Our July 4, 2020 Cartoon:
"Happy Birthday, Dear America,
Happy Birthday To Us..."/The Reckoner
Take II: Above
Take I: Below
Another Fourth of July is upon us, with all the familiar images and rituals that accompany it, from the massive outdoor orchestral concerst televised on PBS; the parades and picnics held in or around cemeteries of long-dead soldiers; and the President, whoever it happens to be, saluting the enormous responsibility of safeguarding our democratic heritage, in a suitably solemn backdrop, such as Arlington National Cemetery.
The homespun simplicity of such images is enduring and appealing, even reassuring, for millions who associate the Fourth with a more basic appeal: a day or two off. It marks one of the few times that the hamster wheels of America's economy go on pause. If the Fourth falls on a Thursday, or Friday, so much the better. At many jobs, it may even mean the possibility of a three- or four-day weekend.
So much the better for the little man, right? Yet our democracy has never seemed less responsive, never seemed more dysfunctional, never shown more signs of sclerosis. The old hippie rallying cries of "We want the world, and we want it now," or "Never trust anybody over 30," seem little more than quaint punchlines in a landscape dominated by 70-year-old rock stars who no longer release new albums, and near 90-year-old Senators, who no longer move significant new bills.
It's a culture also built on enshrined mediocrity, and repackaged banality, as we see from Fall Out Boy's cover of the Billy Joel Baby Boomer infomercial, "We DIdn't Start The Fire." Nobody expected it, and nobody asked for it, but thanks to the Internet, it's carpet bombing our brains into submission, anyway -- complete with clanking rhyme schemes, and key events jumbled in random order, guaranteeing a seat-shifting experience for anyone who hears it. because Cut, print, and roll out the crime scene tape (but not here -- you can find that version on your own, if you must!).
Once again, Billy and his brethren have a lot to live down. So do unrepentant fossils like Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, who ran for re-election last fall, at the ripe old age of 89. Other than his donors, I suspect, nobody asked for it, and nobody wanted it; yet there he sits, anyway, enshrined in the Beltway crypt that he's comfortably inhabited for decades.
Ditto for Grassley's dysfunctional twin, DIanne Feinstein, of California, whose physical and mental decline seems painfully apparent, to any reasoned observer. Yet she refuses to step down, apparently resigned to sequestering herself amid a phalanx of longtime aides, who presumably don't want to do what everyone else must, in such situations -- that is, look for a job.
Yet no mechanism to ensure a smooth transition exists, other than somehow persuading her "to do the right thing," and retire now, so that Governor Gavin Newsom can appoint one of the previously announced candidates, Barbara Lee, Katie Porter, or Adam Schiff, to the seat. Any of them would mark a major upgrade from "Di-Fi," whose practical and political relevance expired long ago. But first, we endure the gruesome public spectacle of her ongoing decline, until she herself finally passes from the scene. A culture of learned helplessness demands no less, even though it requires little else.
Our July 4, 2021 Cartoon:
"So You Just Bought That?"/The Reckoner:
"My Corona Diary (Take XXXIII):
Fourth Of July Notes:
(The Long Arc Bends Towards Justice? Suuuure...")
<ii.>
Our current stasis seems especially painful, when we consider how much damage the so-called U.S. Supreme Court continues to inflict on the fabric of our democratic framework. You can start with the fall of Roe v. Wade last year, or its newly-concluded term, where an increasingly imperial court took a wrecking ball to affirmative education in higher education, public accommodations protections, and student loan debt relief.
The court's 6-3 rejection of President Biden's plan exemplifies the reactionary right's capacity for raising chutzpah to breathtaking heights. Much of the case focused on standing to sue, yet the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority had nothing to do with the legal challenge to Biden's plan, of which it only learned through news reports (see link below).
What's more, the authority hadn't paid into the state's student loan fund in 15 years, nor did it intend to; but no matter. For 45 million borrowers, their indentured servitude will continue, even as those who spiked their relief remain radio silent about the fairness of subsidizing the uber-rich -- the same ones, remember, who captured the federal courts, and loathe paying taxes, in any form.
A similar critique holds for the 6-3 decision in Creative v. Elenis, in which the court supported a fundamentalist website creator's alleged fear that the mere prospect of providing her services for gay people might chill her free speech rights. This, even though the New Republic found that "Stewart," the man cited in the complaint, had never actually contacted the designer; this, even though he was married -- to a woman (see Yahoo News links below).
No matter. Elenis highlights a different problem, one that starts with the manipulation of simple facts, and rapidly escalates to the corruption of the so-called Justices -- whether it's Clarence Thomas, in accepting decades of luxury travel to settings like Indonesia and the Adirondacks -- thanks to a billionaire benefactor with a fetish for collecting Nazi memorabilia -- or his equally grease-coated counterpart, Sam Alito, for gallivanting to Alaska on the private jet of a different billionaire who successfully steered cases to him.
Ah, you may ask, so what about the handful of voting rights victories that also came last week? Yes, the court's rejection of gerrymandered maps in Alabama and Louisiana is a much-needed win for Black political power. And true, the court's curt dismissal of the far right fringe's "independent state legislatures doctrine" in Harper v. Moore provides appropriate "Trump-proofing" for 2024, should the Orange Menace return to haunt us for another presidential election.
However, weighed against the scale of the court's overall corruption -- much worse than previously acknowledged -- these victories, such as they are, seem more like cynical damage control exercises, orchestrated by "Chief Justice" John Roberts. As Pro Publica's recent expose makes plain, the "Justices" work for the billionaires who bribe them, no more, no less. Always keep this reality in mind, when you view their latest handiwork.
To put it another way, the enemy of your enemy isn't always our friend. That Roberts prefers to roll back commonly held rights at a relatively slower pace than his more combative-minded colleagues, like Alito or Thomas, is like saying that you prefer to eaten by a crocodile, instead of a great white shark. And even then, what doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes, it will kill you, without firing a shot.
Our Lead Image, July 4, 2022:
Found on Facebook (I changed the color)
<iii.>
As badly as the current Supreme Court is surely behaving, they -- and the Corporations Are People Too Crowd, who happily subsidize its Nero-esque excesses -- would hardly get away with so much, if we had a political class capable of correcting the problems.
Such notions seem fanciful and magical, given the various penalty boxes that the Democratic Party have inhabited since the mid-2010s -- starting with the abuse of the filibuster, that makes 60 votes the price of doing even the most routine business. The stalling of 250 military nominations by Alabama insurrectionist Senator Tommy Tuberville, followed by the public vow of his Ohio counterpart, JD Vance, to hold up future Department of Justice nominations, are just the latest, unhappy expressions of this syndrome.
The resulting legislative permafrost, aggravated by a paper-thin 51-49 Democratic majority, also makes it impossible to address the other penalty box -- the aggressive abuses of power through gerrymandering and supermajorities, a related problem that is equally noxious, but only now beginning to get the same degree of scrutiny.
Six states (Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia) have Republican supermajorities of 70 percent or greater -- meaning, they can pass whatever legislation they wish, and override any veto that comes -- which makes extreme politics more routine, and more rampant. Twenty-eight states in all -- 19 Republican, eight Democratic -- have supermajorities. You can hardly blame people who live in such climates for viewing their votes as theoretical exercises.
The more I watch the antics of the current political class, however, the more convinced I become that a new generation will have to clean up whatever current messes it leaves them to inherit. Consider President Biden's continuing dismissal of calls to expand the Supreme Court, even after he criticizes its latest judicial output: "This is not a normal court." That begs a logical question: if the court is so abnormal, surely, isn't it high time to actually begin doing something about it?
Try to imagine a Republican President taking such a passive stance in a similar situation. No past examples, nor similar images, will come to mind. However, inert expressions of outage, like Biden's above-referenced, represent the Minimum Payment Thinking that bedevils the Democratic Party, whose elders remain frozen in some 1990s-era time warp -- when lesser evil politics became standard operating procedure, one deemed sufficient to continue doing business. It wasn't then, and isn't so now.
When any organization's prevailing mantra becomes, "Wow, we sure dodged a bullet," or, "All things considered, it could be worse," it should hardly come as a surprise when your enemies come calling to feast on whatever flesh they haven't already pulled from your bones. Or, as Winston Churchill so aptly put it: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."
<July 4, 2023:
"You Broke It, You Bought It"/Take I: The Reckoner>
<iv.>
Apparently, I am not alone in expressing doubt whether July Fourth is really the "New Year's Eve of the summer," as one doubter tells the New York Times (see below). So where does this roll call of repressive consequences leave us on this particular Fourth of July, as we near the 250th year of our democratic existence? We cannot leave it there, nor should we. Yet overturning it won't come without recognizing some inconvenient truths; call them the price of reclaiming our democratic heritage. How, then, do we go about it?
It will require a readiness to push back harder against a mainstream media that still treats authoritarian wannabes like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis as conventional candidates with a few rough edges. The stakes are too high to repeat the blinkered narratives of 2016, that yielded blanket coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails, the scandal that never was, yet ignored Trump's unwillingness to release his tax returns -- for reasons that only became clear six years later, when House Democrats finally obtained them. A democracy cannot function under a backdrop of delay, delay, and delay.
It will require promoting a grass roots resistance that shouldn't feel shy of demanding more from its uninspired leadership. One of the biggest mistakes that progressives consistently make is giving up whatever leverage they gain, in exchange for vague promises that never materialize; the sacrificing of the COVID-era child tax credit is one of many unhappy such examples. If you don't want to be treated like a cheap date, don't continue enabling the behavior.
It will require jolting the Democratic Party leadership out of its "lesser evil" comfort zone, and into a more activist mindset that doesn't always settle for doing the bare minimum legislatively, and calling it a day. We will never reach the more transformational political age that we hope to achieve, if all our aspirations begin and end with sentences like these: "It could always be worse," or, "We're not as horrible as they are."
It will require a willingness to move beyond the transactional thinking that led to the Democratic Party during the 1990s and 2000s to downplay its traditional strength of building broad-based coalitions, in favor of chasing a different shuffle of dirty money (reactionary Big Tech Bros, instead of traditional pinch-nosed Big Business interests), and a newfound philosophy of passive, reactive thinking.
It will, most of all, require the inner strength to confront the various penalty boxes that we all inhabit -- the filibuster, the gerrymander, the supermajority, and twisting of federal courts to serve reactionary interests -- with their most potent antidotes, the powers of public opinion, and public pressure.
The example of Martin Luther King is especially relevant here. As King often stated during his lifetime, he could never settle for a political strategy that enshrined the pursuit of legal reform at the expense of his greatest, most pressing priority -- that is, of mobilizing public opinion to strike at the roots of of entrenched inequality, and in doing so, drive a stake through its dark, toxic heart.
African Americans "must not get involved in legalism [and] needless fights in lower courts," King urged, which he saw as "exactly what the white man wants the Negro to do. Then he can draw out the fight." Without a commitment to direct action, King argued, nothing else that he and his mass movement hoped to achieve would ever happen: "Our job now is implementation... We must move on to mass action...in every community in the South, keeping in mind that civil disobedience to local laws is civil obedience to national laws."
<"You Broke It, You Bought It," Take II/The Reckoner><Coda>
Thankfully, some groups of Americans are drawing comparable conclusions, and launching similar reclamation projects, without waiting for a suitable cue from some Beltway eldercrat. Start here in Michigan, a state that Trump carried in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes, where the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state were all Republicans, who also enjoyed majorities in the State House and Senate -- thanks to the usual artful gerrymandering -- and a majority on the Michigan Supreme Court.
Then came last November's midterm miracle, which landed with the most stunning results in Michigan. Voters decisively re-elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to second terms, and sent their election-denying, would-be authoritarian Republican opponents back to the belfry from which they emerged, and where they belonged.
Voters also gave control of the Michigan Supreme Court, and both state houses, back to the Democrats -- an event that would never have happened without the creation of an independent redistricting commission in 2018 -- and codified abortion rights into law, by decisive margins. The resulting momentum has led to the passage of many bills long stifled under Republican rule, such as the scrapping of right-to-work laws, measures to control gun violence, the end of taxes on pensions, and targeted tax relief for workers, among others.
A similar reclamation effort is underway in Minnesota, where Democrats also hold narrow majorities, including a one-vote margin in the State Senate. Sound familiar? Unlike their excuse-mongering counterparts on Capitol HIll -- whose trademark refrain, "We can't, we can't, we can't," rings hollow, over and over, like some pitiful broken record -- Minnesota Democrats simply got to work, resulting in a plethora of progressive legislation that is impressive, by any measure.
But all this legislative success would mean nothing, without Gopher State Democrats' willingness to pass measures that benefit the voters who put them in power. The Democratic Party of tomorrow cannot continue to look like the Democratic Party of yesterday, an entity content to hoard power purely for its own theoretical sake, as it has done, time and time again, in election after election.
And that reclamation may yet happen in Florida, where momentum is growing to place a measure enshrining abortion rights onto the 2024 ballot, an outcome that DeSantis and his allies will surely do everything to prevent. After all, they hold every lever of power that counts, right? But leave that image to one side, for the moment.
Imagine the embarrassment, the emotional hammer blow, the psychological jolt that the Tallahassee Mussolini and his fascist shock troops would feel, if Floridians ever pass such a measure. It would undercut the most potent argument in Mad King Ron's arsenal -- that he alone can implement the MAGA agenda, without the baggage that dogs his rival, Donald Trump.
How could such an outcome happen, in a state that re-elected one of the nation's most reptilian politicians by a 20-point margin? As Ricky Ricardo might say, he'd have some 'splainin' to do, and it wouldn't sound convincing. But this where our hopes for reclamation start, in the knowledge that the most critical aspects of fascism are built on sand.
A nation cannot live in perpetual fear of some ill-defined "other," driven by a counterfeit moral panic, and an all-powerful ruler who demands absolute loyalty from the cult of personality that he's spent a lifetime building up, even as he and his underlings systemically steal whatever isn't nailed down.
That is the reality of illberal democracies like Hungary and Turkey, after all. Yet here in America, at least, no popular majority for any of those premises exists -- and that is where our hope still flickers, and our reclamation starts. To celebrate, or not to celebrate, is an individual decision.
But if we really want to ensure a better tomorrow, let us turn the page to July Fifth, and gear for the task that lies ahead. For there is much work to be done. The reclamation -- and, ultimately, in the long run, restoration -- of our demcoratic heritage demands nothing less. -- The Reckoner
Links To Go (Food For Thought):
Democracy Now: Supreme Court Case
No Sparklers For These Folks:
