Image of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates is from the Financial Times, June 23, 2021, “Buffett Resigns from Gates Foundation,” by Joshua Chaffin and Andrew Edgecliffe.
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I hadn’t planned on continuing the dialogue on Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and the obstructionism of Senator Joe Manchin , right out of the gate in 2022, but an early morning Email from a citizen of standing in Western Maryland helped me change my mind. This citizen, while sympathetic to my take on the power of corporate democrats, sided with Professor Nancy MacLean’s recent criticism/attack of my view of the party and the Biden presidency, essentially saying I was bad for morale. Therefore, below, you will find my expanded response, “An Exchange of Views on Biden, Manchin, and the State of the Democratic Party, Part II.”
What I had intended to write about first in this New Year, though, is the apparent shift in winds among those in the Democratic Party whose first priority has been the three bills about Democracy and Voting Rights and thwarting Republican Right attempts to subvert if not outright overthrow them. I do agree with the assessment of Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein fame, who said on a CNN segment from Dec. 23rd that the Republican game plan, and Trump himself, were engaged in “seditious activities” and intent.
I’ve spent some time looking at the three bills that are on the table, those mentioned in a letter sent first to the Democratic Senate Leadership and then the whole Senate, signed by some 800 religious and civil rights leaders, demanding that voting legislation, not Build Back Better, be made the party’s immediate priority in 2022. And of course, that also means taking on the issue of the filibuster.
It is interesting to note that the language contained in the letter, as covered by CNN on Dec. 23rd, sounds very familiar: the Democratic base, or key parts of that base, is very frustrated by the lack of party “deliverance.” The text of the letter was just two pages; the next 20 pages were the list of signatories, and the striking thing about those who signed was the large number who were Rabbi’s and Cantors, including Michael Lerner of Tikkun. The heart of the message is that equality in voting is the secular equivalent of “equal in the eyes of God” (my words) and “‘that is why, this Martin Luther King Day {January 17th} we will not accept empty promises.’”
Here is the article: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/23/politics/faith-leaders-voting-rights-letter-biden/index.html The headline being “Hundreds of Faith Leaders demand more from Biden and other Democrats on voting rights legislation.”
I support the findings of the letter, and the passions expressed, which are just and righteous. Now I have to fit them into my head’s understanding on what is going on, and Bernstein’s take on sedition.
The Republican Right’s Long March back into the 19th Century (if not earlier)
The Republican Right has a long tradition in our politics, and in its modern form that tradition goes back at least to William F. Buckley’s founding of the National Review magazine in 1955 and highlighted by his reading the John Birch Society’s leader Robert Welch out of the movement in Feb. of 1962. (see Rick Perlstein’s account in “Before the Storm,” pages 153-156). No such effective action however, has happened within the Republican Party of Donald Trump today, and if Trump somehow doesn’t run, you can see the logic of Goldwater’s strategy (tough on Welch, softer on his party members) intimated in Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in November of 2021: a less toxic candidate who keeps the Trumpian based “stoked,” which I suppose rhymes with “woke.”
Indeed, I don’t know how Buckley, were he alive, would react to the clear shift of the Republican Right to a form of Constitutional Fundamentalism, Original Intent, which brings us to the heart of the matter of voting rights, addressed in several places. One of which, the older, a book from 2003, gets very little citation, and the other, hot off the press, impressed me with its comprehensive take on the Republican Right strategy in 2020, on Jan. 6th and heading into 2022 & 2024: Barton Gellman’s essay in the Atlantic, January 6 was Practice, here https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
Here’s the core of the Republican Strategy, and judge for yourself whether it is or isn’t faithful to the logic of the party in legal matters, and policy matters too, decade after decade: take the Republic back to a form close to imagined dreams of the founders, remarkably, pre-Civil War (without the slavery) and well before the perniciousness of FDR and the New Deal and later Great Society. (I might add, sorry for the digression – a wonderful way for President Biden to have gone after Joe Manchin’s statement that “‘I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society moving towards an entitlement mentality.’” (quoted by David Leonhardt, NY Times from Manchin in September; opening up the full Monty philosophical debate that might educate or heaven forbid, passionately engage those who work two jobs, or work in a candle factory in Kentucky alongside prison labor).
I quote now from Gellman on the keystone Republican constitutional attack angle:
Electors are the currency in a presidential contest and, under the Constitution, state legislators control the rules for choosing them. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors ‘in such a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’ Since the 19th century, every state has ceded the choice to its voters, automatically certifying electors who support the victor at the polls, but in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state ‘can take back the power to appoint electors.’ No court has ever said that a state could do that after its citizens have already voted, but that was the heart of Trump’s plan.
Now here is Representative Jamie Raskin’s (D, MD-8th) take in his 2003 book, Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People, agreeing with Barton Gellman’s constitutional reading in the third chapter of his book:
The key sentence in Bush v. Gore makes an early and ominous cameo appearance early on in the decision…Almost in passing, the majority writes: ‘The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.’…the current Court reads the Constitution as establishing the state legislatures’ absolute power to choose presidential electors without public participation if they so desire. Although the states currently hold popular elections to choose the electors, the Court was emphatic that any legislature could decide to bypass the voters and appoint electors of its choosing: ‘the State legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself…’ (Pages 31-32.)
I might add that however strained this interpretation sounds, I would think the present court, that of 2022, would be just as emphatic as the 2000 one was in this strange reading. Yet it is a reading consistent with the drift of so much Republican Right policy, to return to a states’ right stance, diminishing federal power wherever it can manage it, even to the manner of what we once all naively thought was settled practice, even in the Electoral College: a citizen’s right to vote.
Therefore, I began asking myself if there was anything in the three current bills being pushed in Congress to address voting rights, which might alter this stance of the Right wing dominated Supreme Court. I sent a question to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School on Dec. 26th, to which I’ve received no reply, not surprising, given the holidays. In the silence since, I’ve come up with my own answer, trying to think logically: given the Court’s stance, no Democratic legislation could correct it unless it was a Constitutional Amendment; ordinary legislation would not work.
Still, I was curious to see how the bills did or did not approach the matter. It’s a bit daunting even for a citizen used to long legal documents and policy initiatives, to see the scope of the task. The original bill, “The For the People Act,”, HR 1, S-1, is between 820 and 888 pages, depending on the version. That’s right, over 800 pages. The “compromise” bill, once again driven by Senator Joe Manchin in his search for bi-partisan support, comes in at just 594 pages, “The Freedom to Vote Act,” S-2747. The John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, S-4263 comes in at a mere smudge at 41 pages.
Well, I needed a method of searching for the answers to the question I posed, and fortunately the bills are laid out initially in broad Titles, Issues and Sections of what is covered, and they have PDF search engines. And so I searched under the logical topics and came up with zero relevant attack angles on what the Republicans have set in motion. The closest to approach the issue of state legislative constitutional authority was in Title III of the Freedom to Vote Act, “Preventing Election Subversion” on pages 255-265, where Section 3001 addresses the removal of local election administrators who are presiding over Federal elections (where the Constitution does give full authority to the Congress to regulate its own elections as opposed to the Presidential one…) The remedies in the bill for improper removal of “down the chain of command” election officials are to have the grounds for removal formally specified, notifying the US Attorney’s Office in writing and granting the removed the right of appeal to federal court. All logical and worthwhile, but it seems to this non-constitutional scholar, insufficient to change the playing field for those acting with “seditious intent.”
That still leaves me with a major question: would any of the bills blunt the Trumpian intent to challenge the Presidential votes in swing states, or closely contested “surprise” ones (where Republicans have legislative majorities) so that a state legislature could substitute its own will and electors for those of the voters?
I don’t think so but I would defer to a constitutional scholar who still believes in democracy to tell me – and the citizens about to throw their hearts, souls and bodies behind these bills – that they are not wasting their time on important but secondary features to the attack plan of the Republican Right.
I have asked myself whether all the enormous range and details in the cumulative 1,523 pages of the three bills could, by improving every sequence in the complex American voting practice, ancient and modern in the wake of Covid experience, add enough friction to thwart the Republican intent to shift sovereignty from the voter to state legislatures? I don’t have the answer, but I lean towards saying no, these 1500 pages don’t meet the nature of the challenge.
One last “loose end.” Given my take, the last resort to thwart a Supreme Court intent on repeating the direction of Gore v. Bush 2000 would be to alter the composition of the court by expanding it…under a Democratic President; makes sense, no? Touchy subject that: “expand” or is it “pack”? Better summon a commission, Bi-Partisan of course, of 34 constitutional scholars via a Biden Executive Order. The Commission’s report, 288 pages, came in on Dec. 7th. It voted 34-0 to state that it reached no consensus or recommendations. Fitting for our troubled time, don’t you think?
Reflections on “Democracy, Ancient and Modern”
I can’t quite leave the emotional, visceral almost, terrain of the fate of American Democracy under the threat of Trump and the Republican Right without a few more thoughts. You can sense the painful history of the black church and its white religious allies from the heroic days of the Civil Rights movement in that letter sent to the Senate. How could this be happening in America? Maybe it helps to remember that William F. Buckley initially, early after the founding of National Review magazine, didn’t believe black people in the US were worthy, educated enough to have earned the right to vote. It was a view that harkened back, albeit in racial terms, to the long struggle of the working class in England and Germany to win the right to vote under the nervous eyes of the landed aristocracy, and how grudgingly given the ground was. And how long it took to enfranchise one half of the rest of humanity: women voters. And after those battles were won, the affluence of the West in the three “glorious decades, 1945-1975” caused a new problem: apathy and low turnout, worse in the US than in Europe, but bad enough there as well. The much honored classical scholar M.I. Finley’s “Democracy: Ancient and Modern” (1973 &1985) gives us a tour from the summit achievement in Athens in the mid-fifth century BC (I just sent a poster reminder of it, the Acropolis in gleaming early morning sunlight, to Representative Jamie Raskin, in honor of his new book and his crucial role in defending our own democracy), to the rise of “futility” in the working classes, 1970- present, the feeling that economic powers have, in ways voters can’t reach, already chosen the “options” for the parties, leaving little room to change direction, to alter the status quo. Recent American political science studies have grounded that feeling in data: policy initiatives favoring the 1-10% at the top do quite well negotiating the American Congressional minefield, those, like the Green New Deal or even Build Back Better…well, talk to Joe Manchin about that.
And let’s not forget a long and important qualifying view on the traditional workings of Western Democracy, that from the social democratic and democratic socialist parties, those who gave up revolutionary views for parliamentary evolutionary processes of change. That’s a whole couple of years of graduate school level work, the view from the historical left which in its own way said the system was always “rigged,” the power of class and money to keep the “market” and the central banks “out of politics.” And unions under control, if not crushed. Missing today from the writing about the American democratic crisis are two voices who should not be forgotten: William Greider and Kevin Phillips, the former now deceased, and the later dropped completely out of public life. Both kept their eyes on what was happening in the economy, and the rise of corporate political consciousness, expressed in Greider’s “Who Will Tell the People” (1992) and in 1997 by his critique of globalization and the rise of China: “One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.” The number and range of Phillips books are in themselves a foreshadowing of what we are most worried about today, setting the climate crisis aside; just take a look here at the bottom of his Wikipedia biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_commentator)
Both writers were very worried about the fate of American democracy well in advance of the current Republican Right’s voter suppression tactics: they were focused more on the traditional worries of the left, how in a truly “political economy,” economic power’s revival since the 1970’s put lobbyists on behalf of that power between elected officials and distant voters. Corporate power in the Democratic Party is probably the greatest single factor in preventing the Democrats from coming up with a revised New Deal, Green or not, a national program to represent the interests of the bottom 65% or so of the electorate. The detailed fragmentation of the democratic constituencies or movements, aside from the corporate power, are also a huge obstacle to forming the missing “Movement,” that would transform the Party or break away and form a new one.
Part II: An Exchange of Views on Biden, Manchin and the State of the Democratic Party, January 1, 2022
Thanks “citizen of standing” …. for the thoughtful reply. Bill Wolfe of Wolfenotes.com agrees with you, that the pressure point for Dems was campaigning for Biden’s policies in West Virginia – it’s a tactical question of nuance – how hard they should have gone after Manchin, as opposed to touting the needs of the state and what Build Back Better would deliver. I don’t remember which group it was that I gave $7 to, might have been Move On – it was a major national “activist” one – for towed billboards putting pressure on Senator Manchin. So far it hasn’t seemed to have worked.
Of course (a little sarcasm here) historian Nancy MacLean has the apparent right answer: increase turnout and voting for Dems. However, as I tried to indicate earlier in my response of December 21st, that becomes, over the decades, a rather mechanical-logical answer and while that might drive some to the polls, I’m not sure that’s where the “mysteries of turnout” lie. We do know where the non-voters, and episodic voters, “reside” in the national demographic: the bottom 30-40% of the electorate by income. The swing and “undecideds” who garner so much attention, somewhat higher up in income. And that’s why emotion is so important to politics – but greatly feared by the centrist/corporate Dems – that it will eventually be turned against them by a populist left movement. Bernie had some of it, more than any other serious candidate that I can think of except George Wallace, who was populist right and racial, despite claims he was populist on economics. And we know what happened to Bernie. He couldn’t reach far enough, and despite sounding working class, his style was probably too mechanical for our age: the age of winging it on stage: and you know who is very good at that: “You’re Fired.” Is it a comment on the Ukrainian situation that their current President is a former comic? Yes, a tragic-comedy in formation.
It is a long-term project of mine to outline, at least, why it is that the willingness of the Republican Right to mobilize the ugliest side of human nature has been an arguably successful tactic for so long, runs like a dark thread through the four volumes of historian Rick Perlstein’s history of the Right, but is a forbidden force on the left. I have my own thoughts, I hope a little better than guesses, and I named some of them in the parallels to the fate of the non-communist left in the Weimar Republic, the second of my two Dec. 21st responses to Nancy MacLean.
To be direct about it today, I can’t imagine a speech I might give that originated in equal parts from my heart and my head which could successfully reach even a majority of the major democratic party “movements.” The floundering of the Green New Deal being the prime exhibit. Floundered in the church pews of black congregations in South Carolina; floundered in rural progressive “back to the land”‘ remake agricultural enclaves…floundered among sophisticated upper middle class professional women in places like Montgomery County Maryland: oh Bernie, can’t you change the key, talk about your early home life more…why you could cut it with Vermont diversity but not with us…? And floundered in the halls of conservative AFL-CIO unions, where the proposed forms of a “Just Transition” weren’t enough, brokered properly, even though when I tried that gambit to offer to Manchin, New York times readers asked why only fossil fuel workers should get such a great deal (not in the official Dem document of 547 pages) when everyone else was “jettisoned” in society -all those middle class-middle managers shredded in the 1980’s and 1990’s who had to basically swim on their own?….
Watching the reaction of our progressive community in Western Maryland towards the Green New Deal, I wonder what, other than fear, will drive Nancy MacLean’s hoped for turnout surge. In the past in American elections, it’s been major watershed elections: 1860, 1896, 1932, almost in 1980 (about 70% there)…but hardly even close in 2020. How a party can produce that – and FDR’s 1932 election carried over into the congressional elections of 1934 and the next presidential one, 1936…without a coherent philosophy and solid achievements and so badly divided within its own ranks over problems and solutions, I don’t know, fear of the Right/Trump being the only current answer. Or, if you think I am overstating the “coherence” of the New Deal’s experimentally driven policies, then perhaps only some as yet unknown “catastrophe,” ecological, economic or democratic breakdown (worse and more protracted than Jan. 6th) could trigger the “re-alignment” process. Perhaps that was what was missing from the Green New Deal “context.”
Fear of Trumpism, the Republican Right may work at the upper reaches of the Democratic demographic, but down below…? It works to an extent for me: it’s the bottom 30-40% who ought to be solidly in the Democratic camp who need convincing. Has anyone done further follow-up on the workers of the candle factory in Kentucky destroyed earlier in December by the monster tornadoes? $8.00 per hour pay, plus required OT supplemented by prison labor really caught my attention. I did not write about it out of courtesy for the dead; yet the regional press did the very next day. It will take more than hugs to reach them, workers who can “thrive” on that and yet won’t revolt…
I can’t imagine ever not voting for the Democrat whomever that might be in 2024. I doubt Biden or Harris will be there, but I do know that you can only lure me with the Democratic “Two Step” so many times before I loose the enthusiasm you seek: Carter in 1976 who de-regulated and de-labored; Clinton the “populist” in 1992 vs 1996 the welfare reformer, balanced budget champion who could only offer the working class a chance to gain the tools to compete in a global system Clinton himself was all in for…China elevation included: we would “convert” them to democracy, no Greider or Mearsheimian voices to dissent. Gore 2000 bragging how he downsized the govt which today can’t cope with pandemics, climate change or even claw back a little of the R & D risk taking public capital it supplies to a private sector “awash in cash”…a sector bored and labored with the question of where to place its surplus trillions; the Obama of Hope and Change in 2008 and Caution and Austerity in 2010…and at every turn in 2012…and so on…
I think the left critics over at Jacobin magazine have a better analysis: you can’t expect a party torn between the corporations of the 21st century and all the other reform camps (many of whose leading lights are dependent on those corporations for approval and financing) to produce anything coherent or with sustained ideological momentum to match the Right; a Right which, like their ideology or not, and I certainly don’t, has, through Reagan and Trump, been consistent, even after a very sinister turn towards barely disguised authoritarianism and if you prefer, “sedition.”
I so well recall my first visit to the Appalachian festival in Western MD, Fall of 2014, where I heard an union drum beater from West Virginia, published and rather polished, insist that organizing was all a local affair, “local, local, local,” roundly rejecting my counter that the reason the National Democrats couldn’t compete across the board with the Republican Right was the absence of a systematic, coherent national ideology. And how is West Virginia trending since then?
I wish I could say that Nancy MacLean’s rejoinder to me didn’t smack very much of “muzzling,” via heavy moral pressure, always for a good cause; sorry Nancy, I’ve heard the same line all my life, since 1972, and when the Dems win, they don’t produce very much to alter American life. Maybe because their leadership is solidly upper middle class or higher, in the top 10%, they don’t have the drive that financial desperation supplies. I can’t imagine Montgomery County women, or men for that matter, Mark Elrich, county Ex., swooning over William Jennings Bryant’s 1896 Cross of Gold speech…to highlight maybe the last time, before FDR’s 1936 nomination acceptance speech at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, that a national dem so swam in emotionally charged ideological waters. Here is a good account of the 1936 event from a warm heart, the historian Jack Beatty: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2016/07/08/1936-democratic-convention-fdr
When a great nation no longer can produce convincing leaders it is a very strong signal that its time as hegemon is past, and it is a mighty struggle to overcome that with – and I’ll be very blunt: Nancy MacLean’s prescription of cheerleading and ultimately, as you can see from the tone, issuing orders, as usual for the left to shut up and work like hell time and time again for those who don’t have either vision, ideas or programs that they will fight for as hard as the Right does for its morally much poorer causes. Maybe for some that’s all they need, ordered enthusiasm, but I need a little conviction “guarantee” from those who will carry out the supposed policies to go with it. There are no guarantees of success in politics, understood, especially under the tiny margins in Congress today, and fanatical resistance, yet I do ask at least that my leaders in the Democratic Party go down fighting, with imagination and direct appeals to the electorate, over and above…you know who, that composite figure, half-coal miner, half-coal baron, from the Mountaineer state.
And how about those whom Professor MacLean tops it off against, the left protestor. What I mean by that is that surely, based on her book “Democracy in Chains” she realizes the power in this society lies with the wealthy and the corporate and the blending of the two, true as well inside the Democratic Party as the Republican (with different demographics): and Biden’s whole career. “They” have poured money into Manchin’s and Sinema’s coffers, like very much the resultant obstructionism and shrinking of scale; however, business is not monolithic: surely, if such an experienced judge of American life as Joe Biden has backed the corporate “moderation” inside the Democratic party for so many years, he would have a favor to ask, to call in, don’t you think? That’s the way of the insider. And surely some powerful corporate leaders must know that Trump again (or a Trump surrogate in disguise) would tear the country apart, so don’t you think a delegation consisting of Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Bloomberg (pick your own delegation) sent to talk compromise with Manchin, with so much at stake, just as Nancy MacLean declares, would be a logical even compelling tactic? No? So why not? I’ve suggested as much in comments to the NY Times, to go along with the other three tactics you didn’t think would have much of a chance – but, let me be clear: these four would have been the advice I would have given if I were to be on Biden’s staff; an impossibility, of course, but it tells me a lot that he has been running into a brick wall since March of 2021 and never has tried other tactics. Isn’t this a re-run, Nancy, of the Dems blaming Ralph Nader for the 2000 loss, a party so adrift it couldn’t withstand a “conscience candidate” polling in the low singe digits? And which wouldn’t, couldn’t match the Republican “will to power” resting on far poorer legal and moral grounds given what we know about the Florida 2000 election today, as presented to us in detail and with “an edge,” in Representative Raskin’s 2003 coverage on that election: Overruling Democracy.
Why doesn’t Nancy MacLean criticize the real powers in the country, and she can pick the names herself if she doesn’t agree with my nominees, for not coming to Biden’s aid, for making clear that the country cannot still be a democracy (or good for business? By no means clear at all that tension, and Yanis Varouvakis’ challenge: “Can Democracy Survive Capitalism?”…given the longest historical run of no recession in the history of Western Capitalism, March of 2009 to April of 2020, according to the Economist magazine) if Trump or a cagier successor escalated the brewing Civil War, a war or civil conflict of unknown shape and dimensions? Conducted it with more cunning and greater finesse than Trump can master? As in Virginia?
If there is no “Progressive national business community” that can step forward, in private, to turn Manchin Biden’s way, or to speak publicly to the country to blunt the undercurrent that helped elect Trump in 2016 (“a successful billionaire knows best”), then what is the Democratic Party doing in welcoming and nurturing those who will not defend democracy against the greatest liar in our history, the chief “seditionist” for anyone with eyes to see?
Much safer bet to muzzle the Gracchi Bros. of the democratic discourse, such as it is.
Best,
Written from the mid-fifties of late December and early January weather, in the Mountains of Western MD.
Editor’s Note: Image of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates is from the Financial Times, June 23, 2021, “Buffett Resigns from Gates Foundation,” by Joshua Chaffin and Andrew Edgecliffe.
gracchibros 