Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[kenberg]

It's only May. I really worry what he'll do in October if it still looks like he will lose to Biden.

 

Absolutely. This is my biggest concern of all political concerns. I am sure that if we look at past elections we can see some things that happened that should not have happened. Happened here, and in other democracies as well. But whatever happened in the past, we are at a new level. Trump recognizes no constraints. If he can getaway with it, or thinks he can, he does it. "Politics is not tiddly-winks". True enough. But Trump recognizes nothing except his own ego. We can acknowledge that lines have sometimes been crossed and still believe that standards are important, that they should not be scuttled completely.

 

[y66]

We can acknowledge that lines have sometimes been crossed and still believe that standards are important, that they should not be scuttled completely.

The walls are closing in on Trump like a scene in the old Batman tv show the difference being that Trump is in a trap of his own making and has zero scruples about taking the country down with him. Meanwhile, Robin and Alfred are nowhere to be found.

 

It is encouraging to see Jack Dorsey at Twitter stepping up somewhat and trying to uphold some standards.

[y66]

Vincent Blevins at NYT:

 

If you read the commentary coming out of New York and Washington, or speak with elites in Western Europe, it’s easy to find people panicking about the loss of “American leadership.” From Joe Biden’s campaign pledges to trans-Atlantic think tanks, exhortations to revive American supremacy and contain China are everywhere.

 

They have reason to be worried: This moment is shaking the foundations of America’s hegemony. It is painfully clear that the United States is ill-equipped to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, which does not play to American strengths (we can’t shoot it, after all). President Trump has for years been dismissing allies and antagonizing international institutions. And China is seemingly laying the groundwork for its arrival as a great power. American officials are now talking openly about a “new Cold War” to confront Beijing, and China now seems such a threat that Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute wonders whether the United States should get back in the business of covertly toppling unfriendly governments.

 

It’s unsurprising that establishment pundits, American policymakers and their allies would be alarmed about American decline. The United States and Western Europe have been the winners of the process that created this globalized world, the main beneficiaries of Washington’s triumph at the end of the Cold War. But a lot of people feel very differently.

 

In early April, I received a message from Winarso, a man I know in Indonesia who runs an organization that cares for the survivors of the mass murder that took place there in the 1960s. He was trying to raise money to buy rice so his community wouldn’t starve under lockdown. A dollar still goes a very long way in Indonesia, as Winarso knows too well. To explain America’s economic and political power, he points to the Cold War. It’s easy to see that Washington was truly victorious in the 20th century, he told me, because “we all got the U.S.-centered version of capitalism that Washington wanted to spread.” I asked him how America won. He answered quickly. “You killed us.”

 

I have spent the last three years with the losers of that great game, the individuals whose lives were shattered so this global order could be constructed. I spent most of my time interviewing the victims and survivors of a loose network of mass murder programs that targeted civilian opponents of Washington’s Cold War allies. I got to know people on four continents who lived through the coups and C.I.A. plots that Mr. Brands is talking about. To fully understand the nature of American power — and its future — their experiences are as important as those of anyone in a Paris boardroom or Washington think tank.

 

Winarso’s country is the most significant example. In 1965 and 1966, the American government assisted in the murder of approximately one million Indonesian civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the Cold War — Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, and policymakers at the time understood it was a far more valuable prize than Vietnam. But it’s largely forgotten in the English-speaking world precisely because it was such a success. No American soldiers died; little attention was drawn to one more country pulled, seemingly naturally, into the United States’ orbit.

 

But the process was not natural. The U.S.-backed military used a failed uprising as a pretext to crush the Indonesian left, whose influence Washington had been seeking to counter for a decade, and then took control of the country. Recently declassified State Department documents make it clear that the United States aided and abetted the mass murder in Indonesia, providing material support, encouraging the killings and rewarding the perpetrators.

 

It was not the first time the United States had done something like this. In 1954, the American ambassador to Guatemala reportedly handed kill lists to that country’s military. And in Iraq, in 1963, the C.I.A. provided lists of suspected communists and leftists to the ruling Baath Party.

 

Indonesia in 1965 was the apex of anti-Communist violence in the 20th century. The slaughter obliterated the popular, unarmed Partai Komunis Indonesia, the largest Communist party outside of China and the Soviet Union, and toppled President Sukarno, a founding leader of the Nonaligned Movement and an outspoken anti-imperialist, replacing him with General Suharto, a right-wing dictator who quickly became one of Washington’s most important Cold War allies.

 

This was such an obvious victory for the global anti-Communist movement that far-right groups around the world began to draw inspiration from the “Jakarta” model and build copycat programs. They were assisted by American officials and anti-Communist organizations that moved across borders. In turn, leftist movements radicalized or took up arms, believing they would be killed if they attempted to pursue the path of democratic socialism.

 

In the early ’70s, right-wing terrorists in Chile painted “Jakarta” on the houses of socialists, threatening that they too would be killed. After the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1973, they were. Brazilian leftists were threatened with “Operação Jacarta,” too. By the end of the 1970s, most of South America was governed by authoritarian, pro-American governments that secured power by mass murder. By 1990, death squads in Central America pushed the Latin American death toll into the hundreds of thousands.

 

In North America and Europe, if people think about these terror campaigns at all, the narrative is too often that the United States made alliances with unsavory characters, who committed unfortunate abuses. That is wrong. The United States government was behind much of the violence, and it was far from inconsequential. Most nations in the former third world were set on their current path by conflicts that took place during the Cold War. The violence made possible a version of crony capitalism that comprises daily reality for billions of people, and it is an integral part of the version of globalization that the world ended up with.

 

No reasonable person denies the great things the United States did in the 20th century, or that many countries enjoyed prosperity while in happy alliances with Washington. But as we move deeper into the 21st century, Americans are going to need to confront the darker side of American hegemony — because much of the rest of the world already has. Part of the reason the current order is so fragile is because so many people around the world know, indeed can physically feel in their bodies, that Washington used brutality to construct it.

 

We do not know yet what the world would look like were China to take up the position the United States is losing. There is no reason to believe that just because this world order has blood in its roots, something better will spring to life if it dies.

 

As Americans reckon with — and fret about — their country’s diminished position in the world, we need to understand that the United States is not, in fact, beloved as a beacon of freedom, democracy and human rights. From Argentina to the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor to Iran, millions of people are skeptical of Washington’s intentions, even if they have no particular desire to emulate China’s government, either.

 

A failure to recognize reality, however, and a desperate attempt to claw back a deeply imperfect global order, could be very dangerous for everyone.

Vincent Bevins (@vinncent) is the author of “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World.”

[Winstonm]

It's only May. I really worry what he'll do in October if it still looks like he will lose to Biden.

 

I'm more concerned about what he and Barr in concert will do in November.

[Winstonm]

On an unrelated note, I could not post earlier today until I went into my settings and found that they had been changed - without my consent or knowledge. Any ideas on how that could happen?

[Winstonm]

Is anyone else expecting to hear Donald Trump say, "There are very good thugs.....on both sides." No. In Trump's world, only white thugs can be very good.

[kenberg]

On an unrelated note, I could not post earlier today until I went into my settings and found that they had been changed - without my consent or knowledge. Any ideas on how that could happen?

 

The Deep State strikes.

[cherdano]

On an unrelated note, I could not post earlier today until I went into my settings and found that they had been changed - without my consent or knowledge. Any ideas on how that could happen?

Sorry. Won't happen again. ;)

[y66]

As a former woman in blue, let me begin with my brothers and sisters in blue: What in the hell are you doing?

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/my-fellow-brothers-sisters-blue-what-earth-are-you-doing/

[Winstonm]

The Deep State strikes.

 

My states is not that deep - it's Oklahoma.

[johnu]

Is anyone else expecting to hear Donald Trump say, "There are very good thugs.....on both sides." No. In Trump's world, only white thugs can be very good.

Are you implying that the Imperial Wizard in Chief is a racist and bigot?

 

 

 

[Trinidad]

My states is not that deep - it's Oklahoma.

My state is. At some places it's about 50 ft below sea level!

 

Rik

[PeterAlan]

On an unrelated note, I could not post earlier today until I went into my settings and found that they had been changed - without my consent or knowledge. Any ideas on how that could happen?

Some or all of mine were reset when I installed the very recent Windows 10 feature update (version 2004). Could that be the reason?

[johnu]

Some or all of mine were reset when I installed the very recent Windows 10 feature update (version 2004). Could that be the reason?

Microsoft Warns Troubled Windows 10 Update Has New Problems

 

Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Update Warning

 

I'm not sure why the Windows update would be overwriting Bridgebase settings, but consider yourself lucky that the update didn't brick your computer. I know several people who had to reinstall windows after the Windows 10 update trashed their computers.

[PeterAlan]

Microsoft Warns Troubled Windows 10 Update Has New Problems

 

Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Update Warning

 

I'm not sure why the Windows update would be overwriting Bridgebase settings, but consider yourself lucky that the update didn't brick your computer. I know several people who had to reinstall windows after the Windows 10 update trashed their computers.

I have several machines and use a Microsoft Surface Book as my testbed for an initial installation. It's relatively straightforward to restore that machine if need be. My experience was that KB4556799, to which the Forbes articles refer, was installed some time earlier under the regular monthly update of the previous Windows 1909 release rather than this later feature update, and didn't give rise to problems on any of my kit.

 

My choices are my own, and I've been fairly relaxed about early adoption in this controlled way on what is just my personal kit. I'm not recommending it for others, just suggesting a possible cause for Winstonm's issue.

 

Incidentally, I also chose the option to install the new Chromium-based version of the MS Edge browser, and it may be that this optional step was the trigger for the reset. That option was presented as part of the installation process for the feature update, but, as I understand it, is also now available as a download for earlier Windows 10 versions too, so possibly that, without the feature update, would have had the same effect.

[y66]

How this thread ends:

 

[y66]

This isn't 1968. This isn't even 2015. This is Americans seeing their country get run into the dirt by the most incompetent corrupt administration in history, which was elected purely so that a few old racists could keep their knee on the neck of Black America a little longer.

These aren't just protests against the murder of George Floyd (horrifying as that was). They're protests against the whole nightmare of the murderous, disastrous Trump years.

 

People are demanding that the nightmare end.

[Winstonm]

Some or all of mine were reset when I installed the very recent Windows 10 feature update (version 2004). Could that be the reason?

 

Possibly. Thanks for the info. My updates are automatic so I didn't even know it was done.

[shyams]

https://www.theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351

 

... for a laugh :)

[Winstonm]

I looked up Bill Barr's latest comments in my Ronald Reaganese dictionary and found that when Barr says, "far left outside agitators using Antifa-like tactics", in Reaganese it means "Welfare queens". I don't even want to know what Reaganese to George Wallacespeak would have been.

[Chas_P]

I looked up Bill Barr's latest comments in my Ronald Reaganese dictionary and found that when Barr says, "far left outside agitators using Antifa-like tactics", in Reaganese it means "Welfare queens". I don't even want to know what Reaganese to George Wallacespeak would have been.

Please describe for us "arsonists and looters" in the Winstonese dictionary. Thanks.

[hrothgar]

Please describe for us "arsonists and looters" in the Winstonese dictionary. Thanks.

 

The ones instigating the riots seem to be accelerationists and Bugaloo Bois

[y66]

From Alisha Haridasani Gupta's conversation with Samantha Power at NYT:

 

“The most significant blow to U.S. leadership is the handling of the pandemic at home.”

— Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

On Friday, President Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, accusing the agency of helping the Chinese government cover up the coronavirus epidemic.

 

Public health experts in the United States reacted to Mr. Trump’s announcement with alarm.

 

“We helped create the W.H.O.,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The New York Times.

 

“Turning our back on the W.H.O. makes us and the world less safe,” Dr. Friedan said.

 

Experts argued that global cooperation would be key to containing the virus, as it did six years ago during the Ebola outbreak that was raging through West Africa.

 

At the time, President Barack Obama sent 3,000 American troops to the region to help with the response on the ground. And Samantha Power, former ambassador to the U.N., convened the U.N. Security Council for its first ever meeting over a public health crisis and helped pass a resolution declaring the outbreak a “threat to international peace and security” — a step that led to an infusion of funds and resources for the response effort.

 

“Like so many 21st-century challenges, Ebola was not a zero-sum fight in which some countries could ‘win’ by pursuing their interests in a vacuum,” Power wrote in her book “The Education of an Idealist.”

 

I spoke with Power at a digital event hosted by The Wing last week. We discussed what the W.H.O. would look like without American contributions and the lessons learned from the Ebola crisis.

 

The interview has been shortened and edited for clarity. You can watch the full video here.

 

Walk me through the immediate ramifications of cutting funding to the W.H.O., which President Trump declared this past week that he would do.

 

Seventy percent of U.S. funds, roughly, go to H.I.V., malaria, vaccinations. So you may be making a political statement and trying to thumb your nose at China but what you’re doing is cutting funding from children getting measles and polio vaccines.

 

The main job of the World Health Organization is actually to gather information from the various countries that comprise the U.N. and publicize information that needs to be turned into an alarm. That is something that they did in this case but they were a little bit later than we wish they would have been. But it’s hard to pin any dimension of our lack of preparedness on the World Health Organization. So that coordinating, alarm-issuing role is very significant.

 

Unfortunately, international organizations are very dependent on the governments that comprise those organizations. It’s not as though the U.N. secretary general gets to march into the Wuhan wet market and poke around. He’s dependent, as is the head of the World Health Organization, on the Chinese government allowing that kind of access. While that seems kind of lame on one level, imagine if we were talking about the United States.

 

The W.H.O. also gathers resources from the member states, particularly the wealthier ones, the donor states, and then provides supplies to developing countries and governments that just don’t have the ability to manufacture them or to afford them. I mean, the country of South Sudan only had four ventilators at the start of this crisis and fewer than 200 doctors in the whole country. So that pooling of resources to send to those areas is critical.

 

In a recent opinion piece in The Times, you argue that America’s chances of recovery from the coronavirus outbreak are tied to the well-being of other countries and therefore the U.S. needs to lead global efforts to stem the spread of the virus. Could you explain exactly why our fates are so linked with the fate of other countries?

 

I’m old enough to remember when it was not controversial to note how linked we are. It’s a pandemic that came from somewhere else, traveled presumably on an airplane with somebody, unwittingly, and has wreaked havoc on our communities, our economy, our psychology. But it has become something you kind of have to argue now, to say “actually, it matters what happens beyond our borders.” We have so many family ties with people living in other countries. Our global supply chains, at least for the time being, stretch like capillaries into the deepest recesses of many developing countries. Our trade ties extend to other places. Normalcy elsewhere matters to normalcy here. We know that viruses don’t respect borders. But that also requires thinking about the recovery in similar terms. We have to buckle down and do what we need to do here, but we won’t be able to return to normal until the hot spots are calmed around the world.

 

What do you think this crisis has done for the respect of global organizations and for the respect of America around the world?

 

Some of the lesson learning in the United States will be related to globalization and it will be healthy. There will be a question about how we make ourselves less susceptible to disruptions in global supply chains.

 

But the scapegoating of international institutions is a travesty and it’s completely antithetical to our interests. Out of a crisis like this, we should be looking to strengthen the authorities of those bodies that have access to information from all over the world. And to pull funding from the World Health Organization at the height of the greatest pandemic since 1918 is a massive blow to U.S. leadership.

 

But the most significant blow to U.S. leadership is the handling of the pandemic at home. The most significant source of our leadership, over time, is our soft power and is the model of our democracy. So when we end up with partisan understandings of what has happened and now we’re leading the world in deaths — that is seen everywhere in the world.

 

It’s some irony that the pandemic was grotesquely mishandled inside China’s borders but because of the U.S.’ retreat, President Xi can stand up and say that he’s leading the world by making a substantial financial contribution to vaccine research. That narrative would have been unthinkable. There will be an enormous excavation and digging out that will be needed by the next president.

 

Some of the countries that have been doing well in this pandemic — New Zealand, Germany, Taiwan and Finland — all have something in common: They have female leaders. What can we take away from that? Is it just a correlation or do you think there’s a real cause-and-effect here?

 

It is so striking the extent to which that correlation exists. Of course, there are a few countries that have performed very well — Australia, the Republic of Korea, for example — that are led by men. But the qualities of leadership in each of them — which vary even among the women, I mean, Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern are very different leaders — is some combination of expressed empathy, a kind of intellectual humility, an ability to change course when something doesn’t appear to be working and an inclusive message. Those qualities of leadership are associated with women’s styles of leadership.

 

But what would maybe tip a little into causality is — imagine what it took for any one of those women to get to where they got. There’s a reason that 85 percent of countries are not governed by women, that our boardrooms look the way they do. So what it took for those women to become the head of state, chances are you’re going to be cool in a crisis and lead with some combination of toughness and humanity.

 

But also imagine in those countries where these female leaders are the ones navigating the crisis — those kids are growing up and seeing women leaders and this is the Winston Churchill moment, this is the Blitz of London moment. So almost irrespective of why it is, the impact on what boys and girls expect in leadership will set the sense of possibility for young girls and women all around the world.

 

In your book, “The Education of an Idealist,” you describe how, during a call with the White House about Russia sanctions, your son Declan is trying to get your attention.

 

After failing to get your attention, he “stomped away muttering ‘Putin, Putin, Putin — when is it going to be Declan, Declan, Declan?’”

 

I know that a lot of parents — especially mothers — are struggling to work from home and shoulder much of the unpaid care work. What advice do you have for families right now and how can women come out of this with their career and, frankly their sanity, intact?

 

I love that scene because I do think even though it’s a pretty esoteric circumstance, every parent, man or woman, can relate to that tension of just being pulled in a professional direction and then having your child banging on the door, and you’re hiding under the table. Everybody has their own version of this. And people who don’t have kids have their own version of just barely hanging on, just the juggle and the inelegance of it.

 

So the answer to your question is, you’re not alone. It’s hard when you feel that the institutions are just ingrained with this expectation that it’s going to be the woman who takes care of the sick parent or oversees the home schooling.

 

And, the second thing is we need to publicize more that it’s not OK. You called it unpaid care, and I love even that shift to that phrase. It’s acknowledging what is work and what might detract from one’s ability to be as timely or as perfectionist as one would like to be on one’s work product. In the post-Covid “what are we learning?” phase, we have to ask what is the social infrastructure that we have that leaves us so fragile and so vulnerable. So much of that is shrouded day to day and then this opens it up.

 

What is your fondest memory from your White House years?

 

One night, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama invited Cass Sunstein, my husband who I met on the Obama campaign, and me to dinner with a group of their friends. I called my stepfather, Eddie, to come babysit our kids — 4 and 1, at the time.

 

By the way, Cass and Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago and Cass is famously very messy. So we get to the White House and everybody’s already seated out on the balcony, having drinks, and we walk out there and Cass kicks a glass of wine and it just shatters. Obama looks up and says: “Leave it to Cass to break the White House.”

 

And then we retire to go to dinner after the drinks and my phone rings. It’s Eddie and I hear my daughter screaming in the background. And I’d left such clear instructions as to how to feed her. I’d left my milk, everything. So everybody else is going to the dinner and I slip off to the side on my cellphone and try to explain to my father how to feed my child. And he’s not understanding, she’s going crazy, Eddie is getting mad at me because I’m not explaining it well even though I’m explaining it perfectly — it’s just going up and up and up. Next thing I hear over my shoulder is ‘let me talk to him.’ And it’s Obama. So he takes my phone and he says: “This is the president. You got this.” And proceeds to walk him through how to calmly retrieve the milk and feed my daughter.

 

And then, as we’re walking from there, Obama asked me to be the U.N. ambassador.

[y66]

The novelist William Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” The past 72 hours of burning US cities triggered parallels with 1968 — a year of urban white flight that ended with the election of Richard Nixon. He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety. Donald Trump does not deal in implicit language. In response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, Mr Trump tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. The line was used by George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate in 1968. Republicans launched the “southern strategy” to win over resentful white Democrats after the civil rights revolution. Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign was the apotheosis of that approach.

 

But history offers little clue as to whether a sitting president can profit from the same manipulation. The stark brutality of Floyd’s killing — and the fact that his eight-minute suffocation was captured on video — has curbed Mr Trump’s ability to portray the police as victims. He has veered between threats of deploying the military to quell the protests and appeals for calm. Mr Trump’s record suggests he will not be able to resist the temptation to incite. It worked for him once. America’s Black Lives Matter movement took off in Barack Obama’s second term just as Mr Trump was weighing up his presidential bid. “White lives matter” and “Blue lives matter” banners festooned his rallies.

 

But can he pull off the same feat from the White House? That will depend on how America defines the protests. Wildly different narratives can be built from the harrowing range of video clips over the past few days. Some show white police officers brutally attacking peaceful black and white marchers. Others show cops marching in solidarity with them. Then there are the scenes of looting and burning. Mr Trump claims that most of the Minneapolis protesters are far-left radicals. Anti-Semitic memes claiming that financier George Soros is funding an army of Antifa (anti-fascist) militants have spread. Russian bots have helped disseminate the conspiracy theory. The Trump administration has picked up that thread. In a televised statement Bill Barr, the US attorney-general, said the protests were “planned, organised and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics”. Without evidence, Mr Trump said 80 per cent of the Minneapolis protesters were from out of state. On Sunday, he tweeted that he would designate Antifa as a “terrorist organisation”.

 

America now faces the spectre of a long summer of unrest, with a president stoking the polarisation. It comes amid a pandemic that has disproportionately claimed minority lives in the most densely populated areas of urban America. Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — serve as a metaphor for a society choking on its increasingly toxic politics. The alternative narrative advanced by Joe Biden, Mr Trump’s opponent, is that America is crying out to be healed. Mr Biden promises to “restore America’s soul”. If recent polls are any guide, Mr Biden’s message is hitting home. A Washington Post/ABC poll gave him a 53 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Mr Trump.

 

But that snapshot was taken mostly before the protests had spread to other cities. Harking back to America’s better angels, as invoked by Abraham Lincoln, Mr Biden’s message has historic appeal. But nations do not possess souls. They have competing ideas of themselves. Mr Biden wants to restore the US to where it was before Mr Trump was elected — a multicultural society with its first non-white president. Mr Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway. He will blame Mr Obama, China, radical leftists and “thugs” for America’s unhappy condition — anybody, in other words, but himself. It is hard to imagine a more dystopian backdrop for the world’s most powerful democracy to settle on its future.

[johnu]

During Ferguson Protests, Trump Blamed The Guy In The White House

 

I have updated the Manchurian President twitter posts from 2014 when he was criticizing Obama for being President while black.

 

Our country is totally fractured and, with our weak leadership in Washington, you can expect Ferguson Floyd type riots and looting in other places

and this

 

As China and the rest of the World continue to rip off the U.S. economically, they laugh at us and our president over the riots in Ferguson about Floyd

!