Decades Of Conservative Dogma Has Turned Our Great Country Into A Banana Republic-- And There's No End In Sight

The GOP is making a bad bet on Vote By Mail. The public likes it, especially during the pandemic and many people see right through the Republican Party's motives. Like every other poll that's asked about Vote By Mail, the new NBC News/Washington Post poll, found that the overwhelming majority favors it, regardless of what the moron in the White House says. Yesterday, Rick Hasen, a law professor and author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy explained why Trump's stand against making voting easier and safer is backfiring. "If there’s one lesson the farce of conducting the April 7 Wisconsin elections in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic should have taught Republicans," wrote Hasen, "it is that the voters you hurt may be your own. Rather than play games in an effort to depress turnout among likely Democratic voters, now is the time for all officials-- both Democrat and Republican-- to think about how to make voting safe, secure and easy in November. There are signs from Wisconsin that Republican efforts to make it harder to vote in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic are backfiring in two ways. First, suppressive efforts are firing up Democrats to come out and vote. As the New York Times reported, Democrats voted in large numbers in a highly contested state Supreme Court race-- and a less contested Democratic presidential primary. Second, suppressive efforts are making it harder for some staunch Republican voters and Trump supporters, particularly in rural areas, to cast their ballots."

[S]ome Republicans still have not gotten the message.

In Kentucky, the Republican legislature just now-- in the midst of the pandemic-- overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a new strict voter identification bill that will make it harder to vote during a pandemic. Among other things, Kentucky’s law, like Wisconsin’s, requires a photocopy of a valid identification or the filling out of an affidavit. I would venture that young Democratic voters in cities like Lexington will have an easier time jumping through new legislatively built voting hoops than rural voters who form the foundation of the Trump coalition.

In Texas, the state is fighting legal efforts to get the state to accept fear of contracting COVID-19 as a legitimate excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Just before a state court indicated that it will issue a preliminary injunction requiring the state to do so, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, issued unofficial “guidance” that claiming fear of contracting the virus as an excuse to allow absentee voting could open up the voter to criminal prosecution. Paxton’s irresponsible actions may be aimed at discouraging turnout among likely Democrats, but that’s a politically risky-- and potentially deadly-- bet.

And President Trump continues his attacks on vote-by-mail as potentially rife with fraud and his opposition to U.S. Postal Service funding, which would directly affect the ability to have a successful election in October. The president has done so despite a lack of evidence that vote-by-mail leads to large-scale fraud or benefits Democratic voters.

Indeed, we have seen stories of many responsible Republican officials who have pushed back on the president’s claims, such as Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who has called Ohio’s vote by mail system safe and secure. Moreover, Republicans in places like Florida depend upon strong vote-by-mail efforts as part of their get-out-the-vote activities. In a state like Florida, with a large elderly population, such efforts are not only good politics but good for the health and safety of vulnerable populations.

It would be nice to think that all Republican leaders would agree that we should think about the remaining primaries and upcoming November election with an eye toward how to maximize the participation of eligible voters in a way that assures they can cast safe and effective votes. But even if some leaders care only about partisanship in designing election rules in the COVID-19 era, what is good for all voters may be especially good for reliable Republican voters.

Hasen's thoughts are a perfect introduction to the essay George Packer penned for The Atlantic yesterday, We Are Living in a Failed State, where he posits that it wasn't the pandemic that broke America; "it revealed what was already broken. When the the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills-- a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public-- had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity-- to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus-- like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly-- not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan-- no coherent instructions at all-- families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power-- a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president... Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and-- every day of his presidency-- political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

Moron by Chip Proser

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981-- a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators-- then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”-- they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods-- only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.