Lazy Caturday Reads: Democracy in Peril

Springtime tea party by KilkennyCatArt

Good Morning!!

I admit I thought once Trump was out of the White House, we’d be able to move on from our 4-year long nightmare. But it appears that elected Republicans are not going to let that happen. They are doing everything they can to prevent people from voting and they are supporting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. It’s still not clear that the U.S. can remain a democratic country. Here’s the latest commentary on our current situation.

David Smith at The Guardian: Is America heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy?

If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.”

The new president, speaking from the spot where just two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a battered, bruised yet resilient Washington.

But now, four and a half months later the alarm bells are sounding on American democracy again. Even as the coronavirus retreats, the pandemic of Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election spreads, manifest in Republicans’ blocking of a commission to investigate the insurrection. And state after state is imposing new voting restrictions and Trump allies are now vying to run future election themselves.

With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline.

“There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not just about one person but there are broader structural issues,” said Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die. “The weird emails that I get are more ominous now than they were in 2016: there seems to be a much deeper level of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

Photo by Patricia Floriano

A timeline of the GOP rejection of democracy:

Just hours after the terror of 6 January, 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election despite no evidence of irregularities. Trump was impeached for inciting the violence but Senate Republicans ensured his acquittal – a fork in the road where the party could have chosen another destiny.

As Trump continued to push his false claims of election fraud, rightwing media and Republican state parties fell into line. A farcical “audit” of votes is under way in Arizona with more states threatening to follow suit. Trump is reportedly so fixated on the audits that he has even suggested – wrongly – he could be reinstated as president later this year.

Perhaps more insidiously, Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 election are maneuvering to serve as election officials in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. If they succeed in becoming secretaries of state, they would exercise huge influence over the conduct of future elections and certifying their results. Some moderate Republican secretaries of state were crucial bulwarks against Trump’s toxic conspiracy theories last year.

The offensive is coupled with a dramatic and sweeping assault on voting rights. Republican-controlled state legislatures have rammed through bills that make it harder to vote in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana. Their all-out effort in Texas was temporarily derailed when Democrats walked out of the chamber, denying them a quorum.

Nicole Hemmer at CNN: The survival of democracy is not a given, America.

President Joe Biden’s inaugural address last January, set against the backdrop of a pandemic-gripped capital wrapped in barricades and barbed wire after an attempted insurrection, stood out for more than just its unusual setting. In the speech, he invoked the word “democracy” more than any other president in US history — at 11 times, twice more than either the runners-up Harry Truman or Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the 1940s.

That has set the tone for his presidency, an administration that has determined to be about first-order things, shoring up the foundation of the nation’s principles and ideals.

Painting by Tatyana Girshunica

Biden’s Memorial Day address on Monday returned to those themes. In a day set aside to remember those who have served and died in the nation’s wars, Biden pivoted to what he saw as their fight: safeguarding democracy. Again and again in the speech, he invoked democracy as “the soul of America.” And while he got a lot right about US democracy in his speech — most importantly, that it is imperfectly practiced and imminently imperiled — he got one essential thing wrong….Democracy has been overthrown in America before. That’s our best evidence and soberest warning that it can happen again.

It’s critical that Biden and others in government understand this point and get it right, because that history — the sometimes-successful fight for democracy and the sometimes-successful fight to thwart it — is exactly the battle that the US is facing today, and there is nothing inevitable about democracy’s success.

The day after his speech, 100 scholars of democracy underscored his point. They warned that Republicans’ efforts to radically reorganize elections at the state level “call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy.” They urged Congress to pass new voting rights legislation but emphasized that would not be enough — minoritarian obstacles from gerrymandering to the filibuster would have to go as well.

Which is why Biden’s speech was so important. With his words, Biden did more than defend democracy — he defined it. That matters, because for much of the past century, presidential invocations of democracy have often amounted to little more than sloganeering (especially when attempting to export democracy abroad). But Biden laid out a theory of democracy, calling it “more than a form of government” but “a way of seeing the world.”

Please read the rest at CNN.

David A. Graham at The Atlantic: This Isn’t Normal, Either. Just beneath a thin veneer of orderliness, the United States faces a set of perilous, unresolved threats.

Squint the right way and things look almost normal. The barriers around the Capitol are gone. People are taking off their masks and going out. The Nats and Orioles are in the basement. Most of all, politics is boring again….

But this appearance of normalcy is a thin veneer. Just beneath the surface, the United States faces a set of perilous, unresolved threats. The former president refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the election he lost. His party’s leaders are abandoning their commitment to democratic majority governance, and its voters insist that he won. Domestic terrorism threatens the nation’s tranquility, and ordinary violent crime is on the rise too. Relaxing about the state of the country feels irresistible, but doing so would be unwise.

A series of reports has shed light on the bizarre situation of the Old Pretender as he continues to stew over the election. The journalists Maggie Haberman and Charles C. W. Cooke report that Donald Trump is saying, and perhaps truly believes, that he will be “reinstated” as president this summer, after it becomes clear that he rightfully won the election; perhaps some Republican senators defeated in November will come back with him. The Post adds that Trump has become convinced that “audits” in Arizona and elsewhere will prove that he actually won.

Several barriers will prevent this: Trump didn’t win, no evidence can prove otherwise, and there’s no constitutional mechanism for such a reinstatement. Many losing candidates have griped about election results, and insisted that they were cheated. Stacey Abrams never conceded the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. John Kerry reportedly remains skeptical of the 2004 presidential-election results in Ohio. But the current situation is unprecedented: No former presidential candidate, much less president, has ever so flatly refused to accept the results or expected to be reinstalled. Samuel Tilden, after being shut out of the White House in 1876, told his supporters, “Be of good cheer. The Republic will live.” Trump, by contrast, exhorted his backers on January 6, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Reality has never constrained Trump’s statements. The problem is how far this thinking has spread beyond him. Large portions of the Republican electorate purport to agree in opinion polls that Trump rightfully won the election, and the on-again, off-again Svengali Steve Bannon claims that staying in lockstep with Trump will be a “litmus test” for future GOP candidates. “There will not be a Republican that wins a primary for 2022—not one—that doesn’t take the pledge to get to the bottom of November 3,” he recently told NBC News.

Meanwhile, exercises like the count in Arizona, which purport to rebuild confidence in elections, are actually likely to only further undermine Trump partisans’ trust. As I wrote this week, opposition both to majority rule and to the notion that Democrats can win elections fairly is on the rise in the Republican Party. These rejections of the system’s basic tenets have consequences. In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee) warned, “January 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon.”

Nude with cat,1910, by Franz Marc

John Haltiwanger at Business Insider: The GOP has proven to be an even ‘greater threat’ to US democracy than Trump in 2021, experts warn.

By the time Donald Trump left the White House, it was widely agreed upon that he was the most anti-democratic president in modern US history. He exhibited an unparalleled disdain for democratic institutions during his four years in power, and topped it all off by refusing to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 election and provoking a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. It was unprecedented and the US is still dealing with the consequences.

On his way out the door, Trump was impeached for a second time for inciting the riot. A week later, President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and some scholars of democracy were hopeful that Trump’s departure would open the door for the GOP to hit the reset button. But those feelings of optimism didn’t last long as Republicans continued to show unwavering loyalty to Trump and his “big lie,” and as GOP-led legislatures nationwide pushed for laws to restrict voting in extraordinary ways.

Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College and author of “Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day,” told Insider she’s become even “more pessimistic” about the future of American democracy in 2021. 

“With Trump gone, I hoped the Republican party might recalibrate, moving away from his illiberal, anti-democratic and irrational behavior and embracing a conservative, but firmly reality-based and small ‘d’ democratic politics,” Berman said. “That the Republican party has proven to be a greater threat than Trump — a single individual — bodes poorly for the health of American democracy.” [….]

Only 16% of Americans say democracy is working well or extremely well, according to a February poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll found that nearly half of Americans — 45% — think democracy isn’t functioning properly. But it’s less clear if Americans are cognizant of the escalating threat posed to the democratic process in the US by GOP efforts to make it harder to vote. 

“I don’t think the average citizen understands the threat because the average citizen doesn’t have the time or the incentive to analyze what is going on politically at the national, state and local level on a daily basis,” Berman said. 

A few more relevant stories

USA Today: ‘His presence is dominating’: How state and local Republican parties are turning ever more toward Trump.

The New York Times: At Once Diminished and Dominating, Trump Prepares for His Next Act.

NPR: Silenced On Facebook And Twitter, Trump Is Set To Speak Out Again On Campaign Trail.

Axios: Trump’s new Hillary. [It’s Antony Fauci]

Jonathan Allen at NBC News: Trump’s back. Here’s what his re-entry means for 2024.

Steve Benen at MSNBC: Why Trump’s utterly bonkers ‘reinstatement’ ideas matter.

That’s it for me. Have a terrific weekend!!

Tuesday Reads: The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory

Wuhan Institute of Virology, where workers fell ill with a Covid-19-like virus in Nov. 2019.

Good Morning!!

We appear to be approaching the end of the pandemic, at least in the US. Now suddenly scientists and journalists are looking more closely at the origins of Covid-19 and seriously considering the theory that the virus escaped from a lab in China.

On May 14, Science Magazine published this letter from 18 scientists: Investigate the origins of COVID-19. The gist is that investigators have not given sufficient attention to the possibility that the virus could have escaped from a lab.

In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (2). In November, the Terms of Reference for a China–WHO joint study were released (3). The information, data, and samples for the study’s first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis. Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9]. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident (4). Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report’s consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility (5).

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.

This week, the questions about Covid-19’s origins are all over the news. Here’s a sampling:

CNN: New information on Wuhan researchers’ illness furthers debate on pandemic origins.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Cat on books by Addy Balajadia

Good Morning!!

There’s a gossipy new book out by a reporter I don’t like very much–Edward Isaac-Dovere. He used to write for Politico and he’s now at The Atlantic. You’ve probably  heard about what he wrote about Obama’s opinions of Trump. This is from an interview at The Atlantic by Caroline Nimbs Nyce.

I caught up with Isaac, an Atlantic staff writer who covers elections and the author of the upcoming book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, to discuss how Biden’s and Obama’s respective approaches to the 45th president have changed over time….

Initially, President Obama seemed pretty restrained when commenting on the 45th president. What was going on behind the scenes?

Obama definitely did not think Donald Trump was qualified to be president. He had a very cautious approach in public to what he said about Trump. But people would push him. Staff members and donors were trying to get him to talk about what he thought about Trump.

And occasionally, he would let something slip and he would say things like, Trump’s a “fucking lunatic.” Or “I didn’t think it would be this bad.” Or even “I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.”

At one point, he’s seeing the news reports about when Trump had the Russian ambassador into the Oval Office, and he says, “corrupt motherfucker.”

I don’t think anybody ever imagined that Barack Obama was a Trump voter. But the clarity and the harshness of his view was surprising to many people.

And from The Guardian: ‘Madman … racist, sexist pig’: new book details Obama’s real thoughts on Trump.

For much of Donald Trump’s presidency, Barack Obama largely abided by the convention that former presidents do not publicly criticize or attack their successors.

Obama jettisoned any such caution during the 2020 election that put his own vice-president, Joe Biden, in the White House. But behind the scenes, with donors and advisers, Obama was reportedly much more candid.

According to a new book, Obama called Trump a “madman”, a “racist, sexist pig”, “that fucking lunatic” and a “corrupt motherfucker”.

The remarks are reported in Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer at the Atlantic, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Trump’s loathing for Obama is well-known and oft-expressed, beginning with his championing of the racist birther conspiracy which said Obama was not qualified to be president.

Painting by Deborah DeWit-Marchant

Obama’s feelings are well-known, but have rarely been reported in such blunt detail.

Dovere reports that Obama first preferred the prospect of Trump as president to Ted Cruz, because Trump was nowhere near as clever as the hard-right Texas senator, the runner-up in the Republican primary in 2016.

But from 2017, as reality swiftly set in, Obama reacted like many in the US and around the world.

“He’s a madman,” Dovere reports Obama telling “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big checks they were writing to his foundation”.

“More often: ‘I didn’t think it would be this bad.’ Sometimes: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a racist, sexist pig.’ Depending on the outrage of the day … a passing ‘that fucking lunatic’ with a shake of his head.”

Obama’s strongest remark, Dovere reports, was prompted by reports that Trump was speaking to foreign leaders – including Vladimir Putin, amid the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – without any aides on the call.

“‘That corrupt motherfucker,’ he remarked.”

I’m not sure why anyone would find Obama’s opinions on Trump surprising. I’m glad it’s out there publicly now, but I suppose it will provide fodder for the Trumpist maniacs.

While we’re looking back at the 2016 election, there’s an interesting piece at Just Security by former CIA intel officer John Sipher: Same Data, Same Strategy: A New Look at How the Trump Campaign and Russian Intelligence Operated in 2016. Sipher takes a new look at Paul Manafort’s relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik–how he passed Trump campaign polling data to the Russian Spy. We now know that Kilimnik turned the data over to the Russian government.

The recent Biden administration sanctions on the Russian government are part of an ongoing effort to push back against the Kremlin’s malign influence campaign against the West. Although the White House actions are related to Russian attempts to interfere with the 2020 election, included in the announcement is a detail that has reinvigorated interest in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s potential connivance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services.

In the announcement, the Treasury Department disclosed that in 2016, Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received directly from Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort in the summer of 2016.

It was already known that Manafort had passed confidential internal polling data to Kiliminik, who was described by the 2020 Senate Select Intelligence Committee report as a “Russian intelligence officer.” While it is not a great leap to assume a Russian intelligence officer would pass material to his bosses, the recent announcement was the first time the U.S. government acknowledged Putin’s intelligence services were the recipient of the campaign data.

Those who were already troubled by the Trump campaign’s apparent collusion with the Kremlin, like myself, will see this as yet further proof of Trump’s intent to use illicit means to sway the 2016 election. Those who have long shouted “no proof of collusion” will likely scoff at the detail, labeling it as just another piece of information from the U.S. government with little public evidence to back it up.

Cat philosopher, by Olena Kamenetska-Ostapchuk

Read the whole thing if you’re interested. Sipher’s argument is that the Russians weren’t trying to change voters’ minds with their fake news propaganda and other active measures. What they hoped was that they could appeal to new voters who might support Trump and suppress those inclined to vote for Clinton. A bit more:

As aggressive as the covert Russian influence campaign was, it is hard to imagine that fake Russian articles, tweets, and advertisements could persuade a Democrat to vote for Trump. Some researchers have echoed this assumption. Looking at the 2016 election, political scientist and Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan concluded that it is extremely difficult to change the minds of committed Democrats and Republicans. His research on the 2016 election suggests that fake news on social media was more likely to reinforce existing biases rather than change any minds.

While this theory makes sense as far as it goes, this is not what the Russian government – or the Trump campaign – were doing. They were doing exactly the opposite. They wanted to reinforce existing biases, not change minds. They were not interested in appealing to voters to consider alternatives. As information warfare expert Molly McKew explained in a February, 2018 article in “Wired,” following the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency (often called the “troll factory”).

Unfortunately, Trump is still trying to create chaos in U.S. politics. At the Atlantic, Peter Wehner, who apparently still things there could be hope for the GOP, warns: Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence. The Republican Party must counteract lies rather than indulge them.

At the beginning of last week, former President Donald Trump referred to the 2020 election as the “greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country.” By the end of the week, he had issued a statement saying, “As our Country is being destroyed, both inside and out, the Presidential Election of 2020 will go down as THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”

What else is new? These are the ravings of a 74-year-old sociopath, isolated and banned from social media, living in Mar-a-Lago, where he is crashing wedding parties and delivering rambling monologues.

Karen Hollingsworth, Connected, 2010

Or at least, that would be the right way to look at things, if not for the fact that the GOP remains fully in Trump’s thrall, with its leadership more committed than ever to spreading his foundational lies and conspiracy theories. Under Trump’s sway, the Republican Party is becoming more fanatical, venturing even further into a world of illusion….

No former president, and certainly no president defeated after only one term, has so dominated his party after he left office. So Trump’s words matter. They mattered in the lead-up to, and on the day of, the deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6. They still matter. And if the Republican Party doesn’t counteract these lies rather than indulge them, political violence will become more acceptable and more prevalent on the American right.

This assessment isn’t based on mere speculation; we know that many of the people who participated in the violent assault on the Capitol believed that they were acting patriotically, foot soldiers in the 21-century version of the American Revolution, doing what they understood their leader was asking of them. As a Washington Post story put it, “The accounts of people who said they were inspired by the president to take part in the melee inside the Capitol vividly show the impact of Trump’s months-long attack on the integrity of the 2020 election and his exhortations to supporters to ‘fight’ the results.” The Post story points out that a video clip of rioters mobbing the Capitol steps caught one man screaming at a police officer: “We were invited here! We were invited by the president of the United States!”

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

We know that a number of Republican lawmakers not only sympathized with the Capital insurrection, but also that some actually participated in or knew of the the planning for it. Only a few have gone against the GOP flow. Here’s an interesting piece by Jim Acosta at CNN: Chief of staff for GOP lawmaker spoke to law enforcement after overhearing talk of storming FBI building on January 6.

Trump cultists are still “recounting” 2020 presidential votes in Arizona, and now the insanity is spreading to other states. 

Arizona Mirror: Wake Technology Services audited a Pennsylvania election as part of the #StopTheSteal movement.

The company that is conducting a hand recount of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots conducted an election audit in rural Pennsylvania county at the request of a state senator who has been a prominent advocate of the “Stop the Steal” movement that has spread baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump.

According to records and news coverage from Fulton County, Penn., state senators Doug Mastriano and Judy Ward asked county officials to allow Wake Technology Services Inc. to conduct an audit of the election. Ward, who represents the rural county in southern central Pennsylvania, told the Arizona Mirror that she passed the request on to county officials at Mastriano’s behalf. 

Mastriano has been a prominent supporter of the “Stop the Steal” movement and Trump ally. He helped organize a Nov. 25 hearing in Gettysburg where Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuiani and others aired baseless conspiracy theories that Trump lost Pennsylvania through “irregularities and fraud.” He said on Wednesday Trump recently urged him to run for governor.

Wake TSI, an information technology company that has predominantly worked with clients in the health care sector, is now conducting a hand recount of all ballots cast in Maricopa County during the 2020 presidential election as part of an audit ordered by Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott. The company is part of an audit team led by Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity company located in Florida. Fann and Cyber Ninjas cited Wake TSI’s experience in Fulton County as a qualification to participate in the Maricopa County audit.

One more from The Washington Post: In echo of Arizona, Georgia state judge orders Fulton County to allow local voters to inspect mailed ballots cast last fall.