Journal of the Plague Years

November 2, 2021

     We can feel complacency setting in.  Many of us treat the daily drumbeat of alarming stories of how close Trump and his supporters came to violently overthrowing our democracy, and of how committed they still are to doing so, as mere background noise.  Just last week, The Washington Post reported that John Eastman, the architect who wrote the blueprint for the coup attempt in his notorious memo sought to use the Capitol insurrection itself as a basis for stopping the peaceful transition of power, (Source: “During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol,” by Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Jon Swaine and Emma Brown, The Washington Post, 10/29/21).  Eastman alleged that the fact that Pence displayed a scintilla of decency by allotting his time to shaken members of Congress to speak once Congress reconvened violated the Electoral Count Act by extending debate beyond the specified two hours (ibid).

     Thanks to a massive data dump by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, we learned just how much Facebook chose “profits over safety,” and refused to take steps to stop the flow of incendiary misinformation because it might cost them money, (Source:  “Whistleblower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety,'” by Ryan Mac and Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, 10/27/21)[NB:  The irony of my posting this on Facebook is not lost on me].

      Worse still, there is plenty of evidence that those who favor a fascist coup remain a clear and present danger.  The calls for violence against Democrats are escalating, with “almost one in three Republicans believing that violence may be necessary to ‘save’ the country.”  Yet Washington remains stuck, thanks to the performative obstruction of Joe Manchin, who takes perverse pleasure in playing Lucy with the football to the Democrats’  Charlie Brown.

      Frustrated by the sameness of the story, cushioned by rising 401k values and a receding pandemic, millions of us simply tune out.  We can’t be bothered with writing postcards, let alone knocking on doors or hitting the streets.  Many don’t feel threatened, even as women scream that Texas’ S.B. 8 turns us into compulsory baby making machines. Even if we felt heartened by the Supreme Court’s spirited questioning during yesterday’s oral argument, we remember that the Mississippi law which bans abortions after 15 weeks is likely to be affirmed by a Supreme Court more offended by a threat to its supremacy than a threat to Americans’ humanity, (Source:  “The Architects of Texas Abortion Ban Overplayed Their Hand,” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 11/1/21).

     Many sit on their hands, even as Black, Brown and Indigenous people, who delivered The White House and Congress to the Democrats, scream that widespread voter suppression is nothing less than the dismantling of democracy.  Many look at the paralysis in Congress and blame the Democrats, rather than the Republicans who prefer fascist cosplay to governing.

     In the face of all of this, the governor’s race in Virginia shouldn’t even be close, yet many are more alarmed at the idea of their fragile children reading the work of a Black woman Nobel laureate whose work dares to depict the horrors of slavery, than of elected officials who cozy up to those who traffic in lies and political violence, (Source:  “Glenn Youngkin Was a Traditional Republican.  Then He Became a Culture Warrior,” by Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times, 10/29/21).

Those folks have made it clear to the rest of us. Cosseted by comfort, they feel no threat from the destruction of women’s reproductive rights or the civil rights of BIPOC and LGBTQ Americans. They don’t realize that when they’re done with us, there will be nobody left to stand up for them.

#Weareallwehave

#Arepublicifyoucankeepit

September 25, 2021

     As trouble mounts on every front, from a barbaric Texas law that deprives women of their bodily autonomy to a spate of laws in 18 states that deprive people of color of their right to vote, Democrats in Congress are tied up in Gordian knots of their own making. Hamstrung by fealty to fusty procedures and paralyzed by posturing moderates, they are incapable of even crafting a strategy to avert the government shutdown being engineered by nihilist Republicans.

     Despite the existential threats to our democracy posed by the relentless attacks on voting rights and election integrity, Congressional Democrats are unable to eliminate or even amend the filibuster. The party is hostage to the performative centrism of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are not only torpedoing voting rights legislation, but imperiling Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda by objecting to its $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.  Very few are pointing out the hypocrisy of objecting to spending $350 billion per year over ten years on programs that will help Americans and confront climate change, while not saying a word while the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act covering one year, passes in the House by a margin of 316 -113.

Last Sunday, our hopes of including immigration reform in the reconciliation bill were dashed when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that “the policy change would far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation,”. (Source: “In A Blow to Democrats, Senate Official Blocks Immigration Reform In Budget Bill,” by Claudia Grisales, npr.org, 9/19/21). Given that the proposal was projected “to increase GDP by a cumulative total of $1.5 trillion over ten years and create 400,800 new jobs,” this seems like a political decision made by an unelected bureaucrat. Democrats expressed “disappointment” with the Parliamentarian’s decision, pretending they were powerless to overrule or fire her in order to create a path to citizenship for 8 million undocumented immigrants.

        Meanwhile, at the Southern border, a full fledged humanitarian crisis erupted, which only got uglier by the day.  Last week, we learned that the Biden Administration responded to an encampment of 15,000 Haitian migrants seeking refuge from their dangerously unstable country by announcing a plan to speed up deportations.  The administration shipped 500 migrants back to Haiti in the first 48 hours after announcing its plan, (Source: “Some Haitians at U.S. border released, others deported, as pressure builds on Biden,” by Diana Beth Solomon, Reuters.com, 9/22/21).

     The day after we learned of mass deportations, images emerged of white Border Patrol officers on horseback grabbing and berating Black Haitian migrants, while wielding their reins overhead like whips, (Source:  “Images of Border Patrol’s Treatment of Migrants Prompts Outrage,” by Eileen Sullivan and Zolan Kano-Youngs, The New York Times, 9/21/21).

     The violent anti-Blackness was so sickening that it prompted Daniel Foote, the U.S. envoy to Haiti, to resign.  Foote wrote a blistering resignation letter, stating ““I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.”

    Foote’s bracing moral clarity does not reckon with American complicity in that instability, but it is a welcome contrast to others in the administration who claim that Border Patrol depravity “is not who we are,” while packing planes to deport more Haitians in the middle of this crisis, (Source: “Biden Condemns Border Patrol Treatment of  Haitian Migrants as Expulsions Continue,” by Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 9/24/21).  There is a marked contrast between the speed with which this administration relied on a reviled Trump era policy to deport Black migrants and its hesitation to pressure holdout Democrats to act to protect the Constitutional rights of Black citizens.  One has to ask – are Democrats more afraid of a truly representative multiracial democracy than of a takeover by fascist white supremacists?  All I can say is — actions speak louder than words.

July 18, 2021

     We watch in dismay as a dizzying number of our fellow citizens turn their backs on science in obdurate imbecility and send COVID case numbers skyrocketing upwards.  The willful ignorance being encouraged by the right wing media is having deadly consequences.  In the last week, the average number of coronavirus infections surged 70% and hospitalizations climbed 36%, (Source:  “U.S. cases surge as delta variant takes hold,” by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post, 7/16/21).  97% of the hospitalizations and “almost all COVID-19 deaths” are among the unvaccinated.  40% of the new cases come from just four states, with 20% of new cases coming from Florida alone, (ibid).

     Still death is no deterrent for the shameless hucksters peddling fact-free fear and hatred.  As the latest surge shows, they are turning their credulous viewers from vaccine hesitant to vaccine hostile, despite the fact that many of them have, in fact, been vaccinated. Trump’s acolytes across the country are turning their backs, not only on the recent scientific advances represented by the vaccine, but on a century of public health best practices.  Eight states have blocked schools and colleges from requiring proof of vaccination as a prerequisite for attendance and three of those— Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma— have banned in-school mask requirements, (Source:  “COVID-19 School Mandates for Masks, Vaccines Are Blocked in More States,” by Lee Hawkins and Aydali Campa, The Wall Street Journal, 7/16/21).

     It is hard to understand what the endgame is here.  These laws will undoubtedly lead to needless and entirely preventable illness and death, not only among the stubborn and credulous who buy into these irrational conspiracy theories, but among schoolchildren too young to be eligible for the vaccine, and among Black and Latino frontline workers forced to interact with these people in their jobs.  This lunacy is being propagated to foster distrust in an anodyne Democratic President who took the entirely reasonable position that his most important responsibility was to protect American citizens from a deadly plague.

     Sadly, this behavior is consistent with the peculiar American proclivity for ignoring inconvenient facts and insisting on one’s own reality in the name of “freedom.”  For many Americans, freedom doesn’t mean the pursuit of happiness, but the ability to assert power over the marginalized and more vulnerable, free from consequences.  For these Americans, their freedom is meaningless unless there are others who are less free.  They want, not only the right to live the life that they choose, but to choose the lives the rest of us live. That is the thread that unites these laws flouting common sense public health measures with draconian anti-abortion bills, and dehumanizing anti-trans bills. Their insistence on their own reality has led to a rash of bills banning “critical race theory” which the right wing has redefined so expansively that it would ban teaching students about Ruby Bridges,, whose heroism facing down angry mobs as a 6 year old girl to integrate the New Orleans public schools was memorialized in a painting by Norman Rockwell.

      The people passing these laws know that their positions are deeply unpopular, but rather than moderate their views, their strategy is to disempower the majority.  Since the January 6th insurrection, Republicans have doubled down on The Big Lie, using it to justify a spate of voter suppression laws targeting Black and Brown voters.  Although activists and voting rights advocates have been steadily sounding the alarm, the response from elected Democrats has been hapless and ineffectual. 

     Their single minded focus on passing Biden’s infrastructure package suggests that they believe that the same people rationalizing the January 6th insurrection and supporting the passage of memory laws can be swayed by new roads and bridges.   The Congressional Dems seem oblivious to the existential threat that elected Republicans and their supporters pose to democracy itself.  Their refusal to get rid of, or even amend, the filibuster suggests that they think democracy can be saved with some combination of earnest speeches and Black Girl Magic. We need to follow the lead of Rep. Joyce Beatty, LaTosha Brown and the other Black women activists and descend on the Capitol to remind Democrats who put them there.  We saved democracy once.  We can’t do it again without their help.

July 2, 2021

     On the last day of the term, the Supreme Court issued two decisions, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. ___(2021) and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, 594 U.S.___ (2021), which together spell the end of American democracy.  This may sound hyperbolic, but even a cursory reading of these decisions leads to that conclusion.  In Brnovich, the Court finished the job that it started in Shelby Cty. v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, and eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.

     Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the five other members of the Court’s ultra-conservative block, thoroughly rewrote the standards of Section 2 to turn them on their head.  In Alito’s radical view, statutes “with a disproportionate impact on racial minorities are not inherently unlawful,” (Source:  “How Unprecedented Is the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act Ruling?” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 7/1/21).

     Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent shows just how much of a radical departure the majority’s decision represents. Justice Kagan exhaustively details how the majority both reinterpreted the plain meaning of the statute, and arrogated legislative power for the Court in a manner that arguably violates the separation of powers.  She notes that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “applies to any voting rule, of any kind.  The provision prohibits not just the denial, but also the abridgment of a citizen’s voting rights on account of race,” (Source:  Brnovich, dissent of Kagan, J.).

   Justice Kagan points out that in drafting Section 2  Congress explicitly focused on the effect, rather than the intent, of a given voting rule, because of the difficulty of demonstrating discriminatory intent.  As we know, the century of voter suppression that followed the enactment of the 15th Amendment relied on “facially neutral” poll taxes and literacy tests, (backed up by violent repression).  This disenfranchisement scheme was so effective that “by 1965, only 27% of black Georgians, 19% of black Alabamans and 7% …of black Mississippians were registered to vote,” (Source: ibid).  This is the past to which the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision condemns us to return.

      While the Brnovich decision will be an accelerant for Republican efforts to incinerate voting rights, yesterday’s companion decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, 594 U.S. ___ (2021) makes it easier for monied forces to hide their disproportionate influence on public debate.  In Bonta, the Court held that California’s law requiring nonprofits to disclose their donors violated the donors freedom of association rights under the First Amendment, on the theory that the mere threat of disclosure might deter people from donating to causes of their choice.  Chief Justice Roberts issued a sweeping ruling even though the state keeps donors’ names confidential and even though no individual donor had actually alleged that they were deterred.

       In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor pointed out that this decision “marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bullseye,” which regulated entities can evade by citing vague “First Amendment ‘privacy concerns,’” (Source:  Bonta, dissent of Sotomayor, J.).  The majority’s departure from decades of Supreme Court precedent will facilitate the wholesale purchase of our government enterprise by dark money forces.

     The Court may cloak its sophistry in elegant phrases, but it is doing as much violence to our Constitutional order as the insurrectionists did on January 6th.  Like their Republican counterparts in Congress, the Supreme Court majority has gone all in on minority rule.  If the Democrats don’t get rid of the filibuster, we will be forced to conclude that they have too.

June 11 , 2021

     Democracy is on a collision course with itself.  It is at the mercy of an elected body of people, half of whom are actively working to dismantle it and half of whom are so concerned with slavish adherence to tradition that they are willing to sacrifice the entire 245 year experiment in self-governance on the altar of outmoded procedure.

     On Sunday, Joe Manchin published a garbled op-ed in The West Virginia Gazette trumpeting his opposition to the For the People Act.  Since Mondaire Jones dispatched with Manchin’s specious arguments here, as did Baltimore Sun columnist Peter Jensen here, there’s no need to repeat them.  Manchin’s opposition is frustrating, but hardly surprising.  He is a Democratic Senator from a state that voted 2-1 for Trump.  Whether his racist indifference to the voting rights of Black people is performative or bone deep really doesn’t matter.  The result is the same.

      Our focus should be on the 49 other Democratic senators and the Democratic President, who owe their majority and their presence in office to the Herculean efforts of BIPOC organizers who mobilized voters of color to deliver the margin of victory in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia (twice!).

     Even if elected Democrats believe (mistakenly) that the voting rights of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous Americans are an afterthought, their own self-interest should motivate them to pull out all the stops to protect voting rights.  At last count, 14 states have already enacted a suite of harsh voter suppression laws aimed squarely at BIPOC citizens and 18 more states have similar legislation tee’d up, (Source: “Voting Laws Roundup:  May 2021,” BrennanCtr.org, 5/28/21).  Without the support of people of color Democrats will not win.  They should be fighting like hell to protect voting rights, if only to keep their cushy government jobs.

      Instead, in the wake of Manchin’s ridiculous salvo we hear crickets from President Biden, while civil rights leaders are forced to go and plead with Manchin to respect the Constitutional rights of Black people, (Source:  “Sen. Manchin steadfast in opposition to voting rights bill after meeting with civil rights leaders,” by Mike DeBonis, Amy Gardner and Sean Sullivan, The Washington Post, 6/8/21).   Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s tepid response was to promise to bring the bill to the floor this month, with no hint of a strategy for passage and no articulation of the critical urgency of protecting democracy.

      With friends like these, it is easy to fall prey to despair.  We can’t help but feel that we are doomed to an inexorable slide into autocracy.  We fear that it will be ushered along by hapless handmaidens too insulated from the impact of their ineptitude to act until it’s too late, but we are not powerless.  As Ezra Levin of Indivisible reminds us, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had to overcome a 54 day filibuster.  If we want our senators to step up and protect democracy, we need to remind them who they work for.  We will need to make some noise and make them uncomfortable.  Summer is here.  It’s time to hit the streets.  Democracy depends on it.

#Indivisible.org

     We have long said that knowledge is power, but the ability to obscure, erase or bury facts that stand in the way of what you want to do is a power of its own.  The sunny optimism and complacency that is the American national character depends on that power.  The dark truth is that the maintenance of white supremacy is entirely dependent on a specific kind of ignorance.

       Our history is rife with examples of Americans clinging to that ignorance to maintain wealth, power and position.  Time after time, Americans deployed every tool in their arsenal to insist that their alternate reality be accepted as gospel.  Decaying urban neighborhoods were blamed on a Black “culture of poverty,” rather than official government policy that prohibited investment in Black neighborhoods, or an Interstate Highway System that systematically destroyed Black communities. Despite the fact that the first public schools in the South were established by Black people, who then waged a 50 year legal battle to regain access to those schools after Jim Crow, the so-called “achievement gap” is attributed to Black people not valuing education.

       Willful ignorance allows Americans to view the Black/white wealth gap as a puzzle to be solved by financial literacy classes for Black people.  They refuse to see it as the logical result of policy decisions that can only be addressed by an acknowledgment and an accounting of the cumulative impact of decades of the deliberate exclusion of Black domestics and farm workers from Social Security, Black Southern veterans from the G.I. Bill and Black families from buying homes in Levittown, (Source:  When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Katznelson, (W.W. Norton, 2006)).

      It is not simply that much of this country’s wealth was built on stolen land with stolen labor, although that is certainly true.  It is that whenever Black people achieved any economic prosperity or built thriving communities, white people destroyed them through state sanctioned violence.  It happened not only in Tulsa, but in Wilmington, North Carolina, Rosewood, Florida and Elaine, Arkansas.

     This is the history that the dozen states seeking to outlaw the teaching of critical race theory are trying to suppress, (Source:  “Nearly a dozen states want to ban critical race theory in schools,” by Caitlin O’Kane, CBSNews.com, 5/20/21).  Despite relentless demagoguery by Fox News, “critical race theory,” is not being taught in elementary schools.  Critical race theory is the name coined by 

legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw for the “practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society.” It “acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation and the imposition of second class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation,” (Source:  “A Lesson on Critical Race Theory,” by Janel George, Human Rights Magazine, American Bar Association, 1/12/21).

     Thursday night’s Republican filibuster of the bipartisan bill to establish a commission to investigate the January 6th terrorist attack is the apotheosis of ignorance as policy and political strategy.  Those stonewalling further inquiry know that an investigation will show that pernicious white nationalism was the animating force behind the insurrection, white nationalism that they stoked with their misdirection and lies.  Remember that violence, silence and ignorance is the three legged stool that props up white supremacy.  We would do well to remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  It’s the only thing that can.