those Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930’s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960’s – only without the overwhelming Democratic Congressional majorities they had. Meanwhile, the modern-day Republicans have played a far longer game, trusting in their ability to exploit the anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic features of U.S. politics to force their will on the American people and become a permanent dominant party. As historian Leonard Schapiro wrote about the Russian Bolsheviks, who seized power in 1917 and held it for 72 years, the modern-day Republicans are “a minority determined to rule alone.”

Though many Republican voters may think, as Goldberg claimed, that “the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years,” they really haven’t. They’ve lost a few of them, some in the economic sphere (like the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a major expansion of the social safety net which ideological Republicans had wanted to shrink and ultimately eliminate, even though many of their voters are dependent on Social Security and Medicare) and more in the cultural sphere. But for the most part, Republicans have won most of the ideological battles over the last 40 years, confining Democratic Presidents to what Bill Clinton called “small ball” and radically restructuring the nation’s tax system to make social programs and government spending in general unsustainable. After hard-core Libertarian Paul Ryan pushed through the Trump tax cuts in late 2017, he announced his retirement from Congress and said, “My work is done” – meaning that those cuts had destroyed the ability of future Democratic Presidents and Congresses to fund even already existing government programs, let alone expansions of them.

Now, thanks to a laser-like focus on “packing” not only the U.S. Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary with Right-wing Republican judges, almost all from the Federalist Society (an organization formed in 1982 specifically to identify young law students with Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession and eventually became judges), the Republicans are poised to win their biggest and longest-term victory in the culture wars: an end to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and an ability for state governments to take control of women’s bodies by denying them the right to abortion. The Supreme Court has lost its liberal members through attrition and its thoughtful conservatives (people like Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter) have been replaced by Right-wing ideologues. Every Republican President since Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, signed into law the U.S.’s first abortion-rights bill in 1967, when he was governor of California) has pledged to appoint only Supreme Court justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade – and they now have a majority of justices committed to doing just that.

As the battle stands at this writing (October 5, 2021), the Democrats are locked into a mini-war between progressives tired of being “rolled” in big pieces of legislation – as they were in 2009, when they were forced to support the Affordable Care Act even though it locked the U.S. even tighter into its system of private, profit-driven health insurance progressive Democrats have long wanted to eliminate – and moderates who hold the balance of power, largely because progressives have simply not been able to elect enough people to outvote them. “You want more liberal outcomes? Elect more liberals,” Joe Manchin rather snippily – but accurately – said, reflecting that the 2020 election was hardly a walk for the Democratic party. Republicans kept control of most state governments and slashed the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to four, indicating that this remains a center-Right country and many Biden voters were repudiating Trump but remaining basically Republicans.

Joe Manchin’s latest break with his party’s nominal leadership was an announcement he made October 4 (https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/politics/manchin-debt-ceiling-biden-economic-package/index.html) that he would no longer join his fellow Democrats in resisting an immediate vote on the reconciliation bill. With Republicans blocking any extension of the nation’s debt ceiling except through reconciliation, Manchin and Sinema can either trigger a “vote-o-rama” session in which they can join the 50 Republicans to strip out most of the Democrats’ social-spending wish list from the bill, or – even worse – force the Democrats to pass a reconciliation bill just to keep the nation from defaulting, meaning any big reconciliation package can’t be taken up again for nearly another year. He’s also said that he won’t support a reconciliation package that doesn’t continue the ban on federal funding for women seeking abortions – while House Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal says she won’t support a bill with the ban.

No doubt the Democrats will realize that their already slim chances of keeping Congress in 2022 will be annihilated completely if they don’t pass some part of the Biden infrastructure agenda – both the $1.25 trillion bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill that’s already cleared the Senate and at least some shell of the reconciliation package – and if they allow the U.S. government to default on its debts for the first time in its history. They will take whatever they can get and call it a victory, and limp along through the rest of Biden’s presidency as they face a Republican Congress that, as Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has promised, will turn Biden into a “half-term President,” unable to get anything more done before the 2024 election. The “progressive” Democrats who have held up the “hard” infrastructure bill in the House will have to give up their resistance – as, 12 years ago, they gave up their resistance to the Affordable Care Act and sullenly voted for it – and let it go through because the consequence of doing so will mean that neither bill succeeds and the Democrats in general will look like incompetent fools.

If that happens – if this unwitting coalition of implacable Republicans, irresponsible “moderate” Democrats and obdurate “progressive” Democrats blocks either infrastructure bill from passing and makes Biden look as hapless in the White House as Jimmy Carter – Donald Trump will sweep back into the Presidency in 2024 and run as an avenging angel. He will use the power of the Presidency to destroy all his real or perceived opponents and complete the task of ending American democracy he and the Republican Party have been engaged in for many years. And, since one of the big priorities of the modern-day Republican Party is to block any programs to slow down human-caused climate change, and also to do virtually nothing of substance to slow down or stop pandemic diseases, Mother Nature, which always bats last, will render the Earth no longer inhabitable by humans in the next 100 years or so.