Courage And Concession

How many of us remember Charles Sumner from our American history courses? (Assuming those courses included information about Sumner and his principled opposition to slavery…)

The author of “Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation,” Zaakir Tameez, wrote a recent essay in the Washington Post, reminding us that the violent opposition Sumner faced is still with us.

On May 13, a man who made death threats against Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) for her foreign policy views was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Last month, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she was “afraid” of using her voice to speak about political controversies. A month before that, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) released audio recordings of death threats he received while he was considering how to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

At least one senator made light of the threats. In April, Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) joked on X about “bringing back caning to settle political disputes.” It was a reference to the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, 169 years ago.

Tameez recounted the attack for readers unaware of that bit of American history.

Sumner had taken two days — May 19 and May 20 in 1856 — to deliver a passionate anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor. Among other things, he accused Southern leaders of undermining democracy. That set off Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who wielded his gold-tipped cane to beat Sumner so badly that the cane shattered. Sumner barely survived.

News of the assault reinvigorated the antislavery movement. Tameez tells us that voters recognized a “parallel between Sumner’s beating and the beatings that those enslaved in the South experienced daily” and In the next election, outraged Northerners elected scores of anti-slavery politicians.

Today, as threats of political violence rise, Tameez counsels us to revisit the caning and to learn “three lessons that most history textbooks overlook.”

Lesson number one: many pro-slavery politicians rejected America’s founding texts. John Pettit of Indiana belittled the immortal words that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence: the phrase “all men are created equal.” A committed White supremacist, Pettit scorned the Jeffersonian ideal of human equality as “a self-evident lie.” (Unfortunately, Pettit’s ideological descendants still populate Red Indiana.)

Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, faced few consequences; he became a celebrity at proslavery rallies across the South, and once declared that “the Constitution of the United States should be torn to fragments.”

Tameez’ second lesson is that such anti-constitutional rhetoric can prompt political violence–not to mention actual election “rigging.”

Only weeks before the caning, David Rice Atchison of Missouri — the former president pro tempore of the Senate — led an armed gang into the territory of Kansas. With bowie knives and guns, Atchison’s men seized polling locations, intimidated voters and stuffed thousands of fraudulent ballots into the voting boxes. Their goal was to ensure that Kansas voted to become a slavery state, even if it required violence and election fraud to make it happen. “If we win,” Atchison told his thugs, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”

Some states simply ignored the constitution. Maryland and Tennessee banned abolitionist newspapers, and Virginia made it a crime to criticize slavery. North Carolina imposed the death penalty on anyone found to have encouraged enslaved people to revolt. In 1860, Southern states outraged by Lincoln’s modestly anti-slavery platform refused to put his name on the ballot.

Nevertheless,

Through grassroots programs, tens of thousands of people gathered in “indignation meetings” to lament Sumner’s assault and strategize political responses. The Republican Party — founded on the idea that slavery should be abolished in federal territories — passed out as many as 3 million copies of the speech that led to the caning. Sumner’s near-martyrdom energized the Northern public so much that it probably contributed to Lincoln’s epic victory in the 1860 presidential election.

Lesson number three is one that fearful senators today would do well to consider. “To galvanize a public that had been asleep to democratic slippage, Sumner believed that politicians like him needed to be brave. If they had to risk their physical safety to speak their conscience, so be it.”

Personal courage is necessary in order to resist assaults on constitutional democracy. Sumner knew that courage, not concession, was the key to defeating autocracy–while stumping for Lincoln, he even quoted Jonathan Swift, who wrote “And know that to be brave is to be wise.”

The GOP cowards who control Congress today are neither brave nor wise, leaving it up to an awakened grassroots to once again save the American Idea.

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Money, Trump And The Media

The longer we suffer the agony of the Trump administration and its assaults on governance, science, logic and basic decency, the more I become convinced that our current information environment is largely responsible. The enormous growth of online propaganda is partially to blame for the fact that 37% of Americans still tell pollsters they approve of Trump.

But the Internet isn’t the only culprit allowing MAGA and MAGA-adjacent folks to escape confrontations with reality. The party that holds the White House has a built-in information advantage, and Trump’s visceral need for attention–and his ability to command it– has made use of that advantage.

That said, I have become more concerned about the decline of what we think of as “mainstream” journalism.

Take the reporting about the administration’s refusal to fund SNAP. On the NBC evening news I watched, the lack of funding was attributed to the shutdown; there was absolutely NO reference to the fact that the administration was refusing to release funds that had been appropriated for precisely this purpose–to ensure ongoing funding of a critical program in cases of government shutdown.

That failure to explain the actual reason for the SNAP crisis is journalistic malpractice. It allows partisans to point fingers and distort the political conversation. In a very real sense, it’s participation in a lie.

NBC isn’t the only network or mainstream source to evade this reality, and the question is: why? Why are major networks and news sources “both siding” multiple reports rather than accurately reflecting the fact that one side is primarily responsible? Why are they normalizing so many aspects of a profoundly abnormal Trump administration?

One recent report from the American Prospect provides a chilling answer to that question.  It involves Trump’s “stage-managing” the business of information.

Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns a movie studio, numerous cable networks (CNN, Discovery, TBS, TNT, HGTV, Cartoon Network, TCM), the pay-TV channel HBO, streaming service HBO Max, DC Comics, part of The CW network, part of Fandango, several gaming studios, some theme park in Madrid, and much more—has publicly announced that it is for sale. Several companies, including Comcast, Netflix, and Amazon, are sniffing around a purchase, but the one that’s clearly amped to acquire WBD is Paramount, fresh off of being acquired itself by David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

Ellison and his billionaire father have been moving to consolidate ownership of the mass media. Ellison’s Skydance Media has already taken control of CBS through its recent merger with Paramount Global. Reportedly, the Trump administration has vowed to block Comcast, Netflix or Amazon from buying WBD, and to facilitate its acquisition by Paramount. The Ellison family is a longtime Trump ally, while Comcast and Netflix “have angered the president with Saturday Night Live parodies or perceived wokeness; and these grievances are driving the discretionary application of law.”

Trump pays more attention to media mergers than other business combinations, as befits his obsession with how he is portrayed to the public. The Ellisons, who already have their hands on TikTok, would add CNN to CBS News, building out a right-leaning rival to Fox in old and new media. Doing so through a shotgun wedding with implicit (if not explicit) approvals is just deeply corrupt.

This wouldn’t be a slam-dunk: under the Clayton Act and new guidelines written by Biden antitrust officials, such a merger would trigger several structural presumptions of illegality.  State attorneys general can use them and the relevant federal laws to block the merger–assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t put a corrupt thumb on the scale. But the very prospect of yet another merger, another consolidation of ownership of the media, should be a wake-up call.

There has already been far too much consolidation, too much transformation of journalism into just another business, where owners worry more about official reprisals for stepping out of line than providing first-rate reporting.

A study by the University of Chicago found that, in the last ten years, consolidation of America’s TV broadcasting has accelerated–that currently 40 percent of all local TV news stations are controlled by three conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, each of which owns about 100 ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations –and that those stations operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets. The research found “weaker constraints on owners’ interference with editorial decisions, whether for purely economic or for political motives.”

No kidding.

Our would-be King wants to control the information we receive–and with the help of his billionaire friends/courtiers, he’s well on his way.

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Those Election Results

Each morning when I get up, my husband’s first question is: any news? (That comes right after his opening observation that “growing old is not for sissies.”) Yesterday, boy was there news! And for the first time in what seems like forever, that news was ALL good.

As usual, Heather Cox Richardson said it best:

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”

Those of us who care deeply about this country–whose patriotism is rooted in allegiance to the philosophy of the Declaration and fidelity to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those of us who work to achieve a society reflective of what I’ve called “the American Idea”– turned out in force.

If yesterday’s elections proved anything, they proved that real Americans can do this. We outnumber the haters–the racists, anti-Semites, homophobes and misogynists who are the face (and base) of today’s Republican Party. More importantly, yesterday demonstrated that We the real American People will come out to defend the real America.

Obviously, gratifying as Tuesday’s election turnout and results were, now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to return this country to the path laid out by its founders–both the original founders and those responsible for the post-Civil War “second founding“–a nation committed to both individual liberty and civic equality.

The enormous turnout for No Kings Day was an indication that Americans were up to the task; yesterday’s blowout victories confirmed it. We aren’t out of the woods by any means, but we are on the way.

There’s an old TV ad that has one person asking another “How do you spell relief?” The answer isn’t “rolaids,” as in the ad. It’s the growing, impressive evidence that resistance is–forgive the Borg reference– anything but futile.

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Building Back Better

There’s no avoiding the fact that U.S. citizens are currently experiencing a world of hurt. As one newsletter glumly reported, the federal government is now a subsidiary of Trump Inc. and the laws meant to prevent such a takeover go unenforced. There’s no investigation into Trump’s open corruption and self-dealing. The U.S. Supreme Court has elevated the president  above the law. Congress won’t even meet. 

No wonder Americans aren’t having policy debates.

The current lack of interest in the intricacies of policy may be entirely understandable, but–unless we are prepared to give in to Trumpian autocracy, we need to be thinking about how we go about rebuilding once the would-be king is gone and his MAGA racists have crawled back under their rocks.

According to a recent article in the American Prospect, a new think tank is doing precisely that. The organization is called Common Wealth. It is based in both Britain and the U.S., and it is focused not only on policy repair, but upon analysis of the policy failures that enabled Trump’s rise.

Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and building state capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality: Despite the utter madness of what Trump is doing, the mess he’ll leave is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic president, should there ever be one, will have no choice but to rebuild much of the entire administrative state from scratch—so they might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase. “We’re in a moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common Wealth’s U.S. program director Melanie Brusseler, “but also there’s a lot of hope in response.”

One important focus for Common Wealth is the affordability crisis. It has become obvious that neoliberal strategy didn’t work- belief in shipping jobs overseas to cut labor costs and keeping supply chain investment low finally collapsed during the pandemic, as supply shocks led to skyrocketing prices for goods and shipping. But it isn’t simply manufacturing; Common Wealth researchers point out that our current crisis of affordability is primarily driven by prices for things that can’t be offshored and/or imported– housing, education, health care, transportation. 

As a result, Common Wealth supports public provision, including Medicare for All and free college. As its researchers point out–and as this blog has frequently noted–America’s health care system is so plagued with hyper-complicated rent-seeking in which “uncountable private actors maneuver to swindle each other and/or the government and thereby claim a fat slice of America’s world-historical spending on health care, that the case for state coordination of providers as well as insurance practically makes itself.’

A primary focus of the new think tank is–understandably–climate change, and the policies necessary to ameliorate or slow it. Their researchers advocate “adaptations and asset development” –the creation of a huge number of publicly owned electrical generating assets that would be totally disconnected from volatile global markets for oil and gas.

Common Wealth claims affinity with previous efforts at what it terms “public provision.

Many Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic democratic compact, and rightly so. But there’s a reason that all the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had an aggressive program of reform—and these also included public provision and ownership. Abraham Lincoln had greenbacks and land grant colleges; Franklin Roosevelt had Social Security, a massive public works program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. A core purpose of a democratic republic is to protect the welfare of the citizenry, and if a future government is to repair the damage inflicted by Trump and fight climate change as well, they will have to think even more ambitiously.

I will admit to significant reservations about some of the “public provisions” Common Wealth endorses, but we should all take comfort from the fact that there are institutions and individuals who are engaging with what will be a truly monumental task: rebuilding our governmental guardrails and ensuring the ability of those we elect to do their jobs. 

And speaking of “their jobs”–policy wonks need to start with a foundational inquiry: what is government’s job? What parts of our civic and economic life should government control, and what parts should be left to individuals and voluntary organizations? What aspects of our common lives must be approached collectively, and what parts must be protected against government overreach? 

That inquiry must be the framework within which we evaluate proposals to “build back better.”

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Civil Resistance

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman shared a transcript of his interview/conversation with Erica Chenoweth, author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. During Trump’s second term, Chenowith, a Harvard professor, has become well-known for her studies of resistance to autocracies across the globe–especially her conclusion that peaceful civil protest by 3.5% of a country’s population is usually effective in overcoming an autocratic regime.

Krugman’s first question is one most of us would ask: do protests like No Kings really matter? As Chenoweth noted, that question is slightly different from the question whether civil resistance matters.

On the protest side, just immediately speaking, there are a lot of papers about this. There are papers in my discipline (political science and sociology and econ) even about trying to understand the impacts of even a single day of protest and widespread participation, and a single day of protest on things like shifts in public opinion, changes in policy, shifts in election turnout for particular parties, the tendency for people to run for office, all kinds of reforms.

I think the general answer is that, on a number of dimensions, even a single day of protests with very widespread participation can often lead to shifts and those different outcomes, even if there’s sometimes modest shifts in places like the United States where a modest shift in voter turnout can actually be quite decisive because of the nature of our voting rules. “First past the post,” that means elections can be completely changed by small margins. So it’s easy to overstate the impact that a single day of protest can have. But it’s also easy to underestimate it, given where the scholarship is on this topic.

Chenoweth then turned to the “slightly different” question of civic resistance, which she explained is a broader phenomenon than protest, involving more sustained levels of nonviolent mobilization and organization. It extends beyond protests to other methods of non-cooperation like strikes and boycotts.

Chenoweth noted that, in the 20th century,  these tactics initiated democratic breakthroughs in Poland, the Philippines,  Serbia, Brazil, and Argentina, and prompted the Arab awakenings of the early 2010.

Krugman and Chenoweth returned to the impact of the recent No Kings protests; Krugman observed that those events weren’t simply peaceful–they were joyful, and the festive atmosphere arguably attracted more participants, while the act of participating encouraged a belief in the possibility of change.

Chenoweth agreed, citing studies on the impact of participation in the civil rights movement on those who participated. Engagement in those protests gave rise to a belief that the situation could be changed–not only that each individual should do something to effectuate that change, but more importantly, that individuals could do something to change it. Once that recognition dawns, “there’s no going back to the previous status quo where it felt like the situation was permanent, only going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The No Kings mass resistance also accompanied other defections: Chenoweth cited incidents of prominent people resigning– or refusing to resign and forcing the administration to fire them; the archbishop of Chicago releasing a statement calling the  administration’s policy toward immigrants intolerable;  the Chamber of Commerce suing the Trump administration over its H-1b policy (on the basis of it being unconstitutional, not just on the basis of it being harmful for their industries); the multiple airports refusing to run Kristi Noem’s TSA commercial. These are all examples of non-cooperation. Krugman added the example of universities refusing to sign the administration’s “compact.”

The preparation that went into the No Kings protests–preparation that worked to ensure that they would be non-violent–was important. As Chenoweth put it,

The more representative the crowd is of the general population, the more likely it is to have non-escalatory impacts with police or with bystanders or anything else. Part of that is just because it’s very clear to all who are observing it, that these are folks from every walk of life, regardless of what the GOP wants to say about these people, they’re plainly peaceful protesters, some of them engaging for the first time in a political protest in their life…That’s the needle that civil resistance campaigns thread, which is to say they’re able to convey a political threat without threatening people and property around them.

Chenoweth says we are experiencing something new to the U.S.–authoritarianism has captured federal power. We the People must strengthen the civil society response, uphold the institutions that need upholding, and “renew and improve the institutions that need renewal and improvement without bloodshed. I truly believe that we have the capacity to do that.”

I hope she’s right.

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