How Trump Remade the Republican Party in His Image – Featured Stories – Medium by Jennifer Victor

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How Trump Remade the Republican Party in His Image – Featured Stories – Medium
Jennifer Victor
5-7 minutes

Donald Trump is shattering our political norms, and his party is falling right into step.

Whether he is defying subpoenas, rejecting the findings of the U.S. intelligence community, or unilaterally withdrawing from international treaties, Trump has a history of breaking from the conventions associated with the American presidency. Why does Congress tolerate this behavior? Or more specifically, why don’t Republican Senators challenge the President when he defies values that have been long associated with the presidency?

While Trump remains relatively unpopular — his overall approval rating hovers somewhere in the 40th percentile and has never topped 46% — his popularity among Republicans is around 90%. With strong support from his own party, it is unsurprising that his co-partisans in the Senate would remain loyal. On the other hand, as former president Bill Clinton’s improprieties came to light, he began to lose support among Democrats, and the same is true for Republicans during the Richard Nixon impeachment (although neither lost the total support of their party). But Trump, by some standards, has already been shown to have violated more norms (or maybe laws) than Nixon or Clinton did, and remains steadfastly supported by nearly all Republicans. Why?

A look back at Trump’s road to the White House can help explain his ability to withstand scrutiny. Trump ran as an outsider in 2016 and took advantage of a lack of policy coherence in the Republican Party. When he won the Republican nomination, and then the White House, he became the leader of the party. As its leader, he commands immense power to shape the party and define what it stands for.

In essence, Trump did to the Republican Party what he’s done for his real estate properties around the world: First, he purchases or builds a property, then he boldly features the “TRUMP” name on the property, and promotes it as a high-end, exclusive product that everyone wants. This may or may not be a successful strategy in real estate (or steaks, or bottled water, or golf courses), but it is a highly unusual way to build or brand a political party.

Typically, a political party forms by various groups, interests, and activists forming a coalition to try to achieve some policy goals through winning elections. The “glue” of a party coalition is traditionally some coherent sense of policy objectives. Coalition partners do not have to fully agree on all the objectives, but they have to agree to share a label, a message, and a candidate (or several). That is how the modern Democratic coalition has been kept together.

Research by political scientists Matt Grossman and Dave Hopkins, however, has shown that the modern Republican and Democratic coalitions are not held together by the same type of glue. While Democrats are driven by policy goals, Republicans are drawn together by ideas and values.

The glue in the Republican coalition is fluid and amorphous. This is, in part, how Trump was able to co-opt the party — despite not being a loyal Republican partisan himself. Trump changed his personal political party affiliation six times between 1987 and 2012, oscillating between Republican, Independent, Democrat, and no party affiliation. He’s been a registered Republican only since 2012. While Trump is no tried-and-true, lifelong Republican, as its current leader, he is able to define the party to his advantage.

Traditionally, political parties provide members of Congress with the branding they need for reelection — think Democrats’ climate policies, or the Republican mantra of “family values.” With a party brand, Senators and House members who may not be well known as individuals can effectively communicate to their constituents what they stand for and how they’ll lead. In eras where weak parties have failed to definitively provide this brand signal, candidates relied on incumbency status to signal their competence for office.

However, recent political science research shows that the advantage members gained from incumbency alone is all but lost, so they need something else to clearly communicate to voters who they are and where they stand. Trump offers this branding to Republicans in spades. As a business entrepreneur, he has excelled in product promotion through sheer association with self-proclaimed excellence. If you’re a Republican, reelection-seeking Senator, this type of clear branding is exactly what you’re looking for.

There is nothing more valuable to a Senator seeking reelection than the ability to send a clear and strong signal to voters about where their partisan loyalties lie. Aligning with the President is the best possible way to do that, regardless of whether they agree with him on individual policy choices.

And so Republican members of Congress are beholden to support a President who embraces foreign dictators, coddles white supremacists, dehumanizes immigrants, and rejects international treaties. While some may support these activities, we should not assume they all do. We should, however, assume they all want, more than anything, to be as strongly associated with the Republican Party label as possible. Really, they are partisans first, and legislators second.

India’s Chilling Lesson for the Left The New Republic / by Siddhartha Deb

India’s Chilling Lesson for the Left
The New Republic / by Siddhartha Deb / 3h
Shortly after the election results in India last week that returned the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its leader, prime minister Narendra Modi, to power, a video began circulating on social media. Shared widely by Modi’s supporters, it purported to show a “millionaire Indian” celebrating Modi’s victory in New York City’s diamond district by throwing dollar bills into the air, westerners scrambling to pick up the money.

It turned out to be a hoax, one in an unending series of absurd claims through these elections, some of them emanating from Modi himself. Yet much about what Modi’s electoral victory means, for India and the world, can be inferred from this piece of dross: the peddling of falsehoods as truth, the unabashed celebration of wealth and profiteering, the idea that Modi’s enriched Indian fanboys now command respect from the west. That, in essence, is what counts in what is routinely called the world’s largest democracy.

This claustrophobic bubble of spectacle offers little breathing room for truth. The truth, however, is that amidst an electoral democracy involving 900 million adults, Modi’s rise exposes uncomfortable realities about both India and democracy, increasingly host to violent majoritarianism that itself is morphing into outright fascism.

For details of who Modi is, what the BJP is—for their connection to a shadowy paramilitary organization of Hindu supremacy that took its inspiration from European fascism in the twentieth century—I refer the reader to the essay I wrote for this magazine in May 2016. In the aftermath of its publication, I was subjected to a barrage of denouncements and threats via Indian social media, which seems to include paid thugs of the BJP as well as likeminded follower in both India and the Indian diaspora in the United States. One man said, on Twitter, that he would cut my finger off. And yet this was nothing compared to the routine threats of violence, sexual and otherwise, that women, minorities, and dissenters are subjected to in Modi’s increasingly intolerant India, where people have been lynched by mobs, assassinated by hitmen, arrested by the police on questionable pretexts, driven to suicide through threats and social pressure, and assaulted in judicial complexes, in full view of the police.

Despite the many signs of trouble in Modi’s India, the BJP retains an air of respectability. India’s elites—educated, urbanized, upper caste Hindus—are today either rabid Modi supporters or conveniently indifferent to his majoritarian menace. The powers of the west have embraced Modi too, despite his record, when chief minister of Gujarat, of unleashing a pogrom against Muslims in 2002, violence so egregious that the Bush administration felt compelled to cancel his visa. In 2014, Modi’s election as prime minister was greeted with eagerness, by Wall Street, by Silicon Valley, by American journalists and by Indian pundits, by people who otherwise tend to assure you of their liberalism and commitment to human rights while swirling their expensive wine. Modi wasn’t really an instigator of violence against minorities, they argued, as much as the leader India needed at this historical juncture, a neoliberal dynamo who could modernize the country, sweeping aside the vestiges of labor legislation.

Not only did Obama visit Modi in India, he wrote glowingly in Time magazine that Modi’s “life story—from poverty to prime minister—reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.” Then, because this was not enough, he invited Modi, in 2016, to address the joint houses of Congress. A few months later, Modi cancelled 90 per cent of the Indian banknotes in circulation, devastating the lives of poorest Indians, people who live largely in a cash economy.

Western admiration of Modi continues. Last week, even before the counting of the votes in India had been completed, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled “Why India Needs Modi.” The person who knows what India needs so well is Steven Rattner, financier and “counselor to the treasury secretary in the Obama administration.”

There is a lesson to be learnt here for everyone, but especially for those in the United States hoping for a regime change that might end the nightmare of the Trump presidency. If India’s electorate delivered a second term to Modi in spite of the breakdown in everyday life, riven by violence and accompanied by a collapsing economy—and in spite of India’s strong, anti-colonial tradition of leftism—the same can easily happen in the U.S.

Extreme majoritarianism—the sort that uses democracy to legitimize the subjugation of a country’s minorities—flourishes best in times of great turmoil. The history of twentieth-century fascism shows as much, although it also shows the labor-protecting legislation and welfare states that can arise out of that turmoil. But two decades of unchecked neoliberalism have eviscerated the social landscape and the idea of the welfare state, in India and elsewhere. This has been accompanied by the accelerating, catastrophic impact of climate change. Into this space, vacated by a dwindling left as well as a state devoted largely to protecting elites and their profit-making mechanisms (at the very moment when humanity needs to think of solidarity across hierarchies and borders, even across species) the BJP and its Hindutva allies have moved. They are the ones providing the underclasses with schooling and social services, offering the structure of their paramilitary organization and a simple, right-wing ideology that blends seamlessly into nationalism. For the classes living between the precariat and the elites such an identity-based political ideology seems to offer power, dominance, and the illusion of upward mobility, largely by suppressing minorities who fail to fit into the BJP’s Hindu nationalist vision.

The liberal opposition in India, led by the once-powerful Congress party, offers only a diluted version of this right-wing feast. In 2004, when the Indian electorate gave the parliament to the Congress party and its allies, they introduced few social programs, but squandered their chance by mainly continuing the BJP’s political and economic blueprint, from nationalist posturing over the restive Muslim-majority province of Kashmir to a neoliberal agenda that included kickbacks, handouts for corporations, and an unbridled assault on the poor, the indigenous, and the displaced.

All this, Modi and the BJP were capable of delivering in far greater scale, along with the added toxic dose of Hindu pride. As in Europe and the United States, the problem with liberals trying to compete with right-wing nationalists by moving right is that right-wing nationalists are far, far better at that game. The same pattern played out in 2016 in the United States when voters proved lukewarm on the centrist, banker wing of the Democratic Party represented by Hillary Clinton. It threatens to play out again as the American left lingers on arcane conversations about a Russian conspiracy and impeachment rhetoric, unable to find the moral courage to denounce Trump’s warmongering over Venezuela and Iran, or to support younger, feisty leftists like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar as they fend off right-wing attacks.

If that is the state of the opposition, with the centrist, Trump-lite, folksy figure of Joe Biden at the head of a field of 23 candidates, then the conclusion is foregone. Modi’s challengers failed because technocrats adopting a few nationalist talking points stand little chance against a right-wing leader adept at channeling a nation’s rage and resentment. Even the Congress party’s talk of inequality and inclusion was seen as just that: talk, short on courage, conviction, or any meaningful track record of addressing inequality and uncertainty in a structural manner—something American leftists also lack. Against such pallid fare, anything will do, even fake news and false messiahs, with millions of thumbs forwarding the image of dollar bills raining down on a street of diamonds.

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Arundhati Roy on India’s Elections: “A Mockery of What Democracy Is Supposed to Be” The New Republic / by Samuel Earle

Arundhati Roy on India’s Elections: “A Mockery of What Democracy Is Supposed to Be”
The New Republic / by Samuel Earle / 6h
“In India,” Arundhati Roy wrote in 2002, “if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a politician, you have every reason to be optimistic.” Roy was referring to Narendra Modi, the then-chief minister of Gujarat who had been implicated in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the state that killed at least 1,000 people. Modi has always maintained his innocence—implausibly so, in many eyes—but Roy’s assessment of his future proved prescient. Following India’s latest elections, which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won with an unprecedented landslide on a brazen message of Hindu supremacy, he is set for a second term as president—and is more powerful than ever.

As Roy puts it, the “world’s largest democracy”—a proud national epithet Roy places within scare quotes—exists in several centuries at once, caught between tradition, the caste system, and the chaos of turbo-charged capitalism. Modi embodies these contradictions more than most: a figure at once authentic and aspirational, promising both the glorious resurrection of Hindustan and neoliberal reforms; the mythical child chaiwala who now wears $16,000 suits.

Modi was not named in Roy’s long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published in 2017. But his vision of a Hindu nation haunted the book. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this,” she has said, “but if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of this novel is the idea of ‘one nation, one religion, one language,’” which is the slogan of Modi’s Hindutva ideology.

Though Roy first rose to fame for her fiction, winning the Man Booker Prize in 1997 with her debut novel The God of Small Things, she never wanted to be known, as she once said, as “some pretty woman who wrote a book.” Nor was she interested in becoming a cultural ambassador for the modern, “rising” India that has dominated the Western media’s characterization of the country in the 21st century. Today, Roy is known as much for her politics as for her fiction. She has been imprisoned and charged with sedition, joined Maoists in India’s jungle, and thrown her weight behind political movements across the globe. In June, she publishes her collected non-fiction, My Seditious Heart, a book that runs to over a thousand pages.

I recently spoke to Roy over email about the Indian election result, the meaning of Modi, and the role of a writer when—in her words—“the world is in a churning.” This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.

Amid all that’s changed in your writing and the world, Modi has always stood as a consistently terrifying figure within your work. Has the “tragedy” of his presidency played out how you expected, or has his leadership surprised you in some ways?

Modi’s first term played out in ways I expected as well as in ways that I did not. I did expect him to behave like a dedicated worker of the proto-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mothership of the BJP, dedicated to formally declaring India a Hindu nation. So, I expected the attack on the Muslim community, the demonization of Christians and communists, the drive to attack as well as co-opt and “Hinduize” Dalits. That went to script. I even expected (and anticipated in writing) a terrorist strike/war just before elections. I expected the embrace of big corporations, the privatization drive, but did not expect his policy of demonetization which he announced one night on TV, declaring that 90 percent of Indian currency was no longer legal tender. It dealt a hard blow to people—but it has not prevented them from coming out in numbers to vote for him again.

Modi is back once again, even bigger than before, worshipped like a deity. It’s fascinating psychology—pain turned into pleasure for the sake of the “nation.”  It is a formidable victory—enabled by voters across castes, classes, regions, and ethnicity.

“Modi is back once again, even bigger than before, worshipped like a deity.”
In his victory speech to the thousands chanting his name he said two very frightening things—first, that the 2019 election marked the official death of secularism in India. Not a single political party dared to campaign under the banner of being secular, he said. He was more than right—the main opposition party, the Congress Party, did not have the nerve to mention the word “Muslim” for fear of being labelled “Muslim-lovers.” So, the lynching, the massacres of Muslims were all airbrushed out of the story. Majoritarianism—Hindu nationalism won the day.

Second, Modi declared that this election proved that by soundly defeating parties that claimed to represent the “lower” castes, the BJP had defeated caste. The only two castes he recognized, he said, were the poor and those who work to end poverty. So, while socially, the BJP thrives on portraying The Enemy in economic terms, apparently, there are no enemies. In a country where nine people own the combined wealth of the bottom 500 million—the rich are missionaries. This is a terrifying view. And having been re-elected and achieving God-status by throwing crumbs to the poor, a gas cylinder to rural families stalked by hunger, a gift of 2000 rupees (30 dollars) to farmers deep in debt and committing suicide in their hundreds of thousands, by arming millions of jobless youth with nothing but vicious rhetoric, Modi has earned himself the right to continue with the economic policies that created this problem.

By claiming that there are no more castes except the poor and those who want to alleviate poverty, he is claiming that he and the RSS have done what Dr B.R Ambedkar, a pioneering advocate for Dalits, could not—they have annihilated caste. This is an extremely disturbing statement. Because, as Ambedkar said—Hindusim is caste. What the RSS-BJP has done in this election is to reinforce caste—to work with caste divisions, exploit the material contradictions between castes and sub-castes, and pit them against each other with mathematical precision.

It seems he has effectively redefined the political center in his image. Do you see ways of challenging this “new normal” over his next term?

In the days after he was elected, following some harsh criticism in the international press, Modi made a speech in which he spoke about protecting minorities and upholding the Indian constitution. He more or less directly contradicted what he himself and his senior colleagues had said the previous day. This sort of expediency is pure RSS tactics. Interestingly, the deification of Modi has overshadowed the idea of the BJP as a party. Its massive wealth, its party machinery, have all been harnessed to the crowning of the monarch. There is a ridiculous hagiographic Modi bio-pic, full of falsehood, that has just been released. No doubt it will contribute to his deification. But despite all this, Modi can only be the monarch for as long as the RSS wants him to occupy the throne. RSS-rule is the new normal.

You ask how this can be challenged. At this moment, in northern India, most of the other political parties are in shambles. The Congress has been vanquished, the Communists destroyed, the political parties that identify themselves as Dalit/backward caste parties have been more or less decimated. On the whole, the opposition parties behaved pettily and arrogantly with each other, diminishing each other while their ship went down. Hopefully they are asking themselves some serious questions.

“The opposition parties behaved pettily and arrogantly with each other, diminishing each other while their ship went down.”
The RSS has about 600,000 disciplined, highly trained cadres it can deploy. The others have almost none. This time around the BJP had 20 times more money than all of them put together. Next time that will probably become 50 times more money. And certainly, elections in India are more and more about money, about spectacle, about controlling the mainstream media and social media. Every institution in this country was bent to their will, including the Election Commission and, who knows, perhaps the electronic voting machines. That money bought them tens of thousands of IT experts, data analysts, social media activists who ran thousands of Whatsapp groups with carefully directed propaganda—tailored and tweaked for every section, region, caste, and class, every voting booth in every constituency.

That kind of money can sell anything it decides to sell—in this case a product so toxic, it created an epidemic. Not a single thing of importance, not climate change, not the looming economic crisis, not health, not education was a part of the campaign. Nothing except toxic, medieval stupidity on an epic scale. How can we treat this as a fair election? It was a race between a Ferrari and a few bicycles—and the media cheered the Ferrari as though they hadn’t noticed anything unusual. And now lathers it with praise while it mocks the bicycles for their poor performance.

So, what are the avenues that remain to challenge this formation? Existing political parties in this particular model of first-past-the-post democracy will not easily be able to take on this formidable, money-filled hate-filled machine. I believe that peoples’ rage will one day break the machine. I’m not talking about a revolution. I’m talking about an outbreak, the re-emergence of non NGO-ized social movements. It will come. And that will create new energy and a new kind of opposition that cannot be managed. We will have to play a new game—one that has not been fixed like this one has. This election in India, that is being hailed as a great exercise in democracy, is the opposite—just a mockery of what democracy is supposed to be.

Do you see the BJP’s success as of a piece with other recent nationalist convulsions in places like Britain, America, and Brazil?

I think it is very much of a piece with prevailing nationalist convulsions. Although in India the RSS has been conscientiously working towards this moment for 95 years. It has systems in place that no other current fascists or white supremacists do.

In 2009, you dedicated a collection of your essays to those who have “learned to divorce hope from reason.” What’s hope and reason’s relationship like now? Are there any signs of a reunion on the cards?

I practiced that doctrine during the run-up to the elections. While all the pundits predicted a win for the BJP [with a reduced majority], some of us insisted they would lose. I said so publicly, because I felt the certainty of the outcome needed to be punctured. There were those who dreaded the victory of the BJP who publicly predicted they would sweep to victory. It was probably meant to advertise the fact that they had their finger on the pulse of “the people.” It was no great shakes to feel the pulse. It was all around us. But those doleful predictions only added to the propaganda, to the sense of inevitability. So those of us who had learned to divorce hope from reason stubbornly insisted that the opposition would win, that they had secret pacts and clever strategies. But it is precisely that kind of mad hope that will eventually make people rise up against this nightmare. So yes, hope divorced from reason. And add to that, defiance divorced from reason. That’s what we need.

India’s mindset seems increasingly militarized, and Modi did his best to drum up this sentiment during his election campaign, aligning himself with the armed forces and stoking fears of purported “enemies of the nation.” What is the place of a writer—especially one with a “seditious heart”—in such an atmosphere?

Ha! Tenuous I’d say, and extremely dangerous. Because we have been reduced to a situation in which even those opposed to Hindu nationalism are weakly offering up various brands of “better” Hinduism and better nationalism. Our brains are being shrink-wrapped in the national flag. The attack, not on intellectuals, but on any form of intelligence is going to be ferocious. While politicians, corporate CEOs, and their service-partners in the media are millionaires and billionaires—wealthy beyond the realm of imagination—students, professors, writers, independent journalists are being targeted as elitist “anti-nationals.”

“The attack on universities, on intelligence itself, is on hand.”

“Elite” is the stand-in word for anybody of above-average intelligence who harbors non-servile instincts. Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, and Ram Madhav, the general secretary, issued their un-adorned threats on day one. Amit Shah, from the victory pulpit on the very night the results were declared; Ram Madhav, in a newspaper column the next day called “The Leader is the Truth,” in which he said that the “remnants” of the “pseudo-secular/liberal cartels that held a disproportionate sway and stranglehold over the intellectual and policy establishment of the country” needed to be “discarded” from the country’s “cultural and intellectual landscape.” Age-old, straight-up, fascist-speak. In this second term, they will try and finish what they started five years ago—the shut-down of any real learning, real scholarship, real thinking, real art. The attack on universities, on intelligence itself, is on hand.

You’ve always refuted those who try to impose a distinction between your “art” and your “activism,” saying “writer” will suffice. Is this constraint—where serious, active engagement with the world is put beyond the remit of a writer—something you feel more strongly in India?

No, actually not. I feel it more strongly in Europe and America, where I used to sense a sort of smug complacency—an assumption that there were no more questions—there was no better aspiration other than to strive to be like them. I think that is changing now—destabilization has set in. Great fears have arisen. Big questions are once again being asked. The whole world is in a churning. Art and literature will reflect that.

Language, in the broadest sense, has become a focal point in your thought—its pluralities, its possibilities, its political perversions. Is this partly a response to the Hindutva doctrine of “one nation, one language, one religion”—a doctrine which all nationalists share—or is language simply the natural terrain of a writer?

It’s the natural terrain of this country—this complexity. And naturally, being a writer, I delight in it. The funniest part of the Hindu Nationalists’ “one language, one religion, one nation” doctrine— known here as “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”—is that all those three words are actually Persian words. But more seriously, in a region where there are 780 spoken languages, 20 of which are recognized by the Indian Constitution, can you imagine the violence of that doctrine? Then you have the English-speaking elite who routinely accuse each other (in English) of being English-speaking elite, you have the upper-caste non-English speaking elite who send their children to English-medium schools, but want to deny the poor the right to learn a language that will give them opportunities that they would not otherwise have.

Finally, over the course of your life you’ve expressed yourself across many different mediums, including fiction, film, plays, reportage, essays, even acting and architecture. Is there a form—or a setting, a time, a place—where you feel most at home?

I’m a story-teller. I think in stories. They are my home. My true love.

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Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter? The New Republic / by Scott Lemieux

Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter?
The New Republic / by Scott Lemieux / 6h
Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter? | The New Republic
This is not to say that it will be all smooth sailing. Having a buffoon in the Oval Office without any expertise or long-standing policy commitments will make it harder to prevail in the most important battle of the next year, over the future of the Affordable Care Act. There will be times when Republicans overreach and fail. But unlike the Democratic Congress under Carter, they know what they want to do and will do a lot of it. A lot more of an ideological agenda will be accomplished by this Congress than under a typical disjunctive presidency, which tends to entail broadly popular compromises or stasis.

Another flaw in slotting Trump as a disjunctive president is that it implies that we’re still in the Reagan regime and that Barack Obama was a preemptive president. Azari doesn’t directly address the issue at much length. But the political scientist Corey Robin, in his intriguing piece in n+1 making the Carter-Trump connection, argues that “we are now reaching the end of the fourth decade of the Reagan regime,” asserting that Obama is a preemptive president, like Bill Clinton.

The problem here is that the “preemptive” label just doesn’t fit the facts. Obama’s signature domestic achievements—increasing taxes on the wealthy to pay for benefits for the poor and middle class, substantially expanding both regulation and public expenditure through the Affordable Care Act, enacting wide-ranging stimulus through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and tightening regulation of the financial industry through the Dodd-Frank Act—are all ambitious statutes, squarely within the New Deal/Great Society tradition.

While 20 years ago Democrats would have reacted to electoral defeat by moving to the right, most signs indicate that the party will continue to move left.
There are strong arguments that all of these laws were compromised by the need to win support of unsavory vested interests and/or Republican senators, and didn’t go far enough. But, of course, the same was true of the New Deal. Particularly when you also consider Obama’s aggressive use of the regulatory state on issues such as the environment, labor rights, and immigration, his governing posture was very different from Clinton’s embrace of the dictum that the “era of big government is over.”

Typically, the minority party facing a dominant regime moves towards this regime. But if this is still Reagan’s regime, the opposite has been happening with the Democratic Party. Obama campaigned to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2008. Clinton campaigned to the left of Obama in 2016 (and far to the left of her husband’s actually preemptive 1992 and 1996 campaigns). While 20 years ago Democrats would have reacted to electoral defeat by moving to the right, most signs indicate that the party will continue to move left.

Obama was neither a preemptive president nor a reconstructive one. Instead, we are in a political space in which there is no dominant regime. Two ideologically coherent parties—one increasingly committed to expanding the New Deal and the Great Society, one to inflict the crushing blows to it Reagan and Bush couldn’t—are becoming increasingly polarized. The same factors that are almost certain to cause the Supreme Court to lurch dramatically to the left or right when the median vote changes hands will also mean that narrowly decided elections will carry increasingly large consequences if there is unified government and hopeless gridlock when there isn’t.

And it’s likely that this post-regime politics will persist for a while. The Democrats, having won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, have a viable electoral coalition. Despite nominating an unpopular candidate facing unique headwinds, the party won three million more votes for its most progressive program in decades. Meanwhile, while it’s a minority coalition nationally, Republicans will remain competitive because of the federal system and skewed apportionment in both houses of Congress. The Democratic Party may well be able to defeat Trump after one term and even stop important parts of the Ryan-McConnell agenda—but even if they do, their opponents aren’t going anywhere. The 21st century figures to be characterized by intense polarization, not by the rise and fall of dominant regimes.

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Feel no pity for Theresa May. She has been the worst prime minister in modern times | Owen Jones

theguardian.com
Feel no pity for Theresa May. She has been the worst prime minister in modern times | Owen Jones
Owen Jones
8-10 minutes

Spare me the inevitable pity for Theresa May after her tearful farewell address this morning. “Oh, wasn’t she given such a terrible hand!”, people might cry, or “is it her fault that her backbenchers are such a bunch of Neanderthal extremists?”, and “it’s not her fault Brexit is such an undeliverable mess, is it?”. We must see through this. May is the worst prime minister – on their own terms – since Lord North’s reign in the late 18th century, when the US colonies declared their independence.

May did indeed inherit a terrible hand. She then proceeded to douse it liberally with petrol and set it alight.

Let’s start with Brexit. The official leave campaigns, and their vitriol about migrants and refugees, merely built on the foundations laid by a home secretary who sent “go home” vans around mixed communities, who spread pernicious myths of being unable to deport illegal migrants because they owned a pet cat, and under whose watch gay refugees felt obliged to film themselves having sex to avoid deportation. There is only one discernible consistency in May’s ideology – and that is bashing migrants.

When she became prime minister, May and her coterie of advisers – defined by a swagger and bravado that would swiftly become hubris – hungrily set their eyes on devouring Ukip’s voting tally in the 2015 election in order to hand the Tories the landslide victory they’d been denied for three decades. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” became her defining mantra, raising expectations to impossible levels and conferring respectability, desirability even, on a disastrous Brexit outcome: the chutzpah, then, of quoting Nicholas Winton when he said, “compromise is not a dirty word”, in her farewell speech.

Her allies in the media set about monstering her opponents, poisoning the well of political discourse: the notorious “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE” Daily Mail front page was penned by James Slack, who promptly became her press secretary. The May premiership will be remembered for creating an environment where terms like “traitor” and “saboteur” became commonplace. She, too, deliberately stoked a culture war that threatens to consume Britain, most notoriously in her demagogic “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” speech. She appointed Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, antagonising the EU states with whom she needed to strike a deal and reducing Britain further to the status of a laughing stock.

For purely domestic partisan gain, she repeatedly made inflammatory speeches about the EU that achieved nothing but fostered bad will. Her chancellor, Philip Hammond, made threats that if Britain did not get what it wanted, the government would undercut the EU in a race to the bottom of tax cuts and deregulation. This was not just a commitment to repeal the hard-won rights and freedoms of the British people, but a near declaration of war on what are supposed to be Britain’s partners. But whatever her demagoguery, whatever her laughable empty platitudes of a “red, white and blue Brexit”, May had no meaningful plan at all, other than undeliverable red lines. She couldn’t negotiate a deal with her own party, let alone with 27 foreign governments.

Holding back tears, May ended her speech describing “the enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love”, but her real commitment was only to her party. She promised over and over again that she would not call a general election, but believing she had the opportunity to obliterate her opposition and turn Britain into a de facto one-party state, she broke her word. Deceit and dishonesty were the hallmarks of her doomed reign. When the Tories had their majority snatched away, May became a zombie prime minister: sadly, as any avid watcher of the genre can testify, zombies can cause a lot of damage, and are very hard to dispose of.
As Theresa May resigns, how will she be remembered? – video

Having hyped up “no deal is better than a bad deal”, May led Britain to the entirely predictable humiliation of a bad deal. That her party’s zealots increasingly embraced pushing Britain off the precipice was unsurprising: she kept throwing them red meat, and they had only grown fatter and hungrier.

But it’s not just Brexit, for we must judge a prime minister by her own promises. When she fatefully assumed the premiership, she declared war on the “burning injustices” she correctly identified had paved the road to Brexit. And then, in the subsequent three years, she oversaw the biggest jump in child poverty for three decades; a housing crisis which has only worsened; the rollout of a universal credit system which is a life-destroying disaster. The Grenfell fire will endure as a reminder of a social order built by Toryism which prioritises money over human life. The Windrush scandal – in which British citizens were denied medical care, kicked out of their homes and even deported from their own country – will remain a salutary lesson of where the migrant-baiting May promoted leads. The surge in violent crime will always testify to the disastrous consequences of the austerity May herself championed.

And however more insular Britain has become, let’s not forget May’s foreign policy record, either: whether it be selling weapons to Turkey’s murderous regime, or arming and backing a Saudi dictatorship that has rained British weapons on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of innocents and creating the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. If you wish to spend a moment expending valuable human sympathy, do it not for May – do it for them.

The only leeway I will give May is this. With Britain in turmoil, it will be so easy for the Tory party to claim this is all on her; to treat her as a human sponge, soaking up all the blame. But to paraphrase George Osborne – himself one of the chief architects of the chaos of our time – they are all in this together. They all imposed cuts that ripped up our social infrastructure and fuelled discontent and anger. They all whipped up resentment against migrants for the “burning injustices” they, and their party’s wealthy bankrollers, were responsible for. They all promoted an ideology which prioritises markets ahead of human needs and aspirations.

The May era was a time of chaos; but something worse now beckons. Until Britain is rid of being ruled by a disintegrating Tory party – the proximate cause of our ills – and a rotten social order that decays further with every passing day, then the turmoil will not only continue but deepen. What a legacy to leave.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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A Presidency That Will Live in Infamy The New Republic / by Matt Ford /

A Presidency That Will Live in Infamy
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 39min
The House Judiciary Committee convened on Tuesday without its star witness. Don McGahn, the former White House counsel and a key witness in the Mueller report, refused to appear after President Trump ordered him not to testify. New York Representative Jerry Nadler, the committee’s Democratic chairman, told the assembled lawmakers and spectators that congressional subpoenas “are not optional.” He also condemned Trump in some of his strongest language yet.

“I believe that each of these incidents, documented in detail in the Mueller report, constitutes a crime,” he told the committee. “But for the Department of Justice’s policy of refusing to indict a sitting president, I believe he would have been charged with these crimes.” The hearing, which largely focused on an empty chair, still received wall-to-wall coverage from news networks and political journalists.

The president’s misdeeds surrounding the Russia investigation can’t be ignored. A tragedy of the Trump era, however, is that it’s hard to know which episodes of wrongdoing to prioritize. Foremost among them should be the Trump administration’s handling of the desperate, vulnerable people crossing the southern border. The inhumane treatment of these migrants is not an impeachable crime, but it may prove to be the deepest scar his presidency leaves on the nation.

The most visceral evidence is the death of young migrants in U.S. custody. On Monday, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez became the fifth Guatemalan minor since December to die after being taken into U.S. custody at the border. Customs and Border Protection officials did not announce the 16-year-old’s cause of death, though a U.S. nurse reportedly diagnosed him with the flu over the weekend. Other migrant children who’ve died in U.S. custody recently also reportedly had infections or flu-like illnesses, raising questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security is doing enough to ensure the health of detained minors.

As for the adults in its custody, the department has held an untold number of them in cruel and unusual conditions. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained more than 8,400 incident reports from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within DHS, about migrants put in solitary confinement in recent years. Officials placed many of those migrants in isolation for months and weeks at a time, even though the United Nations recommends no more than 15 days. The rationales ranged from hunger strikes and disciplinary measures to consensual kissing and having a physical disability. And ICIJ found that nearly a third of those placed in solitary had a mental illness, even though the U.N. says the mentally ill should never occur be subjected to solitary.

It’s well established that solitary confinement can be mentally and physically debilitating. In 2015, Justice Anthony Kennedy denounced the practice after hearing a case about a prisoner kept in solitary for 23 hours a day for more than 25 years. “Research still confirms what this court suggested over a century ago,” he wrote, referencing an 1890 case on the matter. “Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price.” Kennedy was even more blunt during a congressional budget hearing earlier that year. “Solitary confinement literally drives men mad,” he told lawmakers.

The ICE reports provide haunting proof of Kennedy’s assertion. “Records reviewed by ICIJ describe detainees in isolation mutilating their genitals, gouging their eyes, cutting their wrists and smearing their cells with feces,” the organization reported. “The review found that while held in isolation cells, immigrants had suffered hallucinations, fits of anger and suicidal impulses.” A DHS whistleblower told ICIJ that she believes ICE’s approach to solitary confinement “rises to the point of torture.”

While it’s true that federal resources are stretched thin by the arrival of thousands of migrant families, the Trump administration’s response has veered toward cruelty over compassion whenever possible. Last month, the president groused that border agents and military personnel couldn’t “get tough” without consequences. “When you do all of these things that we have to do, they end up arresting Border Patrol people,” Trump complained to Fox Business Network. He also reportedly offered pardons to U.S. immigration officials last month if they ignored judicial orders.

Some rank-and-file officials are receiving the president’s signals. Federal prosecutors in Arizona released dozens of racist and inflammatory text messages this week sent by Border Patrol agent Matthew Bowen. The 39-year-old agent faces criminal charges for knocking down a Guatemalan man with his car in November 2017 and lying about it to his superiors. In the texts, Bowen describes migrants as “disgusting subhuman s--- unworthy of being kindling for a fire” and wrote “PLEASE let us take the gloves off trump!”

Bowen’s lawyer defended his client’s text messages in court filings by writing that the sentiments are “commonplace throughout the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector” and “part of the agency’s culture.” The lawyer later told The Washington Post that he was specifically referring to an exchange where Bowen used the word “tonk,” which some agents insist is a harmless acronym but others say is an onomatopoeic slur—“tonk” being the sound an agent’s flashlight makes when it hits a migrant’s skull. His assertion about cultural problems seems accurate, though: Some of Bowen’s texts came from exchanges with another officer who was later acquitted on murder charges after shooting migrants through a border fence.

In the wake of last year’s family separation crisis, I wrote that migrant families broken up by the Trump administration’s malice and cruelty should receive some form of compensation from the United States for their suffering. Those reparations, like those given to Japanese-American internment survivors in the 1980s and those proposed for African-Americans, should also come with a deeper reckoning of what happened and how it happened.

Trump’s cavalcade of scandals means that such a reckoning is nowhere near imminent. Instead, all but a few Republicans have rallied around the president, defending him against Democrats who, while agreeing that he’s a threat to American democracy, disagree on what to do about it. These political dynamics have consumed Washington and the national media, obscuring an ongoing crisis in which deeply immoral acts—torture, even—are being committed on a regular basis.

Those, on both sides of the aisle, who have kept quiet out of political expediency will live to regret their silence. The negligent deaths and enduring trauma that spring from Trump’s abusive policies toward migrants won’t just define his legacy. They will haunt the American conscience for decades to come.

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Corporate America Is Terrified of the Green New Deal The New Republic / by Emily Atkin

Corporate America Is Terrified of the Green New Deal

The New Republic / by Emily Atkin / 30min

There is a “major shift” afoot in corporate America on climate change, according to Axios. On Monday, energy reporter Amy Harder reported that major companies “across virtually all sectors of the economy, including big oil producers, are beginning to lobby Washington, D.C., to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions.” These companies, in other words, are asking the government to make them pay more in taxes in an effort to solve global warming.

It’s not as surprising as it sounds. For several years now, the heads of oil companies like Suncor and ExxonMobil and BP have been publicly calling for a carbon tax, in which the government would charge polluters for every ton of climate-warming gases they emit. They’re doing this because a carbon tax, as a market-based policy rather than a mandated regulation, is the most business-friendly solution being floated in Washington.

It is notable, though, that such companies are ramping up their advocacy for a carbon tax. Three separate corporate efforts to lobby Congress on the policy have picked up steam in the last month, Harder wrote: “The nonprofit Ceres, which works on sustainable investments, is organizing a lobbying push this week withmore than 75 companies, including BP, Microsoft and Tesla.” A group called “CEO Climate Dialogue,” made up of 13 Fortune 500 companies, also launched this week. And another lobbying group called “Americans for Carbon Dividends” was recently promised $1 million from two oil companies.

So why are corporations so passionate about a carbon? “It’s not really about saving the planet,” Harder noted. Indeed, in the face of growing public support for climate action, these companies increasingly realize they need to throw their weight behind some kind of climate policy. They want a carbon tax because it doesn’t threaten the industry’s very existence, and allows them to keep polluting—so long as they pay for it.

But a carbon tax isn’t just corporate America’s favorite option; it’s the only option. The only serious mainstream alternative to a carbon tax is terrifying to corporations: an aggressive climate plan that doesn’t cooperate with polluters, but seeks to put them out of business.

A carbon tax does not appear in the Green New Deal—at least, not the version popularized by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. It doesn’t appear in Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s $5 trillion planto fight global warming. Even Washington Governor Jay Inslee—who is running for president explicitly on climate change and who spent his career trying to enact a fee on carbon—doesn’t include a carbon tax in his $9 trillion climate jobs plan.

There are many reasons for the absence of a tax in these plans, but the main one appears to be that it doesn’t guarantee emissions reductions. Democrats are starting to realize that drastic action is necessary to prevent catastrophe, and a carbon tax simply isn’t drastic enough.

To keep global warming in check, the economy needs to be completely decarbonized by the year 2050—and the changes that will get us there need to be in place in the next 11 years. Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have said they’re open to including a carbon tax in the Green New Deal, but that it’s insufficient to reach that goal. “It’s certainly possible to argue that, if we had put in place targeted regulations and progressively increasing carbon and similar taxes several decades ago, the economy could have transformed itself by now,” stated the draft textof their Green New Deal resolution. “But whether or not that is true, we did not do that, and now time has run out.”

Instead, the main strategy must be to convert the economy to clean energy and—eventually—to wipe out fossil fuels. As Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesperson told Politico in February, allowing the fossil fuel industry to persist is “not what we’re shooting for.”

By not including a carbon tax, O’Rourke and Inslee’s plans echo the Green New Deal’s reasoning, even if they don’t say it explicitly: We can’t trust corporations to solve the climate crisis themselves. “What is needed to avert the climate crisis is a massive restructuring and mobilization,” Benjamin Finnegan, a Green New Deal advocate with the nonprofit Sunrise Movement, has said. “An overhaul of our economy and society the likes of which has not been seen since World War II.”

That overhaul increasingly looks like it will be mandatory, not cooperative—unless a more moderate Democratic candidate comes out with a climate plan centered around a carbon tax. Even Joe “middle ground” Biden hasn’t done so. But that’s precisely why polluting corporations are now spending millions to lobby for one.

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Why Milkshaking Works The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Why Milkshaking Works
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 15min
The biggest topic in British political circles on Monday wasn’t the country’s impending departure from the European Union. It was milkshakes—or, rather, one milkshake in particular that was lobbed by a bystander in Newcastle at Nigel Farage, a Brexit Party candidate in the European Parliament elections later this week.

Farage, the spiritual leader of the Brexit movement, quickly used the lactic confrontation to blame politicians who oppose him. “Sadly some remainers have become radicalised, to the extent that normal campaigning is becoming impossible,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after the incident. “For a civilised democracy to work you need the losers consent, politicians not accepting the referendum result have led us to this.”

The former UKIP Leader isn’t alone. In recent weeks, other far-right figures running for European Parliament seats have been met with dairy-centric direct action. Anti-racist protesters have targeted Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defense League, with milkshakes on multiple occasions. Carl Benjamin, an alt-right YouTube personality who said last month he “wouldn’t even rape” a woman running against him, has been milkshaked (milkshaken?) four times in the past week.

Throwing a milkshake at someone is rude at worst. It may also qualify as assault in some jurisdictions, especially in the United States. British political and media figures condemned the incidents. Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said that politicians “should be able to go about their work and campaign without harassment, intimidation and abuse.” Tim Farron, the leader of the pro-Europe Liberal Democrats, said, “I’m not laughing along with the attack on Farage. Violence and intimidation are wrong no matter who they’re aimed at. On top of that, it just makes the man a martyr, it’s playing into his hands.”

What these critiques misunderstand is why milkshaking is so potent against Farage and his brethren: It humiliates them. Nothing animates the far right or shapes its worldview quite so much as the desire to humiliate others—and the fear of being humiliated themselves. It’s why alt-right trolls, projecting their own sexual insecurities, enjoy calling their opponents “cucks.” It’s why they rally around blustery authoritarian figures like Donald Trump who cast themselves as beyond embarrassment, shame, or ridicule. They brandish humiliation like a weapon while craving release from it.

Getting doused in a milkshake robs far-right figures of the air of chauvinistic invulnerability that they spend so much time cultivating. They hunger to be taken seriously despite their racist views. They want to be described as dapper, to be interviewed on evening news broadcasts and weekend talk-show panels, and to be seen as a legitimate participant in the democratic process. Most politicians to the left of Enoch Powell would brush off a milkshaking as a harmless stunt. For those seeking mainstream legitimacy, it’s another searing reminder that they don’t belong.

That’s why so many on Britain’s far-right fringes are using the phrase “political violence” to describe milkshaking. It’s true that it qualifies in the most technical sense of the term—it’s political and it’s violent. But the descriptor is a gross exaggeration, especially in the country where a far-right gunman assassinated Jo Cox, a Labour member of Parliament, shortly before the Brexit referendum three years ago. (When the results came in, Farage quipped that the Leave movement had won “without a single bullet being fired.”) Its usage almost seems designed to dilute the term’s significance and meaning.

Behind the terminology also lies an implicit threat: Political violence will be met with political violence. “I’m strongly warning against normalizing political violence,” Kurt Schlicter, a Townhall columnist, wrote on Twitter. “I find it especially unwise considering the side being attacked has the vast majority of people who are good at violence.” Former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam warned that the far right had “kept its collective cool” over the past few years, but with enough milkshakes, “they’ll start doing things back.” Katie Hopkins, a far-right British polemicist, placed milkshaking in the same category as acid attacks and stabbings.

The overreaction to milkshaking, and the British establishment’s handwringing over it, recalls a similar debate in the United States two years ago over Antifa. The anonymous leftist movement rose to national prominence in 2017 for its willingness to physically confront white nationalists when they appeared in public. Perhaps the most famous incident came during Trump’s inauguration when a masked figure sucker-punched Richard Spencer during an on-camera interview. The clip quickly became a meme on Twitter, one shared widely among those hostile towards Spencer’s views.

Spencer, who calls for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of the United States, told The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood a few months later that he has “a right as a citizen to walk the streets and not be attacked, and I have the right to be protected.” Wood wrote that Spencer “sounded vulnerable” after the experience. He told the journalist that he suffered a ruptured eardrum in the attack. Antifa protesters later sparred with far-right demonstrators during protests in Berkeley, at anti-racist rallies in Boston, and outside the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Commentators debated over whether it was okay to “punch Nazis.” New York magazine’s Jesse Singal argued that violence against white nationalists would feed into their narrative of victimization and ultimately strengthen them in the long run. The Boston Globe’s Cathy Young warned that Nazi-punching “is likely to lead to escalation of political violence across the board.”

These predictions have not borne fruit. While there are multiple factors behind the decline in white-nationalist rallies and marches, their fear of public clashes with Antifa appears to be one of them. The Unite the Right sequel rally last August drew fewer than two dozen people to a public square in Washington, D.C. They were faced with thousands of local counter-protesters, as well as a few dozen masked members of Antifa. The effect was intimidating and profound.

What the far right fears more than anything else isn’t a defeat at the ballot box or a temporary setback in policymaking. It’s the sting of shame that comes from being humiliated in public. I personally oppose violence in all forms, so I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to throw a milkshake at the nearest racist I encounter. But I don’t need to believe in it to recognize how effective it is at shaming the far right.

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Who Actually Wants War Criminals Pardoned? The New Republic / by Adam Weinstein

Who Actually Wants War Criminals Pardoned?

The New Republic / by Adam Weinstein / 3h

On first glance, it’s hard to see who would support pardons for these men.

Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher was reported to his commanders by seven of the Navy SEALs who served under him in Iraq, where they witnessed him “[s]tabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death. Picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost. Indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire.” A search of Gallagher’s cell phone found exactly what his SEALs said it would: grisly photos of Gallagher posing with the prone body of a 15-year-old suspected ISIS fighter that Gallagher had stabbed to death, after the boy had been captured and given medical aid. Gallagher’s superiors warned those reporting him that they would be endangering their careers, but they pressed on. His court-martial is set to begin on May 28.

Nicholas Slatten, a former Blackwater security contractor, was convicted of murder—twice—for his leading role in the private security company’s 2007 fatal shooting of 10 women, two children, and two men in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The massacre, which injured more than a dozen other bystanders, endangered U.S. efforts to build trust with the nascent Iraqi government, and highlighted private security contractors’ impunity and lack of accountability in U.S. war zones.

Matthew Golsteyn, a decorated Green Beret, narrowly avoided being charged when he admitted in a 2011 CIA job interview that he’d killed a captured man in Afghanistan whom he suspected of being a Taliban bombmaker. Five years later, Golsteyn got on Fox News and told Bret Baier that he had shot the man. The Army reopened an investigation, recalled Golsteyn to active duty, and charged Golsteyn with premeditated murder.

In 2012, a video went viral on YouTube showing a group of Marines gleefully urinating on the corpses of suspected enemy fighters in Afghanistan. “Have a great day, buddy,” one Marine could be heard saying as the desecration went on. The video inflamed international opinion against the U.S. Eighth Marines who were ultimately reprimanded; three pleaded guilty in a special court-martial and were demoted.

These are some, but possibly not all, of the suspected and confirmed war criminals that President Donald Trump reportedly now seeks to pardon, a week after pardoning Matthew Behenna, who had been serving 15 years in prison for killing an Iraqi prisoner. (Behenna had been ordered to return the man home, but instead took him to a culvert, stripped his clothes, interrogated him, and then shot the naked man dead “in self defense.”) Two U.S. officials confirmed to The New York TimesSunday that Trump requested the paperwork for these men with an eye to pardoning them by Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for American service members who died in war.

The vetting process for prospective pardonees normally takes months, not a week; it normally originates in the Justice Department, not the White House; it normally pardons convicts, not accused criminals awaiting trial. It does not normally fast-track military operators who are accused of murder by seven of their shipmates and who also keep photographs of murdered prisoners in their phones.

What is the constituency in the United States that celebrates war crimes? How big is it, and who speaks for it? Is there some faction of active-duty military brass pushing for this? Is there an adviser telling Trump that the people demand it?

As with so many national security decisions in the past 851 days, this folksy push to make war crimes great again is largely between Trump, his Twitter fan club, and the producers of Fox News. Reporters should of course be looking for voices in the Pentagon and White House who might be telling Trump that pardoning a bunch of goonish caricatures is good policy, but this is not the sort of position one would generally expect from the defense establishment, which has been saddled in recent years with making sense of Trump’s fantastical and ever-increasing list of edicts: his insistence on a Space Force; his Twitter-announced ban on transgender service members; his purging of foreign-born enlistees and refusal to extend citizenship to more of them; his mobilization of U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border (and his musings that the military could build the wall); his demand to end joint military exercises with South Korea after meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un; his insistence on honoring mostly unidentified “verbal agreements” on security with Russian president Vladimir Putin; his refusal to nominate a permanent secretary of defense to replace the one that departed, or to fill the still-depleted ranks of his Pentagon and State Department; and his burning desire for a national military parade, tanks and all, that celebrates his presidency.

It has been nearly a year since a Pentagon spokesperson held a televised, on-record press conference with reporters, if you don’t count Gerard Butler and Gene Simmons. Even the Department of Defense has trouble defending the indefensible.

There is no natural constituency demanding the exoneration of a motley series of heavily armed white men who killed or desecrated the bodies of foreigners overseas in the name of the United States. What these cases have in common is that they have become hobby-horses for a sclerotic part of the conservative media-industrial complex.

Eddie Gallagher’s wife and brother have become fixtures on Fox and Friends, insisting the chief is a “modern-day war hero” caught in a frame-up. The hunger in right-wing swamps for pro-Gallagher content has ballooned, and has led to some troubling  practices worth exploring through his upcoming court martial—such as why prosecutors in his case attempted to track press leaks by sending journalists emails laced with a tracking and monitoring code. 

Rather than letting a court establish facts and responsibility, Gallagher’s supporters have spoken directly to Trump through his favorite show, seeking to short-circuit the justice system. “I know [the president] is being fed false information,” the accused’s attorney Tyler Merritt told Fox News viewers last month. He was accompanied by Gallagher’s wife; they both wore matching t-shirts supporting Gallagher, provided by the veteran-owned shirt business Nine Line Apparel and available for sale for $26.99, plus shipping. In seeking a presidential pardon, they are supported by Republican Representative Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine veteran who himself is facing federal trial for personal misuse of a quarter of a million dollars in campaign funds.

At least Hunter is consistent: Back in 2012, he also insisted that those Marines who urinated on Afghan corpses were “sons of America” who should not face criminal consequences for their actions. That case quickly became a cause célébre for arch-rightists looking to distance themselves from more staid conservative circles. “Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too,” said a then-obscure radio host from St. Louis who had never served in uniform. “That’s me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do you think this is?” The radio host was Dana Loesch, now the paid spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association. When called on her comments, she argued that the “Left is attacking me so they can avoid calling this Obama’s Abu Ghraib.” She was supported by the likes of Islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller, who could barely contain her glee at the desecration. “I love these Marines,” she wrote. “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.”

This, in a nutshell, is the war crimes lobby as it now exists, a metastasizing network of amateurish, enraged gawkers, gorging themselves on Fox News emissions, and who feel empowered to speak for the troops, the war, and the whole darn population of “real” United States citizens. “To the people in middle America, who respect the troops and the tough calls they make, they’re going to love this. These are the good guys,” said Fox and Friendscohost, professional Republican veteran, and onetime Trump cabinet hopeful Pete Hegseth on Sunday. “These are the war fighters. And making a move like this by Memorial Day would be—I would be—wow, amazing.”

“These are the good guys.” What of the seven SEALs who bled with Gallagher, who have seen the worst of America’s expeditionary wars, who faced pressure from above not to report what they saw him do, and who are now treated as dismissively as anonymous HuffPost commenters by the Trump-supporting virtual-veteran commissariat? What of the combat platoon leaders who express their disgust in a president overlooking “serious war crimes in favor of a warped notion of patriotism and heroism”? What of every Marine who sings aloud the words of their hymn: “First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean”? If the small community of American men who unjustly—and against the consciences of most of their uniformed comrades—kill, maim, or violate brown people can successfully evade judgment thanks to the caprices of a feeble commander-in-chief; if these are decreed to be the good guys without rigorous investigation; “goodness” will have lost all meaning. Perhaps the cruelty of it is the point. 

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Harvard Was Right to Fire Ron Sullivan The New Republic / by Lucy Caldwell

Harvard Was Right to Fire Ron Sullivan

The New Republic / by Lucy Caldwell / 2h

When Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan lost his esteemed position as faculty dean of Winthrop House last weekend, and withdrew from Harvey Weinstein’s defense team, he secured a new one in the process: poster child in the war against campus political correctness. Throughout this week, prominent pundit-lawyers and right-of-center journalists have mourned Sullivan’s fate as though American jurisprudence itself had been critically wounded.

“Infuriating: Harvard unilaterally surrenders to the student mob,” tweeted Reason’s Robby Soave, calling it “an evil decision” to oust Sullivan “for the crime of thinking Harvey Weinstein deserves good legal representation (a foundational principle of Enlightened justice).” The school is “teaching Harvard students that they should never represented [sic] unpopular defendants,” wrote Glenn Greenwald. “The new McCarthyism comes to Harvard,” declared Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at the law school, adding that the decision “may be the worst violation of academic freedom during my 55 year association with Harvard.” And his colleague, Laurence Tribe, said he could not recall a “worse” blunder in his 50 years as a professor there.

In addition to such hyperbole, Harvard’s decision not to renew Sullivan’s deanship has inspired fantastic leaps of logic. “The administration,” Soave wrote in an essay, “has endorsed the ridiculous notion that serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, meanwhile, argued that the “decision may deter ambitious young lawyers from undertaking the defense of any potentially controversial client, including indigent men who stand accused of rape or sexual assault. That raises the odds of wrongful convictions, especially among the poor.”

At best, these defenses of Sullivan reflect a lack of understanding of daily life for the university’s undergraduates, including the role of faculty deans. At worst, they reflect the impulse to push aside the serious issues brought to light by #MeToo, chalking them up to a generation of snowflakes.

Harvard students leading the campaign to remove Sullivan as Winthrop faculty dean have not suggested that the professor himself is guilty of sexual misconduct, or that Weinstein is not entitled to legal representation. They have mainly argued that the professor is embracing public positions that make it impossible to carry out his obligations as dean of one of Harvard’s twelve undergraduate houses. Sullivan, who remains a tenured law professor, is not a victim of political correctness. He’s a self-interested public figure who has privileged his professional and academic brand over the welfare of the students he was appointed to protect.

Impugning a professor—not to mention an accomplished defender of the wrongfully convicted, as Shaun King noted—is not something I undertake lightly. I’m a Harvard graduate who’s also skeptical of the school, and I got my start in libertarian public policy. I worry about much of the political correctness on today’s college campuses. (I read Reasondaily!) As an undergraduate columnist for the The Harvard Crimson in the aughts, I frequently took issue with what I perceived as dubious student demands, arguing they were reflective of a move toward paternalism or incompatible with an atmosphere of free and rigorous debate.

Yet, looking back on my time in college, I realize I often overlooked—worse still, denied—the experience of vulnerable students, especially women who find themselves at the mercy of the system after being sexually assaulted or harassed. Perhaps this is because I graduated from college a decade ago, before the #MeToo movement had created the space necessary for women to tell their stories—and actually be heard. Perhaps it’s also because I was a self-involved young person who was fortunate enough in college not to have any traumatic encounters with members of the opposite sex.

Faculty deans are at the center of student life. Harvard undergraduates live in the same house for all but their freshman year. Students don’t get to pick which house they’re in, and they likewise can’t live off-campus. Faculty deans live on the same house grounds as students. They eat many of their meals with undergrads and host them at their apartments. They’re also tasked with advocating on students’ behalf on academic, medical, and personal issues. Women on campus reasonably wondered how, as one student wrote in the Crimson, they could be “expected to live in Winthrop House under the authority of a man who … has exhibited hostility to survivors of sexual assault.”

Sullivan’s defenders would argue that women should trust the professor to separate his role in an outside legal case from his role as her faculty dean. But even in the context of alleged sexual harassment his own university community, Sullivan has openly displayed disdain for female accusers.

An investigation began earlier this year into economics professor Roland Fryer, a rising star at Harvard and MacArthur Fellow who has been accused of sexual harassment. Though Sullivan denied earlier reports that he is part of Fryer’s defense team, he did not hesitate to dismiss the testimony of the numerous women who’d reported harassment by Fryer. He even implied that the accusers might be part of a larger conspiracy. “It shows what the current [#MeToo] movement, some blood in the water, and good coaching [of witnesses] can produce,” he said.

Might reasonable minds disagree on these highly sensitive legal cases, and is it appropriate for the attorney of the accused to mount a vigorous defense? Of course. But uttered by a person in a role as faculty dean, which entails protecting vulnerable students from being violated and vindicating their rights when they have been, such comments will not do.

Friedersdorf notes that “Sullivan long ago appointed Linda D. M. Chavers, a resident dean, to serve as his house’s ‘point person’ for sexual-assault issues. (Moreover, Harvard employs dozens of people to whom any student in need could report sexual misconduct.)” Yet as a resident dean, Chavers herself was both appointed by, and reported to, Sullivan—little comfort to concerned students. But this isn’t just about incidentally protecting women who live in Winthrop House. In a time when Harvard, like so many communities, is collectively processing the suffering of so many women in this post-#MeToo moment, we should expect leaders like Sullivan, who’ve been appointed to facilitate this communal healing and move toward improved social norms to embrace that obligation full-bore. Sullivan has not distinguished himself in this regard.

In the role of faculty dean at Harvard, a lightning rod like Sullivan is wrong for the job. No doubt, there are countless exceptional academics in the nine faculties of Harvard who would not meet this standard of commitment to compassion, making them wrong for the job, too. And Sullivan was not merely wrong for the job as faculty dean because of his decision to represent Weinstein, or because students in Winthrop only learned about it when Page Sixbroke the news, or because he’s made disturbing comments about would-be victims within Harvard.

He proved himself wrong for the job by the way he reacted when students first learned, in January, of his decision to fight to keep America’s most famous (and quite rich) accused sexual assailant out of jail. Sullivan didn’t just defend his decision; he took aim at undergraduate critics in a way that was intellectually dishonest, if not downright nefarious, condescending to them as if they were too stupid to understand how the criminal justice system works. “It is particularly important for this category of unpopular defendant [like Weinstein] to receive the same process as everyone else—perhaps even more important,” Sullivan said. “To the degree we deny unpopular defendants basic due process rights we cease to be the country we imagine ourselves to be.”

As a legal scholar, Sullivan knows well that defendants have the right to legal representation in myriad ways, including through court-appointed public defenders. (Sullivan himself has been one.) And why is it “more important” for someone like Weinstein, who has spent decades using lawyers and his wealth to silence his far-less-powerful victims, to get access to good counsel than anyone else? Weinstein is hardly a charity case, as there are plenty of criminal defense attorneys in America who represent the rich and famous (and get rich doing so). Presumably Sullivan, as a prominent legal figure, is asked routinely to represent defendants in newsworthy cases, and declines, thereby robbing those defendants of his sterling counsel. There is no professional or moral duty of a private lawyer to represent anyone who comes knocking.

Even if one thinks none of that all criminal defense work is just part and parcel with due process, there’s no question that Weinstein is not just another criminal defendant. He is the man whose misdeeds were so severe that they set off a movement that has toppled dozens of famous men who were previously untouchable, and countless others in positions of power (including two connected to this magazine). His case represents a tidal change in American culture, as women not only become empowered to speak out against abusive men, but are believed.

Perhaps that’s precisely what appealed to Sullivan about Weinstein’s case: the ultimate opportunity to push back against the supposed excesses of #MeToo.

Ron Sullivan could’ve gone quietly: apologize to students, resign from Winthrop, and focus on his law work. Instead, he chose to prey on liberal sensibilities to further his personal crusade. In his media campaign to drum up support over recent months, he resorted to the sort of rhetoric his new army of defenders loathe.

In an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner earlier this month, he suggested that he was being targeted because he’s black. At the time, Harvard was taking a survey of the “climate” at Winthrop House to gauge students’ feelings about Sullivan. “It’s absolutely never happened before,” he told Chotiner, “and I do not believe that it would happen again to any non-minority faculty dean.” In truth, a similar investigation occurredjust four years ago in a nearby house overseen by a white, conservative professor who first came to Harvard in the 1970s and served in the Ford, Reagan and HW Bush administrations. It’s also worth noting that the Association of Black Harvard Women was perhaps the earliest and most visible student lobby pushing for Sullivan’s ouster.

Highly educated, well-connected men like Sullivan have the freedom to pursue a range of professional choices, but no one is free of the consequences of those choices. Just as taking a client creates conflict by which an attorney may not be able to counsel another client, being Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer means there can be no role for him as a trusted leader in undergraduate life. Casting doubt on victims’ compelling accounts of trauma doesn’t make a man a sexual assailant himself, but it doesn’t make him an advocate for women either.

This is not a zero-sum game, as Friedersdorf suggested when he wrote that “protecting the norms around the right to counsel is orders of magnitude more important than the ‘unenlightened or misplaced’ discomfort of some Harvard undergraduates.” A world where we acknowledge that women are systematically victimized throughout their lives is not a world in which we’ve done away with defense attorneys for the accused. Sullivan’s defenders may think they’re defending him on the basis of academic and professional freedom, but instead they’re defending a status quo that has caused so many women to suffer for so long.

That status quo persists at Harvard. This spring, freshman Phoebe Suh told her story of being raped by a classmate and reporting it hours later to University Health Services, where she sought medical treatment. Suh was given a range of treatment for her injuries, including preventative measures against pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. But no rape kit was administered because that is not standard protocol at Harvard, which instead insists that students’ first stop in a crisis be the emergency department at its on-campus hospital or the campus police. Soon thereafter, Suh got the message that there was basically no point in reporting her rape to police, because she didn’t have any physical evidence to back up her claim. Her rapist remains a Harvard student. Last month, Suh got her housing assignment for next year: Winthrop House.

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The Criminalization of Women’s Bodies Is All About Conservative Male Power The New Republic / by Laurie Penny

The Criminalization of Women’s Bodies Is All About Conservative Male Power

The New Republic / by Laurie Penny / 11min

Let’s start by acknowledging that women are not things. Before we talk, like we have to, about what the attacks on abortion access mean for this anxious, awful political era, let’s establish as a ground rule that women are not vessels, or incubators, or an undifferentiated natural resource. Women are human beings whose human rights matter.

This week, 25 white men in Alabama decidedotherwise, leading a sadistic nationwide legislative binge against women’s basic reproductive rights. Draconian new anti-abortion measures have also won wide margins of approval in the Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri legislatures. This is all part of a long-anticipated frontal assault on the right to choose, a deliberate ploy to upend the legal foundations of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Waderuling upholding a woman’s right to abortion in the United States. These laws are not about whether a fetus is a person. They are about enshrining maximalist control over the sexual autonomy of women as a foundational principle of conservative rule. They are about owning women. They are about women as things.

Right now in Ohio, there is an a 11-year-old child who was abducted, raped, and made pregnant. It’s easy to see, by any sane moral measure, how a regime that forces a child to carry this pregnancy to full term and give birth is monstrous, heartless, and immoral. And it’s just as clear that a state that threatens to kill that child unless she bears that pregnancy to full term and gives birth is morally equivalent to the rapist—taking away that little girl’s agency, declaring that her pain is unimportant, that she has no right to decide who has access to her body.

But here’s the crucial connective point, the point that gets shunted to the side in the culture-war rhetoric of abortion outrage: It is equally monstrous to inflict the same punishment on a woman in her thirties who doesn’t want to be a mother just because the condom broke on a Tinder hookup. She, too, deserves bodily autonomy. She should not have to beg for it just because some religious extremists and Viagra-addled Republican lawmakers are frightened of women who fuck freely and without remorse. Seen in this light, forced-birth extremism—I refuse to dignify a movement so inhumane and oppressive with the moniker “pro-life”—is the logical extension of rape culture.

“Abortion kills babies” is an article of faith on the American right. The millions of voters who have grown up hearing nothing else are not lying when they say they believe life begins at conception. They are entitled to that belief, as long as they don’t weaponize it to punish strangers. The question of whether a fetus is a person is conveniently unanswerable. The question of whether a woman is a person, however, is not up for debate—and it is female personhood, not fetal personhood, that should decide the issue of basic bodily autonomy.

The mere fact that an abortion is taking a life—if that is truly what you believe—is not enough to justify jailing little girls for getting one. There are plenty of situations where American law permits one individual to take a life: home invasion, self-defense, membership in the armed forces. Now, I happen to believe, along with 58 percent of Americans and most medical professionals, that terminating a pregnancy in its early stages is no more murderous than a biopsy. I happen to believe that a six-week-old fetus with a heartbeat but no limbic brain activity is less sentient than what most Republicans eat for breakfast in any of the constitutionally carnivorous states of the American South. But my personal feelings about the meaning of life don’t matter here. As the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson put it, what matters more—far more—is women’s freedom to control their own lives.

Even if abortion ends a human life, forcing a woman to give birth against her will is worse. No state should be empowered to do so at the point of a gun, just as no state should be empowered to kidnap a person and drain off pints of their blood so that someone else can get a transfusion. That’s the course of action that’s morally equivalent to this clenched fistful of misogynistic laws-in-the-making.

The Trump regime was given the keys to the nation’s capital by white evangelicals mostly on the basis of a promise to criminalize abortion. Now Republicans across the country are gleefully delivering on that promise, because they like power and want to keep it, and because it makes them feel big and tough to confiscate basic human rights from pregnant people. I say “pregnant people” here because, of course, trans men and non-binary people can also become pregnant—but to parsimonious conservative pearl-clutchers, everyone who has a uterus is a woman, and therefore someone whose sexuality is by definition subject to state control.

The eventual aim here is to put women’s bodies under strict and brutal state surveillance across the whole of America. The same thing is happening across Europe—in Poland, in Austria, in Northern Ireland, in every polity where strongmen are elected by a population easily swayed by promises to put women and people of color in their proper place. They don’t put it like that, of course. They cosset their cowardly bloodlust in affected piety, soothe their base’s sentiments with concern-trolling about how all life is sacred—far too sacred to entrust to stupid, poor, and/or nonwhite women. Forced-birth extremists are not yet brave enough to make their position clear.

Part of what it means to acknowledge the humanity of women is to treat them as political agents, and not walking wombs with the inconvenient habit of moaning about their personal preferences and material needs. The monstrosity of this battery of legislative assaults on womanhood as an existential condition stems from a deep patriarchal rage for behavioral control. That’s why Tony Tinderholt, the Republican Texas state representative who is sponsoring a bill to make abortion an actual capital crime—again, so much for the “pro-life” position—says that the great social virtue of his proposal is to “force” women to be “more personally responsible” in their sexual lives.

Criminalizing abortion makes female sexual agency a crime. That is what it is designed to do; it is very much the point. Give the Tony Tinderholts of the world some small credit for candor: They’ve come forward to confirm that what they actually care about is that they’re here to punish slutty slutbags who think they can just have sex without being afraid of the consequences. And they’re also here to ensure that the consequences will be nine pounds of raw screaming need, delivered at gunpoint in the shadow of the electric chair. If such measures weren’t about punishing women for having sex, the rank hypocrisy of the few remaining “exceptions for rape and incest” would ring out even to Republicans pickled in their own precious self regard.

We live in a society that is comfortable letting men get away with sexual violence, but determined not to let women get away with consensual sex. This is why there are vast swathes of society who are comfortable giving vast executive and judicial power to men credibly accused of sexual assault—as long as those same men promise to confiscate women’s power to sexually self-determine.

Female sexual freedom is the basic moral outrage that unites the religious right and libertarians convinced that the state should shrink until it’s small enough to slip into a woman’s underwear in inarticulate rage. The appeal to “choice” does not work on people to whom women’s freedom of choice is a fearful thing. We are told that women who choose to have abortions for “social reasons”—i.e., because they simply don’t want to be pregnant—are selfish. Sure, some of them are, if “selfish” means actively choosing to prioritize your own needs and desires above those of a potential child. Selflessness should not be a legal duty imposed on women at the point of a gun. Choosing to have a baby you don’t want to raise, to give it up for adoption, might make you a very nice person indeed. But women should not be threatened with imprisonment and death for prioritizing themselves.

The biggest lies about women’s rights are told by people who are trying to take them away. In anxious, violent times, when oppression is enacted under a deafening barrage of propaganda, it’s important to listen out for the silences. It’s vital to listen, in other words, to what’s not being said by those who are making the most noise.

The cacophony of outrage shapes itself around a painful silence, one that prevents us from pronouncing the actual stakes at play. We still can’t quite say that there are no circumstances under which it is acceptable to force pregnancy on a woman against her will. None. Because that’s a monstrous thing to do to a person, and women are people, not things.

Instead of affirming that baseline truth, we are still arguing over when a fetus becomes a person and therefore worthy of dignity and protection. Six weeks? Twelve weeks? Twenty? We urgently need to be asking the far more pressing question of when women will be allowed to be people and therefore worthy of protection.

Two distinct legal persons with absolute rights to self-sovereignty cannot occupy the same body. Thanks to this deranged counter-moral calculus of moral deliberation, regimes of male supremacists and religious extremists around the world are now in agreement that a six-week-old clot of cells is more of a person than any adult woman. After all, that clot of cells might be the next Mozart, the next Mandela. The idea that a pregnant woman might be the next Mozart or the next Mandela, of course, does not compute.

This mind-bending determination to bring women’s bodies under maximum control, at all conceivable cultural costs, helps explain why this week’s actions have been so coordinated, swift, and brutal. After Alabama’s all-male senate majority voted to force women to give birth against their will, their counterparts in Georgia went further still, arranging to institute effective life sentences for abortion providers, while placing women’s bodies under strict and callous state surveillance. Indeed, the eventual aim here, beyond the repeal of Roe, is to put women’s bodies under rigid and brutal state surveillance across the whole of America.

It’s a race thing, too, of course, and it always has been. It was anti-choice evangelicals who—together with some carefully timed voter suppression—gave Brian Kemp his razor-thin, contested victory over Stacey Abrams, his black, female Democratic opponent. Across America and Europe, conservatives have been happy to trade away women’s freedom for a chance at power. Kemp is now delivering on the promise he made to white evangelicals—and Donald Trump, who is making increasingly manic mouth-sounds about babies being executed at birth, looks likely to do the same.

Sexual oppression and racial paranoia have always run together under the skin of the story America tells about itself. Any student of racial oppression can readily recognize the ruthless denial of agency, the deep and structural downgrading of persons into objects from the heyday of slavery and white supremacy. Indeed, the forced-birth movement in the United States has always gone hand in hand with white supremacy. Before abolition, white women were tacitly permitted to terminate pregnancies as they chose. In fact, the earliest case law regarding abortion was not designed to protect fetuses, but to protect women from shady doctors operating without licenses or a working knowledge of germ theory. There had long been folk remedies for ending an unwanted pregnancy, and the women who were punished for doing this were to a significant degree African American.

White male slaveowners, meanwhile, had absolute right to the bodies of black women, who were routinely raped and forbidden to prevent pregnancy. Any child born to a slave, after all, was a valued capital asset, the uncontested property of the mother’s “master.”

All of that changed after abolition, when white Americans suddenly began to panic about being outbred by nonwhite people. Theodore Roosevelt himself was one of the first public figures to use the term “outbreeding.”

Laws regulating abortion and contraception—especially for white women—were instituted along with programs of mass, enforced sterilization of black and immigrant women. Ideas of race, nation and territory have always been embedded in the anti-choice movement. “The U.S. subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion,” Representative Steve King told a far-right Austrian magazine. “We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of ‘somebody else’s babies’ who are raised in another culture before they get to us. We are replacing our American culture two to one every year.”

There’s a very clear message here about whose lives matter. Texas legislators care so much about the sanctity of life that they have suggested the death penalty for women who get abortions. The state of Alabama cares so much about life that it executes more prisoners per capita than any other state; it had an execution scheduled for the day after Governor Kay Ivey signed the state’s abortion ban into law.

That’s not the only thing about the forced-birth movement that seems to stink of hypocrisy. People who believe that motherhood is precious do not rip toddlers away from their parents and keep them in sweltering cages at the borders. People who are concerned with the sanctity of life do not advocate for lethal firearms to be sold at every strip mall. People who care about the unborn do not torpedo legislation designed to ensure that the planet those kids inherit is not actively on fire.

For all these crushing moral contradictions, though, forced-birth extremists are not hypocrites. Underlying all of the pious and disingenuous cant of their crusade is a terrifying logical consistency. There is a common thread that cinches together border paranoia, military fetishism, and obsessive state control of women’s bodies. It is chauvinism on nightmare mode: a dark story told by frightened child-men about the right of strong fathers and stern paternal leaders to protect resources. And in that story, women’s bodies are a resource, one that men should be able to access freely. Women should not have the right to refuse men sex, or to abort the baby a man put inside her—sorry, I mean the baby God put inside her.

Is that too much anger? We’re not supposed to get angry when we talk about abortion. An angry woman, more or less by definition, is a crazy woman and a crazy woman can’t be trusted with bodily autonomy, although apparently she can be trusted with a baby.

What we’re supposed to do is quietly and politely explain, even to the extremists grabbing major world governments by the privates, that banning abortion takes away autonomy, as if they didn’t know. Of course banning abortion takes away women’s autonomy. That is the point of banning abortion. That’s the whole point.

Making abortion illegal, after all, doesn’t stop it from happening. In nations where abortion access is restricted, they don’t have fewer dead babies—but they have a lot more dead women. Around the world, 5-13 percent of maternal mortality results from unsafe abortion. The point is to send a clear message that uppity hussies have been having their own way for far too long, and that there should be consequences. The point has never been that babies matter. The point is that women don’t.

We’re supposed to smile and be polite while our basic humanity is stripped away by old men who think little girls should be forced to bear children in rage. To survive in a time of patriarchy, you’re not allowed to speak plainly about how much it hurts to survive patriarchy. If you must speak of it, you speak softly. You don’t talk about anger. And you definitely aren’t supposed to talk about pain. Women’s pain is assumed to be invisible by design.

The strategy of patriarchal restorationists on the evangelical right has long been to strip women of human dignity, and to force them to bear unwanted children in rage and pain. We’re not supposed to talk about any of these ugly, grimy details: the pain, the blood, the tearing, the exhaustion, the insecurity, the poverty. We’re not supposed to talk about all the bitter, degrading things that go along with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in an economy designed and run by men. No, we’re supposed to meekly wipe up the blood and the shit and spend exhausted weeks climbing stairs to nowhere in the gym to “get back” our “pre-pregnancy bodies.” If we commit the cardinal sin of having a pregnancy terminated, we are supposed to be ashamed, to whisper it, to make a show of shame—just as we are supposed to be ashamed of consensual sex, just as we are supposed to be ashamed of surviving rape.

It’s time to be completely clear. Forcing a woman to give birth against her will is morally equivalent to rape. It’s exactly the same logic of entitlement and abuse: Men get to control women’s bodies. Female sexual agency must be punished. Women’s consent does not matter.

This is not a moment to mince words. This is a moment for moral clarity. Women’s personhood is not conditional. Women’s sexuality is not shameful. The only shameful thing, the only thing that no citizen who believes even fractionally in freedom should not tolerate, is a world in which women are treated like things.

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