newrepublic--2020-08-12--Millionaire Coaches and Republican Blowhards Have Derailed the Fight for Equity in College Football

It doesn ’ t take much to defang a movement .
Last week , a group of college athletes in the Pac-12 Conference released a list of demands to create an equitable work environment .
The list included the ability to hold schools liable for breaking any agreed upon medical measures , the right to sit out the 2020-21 season without losing eligibility , and a 50 percent share of the conference ’ s annual revenue—comparable with deals negotiated by players unions in the National Football League and National Basketball Association .
The call for a fair , professional work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic was a monumental and relatively radical step .
Walter Byers , as president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the 1950s , created the term “ student-athlete ” to avoid paying worker ’ s compensation to a dead player ’ s widow .
In the half-century since , the NCAA has often used its warped version of amateurism to stack the deck against athletes .
High-profile college athletic departments reap tens of millions in annual revenue and pay out obscene contracts to coaches and administrators while the actual workers—the players—have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a four-year scholarship is equal to their worth to their universities .
The Pac-12 players push was a long overdue response to the NCAA ’ s lopsided economic model and a necessary declaration of the players ’ needs amid a pandemic .
But as the week wore on , a number of obstacles popped up—namely , the wariness among well-paid coaches and administrators along with college football ’ s top-tier athletes in both the Pac-12 and other major conferences , to accept all their demands .
This hesitation , combined with a mind-numbing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has turned the movement for long-term financial equity and power balance into a debate about whether America can defeat the coronavirus through the power of football .
Coaches and politicians have alternated between infantilizing college athletes and demanding that these students be treated as adults—whichever suits the critics ’ argument at a given moment .
From the start , not all Pac-12 players were on board with the group ’ s proposal .
University of Washington cornerback Elijah Molden , projected to be a first-round NFL draft pick next spring , released @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a “ flawed institution ” but cautioned that some of the demands were “ unrealistic and far fetched given the context of our unique situation ( COVID , financial restrictions , time , etc . )
.
” University of California , Los Angeles starting quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson offered a briefer message : “ I understand and support every guy on the Pac-12 petition & # WeAreUnited but Opting-out not a option for me.
” Then the sport ’ s biggest stars weighed in .
Over the weekend , Clemson University quarterback Trevor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ high-profile players like Ohio State University ’ s Justin Fields and the University of Alabama ’ s Najee Harris , created what they termed the # WeWantToPlay campaign , posting their own list of shared demands : universal medical procedures for all NCAA programs this fall , guaranteed eligibility for players opting out of the season , and the ability to “ ultimately create a college football players association.
” Name , likeness , and image ( NLI ) rights and revenue sharing , prominent features of the Pac-12 demands , did not @ @ @ @

This makes a certain sense, strategically. Bargaining for basic economic rights is a slightly different conversation from ensuring that universities implement safety protocols during a pandemic. The Coloradoan reported on August 4 that players and staffers at Colorado State University were being pressured to avoid testing in order not to slow down practices. University of Houston defensive lineman Sedrick Williams revealed he would sit out the season due to heart complications after he contracted the coronavirus in July. A players association that could legally pursue restitution for a school breaking a universal Covid-19 protocol would be ideal, but for now, the #WeWantToPlay group seems to argue that the NCAA should fill that role so players and their families don’t die.
Those already enriched by the industry tend to burrow into these concessions. In a written response by Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott to the players’ demands, the conference assured the group that member schools were following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines but side-stepped the call for revenue sharing, pointing to the “full cost of attendance benefits” the players already receive. When asked about the proposed players association, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said in a media session Monday, “It would be great,” but added, “that’s different from a union, I’ll say that.” University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh sent a letter in which he pointed to the few positive tests among the Wolverines players and advocated for a season to be played, capping the letter with a Teddy Roosevelt quote. University of Nebraska head coach Scott Frost said that the Cornhuskers would look outside of their Big Ten schedule if the conference decided to cancel the season. After the Big Ten became the first Power Five conference to cancel fall sports on Tuesday, followed shortly by the Pac-12, Nebraska’s athletic department said in a statement that it still believes its campus is “the absolute safest place” for players and will continue to pursue playing in the fall.
These voices are the ones who stand to lose money if their cut of the athletic department revenue is distributed among the players. But they also can’t outrightly dismiss a growing, albeit softer, push for financial equity and medically safe play that includes their five-star, NFL-bound players. So instead of taking the Kelly Loeffler route, these coaches and executives cling to the current model of genteel dismissiveness that’s worked out so well for them while nodding their heads at the lightest of the players’ demands.


newrepublic--2020-08-12--The Women Who Still Can’t Vote

The Women Who Still Can’t Vote

As we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment this month , it ’ s tempting to assume that @ @ @ @ @ complete .
Yet millions of women—because they are incarcerated or on parole , because their @ @ @ @ @ match certain documents , because the polls are open only during the hours they are @ @ @ @ @ their families—still don ’ t have the franchise , either in effect or by law @ @ @ @ @ The Politics of Everything , hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Melissa Gira @ @ @ @ @ at The New Republic , about who remains locked out of the vote , why @ @ @ @ @ , and what the work of suffrage looks like today .
Later in the episode @ @ @ @ @ Trump is changing the books we buy .

As we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment this month, it’s tempting to assume that women’s suffrage is complete. Yet millions of women—because they are incarcerated or on parole, because their legal name doesn’t match certain documents, because the polls are open only during the hours they are at jobs or caring for their families—still don’t have the franchise, either in effect or by law. On Episode 13 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Melissa Gira Grant, a staff writer at The New Republic, about who remains locked out of the vote, why they’ve been excluded, and what the work of suffrage looks like today.
Later in the episode, Alex Shephard explores how Trump is changing the books we buy.


newrepublic--2020-08-12--We Can’t Fight Climate Change Without China

As lawmakers bickered over the next stimulus package in late July , the Democratic Party unveiled an election 2020 draft platform suggesting an unusual amount of bipartisan unity on one issue : China .
Broadly adopting much of President Donald Trump ’ s antagonism , Democrats pledged to “ stand up ” to the world ’ s second largest economy .
Although a Cold War would be a “ trap , ” party leaders wrote , and Trump ’ s trade war has been a disaster , “ Democrats will take aggressive action against China or any other country that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their currencies.
” This sentence echoed Trump ’ s allegation that China has been slashing its currency value , a claim generally agreed to have very little remaining evidence behind it .
Together , China and the United States account for nearly 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions .
Donald Trump ’ s administration has done everything in its power to prop up coal , oil , and gas while in office through generous tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks .
( Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has pledged to reverse his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ language on phasing out fossil fuels . )
China ’ s climate progress has also been a mixed bag : Although Beijing invested heavily in green technology and low-carbon infrastructure after the last recession , subnational governments and the county ’ s coal lobby continue to push for coal build-outs , and the Belt and Road Initiative has financed both fossil fuel and renewables projects throughout the Global South .
Like their economies more broadly , these countries ’ future energy transitions are linked .
Cooperation between the two will be critical to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But right now , neither party in the U.S. seems interested in that , content instead to fumble together into a disastrous new era of great-power conflict .
Though stopping short of Trump and his cronies ’ all-out belligerence toward China , Democrats ’ China policy still features an all-sticks-no-carrots approach , applying double standards on what is and isn ’ t acceptable statecraft .
The 2020 platform pledges , for example , to challenge China ’ s use of “ illegal subsidies ” to Chinese industries , subsidies similar in kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Biden ’ s own climate plan .
Democrats promise to “ rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects , so that China can ’ t outsource pollution to other countries.
” This , too , carries a whiff of hypocrisy : While the Belt and Road Initiative is indeed financing fossil fuels outside of China , Biden ’ s climate plan leaves the door open for the U.S. to continue being among the world ’ s top @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gas—a status he helped usher in as vice president , boosting U.S. gas in Eastern Europe .
Biden ’ s plan makes oblique reference to the need to “ offer Belt and Road Initiative countries alternative sources of development financing for lower-carbon energy investments ” ; he ’ s been similarly opaque about what his commitment to the Green Climate Fund will look like , a body set up through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC ) process to finance climate mitigation and adaptation .
Absent a real investment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what leverage the U.S. would have to influence Belt and Road standards or any other climate policy besides the threat of sanctions or military force .
Such threats would be as counterproductive under a Democratic administration as they have been under Trump ’ s .
“ Economic uncertainty always leads China to revert back to tried and true industries .
You see it now with the Covid recession , which has put a lot of pressure on local governments to shore up growth , ” said Jonas Nahm , assistant professor of energy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hopkins University .
In the first half of 2020 , China approved more new plants since it had since 2016 , even as the rest of the world backed away from the fuel and after its Big 5 state-owned power producers moved last December to phase out a third of their coal fleet by 2021 .
The economic fallout of any new Cold War , Nahm added , “ would strengthen the fossil fuel industry within the country and make it harder to get rid of the existing coal base and reliance on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left of Democratic leaders suggest an alternative approach : Instead of fighting the Belt and Road Initiative , the U.S. could participate in it .
“ If we were serious about this , we would have the U.S. partner with China around investments and financing in One Belt One Road and turn that into a global clean energy investment and financing project , ” said Tobita Chow , director of Justice Is Global , a special project of the progressive organizing and advocacy group People ’ s Action .
Working to change the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stake would give the U.S. more leverage to demand better practices across the board .

Such threats would be as counterproductive under a Democratic administration as they have been under Trump’s. “Economic uncertainty always leads China to revert back to tried and true industries. You see it now with the Covid recession, which has put a lot of pressure on local governments to shore up growth,” said Jonas Nahm, assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins University. In the first half of 2020, China approved more new plants since it had since 2016, even as the rest of the world backed away from the fuel and after its Big 5 state-owned power producers moved last December to phase out a third of their coal fleet by 2021. The economic fallout of any new Cold War, Nahm added, “would strengthen the fossil fuel industry within the country and make it harder to get rid of the existing coal base and reliance on heavy industry.”
Some advocates to the left of Democratic leaders suggest an alternative approach: Instead of fighting the Belt and Road Initiative, the U.S. could participate in it. “If we were serious about this, we would have the U.S. partner with China around investments and financing in One Belt One Road and turn that into a global clean energy investment and financing project,” said Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, a special project of the progressive organizing and advocacy group People’s Action. Working to change the initiative as a partner with a financial stake would give the U.S. more leverage to demand better practices across the board. “There are a lot of abusive practices, and issues of uneven power dynamics with Global South governments and workers. However, it is what we have to work with in terms of financing for Global South infrastructure. A U.S. government that’s serious about climate change ought to offer partnership in exchange for improved standards around labor and making sure that all of these projects are focused on benefiting the local workforce.”


newrepublic--2020-08-12--Trump’s “Blasphemous” Attacks on Biden Were Torn From the Republican Hymnal

Trump ’ s latest slate of rhetorical outrages began with an interview with Geraldo Rivera on Thursday , during which he made a largely faith-based case against Joe Biden .
“ I ’ m in favor of the Bible , I ’ m in favor of the Second Amendment , right ?
” he said .
“ Biden ’ s against all these things .
He ’ s against oil and gas , he ’ s against the Bible—essentially against religion , but against the Bible—and he ’ s against the Second Amendment.
” He would say the same hours @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ No religion , no anything , ” he said .
“ Hurt the Bible , hurt God .
He ’ s against God , he ’ s against guns.
” At a White House press conference on Monday , Trump defended and explained himself by criticizing the Biden-Sanders unity task force : “ If you look at the manifesto that they ’ ve come up with , and if you look at their stance on things having to do—very importantly—with aspects of religion and faith , I don ’ t think a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Bernie Sanders plan.
” The reactions of mainstream pundits and the press to all of this have been heated .
Bill Kristol tweeted a photo of Christian leaders praying with Trump in the Oval Office accompanied by an admonishment .
“ I assume some people in this photograph are going to step forward and caution the president against the presumptuous , not to say blasphemous , claim that a political rival is ‘ against God , ’ ” he wrote .
“ Or is that the kind of religion , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ embrace ?
” Mother Jones ’ s David Corn similarly demanded responses from Senators Marco Rubio , Lindsey Graham , and other prominent voices in the GOP .
“ So , ” he asked , “ there really are no Republicans who have a problem with this ?
” The writer Kurt Eichenwald called Trump ’ s comments further evidence of his “ insanity.
” MSNBC ’ s Joe Scarborough , apopleptic after Monday ’ s press conference , made reference both to the history of anti-Catholic bigotry and Biden ’ s personal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a daughter in a tragic , tragic accident , ” he said .
“ Losing a son to cancer .
I mean , my God !
To suggest that this man of deep faith ‘ hates God and hates the Bible ’ —it ’ s unspeakably vile.
” Notably , multiple outlets went out of their way not just to mark what Trump had said but to label it factually wrong , given that Biden is a practicing Catholic .
The Washington Post has run two long articles to that effect : one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remarks assessing Biden ’ s faith and its political implications in detail and another on Monday , questioning whether Trump ’ s slights against him are strategically sound .
“ Rather than look for campaign ammunition in the former vice president ’ s long track record of politically vulnerable votes and policy proposals , Trump has instead chosen to describe Biden as a godless Marxist bent on destroying the country with a radical agenda that would make Che Guevara blanch , ” the Post ’ s Ashley Parker wrote .
“ The caricature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ critics nor supporters recognize—but it ’ s one Trump continues to promote .
”

In the years since, Catholic leaders and others have protested the scope and design of that solution; there have been a series of Supreme Court decisions on the matter, including one this very year. As complex as the legal questions involved might be, the motivations behind Romney’s framing of the issue can be understood quite simply—especially when one considers the fact that Romney signed a health care reform bill with effectively the same provisions on birth control into law as governor of Massachusetts. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012, Romneycare retained the state’s existing “exception for churches, but not church-affiliated employers, such as Roman Catholic hospitals.” John McDonough, a public health professor at Harvard, told the Journal that contraceptives simply “never came up” while the bill was being debated.
Donald Trump invents attacks on God not because there’s something particularly odious about him but because there’s something particularly odious about the Republican Party.
None of that prevented Romney from invoking a “war on religion.” Neither did the fact that 17 percent of American voters, and nearly a third of Republicans, believed President Obama was a Muslim at the time. With extraordinarily few exceptions, faith-based attacks are simply what the right does: Demolishing personal history and otherizing opponents are precisely what they are crafted to accomplish. Donald Trump invents attacks on God not because there’s something particularly odious about him but because there’s something particularly odious about the Republican Party. It goes without saying that some who’ve spoken out against Trump this week see Mitt Romney as not only a saint but a figure who might have prevented Trumpism had Democrats been kinder to him in 2012. It’s not terribly important whether this is a lie or a mere delusion. What’s critical is that it is wrong. If at some point between now and November Trump says that a Democratic victory will threaten “those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation,” he will merely be quoting Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan. This was the message he deployed to rally evangelical voters in a conference call just before the 2012 election.
That those voters remain a mystery to the political press is itself mystifying. There’s been a tendency to suggest that the Christian right has entered into a novel and strange personal covenant with the president—that, for obscure reasons, Trump has been given a special dispensation for his rhetoric and personal behavior that conservative Christians were reluctant to offer. This persists even in pieces where Trump’s supporters are given the opportunity to speak candidly and clearly for themselves about their support for him. In a dispatch on evangelicals in Iowa this week, for instance, The New York Times’s Elizabeth Dias concluded that Trump’s strength with social conservatives is best explained by his unique role as “their protector.” Trump, she wrote, is “the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly.”


newrepublic--2020-08-12--Jared Kushner, Deputy Assistant Ratfucker

Into this maelstrom of racial animus and nihilism strides Kushner , a bloodless man possessed of a singular genius for locating new petards with which he can hoist himself .
Last Thursday , Kanye got on Colorado ’ s ballot ; within 48 hours , he ’ d gotten a private audience in the state with the permanently wincing White House senior adviser , who started his political career by trying to establish backchannel Trump communications with Russia and who most recently was excoriated for completely fucking up the U.S. coronavirus response—possibly , it was reported by Vanity Fair , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to be relegated to Democratic states ” and Trump “ could blame those governors ” for the resulting mass deaths .
If one could bracket out the immediately obvious evils of manipulating a man in a mental health crisis for maximum political gain , using Kanye to halfheartedly rig an election would be the perfect Kushner tasking .
He has grand ideas about his abilities , as we ’ ve seen .
But this is probably closest to his sweet spot : chumming with celebrities and concocting the stupidest scheme imaginable to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going just a bit longer .
And stupid it is .
West clearly can ’ t file in enough states to be president : He can ’ t even muster the energy or the organization to appear as serious as joke presidential candidates like Vermin Supreme , the Naked Cowboy , and Tulsi Gabbard .
( His campaign reportedly missed Wisconsin ’ s deadline for signatures by 14 seconds and is now arguing that the 59 seconds after 5 p.m. do not , in fact , occur after 5 p.m. ) The states @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all battleground states , and it ’ s not assured in any way , shape , or form that West will peel off voters who might have otherwise cast ballots for Joe Biden against Trump : The meager polling suggests the rapper barely registers in the race , polling at 2 percent with all registered voters as well as with African-American voters , and notably does not diminish Biden ’ s 9-point national lead over Trump .
But in their cynically white point of view , Kushner and the GOP still imagine West @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Trump—not enough to tip battleground states , perhaps , but maybe enough to keep the popular vote close and contest the results in decisive states and precincts .
On one hand , this is completely unnecessary , given that Republicans have lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections but held the White House for 12 of those 20 years .
On the other hand , this is Jared Kushner we ’ re talking about , the heir to a vast fortune amassed by his father , Charles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trying and failing to blackmail his own family , utilizing a video of his brother-in-law in flagrante delicto with a prostitute that Kushner had provided—a crime that even Chris Christie , himself a corruption-filled New Jersey delicacy , called “ one of the most loathsome , disgusting crimes ” he had ever prosecuted .

Into this maelstrom of racial animus and nihilism strides Kushner, a bloodless man possessed of a singular genius for locating new petards with which he can hoist himself. Last Thursday, Kanye got on Colorado’s ballot; within 48 hours, he’d gotten a private audience in the state with the permanently wincing White House senior adviser, who started his political career by trying to establish backchannel Trump communications with Russia and who most recently was excoriated for completely fucking up the U.S. coronavirus response—possibly, it was reported by Vanity Fair, because he reasoned the virus “was going to be relegated to Democratic states” and Trump “could blame those governors” for the resulting mass deaths.
If one could bracket out the immediately obvious evils of manipulating a man in a mental health crisis for maximum political gain, using Kanye to halfheartedly rig an election would be the perfect Kushner tasking. He has grand ideas about his abilities, as we’ve seen. But this is probably closest to his sweet spot: chumming with celebrities and concocting the stupidest scheme imaginable to keep his extended family’s grift going just a bit longer.
And stupid it is. West clearly can’t file in enough states to be president: He can’t even muster the energy or the organization to appear as serious as joke presidential candidates like Vermin Supreme, the Naked Cowboy, and Tulsi Gabbard. (His campaign reportedly missed Wisconsin’s deadline for signatures by 14 seconds and is now arguing that the 59 seconds after 5 p.m. do not, in fact, occur after 5 p.m.) The states where he qualifies aren’t even all battleground states, and it’s not assured in any way, shape, or form that West will peel off voters who might have otherwise cast ballots for Joe Biden against Trump: The meager polling suggests the rapper barely registers in the race, polling at 2 percent with all registered voters as well as with African-American voters, and notably does not diminish Biden’s 9-point national lead over Trump.


newrepublic--2020-08-12--If Donald Trump Can’t Make History, He’ll Steal It Instead

Abraham Lincoln argued that what the Union had achieved at Gettysburg would resonate throughout American history and that no flesh-and-blood mortal had the power to diminish it .
“ In a larger sense , we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground , ” he told the assembled crowd during his 1863 address at the battlefield .
“ The brave men , living and dead , who struggled here have consecrated it , far above our poor power to add or detract.
” It would be inaccurate , then , to say that President Donald Trump would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ renomination speech there later this month .
In a Twitter post on Monday , he claimed that he would formally accept the Republican presidential nomination at either the historic battlefield or at the White House .
His original plan to accept the Republican nomination and deliver a self-coronating speech in front of worshipful crowds in Charlotte , North Carolina—and later Jacksonville , Florida—fell apart some time ago , another casualty of the coronavirus pandemic .
Gettysburg would be an odd choice for the president , to say the least .
Though the small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ major Union victory in the Civil War , Trump is far from the best avatar of the principles for which that army fought .
He is an enthusiastic apologist for Robert E. Lee , who lost at Gettysburg , and a staunch defender of Confederate monuments in public spaces and Confederate names on military bases .
Trump also relishes sectional divisions more than perhaps any other American president before him .
Over the summer , he stoked fears about unrest in Democratic-led cities to energize his largely rural and suburban base and reportedly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his administration ’ s pandemic response .
Other political figures might hesitate to draw comparisons between their rhetorical skills and those of Lincoln at the site of the Gettysburg Address .
That Trump lacks the humility and the self-awareness to restrain himself from such self-aggrandizement comes as no surprise .
And the move is certainly in keeping with the president ’ s nationalist bent : These sorts of political figures often try to adopt national symbols and sites as their own in order to bolster their claims of legitimacy .
There is , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s apparent interest in holding a campaign rally on a battlefield where tens of thousands of Americans fought and died .
In his case , however , the co-opting of the site is more akin to stolen valor .
Holding a campaign event at Gettysburg is fundamentally different from how past presidents have treated the site .
Trump ’ s predecessors have occasionally visited the battlefield to commemorate the Americans who died during the Civil War .
Most of them drew some distinction between their partisan role as the head of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the nation ’ s head of state .
A recurring theme in Trump ’ s presidency , however , is that he rarely sees a distinction between his public role , his private interests , and his civic responsibilities .
It is simply all Donald Trump , all the time .

In past remarks about the Civil War in general, Trump has not shown much depth of understanding. His outdated view of the conflict’s origins led him to once muse that Andrew Jackson, who died a generation before Fort Sumter, may have been able to prevent it. When asked about the potential visit to the battlefield last week, Trump spoke about its role in American history in vague and superficial terms. “It’s a national historic site,” he recently noted of Gettysburg. “It’s incredible. It’s the history, it’s incredible, actually, to me. And it was [a] very important place and is a very important place in our country.”
Trump may not know much American history, but he grasps its symbolic potency all the same and clearly hopes to channel it to his own benefit. In May, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued a special order to reopen the Lincoln Memorial so Trump could use it as the setting for, of all things, a prime-time interview on Fox News. “I don’t think it’s ever been done, what we’re doing tonight, here, and I think it’s great for the American people to see, this is a great work of art, aside from the fact that that was a great man, this is a great work of art,” he told the Fox anchors when asked about his choice of the setting during that interview.
The casual reappropriation of the Lincoln Memorial flows from his apparent belief that the federal government’s resources are at his personal disposal. Last summer, he hosted a large-scale military parade in Washington, D.C., complete with a speech by him at the Lincoln Memorial, in a remarkable display of self-aggrandizement. For Trump, who never served in the military, the parade was mainly an opportunity to adopt some of their martial aesthetic (and their place in public esteem) for himself. The hollow show of strength took a darker turn one year later as Trump threatened to deploy the military to major U.S. cities to violently put down civil unrest after the George Floyd protests.


newrepublic--2020-08-12--A Government Too Broken to Write $600 Checks

As July ended , the Department of Commerce announced that the economy had contracted by nearly a third ; the Department of Labor reported that 1.43 million Americans had lost their jobs .
And shortly after those announcements , the Senate adjourned for a long weekend .
Over the course of that weekend at the start of August , the enhanced unemployment benefits Congress created in March to soften the economic blow of the Covid-19 pandemic expired .
Thirty million people lost their $ 600 weekly benefits .
It came at the midpoint of two weeks of failed negotiations over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were in the midst of contentious talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows .
Notably absent from the negotiations were the president of the United States , Donald Trump , and the Senate majority leader , Mitch McConnell .
The two most powerful political figures in the country , two men whose rise to power define our political epoch , had nothing to contribute to a negotiation about what the government should do in response @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t just the two most powerful people in Washington ; they ’ re the two most powerful , conservative American politicians in more than a decade .
They represent the pinnacle of conservative power , and they excused themselves from the room for the most consequential negotiations of the president ’ s term so far , only to watch those negotiations fall apart completely .
McConnell , for his part , seems resigned to playing no major role in the process largely because his Senate majority includes lots of people who are not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are congenitally opposed to the prospect of the government helping anyone .
It might be different if he had his own opinions on the matter , but he , too , is largely uninterested in using the power of the Senate to do anything besides confirming judges who will stop future Senates from imposing regulations and taxes on the industries and plutocrats that have acted as his patrons .
Nor is it particularly surprising that President Trump has not been directly involved in the negotiations .
It ’ s not simply that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understands the broad outlines , grasping intuitively that politics is about apportioning rewards and punishments to various groups .
It ’ s that he doesn ’ t understand which policies he is supposed to favor as an ostensibly conservative Republican president .
That is why he hired Meadows , whose job , whether Meadows understands it in these terms or not , is to sabotage Trump politically and prevent a betrayal of conservative principles .

Everyone who has passed through this White House has noticed this stark detachment from the principle of cause-and-effect, and most developed strategies to work around it. Throughout Trump’s tenure, the people who truly figured out how to “manage” him weren’t the generals or intelligence community lifers or nonpartisan civil servants; they were Tea Party congressmen, who treated him as little more than a stupid vehicle for their incredibly unpopular agenda. Early in his term, it was Mick Mulvaney’s job to ensure that Trumpism adhered to the gospel of movement conservatism, no matter how damaging it was to Trump’s political brand. Now, Mark Meadows is the person in charge of ensuring that Mnuchin—who has no principles beyond a traditional American rich guy’s belief in the American government’s responsibility to the S&P 500—doesn’t get to yes.
The things we need are simple: Enhanced unemployment was more effectively administered than other programs intended to pause the economy for the sake of a lockdown, and the need for it is not going away any time soon. State and local governments face budgetary craters in large part because there has simply been no federal program to defeat Covid-19; they need money. Struggling homeowners need mortgage relief, and renters need to pay rent. A functional government would have taken what was working in May and simply extended it. It should have been easy: Unlike containing the virus, containing the economic fallout only requires cutting checks, one of the few things our dysfunctional government is still able to do. But now, even that one task has turned out to be too hard. Almost no one in Washington has any experience working in a functional government. Most of the Senate has only experienced legislative paralysis and gridlock.
It took a massive stock market panic to win Americans the most generous social welfare policy enacted in many years. It took fathomless ineptitude on the part of the president and blithe disinterest on the part of his most powerful congressional ally to lose it, along with the hope that additional help will be on the way any time soon.


newrepublic--2020-08-12--Donald Trump’s Coded Message to White-Nationalist “Accelerationists”

Even as his campaign stumbles through these bleak late-summer months , beset by a nationwide health and economic crisis that ’ s largely of his own making , President Donald Trump is blowing full-bore on his racist dog whistles .
The president has , in recent weeks , accused his Democratic opponent , Vice President Joe Biden , of wanting to destroy “ our beautiful suburbs.
” He ’ s repeatedly made derisive comments about black public figures and floated racist “ Kung Flu ” conspiracy theories .
He ’ s even threatened to designate Antifa as an official domestic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no such designation actually exists .
It ’ s nothing new for Trump to traffic in racist tropes and false notions ; these were , after all , present at the birth of his presidential campaign .
But as a pandemic decimates communities and economies , and police clash with protesters on the streets of America ’ s major cities , there ’ s a different tenor to Trump ’ s latter-day rhetoric .
In place of the border-wall fearmongering that Trump used to summon traditional conservatives to his side four years ago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , more slash-and-burn , about his declamations now .
The man who once claimed that “ I alone can fix it ” now seems largely bent on pouring gasoline on every conflagration .
The president who once decried “ American carnage ” now seems to want to play a strong role in facilitating it .
For those who have become acclimated or inured to Trump ’ s typical blend of incompetence , corruption , and giddy divisiveness , these most recent days of his presidential tenure may not seem altogether distinct from any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For those who study the ideas underpinning white nationalism , however , what ’ s been lately emerging from the White House is a distinct strain of rhetoric known as “ accelerationism , ” and it ’ s being heard by a uniquely dangerous faction of America ’ s far-right fringe .
It might not be enough to save his electoral fortunes .
As a new report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the far-right rallies of the Trump era notes , “ Right-wing extremists have increasingly lost confidence in President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the political process more generally .
As a result , “ they have resorted to more authoritarian means of achieving their political goals , ” with accelerationists in particular calling for “ violence to speed the process along.
” But even if Trump is no longer the darling or savior figure of the far right , his rhetoric is continuing to give accelerationist ideas a prominence they ’ ve never before enjoyed and is setting the stage for future violence and illiberalism long after he quits the stage .
Originally born of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a loosely coherent set of social theories built on the precept that action can and should be taken to “ accelerate ” the assumed-to-be inevitable degeneration and collapse of capitalism .
Such collapse would then act as a kind of prescribed land burn , prepping the soil for the emergence of a more economically equitable government .
Beginning in the 1980s , however , white supremacist propagandists latched onto the accelerationist story , adding their own dark twist to the final chapter in which the imagined post-collapse government becomes an authoritarian , @ @ @

Many on the extremist right have become disillusioned, if not wholly dismissive, of Trump’s base campaign message. The idea that he alone can prevent liberals from destroying the country has been substantially undermined by the widespread perception, borne out of four years of failure, that Trump lacks either the skills or the willpower to actually fulfill that promise. Even Trump’s incursions into Portland, by way of Department of Homeland Security irregulars, are seen by most as pure political theater, not a commitment to brutally putting down leftist agitators.
White nationalist leader Richard Spencer, in an email interview with The New Republic, confirmed this disappointment. “After the alt-right burst onto the scene in 2016, I fully expected serious funding to enter the movement—to the tune of tens of millions—much like the left and conservatives enjoy. I was mistaken and naïve.” Spencer and others complain that Trump’s personal pettiness, scattershot leadership, and perceived lack of ideological purity have undermined their efforts. According to Spencer, divides have “resulted, in part, from the infighting and jockeying for power that came after Charlottesville and the attacks on those of us who withdrew from ‘Trumpism’ early and began strongly criticizing him.” Eric Striker, another influential voice in white supremacist circles, looked ahead to the election: “From now until November, Trump has no choice but to start pulling live white rabbits out of his hat. He can’t win without the white nationalist vote, and his campaign from here on out will make this obvious.”
Trump is saying the sorts of things he imagines white supremacists want to hear, but to hear people like Spencer and Striker tell it, it’s not working. It makes a certain kind of sense: They know better than anyone that a string of random racist utterances is not the same thing as a coherent strategy to expand the political power of white supremacists. Moreover, Trump’s current cadre of advisors—with Jared Kushner and Steven Miller at the helm—lack the same sophistication and deft alt-right fluency of his 2016 campaign director, Steve Bannon, who was better at singing the siren songs of white nationalism. Trump has largely been left to dump his racist bait on the pier. And Richard Spencer, for one, isn’t biting. “I will never vote for Donald Trump. I wish him the worst.” He added, “I’m not exactly enthusiastic about voting for Joe Biden, but in all likelihood, I will.”


newrepublic--2020-08-13--Fear of a Black Uprising

Fear of a Black Uprising

The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising against police brutalization of Black people .
The multiracial protests that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo—at least momentarily—against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in American policing .
Fueled by the video-capture of the casual hand-in-the-pocket–style murder of George Floyd , this mass repudiation might be read as an expression of the humanitarian values that the brutal slaying of Floyd flagrantly violated .
But as the 24-hour coverage and daily analysis of the uprising revealed , the regime that produced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Breonna Taylor is not a broken one : It continues to work as it was designed to .
The deeper functions of American policing were revealed every night that breathless reporters told harrowing stories of protesters smashing windows with considerably more urgency than they relayed news of police officers smashing heads .
Not even the frightening descent into a lawless police state could trump the anxiety over a possible takeover from the bottom .
Cable TV viewers watching the commentary and recaps of the president ’ s terroristic attack on peaceful protesters in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unidentified national police force were suddenly interrupted with the urgent story of a local drugstore break-in on the other side of the country—the perpetrators having long since departed from a scene that was miles from any active protests .
The reflexive treatment of erratic outbreaks of looting as a more ominous threat than the organized massing of state terror also speaks volumes about the nation ’ s real civic priorities .
Consternation over the loss of goods rather than the incalculable loss of eyes , limbs , and lives points to the bedrock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was not simply that the vicious response of police to the mass protest ( while the entire world was watching ) was unexceptional .
It was the violence-enabling pearl-clutching about looming social disorder that reminded us yet again that mainstream thinking is just as powerfully organized around the fear of the bogeyman as the nightmares of childhood are .
This particular bogeyman is a phantom born of slavery , a fear embedded in the DNA of post-slavery society grounded in the recognition that orchestrated and professionalized violence might not be enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hierarchy .
The fear of being outnumbered and overrun by the indignant and unforgiving masses is that thing that goes bump in the night—the gnawing insecurity that the paddy rollers in the antebellum countryside would take care of while the misnamed keepers of the peace tucked in the owners and the elites for the night .
Generation after generation , they do their work out of sight , as the descendants of the slaves and the descendants of the guardians play the same unchanged roles , only occasionally brought into unforgiving light by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saw firsthand how the white elite , stuck in the bogeyman nightmare , gave their tacit approval to the ugly work of their guardians when a white woman invited neighbors in a tony university neighborhood to hold up a Black Lives Matter sign at the corner .
All hell broke loose at the very thought ; local business owners closed their shops while their landlord threatened to sue her for the loss of a day ’ s business .
All this for a sign expressing what should be the simple promise of living @ @ @ @ @ @ @

The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising against police brutalization of Black people. The multiracial protests that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo—at least momentarily—against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in American policing. Fueled by the video-capture of the casual hand-in-the-pocket–style murder of George Floyd, this mass repudiation might be read as an expression of the humanitarian values that the brutal slaying of Floyd flagrantly violated. But as the 24-hour coverage and daily analysis of the uprising revealed, the regime that produced Derek Chauvin and the still-uncharged killers of Breonna Taylor is not a broken one: It continues to work as it was designed to.
The deeper functions of American policing were revealed every night that breathless reporters told harrowing stories of protesters smashing windows with considerably more urgency than they relayed news of police officers smashing heads. Not even the frightening descent into a lawless police state could trump the anxiety over a possible takeover from the bottom. Cable TV viewers watching the commentary and recaps of the president’s terroristic attack on peaceful protesters in front of the White House by an unidentified national police force were suddenly interrupted with the urgent story of a local drugstore break-in on the other side of the country—the perpetrators having long since departed from a scene that was miles from any active protests.


Self-Interest, Wrongly Understood

Back in April , when New York City was the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis , The New York Times ’ Bret Stephens published a column entitled “ New York Rules Can ’ t Apply to All.
” The inset quote that Stephens ’ s editor had pulled out to summarize the column was , “ A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.
” Stephens argued that the only reason New York City was in such dire straits was that the New York metropolitan area is the most densely populated in the United States ; absent that degree @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would be no need for extreme measures such as lockdown quarantines to contain Covid-19 .
Stephens opened the article with a sly reference to Saul Steinberg ’ s famous New Yorker cover , “ View of the World From Ninth Avenue , ” showing everything beyond the Hudson River and a nondescript New Jersey as a hazy blank .
New Yorkers , by implication ( and particularly those liberal intellectuals who populate the Upper West Side ) , were so self-involved as to believe their personal experience was relevant to people in other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statistics from the time : There had been more Covid-19 fatalities in Nassau County on Long Island , with a population of 1.4 million , than in all of California , with a population of 40 million .
More people had died from Covid-19 in Westchester County ( 989 ) than in all of Texas ( 611 ) .
The number of deaths due to Covid-19 in New York City ( 132 per 100,000 residents ) was more than 16 times that for the country ’ s next largest city , Los Angeles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were a separate country instead of part of the United States , the fatality rate among the remaining states , Stephens calculated , would be about 7.5 per 100,000 , about the same level as in Germany .
Stephens then went on the attack .
“ No wonder , ” he wrote , “ so much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions much further .
The curves are flattening ; hospital systems haven ’ t come close to being overwhelmed ... .
Right now , there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talking heads ( many of them in New York ) about the danger of lifting lockdowns in places like Tennessee .
Perhaps the commentary needs to move in the opposite direction .
Tennesseans are within their rights to return to a semblance of normal life ... .
I don ’ t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs.
” Bret Stephens got his wish : For the following two months , political authorities throughout large swaths of the country declined to impose strict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of masks .
And this approach to handling the virus has proved disastrous .
The curve of coronavirus exposure , far from flattening or staying flat , has skyrocketed nationally .
Hospitals in California and Texas have run out of ICU beds , and that will soon be true in Tennessee as well .
Tennessee was listed in mid-July as among the states with the highest daily rate of increase in identified Covid-19 cases in the country .

How did Stephens get it so wrong? He is an intelligent and well-educated person, with college and graduate degrees. He’s an accomplished journalist, with long experience in the gathering and checking of facts (which his position on global warming shows sometimes does fall short). But he did not call on either his intellectual resources or research skills before launching into his condescending and ill-informed peroration. The explanation, I think, might be found in his statement, during a discussion at the Aspen Institute, that the essence of true conservatism is “the principles of 1776”—meaning “classical liberalism” with its focus on “maximizing individual liberty.”
Could it be that Stephens is really a refined and articulate version of the folks you see on TV ranting and gesticulating at city council members or journalists or passersby in the street over donning masks in the service of public health? These self-styled sons and daughters of liberty insist that being required, or even asked, to wear masks and socially distance (let alone to observe a quarantine) is a violation of their constitutional right to do whatever they want, wherever they please, even if it endangers other people in the community, or themselves.
The claim that America’s political heritage is based solely on individual rights is a misinterpretation of history and philosophy. Thomas Jefferson, the tribune of classical liberalism, was equally an exponent of classical republicanism, with its emphasis on the obligation of citizens to participate in the political life of their community and attend to its collective needs. Alexis de Tocqueville, when he studied the United States in the 1830s, concluded that Americans had achieved a unique balance between these two conflicting traditions, and called the synthesis thus produced “self-interest rightly understood.” As Stephens’s colleague Paul Krugman has argued, it is Donald Trump’s fusion of irresponsibility and incompetence that has prevented the nation from mobilizing effectively to contain the spread of Covid-19. To his great credit, Bret Stephens has been one of Trump’s implacable enemies on the right. But in the same op-ed section, on the same day Stephens published his libertarian diatribe, former Republican congressional staffer Drew Holden, in a column titled “Why Some Conservatives Resist the Lockdown,” offered more nuanced reflections on the American libertarian conservative’s dilemma. “Conservatives shouldn’t conflate the ephemeral necessity of collective sacrifice in pursuit of the greater good with an assault on individual freedom, particularly in moments of crisis,” Holden wrote. “Not every compromise is a harbinger of tyranny.... As we attempt to marshal a collective response to the virus, our own instinct to see the world through only our own eyes presents yet another impediment that we must confront together.” Had the leaders of the right heeded Holden’s counsel instead of Stephens’s, the country could well be in far less treacherous, and lethal, straits today.


newrepublic--2020-08-13--The Inevitability of Defending Henry Kissinger

Barry Gewen introduces his study of Henry Kissinger , The Inevitability of Tragedy , with an anecdote that may be more telling than he intended .
“ A couple of years ago , I was having dinner with a friend , ” he recounts , “ when he leaned across the table and whispered to me , ‘ Barry , Henry Kissinger is evil.
’ ” Throughout this book , Gewen defends Kissinger ’ s record as flawed but indispensably instructive for Americans now amid the country ’ s converging , collective tragedies .
This is a familiar argument .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s way of delivering his denunciation .
Was he acting theatrically , just for fun ?
Or was he tempering genuine outrage with ironic humor to get through to Gewen—a critic , essayist , and longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review who has promoted Kissingerian Realism for years .
The Inevitability of Tragedy , Gewen ’ s first book , is a manifesto or summa of his efforts to convert Kissinger ’ s critics and would-be prosecutors into his students .
Kissingerian Realism , he explains , is “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of humanity , ” by a sense of the fragility of political order , and by little “ confidence in either the workings of democracy or the inevitability of progress.
” Kissinger believed that policy “ must start from that grim vantage point ” and that tragedy erupts unpredictably in international relations and in all politics , deranging democratic majorities as often as greedy , war-mongering elites .
This can ’ t be stopped by moralistic condemnations but must be finessed and contained , however painfully , by acts of power-balancing—arranged by deft @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and explained by interpreters such as Gewen .
Kissinger , Gewen writes , acquired his “ dim view of humanity ” while growing up in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and ’ 30s , when its democratic institutions were being overtaken by Nazism .
In 1938 , the 15-year-old Kissinger and his family escaped to America , as did thousands of other Jews , shaken by the collapse of democracy and high culture and fearing for their lives .
Only a relatively few intellectuals and political actors among them would embrace Kissingerian-style @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gewen strains to link Kissinger with the tragedy-minded émigré public intellectuals Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt , neither of whom ever wrote or spoke publicly in his favor .
The true exception , whom Gewen portrays at length , was the political scientist Hans Morgenthau , 19 years older than Kissinger and a deeply principled , if darkly pessimistic , conservative political philosopher and foreign-policy remonstrant who became his mentor and remained his friend even when they disagreed strongly about the Vietnam War .
What Gewen doesn ’ t say is that some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Kissinger ’ s “ grim vantage point ” perversely reassuring because it reinforces presumptions of their own dark omniscience , unappreciated by the rest of us .
The inevitability of tragedy helps them to excuse their blunders and outrages as necessary costs of braving what Donald Rumsfeld memorably called the “ unknown unknowns ” that bedevil all grand strategists .
These omissions and concessions might matter less if they did not fit so comfortably into a sustained pattern of excuse-making for Realpolitik at the New York Times Book Review—an institution with far @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shape Kissinger ’ s legacy .
Gewen acknowledges that serious , well-informed people have condemned Kissinger ’ s work as immoral and destructive .
But he mentions many of the most substantial charges only very briefly on his way to rebutting or mitigating them .
He notes , for example , only in passing , book-length indictments of Kissinger made by Christopher Hitchens and Seymour Hersh .
He doesn ’ t mention Gary Bass ’ s The Blood Telegram , which documents Kissinger ’ s energetic complicity in the Pakistani massacres of Bengalis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nixon ’ s bloody maneuvers—in Cambodia , in Vietnam—weren ’ t as necessary or inevitable as their admirers and apologists assert .
Gewen cites the condemnations not so much to engage with them as to give his own assessments an aura of truth-seeking candor :

That brutal coldness—much of it driven by Kissinger’s fear that nations were poised to fall like dominoes to Communism—bears a lot of responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of bodies of innocent non-combatants lying in graves in countries where Kissinger and Nixon intervened. Gewen, unfazed, opines that since “the masses demand firmness and immediate results,” it’s little wonder that, as Morgenthau put it, “the diplomat’s reputation for deviousness and dishonesty is as old as diplomacy itself.” Some of his other reckonings take us through long, conflicted, hydra-headed accounts of Kissinger’s and Nixon’s interventions, enumerating, for example, their reasons for supporting, covertly, the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile.
Gewen’s first chapter on Allende’s rise and demise would have come later in a standard chronological biography, but Gewen calls this his “intellectual biography” of Kissinger’s worldview, not his personal life. Like the book’s prologue, the “Chile” chapter opens with a comment that puts Kissinger in the worst possible light—this time, Kissinger’s declaration, “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” Gewen paraphrases briefly the shocked, liberal-democratic reaction to that comment but then presents Allende and his socialists as subversive of the constitutional democracy that elected them. Telling us that they nationalized some large corporations, imposed wage increases, introduced a “humanist socialist” curriculum in the schools, and even declared that they and Fidel Castro’s Cuba were “marching toward a common goal,” Gewen finds “a core of truth” in the “straightforward formula: Allende=Castro=Communism=Soviet domination”—enough truth,
he thinks, to justify his claim that Chile presented “perhaps the classic example of the potential clash between other countries’ free elections and American security.” But only the discredited “domino” theory made it seem so, and Gewen says next to nothing about the far more authoritarian General Augusto Pinochet, who ousted Allende’s government in a 1973 coup and imposed a brutal American-backed regime for the next 16 years.
Gewen follows his opening account of Chile immediately with a chapter on another democracy’s election of a would-be dictator, this one far more primal in Kissinger’s early experiences and thinking: Adolf Hitler’s duplicitously “democratic” makeover of his National Socialist Party to facilitate its constitutionally legitimate victory of 1932 in the Weimar Republic’s Depression-wracked democracy. From this, Gewen writes, Kissinger learned that “democracy has no sure answer to the demagogue who is able to win the support of the public through fair means and foul”—an echo of Hannah Arendt’s warning that most people would be better off under regimes that restore and enforce some pre-democratic customs and order than they are under unstable democracies. Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation, published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, presented foreign ministers who upheld such regimes after the defeat of Napoleon’s “democratic” conquests.


newrepublic--2020-08-13--America Needs Its Own BBC to Restore Public Trust in the Press

Public trust in the media has reached an all-time low , according to a poll of over 20,000 people released last week by Gallup and the Knight Foundation .
“ Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media , they believe news organizations actively support the partisan divide , ” the report stated .
Those who suspect that the media has had a hand in inflaming partisanship aren ’ t wrong .
The ongoing collapse of local news outlets and mass layoffs at publications across the country has sharpened political polarization among a public that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consult—or , in some cases , none at all .
“ As local newspapers disappear , citizens increasingly rely on national sources of political information , which emphasizes competition and conflict between the parties , ” a team of researchers wrote in Scientific American last year .
As the commercial media ecosystem in the United States has crumbled and traditional sources of funding like print advertising and subscriptions have dried up in the digital age , publications have scrambled to find new , sustainable revenue models with little success .
Venture capital briefly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became clear that those V.C.s were quick to axe any publication that failed to materialize as a cash cow .
Today , when a handful of billionaires owns or controls a significant portion of the media and more than 27,000 newsroom jobs have vanished since 2008 , the industry is in serious crisis with very few means of survival .
One partial solution to the decline of media that often gets ignored—yet has the potential to both alleviate the deepening crisis and also help restore public trust in the media as a whole—is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a truly public media system .
The idea of public media is often conflated with state-run media in the eyes of skittish libertarians , but public media systems in other democracies have proven entirely capable of retaining editorial independence despite being government-funded .
The most famous of those institutions , at least in the Anglophone world , is the UK ’ s BBC , but countries including Canada , Norway , New Zealand , and Japan also have robust public media systems .
According to NYU professors Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the world , the systems in all of those countries and others routinely produce more criticism of the government , a more diverse set of perspectives , and better coverage of national politics than commercial outlets in those same countries .
They manage this , writes Benson and Powers , through various combinations of multi-year funding agreements , trusts , and independent oversight agencies , all of which allow public media outlets to stay funded while keeping at a safe remove from government influence .
Furthermore , as journalist and former Canadian Broadcasting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s a wealth of evidence that residents of those countries and others enjoy greater levels of political participation and trust in the media as a result of that kind of coverage .
“ Research shows that people exposed to news on public television are better-informed than those exposed to news on private TV , ” Gardner wrote in a 2017 analysis for the Knight Foundation .
“ Countries with strong public broadcasters have higher levels of social trust , and the people who live in them are less likely to hold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media system in the U.S. could help slow and even reverse the erosion of Americans ’ faith in the news , especially given that an increasing number of Americans believe media outlets push their own political agendas and neglect to hold elected leaders accountable .
And those are the public ’ s views on the commercial media .
Who needs to worry about skepticism toward public media when the for-profit press is so wildly unpopular ?

The most famous of those institutions, at least in the Anglophone world, is the UK’s BBC, but countries including Canada, Norway, New Zealand, and Japan also have robust public media systems. According to NYU professors Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers, who have extensively studied public media around the world, the systems in all of those countries and others routinely produce more criticism of the government, a more diverse set of perspectives, and better coverage of national politics than commercial outlets in those same countries. They manage this, writes Benson and Powers, through various combinations of multi-year funding agreements, trusts, and independent oversight agencies, all of which allow public media outlets to stay funded while keeping at a safe remove from government influence.
Furthermore, as journalist and former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation director Sue Gardner has argued, there’s a wealth of evidence that residents of those countries and others enjoy greater levels of political participation and trust in the media as a result of that kind of coverage. “Research shows that people exposed to news on public television are better-informed than those exposed to news on private TV,” Gardner wrote in a 2017 analysis for the Knight Foundation. “Countries with strong public broadcasters have higher levels of social trust, and the people who live in them are less likely to hold extremist political views.” A revamped public media system in the U.S. could help slow and even reverse the erosion of Americans’ faith in the news, especially given that an increasing number of Americans believe media outlets push their own political agendas and neglect to hold elected leaders accountable. And those are the public’s views on the commercial media. Who needs to worry about skepticism toward public media when the for-profit press is so wildly unpopular?


newrepublic--2020-08-13--Betsy DeVos’s Plot to Enrich Private Schools Amid the Pandemic

How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools ?
We can answer the question with some hard numbers .
Public school students merit something like $ 266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding .
Kids attending the right private schools are worth $ 5,000 each or possibly much more .
That $ 266 , by the way , is an overestimate .
It ’ s what you get when you take the $ 13.5 billion allocated for K-12 education in the Coronavirus Aid , Relief , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this past March and divide it up among the nation ’ s 50.8 million public school students .
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made sure to siphon some of that money for private and religious schools , which she has long favored , although she did receive pushback : On July 22 , the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) , joined by school districts in California , Connecticut , and Colorado , sued DeVos and her department over the policy , calling it “ as immoral @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Domenech , executive director of the School Superintendents Association , described her efforts as “ an opportunistic money grab , using the pandemic environment to advance the privatization agenda.
” And yet , if we take a closer look , the manipulation of the school-funding portion of the CARES Act was just one piece of the great private-school bailout of 2020 .
The $ 5,000 per student figure for some private schools cited above comes out of the Paycheck Protection Program , which was established by the CARES Act and implemented by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t eligible for PPP money , which is technically a loan but will be forgiven if the funds are used for expenses that meet certain criteria .
Although the SBA does not disclose exact loan amounts , it does make public the recipients receiving more than $ 150,000 and identifies amounts within broad ranges .
With this information , we know that Buckingham Browne & Nichols School , a private pre-K–12 school in Cambridge , Massachusetts , with a $ 75 million endowment and a student body of around 1,013 , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , collected a loan of between $ 5 and $ 10 million—or roughly $ 5,000 to $ 10,000 per student .
( The school did not respond to multiple requests to confirm the exact amount . )

Many of the private schools getting PPP money are already receiving substantial amounts of taxpayer funds through voucher programs. The flow is poised to dramatically increase, thanks to the Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which barred Montana from excluding religious schools from a program that directs taxpayer funds to private schools through tuition grants to parents. In a certain sense, some private schools are starting to be treated like public schools: taxpayer-funded, only with much more money, fewer restrictions on who and how they must serve, and much less public oversight.
The religious school beneficiaries remain free, as they always have been, of the anti-discrimination laws that apply to public schools. For example, Cathedral High School in Indiana took in a PPP loan of between $2 and $5 million ($1,700 to $4,200 per student), but it fired a teacher for having a same-sex spouse. The Foundation Academy in Winter Garden, Florida, whose 2016-17 handbook informs school families that the husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family” while “a wife is to submit herself graciously” and which groups “homosexuality, lesbianism bisexuality” along with “bestiality” as grounds for expulsion, took in between $1 and $2 million in PPP money. Americans United estimates that at least 4,006 religious schools, or about 70 percent of private school recipients, received large PPP loans.
There is no indication, however, that the private schools receiving PPP money are under anything like the pressure the Trump administration is applying to public schools to fully reopen in the coming school year. When Fairfax County public schools offered parents a choice between in-person and remote learning, DeVos denounced the move in vehement terms. (The district has since announced that the 2020-21 school year will be fully remote.) But the Fairmont Preparatory Academy of Anaheim, California, which took in a minimum of $5 million, or $7,700 per student in PPP money, is offering families the same choice, so far with no criticism from the Department of Education.


newrepublic--2020-08-13--Fox News Is Leading the Attack on Kamala Harris

On Tuesday night , Tucker Carlson tried to channel Edward R. Murrow .
Discussing Joe Biden ’ s selection of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential nominee , Carlson flew into a rage after being challenged by consultant Richard Goodstein .
“ So it begins !
You ’ re not allowed to criticize her !
” Carlson fumed .
“ I love the idea that she ’ s immune from criticism because on this show , no one is immune from criticism .
Our political leaders must be held to account : That ’ s our job.
” Goodstein @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s pronunciation of “ Kamala.
” As anyone who paid the slightest attention to the interminable Democratic primary knows , it ’ s pronounced “ COMMA-la.
” Carlson , who certainly knows this , kept calling her “ CAM-ala. ” It isn ’ t a particularly tough name to pronounce correctly .
But Carlson was intent on disrespecting the California senator , then using her name to claim that it was , as usual , the left that was out of line .
Carlson then continued butchering Harris ’ s name .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of the reaction to his repeated mispronunciation of “ Kamala ” —and then claimed that Harris would give Covid-19 vaccines to people of color first .
Compared to the rest of Fox News ’ s programming in the wake of Harris ’ s selection , Carlson ’ s tantrum was subtle .
In one of the most egregious examples of the Trump-Fox feedback loop yet , the network ’ s hosts spent much of Tuesday night reading from the Trump campaign ’ s playbook : Harris is foreign , they suggested , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ purposes .
Biden , meanwhile , is a doddering fool , controlled by powers he is not cogent enough to discern .
It amounted to an hours-long anti-Harris campaign ad—one that was striking because it was sleeker and punchier than the attacks coming out of the Trump campaign .
Harris has been a strong favorite in the veepstakes for months .
Despite acres of lead time , Trump and the Republican National Committee came up with a muddled message .
Harris , in their version , is both too tough on crime ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ role in the rise of mass incarceration in California ) and too soft on crime ( her goal is to bring anarchy and violence to every city in America ) .
She is both a cynical careerist and a doctrinaire Marxist set on ending private enterprise .
On Fox , there was more focus .
The network certainly takes cues from the president , but more often the flow of information works the other way around , with hosts trying to lead Trump where they want him to go .
Taking the negative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during the primary , voters felt she was insincere and too ambitious ) , they built a demonic caricature .
Harris , in their telling , was a mix of Lady Macbeth and Shylock .
Carlson said there are “ payday lenders who are more sincere .
”

Harris is not just a possible successor to Biden, according to Fox News; she is the real candidate. Nearly every host scoffed at the possibility that Biden had actually selected her. “This is kinda like when you go out to a restaurant with your grandfather and you have to order for him,” said Jesse Watters, who has apparently added ageism to his usual comedy repertoire (i.e., making racist jokes about Asians). “Joe didn’t make this pick. This pick was made for Joe.”
“Who really picked this woman to be the vice presidential candidate?” Jeanine Pirro asked Sean Hannity. “I believe Joe Biden isn’t even going to be on the ticket in the end because I can’t believe he would pick this woman.” On Wednesday, Pirro made the same point in an even more ominous fashion. “I have a sense that something’s going to happen before the election, and he’s not even going to be on the ticket, so don’t even ask me if he’s going to make the four years,” she said. Pressed by Brett Baier about what that “something” could be, Pirro only said she wished Biden “good health.”
"Something is going to happen before the election and he's not even going to be on the ticket" -- Jeanine Pirro predicts something horrible will happen to Joe Biden in the next 2+ months pic.twitter.com/dVQ3ImHfb3 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 12, 2020
That shadowy forces—George Soros, the Muslim Brotherhood—are secretly controlling the Democratic Party is a favorite theme of Fox News’s opinion-side programming. (Indeed, Ayaan Hirsi Ali told Carlson on Tuesday that she believed that the Muslim Brotherhood is writing Biden’s talking points with the goal of instituting Sharia law in America.) Pirro may have yada yada-ed the conspiracy, but the point is clear: The Democratic Party and their enablers are conspiring to replace the senile Biden with the sinister Harris.


newrepublic--2020-08-14--A Novel Way to Fund a Green Economy

A Novel Way to Fund a Green Economy

The government has been pretty kind to fossil fuel companies these last few months .
Recent disclosures from the Federal Reserve ’ s secondary bond-buying program show that it has now bought $ 17 billion worth of ExxonMobil debt and $ 28.5 million from Energy Transfer Partners , the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline .
Private asset manager Blackrock oversees this purchasing program , among others .
Blackrock , with friends in both parties , is on the verge of becoming a fourth branch of government .
Despite its pledge in early 2020 to recalibrate investment practices with climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behalf of the Fed it has seemed to offer up nearly unlimited public funds to bail out the world ’ s biggest polluters .
These investments serve as a lifeline to a deeply troubled and increasingly unprofitable industry .
Meanwhile , state and local governments—and the millions of people who ’ ll soon lose their unemployment insurance—have found bailouts much harder to come by .
And hopes for a green recovery ( which an increasingly large swathe of the Democratic Party supports to stave off depression and climate catastrophe ) look alarmingly scarce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Washington could address all of these problems .
In a recent memo for Data for Progress , Cornell University law professor and financial regulation expert Saule Omarova proposed creating a National Investment Authority , or NIA .
Modeled loosely off the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation , the NIA Omarova outlined would contain two main bodies—a National Infrastructure Bank , or NIB , and a National Management Corporation , or “ Nicki Mac ” —to provide a lifeline to millions in the current crisis , jumpstart a green transition , and democratize the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guarantor , venture capitalist , and investment manager all rolled into one .
Democratizing the financial system , Omarova and others believe , is a crucial step toward enabling both the government and ordinary people to invest in a climate-friendly future .
“ The financial market is such that even if an investor wants to make an investment in the real economy , they frequently don ’ t even have the chance to do so because they ’ re only presented with a menu of financial instruments , ” Omarova told me by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Global Infrastructure Fund .
All they do are things like buying up public highways and turning them into toll roads .
Even when investors really want to help to create a clean public transit system , for instance , they simply don ’ t have the ability to do it on the necessary scale .
But they have to put that money somewhere , so they ’ ll give it to a private equity fund .
Instead , the NIA will actually come in and give them a public option , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ real economy .
The lack of these options , currently , is a bigger problem than you might think .
Successive rounds of quantitative easing and low-interest rates after the Great Recession have made Treasury bonds a less attractive option in the past decade for big institutional investors like colleges and pension funds , who had previously flocked to their reliable returns .
Right now , there is an enormous amount of money sloshing around the global financial system .
But it has few places to turn other than big private asset managers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Street .
Such firms have ballooned since 2008 and today hold enormous sway over the economy as a whole , with the three together owning an estimated 20 percent of all firms on the S & P 500 .

Given the way 2020 has gone so far, the next decade is also likely to feature low-interest rates. Under the current structures, that would exacerbate this problem. An institution like the NIA, however, would offer an alternative to asset management giants, promising bonds comparable to the Treasury’s that are also fully backed by the federal government. And whereas Blackrock’s dominance has turned millions of pensioners into unwitting investors in everything from fossil fuels to real estate speculation, entrusting 401Ks to the NIA would enable ordinary workers’ investments to flow toward projects that are firmly in the public interest and subject to democratic governance and oversight. It’d also bring services currently being farmed out to Blackrock, with all of the potential conflicts of interests that entails, in house.
The United States currently uses public funds to support industry in various ways, whether through military arms purchases, basic research via bodies like the National Institutes of Health, or the tens of billions of subsidies that flow each year to fossil fuel companies. But key investment decisions guiding what sorts of things get built are left almost entirely up to the private sector, whose search for short-term profits can leave massive gaps and spawn speculative bubbles. While such decisions might be rational for individual investors, Omarova wrote in her memo, “the cumulative result is collectively irrational and tragically ironic: many potentially beneficial infrastructure projects simply do not get funded in private markets, while abundant private capital is desperately searching for profitable deployment.”
A lot of money also just doesn’t get spent at all, collecting dust on privately held balance sheets. Private investors, for instance, started off 2020 with a $1.5 trillion cash pile. “It would be a sea change in the way we do economic management,” Yakov Feygin, an economic historian and associate director of the Berggruen Institute’s Future of Capitalism Program, said of the NIA. “If you do it, what you’ve done is created a jump wire between fiscal and monetary policy.”


The Douglass Republic

As our country grapples with a deadly pandemic , responds to still more outbreaks of police brutality , and bears astonished witness to street after street filled with fed-up citizens calling for change , I find myself thinking of Frederick Douglass .
The former slave , orator , political organizer , and self-taught man of letters in many ways speaks to the present moment of civic and racial fracture almost as powerfully as when he scourged the conscience of white America in the mid-nineteenth century .
Indeed , it ’ s no exaggeration to say that Douglass ’ s legacy—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urgent quest for real and enduring racial justice in twenty-first–century America .
After Douglass found a wider audience in 1842 as the well-spoken protégé of William Lloyd Garrison ’ s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society , he went on to become—alongside his many other celebrated accomplishments—the most photographed American of the nineteenth century .
His image has remained a steady presence in our time as well , and not just on film .
According to the Douglass scholar John Stauffer , in addition to 168 photographic portraits , the great man ’ s face graces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seventeen schools or universities ; seven libraries or historical societies ; seven community centers ; five public housing projects ; five government buildings ; five churches ; three stores ; three playgrounds and parks ; two prisons ; two underpasses ; one fire station ; one newspaper building ; one publishing house ; and one subway station.
” This vast roll call of Douglass mural sites and building names neatly distills the aspirations and deferred promises that continue to define so much of black experience two centuries after his birth .
Douglass almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself as sober , dignified , confident , he refuted prevailing stereotypes that cruelly caricatured African Americans as carelessly content with bondage , while also furnishing vivid and unassailable evidence of black equality .
He hoped his white viewers would see him and his kinsmen as , well , kin .
“ Whether we read Shakespeare or look at Hogarth ’ s pictures , we commune alike with nature and have human beings for society , ” Douglass wrote in a lecture called “ Pictures and Progress.
” “ They are of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ known tongue .
They are neither angels nor demons , but in their possibilities both .
We see in them not only men and women , but ourselves.
” Douglass anticipated the evocative power of recorded images a century before photos of police dogs attacking civilians helped tame the Klan in Birmingham , and even longer before cell phones captured police killings of Eric Garner , Walter Scott , George Floyd , and so many others .
He also knew that countering the narrative of delusional white supremacy was a double-edged sword ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brutalities could bring new and unintended forms of harm .
He bristled at other authors of slave narratives who included a surplus of details surrounding their escape from bondage .
It was best , he argued , to leave some edges blurred .
Here , too , Douglass ’ s cautions echo down through today ’ s agitations for racial justice : Some protesters demonstrating in response to George Floyd ’ s murder asked their supporters to stop sharing their photos on social media .
We serial tweeters may believe we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he observed , “ It is evident that the great cheapness and universality of pictures must exert a powerful , though silent , influence upon the ideas and sentiment of present and future generations.
” In reality , though , such images now possess an ominous underside—and present a new opportunity for the racial surveillance state : By trafficking in cheap , universal images of today ’ s uprisings , we may just be thoughtlessly exposing our friends to facial-recognition technology .
Discovery in Douglass ’ s time could mean a return to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ modern protesters , it can also result in death ( as it may have for six Ferguson activists after 2014 ) or having their names and addresses publicly released over Facebook Live—as St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson did in June .
Krewson ’ s actions helped spur a demonstration demanding her resignation , which in turn yielded an iconic image of an affluent white St. Louis couple brandishing firearms at the peaceful demonstrators marching past their downtown mansion .
In the long-standing American tradition of evasion and violent eruption around the foundational wounds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demands for justice and accountability once more had seamlessly been translated into the charged register of white existential rage .
And that , in turn , produced heightened black vulnerability , in a fraught dynamic Douglass mapped out in striking depth a century and a half ago .
The legacy stretching alongside that of Douglass ’ s image is , of course , his singular literary voice .
Douglass ’ s three autobiographies resound with the sort of moral indignation and impatience with the folklores and cant of established powers that we associate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In addition to his courage and ferocious intellect , his candor sears through every sentence .
At no point in his long , public career did he suffer fools gladly .
He “ rejected empty politeness , ” as his recent biographer David W. Blight put it .
Benjamin Quarles , an African American and author of a landmark earlier study of Douglass ’ s life , noted that his subject , shaped by the bludgeoning invective of his mentors , “ developed no sense of the precise shadings of the nouns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opponents.
” Maybe .
I like to think of Douglass as fully aware of the properties of shade-throwing—that he was a “ firespitter , ” to borrow a phrase from the poet Jayne Cortez , steeped in thunder and lyricism .

It was hardly a novel notion. The original Framers had similar thoughts when they declared themselves independent; “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” as Thomas Paine declaimed in Common Sense. Lincoln, too, had extolled the sacred right of the people “to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” Not for nothing was the period following the Civil War called Reconstruction, after all. It ultimately failed—with long, tragic consequences for African Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois described its overthrow as “a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation.” A far cry, in other words, from what Douglass and the abolitionists had in mind. Nonetheless, the opportunity to tear up the country and begin again from the ground up has continued to tantalize activist imaginations at key junctures in the struggle to advance the cause of racial equity. During the civil rights movement’s “Second Reconstruction” over the 1950s and ’60s, Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed boldly of little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls—an image of another, better America that remains maddeningly elusive more than half a century on. Even over the brief span between the death of George Floyd and today, we’ve likewise already glimpsed the promise of a thorough overhaul of the American ideal, as protesters give greater context to police brutality by addressing other systemic inequities such as the lack of universal health care, substandard schools, and the need for a minimum basic income. They’ve pointed out that civilian review boards, bias training, and body cams won’t even fix law enforcement, let alone the far deeper ills of a profoundly broken society.
And at the outset of this renewed agitation for what might be a Third Reconstruction in the making, it’s crucial to again engage the question that remains at the core of this country’s racial despair: Dare we try once more to make good on Frederick Douglass’s prophecy of a genuinely new American order of the ages? Can African Americans hope any longer that such a thing is feasible, or would the embrace of such a radical possibility simply set ourselves up for massive disappointment, yet again? Most discussions of this nature drift toward talk of managing expectations, and segue into the sober counsel to steer clear of pessimism and reclaim a hard-won faith in things still unseen—the “stone of hope,” as King memorably phrased it. But as we wait to see what sort of movement emerges out of the present popular mobilizations against racist police violence, I worry that the search for silver linings or cosmic meaning is an unhelpful distraction. Sure, some of us need to see hopeful portents when cops kneel in sympathy and kids gratefully accept ice cream cones from kindly patrol officers. But how audacious is hope, really? Is it any more useful than robust skepticism? A certain wariness of hope doesn’t automatically translate into self-indulgent despair—despair being, as James Baldwin noted, a luxury only white men can afford.
Rather, a disciplined aloofness from hope is the chastened brand of knowledge forged in experience. Even a casual student of history can detect the seesaw character of black struggle in the United States, its motions calling to mind nothing so much to a pendulum swinging back and forth just above our heads, often at an uncomfortably perilous close remove. Emancipation, followed by sharecropping. Reconstruction, followed by massive voter suppression, land theft, and convict leasing. The civil rights movement, followed by more residential segregation, white flight, and urban renewal. Toxic waste and lead paint pointing the way to for-profit policing, school-to-prison pipelines, payday loans, and—lest we forget—greater black exposure and fatality levels in the Covid-19 pandemic. Even now, with unprecedented numbers of white Americans marching beside us in the streets, it still makes sense to look over our shoulders for the coming reverse swing of the pendulum.


newrepublic--2020-08-14--Can Kamala Harris Earn the Trust of Indian Country?

On Tuesday , Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden officially announced California Senator Kamala Harris as his pick for vice president .
Harris famously comes from a background in law enforcement as a former prosecutor who rose to the rank of state attorney general , a position she held from 2011 to 2017 .
Critics have dissected her record from that time with a focus on her office ’ s punitive response to truancy in public schools and stubbornness in cases of wrongful convictions .
But over the course of her 11-month presidential run , and now again with her nomination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another discussion happening in Indian Country about whether Harris will be an ally of tribal nations seeking the right to land that was legally guaranteed to them .
Depending on whom you listen to , Harris is either a politician who ’ s shown a tremendous amount of growth during her three-plus years as senator on the issues of tribal nations , or she ’ s a former attorney general who flagrantly blocked the pursuit of tribal sovereignty .
The two characterizations are not mutually exclusive , but the question of what her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both of these truths , and her limited powers if elected as vice president , be appropriately weighted .
That means not fawning over Harris when she sponsors a batch of progressive Native-focused legislation and not wholly condemning her for some truly harmful decisions she made in the past .
There ’ s also cause to be relieved that she now won ’ t be tapped for U.S. attorney general .
While the Democrats certainly have been the more empathetic and outspoken party on Indian Country political issues , these matters often do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their legal nature .
The Obama administration endeavored to show how important tribal consultation is to establishing a healthy relationship with the 574 federally recognized tribal nations ; it also reigned during the violent militarized police response from state and federal forces to the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline .
Conservatives in Congress , like Representatives Tom Cole ( Chickasaw ) and Paul Cook and Senator Lisa Murkowski , have regularly championed issues of tribal communities .
Last month , Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch , a Trump appointee , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the opinion in the biggest tribal legal victory of modern times when he ruled that the United States was still bound to the treaty it signed in 1866 with the Muscogee ( Creek ) Nation .
Being a Democrat does not automatically win Biden and Harris the votes or confidence of Native peoples .
The pair will have to prove that they have good policy plans in store as well as a blueprint for how they will set about reverting federal agencies to work for , not against , tribal nations .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Trump administration , the most defining decisions made by a president , as it relates to tribal nations , tend not to stem from executive orders but from whom they appoint to head the Department of the Interior , the Department of Justice , the Department of Health and Human Services , or DHHS , and , if they have the chance , whom they tap to fill a Supreme Court vacancy .
Many of the issues facing Indian Country are predicated on how these departments read and respond to treaties and @ @ @ @ @ @ @

At the Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum held in Sioux Falls, Iowa, last August, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier confronted Harris over her history of fighting against tribal sovereignty and fee-to-trust applications. Her response was similar to her defenses of her harsh incarceration policies as San Francisco district attorney and California A.G.: “When I was attorney general, I had a number of responsibilities, including being lawyer for the governor. And it was in that capacity when the governor—I was the lawyer for the governor, and the governor made decisions about the fee-to-trust applications by California tribes. As the lawyer, as the law office for the governor, we had to file those letters. But that was never a reflection and has never been a reflection of my personal perspective, and when I have had the ability to independently act, not on behalf of a client, I think my history and my positions are very clear, which is that there has to be a restoration of tribal land.”
Contrary to this statement, Pechanga.net reported in 2014 that the then Governor Jerry Brown and senior aide Jacob Appelsmith “were unaware Harris’s office had sent at least 15 land/trust objection letters to the BIA since Brown took office in 2010.” Still, it’s true that as a senator, Harris has steadily developed into a friendly voice for Native issues. She has sponsored legislation like a Senate companion to the House’s Remove the Stain Act, which would revoke the Medals of Honor given to the soldiers who carried out the Wounded Knee Massacre. Last October, she pledged that as president, she would take half-a-million acres of land into trust for federally recognized tribes in addition to pushing for more tribes to assume autonomy over their local IHS operations. In the midst of the Department of Treasury delaying the distribution of federal pandemic relief funds to tribal nations, Harris lent her voice to the growing chorus of politicians criticizing the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus in Native communities.
Biden has not been as proactive. He declined to participate in the aforementioned Native-focused presidential forum and was the last of all major Democratic presidential candidates to release an Indian Country policy plan. In the past four months, he’s taken steps to shore up this weak point in his campaign by hiring Native staffers, including a tribal engagement director, and pledging to make IHS funding mandatory. Biden also publicly supported the Mashpee this past spring. This is a start, but Biden and Harris still have a lot more work to do to convince Native nations. This is still a presidential candidate who, three weeks ago, had oil and gas groups saying they feel they can find “common ground” with his administration.