Regarding the failure of institutions and constitutions

From what I can tell, a small but maybe growing number of reasonable people are starting to question the failure of key democratic institutions and/or the constitution itself. Most elite authoritarian radical right activists are doing the same, but with intent to destroy democracy and the institutions and laws that support it. The questioning on the other side looks to support democracy and its implementing institutions. 

One commentator, Alex Pareene, is a pro-democracy advocate who writes about this issue, which I consider to be critically important:

The Institutionalist's Dilemma

On trusting the process after it's openly failed

Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the Senate “works” since George Packer wrote the damning portrait of a dysfunctional institution that I reference in that old Salon piece. More than a decade later, Senate institutionalists still make up the majority of the Democratic caucus, and they still believe the way to make the institution work is not to change its rules but to somehow change the nature of the opposition.

So, in some sense, I gave up on the Senate. I spend less time carefully making the arguments for reforming it.

When we all learned that the far-right majority on the Supreme Court plans to gut the right to privacy that undergirds legal abortion access in the United States, a few patterns emerged in people’s responses. Most liberals were furious. Others in the media were outraged—on behalf of the Supreme Court, because they feared the leaking of a draft opinion could undermine the public’s faith in the “legitimacy” of the institution.

Many of those takes were bad faith from conservatives sort of desperately reaching for a talking point, but some of them were quite sincere. This is the mindset of the institutionalist. It is important that people retain faith in our institutions, which does not mean that our institutions should work to earn people’s faith, but instead that people shouldn’t hear about it when they don’t. This attitude is especially common in lawyers, who, as a profession, turned “nothing is true, everything is permitted” into a professional ethic. And of course, many elected officials, and especially many Democrats, are lawyers.

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, electeds, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. But when the party does manage to win majorities, it depends on support from a substantial number of anti-system people. Barack Obama defeated the Clintons with this sacred knowledge, before he started reading David Brooks. (emphasis added)

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish. (emphasis added)

In the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency a lot of very intelligent people tried to come up with ideas for how to change the Supreme Court, which is poised to spend years eroding the regulatory state and chipping away at civil rights. Expand it, perhaps. Or marginalize it. President Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, formed a commission of legal scholars—from across the ideological spectrum, of course—to investigate what ought to be done about it. They failed to come up with any answers. “Lawmakers,” the commission wrote, “should be cautious about any reform that seems aimed at the substance of Court decisions or grounded in interpretations of the Constitution over which there is great disagreement in our political life.” You might be mad at the Court because of the decisions it produces, but it’s essential that everyone still trusts the processes that led to them.

 

This was a white flag. I think some people in the White House have some sick hope that the end of Roe will galvanize the midterm electorate. Something like that may indeed happen. But if they wish to understand why the president has been bleeding youth support for the last year they should try to imagine these young people (and “young”, at this point, has expanded to like 45) not as the annoying and hyper-engaged freaks they see on Twitter every day, but as ones they don’t see anywhere, because, having been urged to pay furious attention by people in the party, they discovered that those people had absolutely no realistic plans to overcome entrenched, systemic obstacles to progress.

The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch. (emphasis added)

This line of reasoning resonates strongly with me. I see this core problem the about the same way that Pareene sees it. He saw the problem with the system years before I independently came to about the same beliefs. He sees the whole picture more clearly than my still incomplete thinking on this issue. 

Channel note: I'm baaaaaack, sort of

SCENE 1: The exciting action causing the injury, just a notch below the intensity of action in The Terminator: A few days ago I sprained/strained my left shoulder and bicep moving a heavy box from one place to another. That was real dumb. Pain started immediately but flared into intolerable the next day.

This was close in intensity to my action scene

SCENE 2: The exciting medical drama, like the TV show House: I'm not sure if it was a sprain or strain. The interwebs indicates that the two are overlapping things. The doctor called it a sprain based on X-rays, so I'll go with that. 

I was close to this level of medical action

My ER doctor's charming bedside manner

telling me to stop wasting his time or the 

oxygen I was breathing in his ER room

(I think he wanted me to stop breathing?

My div is a tough old geezer, probably ~35 years old)

Anyway, the pain was so intense I couldn't even keyboard and didn't feel like blogging. I got some wuss pain pill, naproxen and a muscle relaxant. From what I could tell neither drug did squat for the pain. The most effective treatment by far was to sit still and not move. But today, something changed and most of the pain faded to just a menacing little gremlin waiting for me to do something stupid with my left arm. 

The gremlin is about a 3 according to this scientifically 

precise measuring stick

Before today, the flares were about a 9 if I moved wrong, 

but pretty stable at 6.5 (not 6 or 7) for a couple of days if I didn't move much

So, today and tomorrow and until the gremlin goes away, I'll try to refrain from doing something stupid with my left arm. Otherwise, we can go back to exciting action causing injury.

Thanks to all for your kind words and support. 

 

Biden’s Very Trumpian Response to the Peaceful Student Protests

He’s explicitly demonizing nonviolent demonstrators and implicitly supporting the disproportionate and violent police response.

Fr. The New Republic 5/3/24 

On Tuesday evening, dozens of NYPD officers stormed Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which pro-Palestinian demonstrators had occupied earlier that day. Some officers entered the building with their guns drawn; one officer accidentally fired his weapon, thinking he was turning on a flashlight. That same evening, pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked an encampment at UCLA, shooting fireworks and mace at the students while police did nothing; a day later the police entered the encampment, arresting over 100 people. On Wednesday, at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth University, police pushed over and body-slammed a 65-year-old Jewish studies professor [who is past chairperson of the Jewish Studies Dept.-ed.] and then charged her with resisting arrest.

These scenes have been repeated across the country. Over the last three weeks, encampments protesting Israel’s bombing and starvation campaign against civilians in Gaza have sprouted up at over 100 colleges and universities. These protests have been controversial but peaceful—there are teach-ins and movie screenings. And college administrators, panicked about angry donors and opportunistic politicians from both parties, have responded to the tents popping up on their quads by calling in armed police—often under the bogus pretense that violent “outside agitators” have infiltrated the camps—who arrest students and, in some instances, the faculty members trying to protect them. More than 2,000 protesters, many of them students, have been arrested since the demonstrations began less than three weeks ago. 

On Thursday, in his first unscripted remarks about these events, President Biden delivered a forceful message in which he defended students’ “right to protest” and added, “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.” He’s absolutely right: Students have the right to peaceably assemble on their own campus without worry of being assaulted by police.

The only problem is that Biden, the self-appointed defender of American democracy, was actually condemning the students themselves. He said they don’t have “the right to cause chaos,” when in fact the chaos on campuses across America is being overwhelmingly caused by the police—as well as the people who are directing and backing the police, a group that includes purportedly liberal school administrators, Democratic mayors and governors, and even Biden himself. It has been a shameful week for the establishment left, and one we may all look back on when the election results come in on November 5.

The Democratic Party’s best electoral argument in 2024 is no different from four years ago. The Republican Party is in the grip of a two-bit authoritarian and aspiring strongman intent on using the state to crush opposition wherever he sees it. Openly disdainful of democracy and pluralism, Donald Trump has already tried to steal one election, expresses a desire to arrest or deport his political opponents, and do I need to keep going? Biden and the Democratic Party are the country’s most powerful bulwark against this growing extremism, which is hardly limited to Trump himself; practically the entire GOP is in his grip. 

In June 2020, as demonstrations spread across the country in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, Biden gave the best speech of his campaign. “We need to distinguish between legitimate peaceful protest and opportunistic violent destruction,” he said. “And we must be vigilant about the violence that’s being done by the incumbent president to our democracy and to the pursuit of justice.” He then attacked Trump for using riot police to clear a protest outside the White House so he could do his infamous photo op holding the Bible that he’s never read.

It was a similar message to the one Biden delivered on Thursday—except that you’d be hard pressed to find many instances of uninstigated violence by student protesters over these past few weeks. Meanwhile, there is ample, indisputable evidence of police violence against student protesters. At UCLA, police fired rubber bullets at demonstrators, causing one student to require 11 staples to close a head wound. At Arizona State University, four Muslim students had their hijabs ripped off by officers. At New York’s City College, police shattered one protester’s ankle and broke the teeth of two others. Student journalists have been pepper-sprayed, beaten, and arrested at some protests. At many, reporters are locked out altogether—a grotesque assault on the press’s ability to inform the public and uphold democracy.

In his speech this week, Biden attempted to define what he meant by violence and chaos—and it wasn’t what I just described. “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest,” he said. Misdemeanors like vandalism or trespassing—a reference to the occupation of Hamilton Hall—surely don’t warrant hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear. Moreover, classes were canceled at Columbia in large part because of the police presence on campus. If anyone caused a disruption to education at Columbia, it was its embattled president, Minouche Shafik, whose panicked response escalated the situation dramatically. And the only commencement that has been called off was at the University of Southern California, which did so after the controversy generated by its decision to block its pro-Palestinian valedictorian from speaking.

It is not difficult to understand why students are protesting. Tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, at least as many are starving and lack access to health care, and most of the Strip has been destroyed—including all of its universities. This has happened with the full diplomatic and financial support of the U.S. government, which provided many of the weapons responsible for this carnage. And yet, when thousands of students across the country peacefully organize protests against these atrocities, leading Democrats—including Biden himself—have responded by demonizing them, tarring them with unsubstantiated or exaggerated accusations of antisemitism and cheering on their arrests.

The protests are politically inconvenient for Biden, who is trailing in most polls and has struggled to hold together a Democratic Party that is deeply divided over Israel. But his callous response—remember, this is a politician who prides himself on empathy—is only widening that rift. The police response has been wildly and unquestionably disproportionate. It is inherently undemocratic, not to mention disappointing coming from the head of party that a few short years ago was condemning the excessive use of police force against nonviolent, unarmed civilians. It cuts against everything Biden and his party theoretically stand for in the fight against Trump and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. It is, in fact, Trumpian.

Alex Shephard is senior editor of The New Republic. His work has also appeared in New York, The Atlantic, The Nation and GQ.

Link to article at The New Republic

 

 

Channel note: Out sick

 I've got a major injury. Ouch, seriously. Will be out at least today and tomorrow.

Opinion poll: Voter fear; Radicalization of Catholicism?; Forced birth war update

NPR reports that poll data indicates that fear is a significant concern among voters:

NPR poll: Democrats fear fascism, 

and Republicans worry about a lack of values

The fear factor is real in America, but Democrats and Republicans are scared for the country's future for different reasons, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.

They also believe very differently about what children who will inherit that future should be taught.

Looking at this year's presidential election, the survey also found big shifts with key voter groups, along generational, racial and educational lines.

It also explored how third-party candidates and so-called "double haters" — who have unfavorable ratings of both President Biden and former President Donald Trump — could affect the race.

Finally, the poll finds a jump in Republicans now believing Trump has done something unethical, as he continues to contend with dozens of criminal charges and legal troubles. The number of Republicans saying Trump has done something unethical has jumped 12 points since February, from 34% to 46%. Still, only 8% of Republicans think he's done something illegal, compared to almost half of respondents overall (47%). A whopping 77% overall think Trump has done something illegal or at least unethical, and a majority believes the investigations into his conduct are fair.

Biden's 2-point lead with all adults and 5-point lead with registered voters evaporates when RFK Jr. and others are considered. RFK Jr. takes in 11% of the vote, which is about how much he's been registering on average in previous Marist polls and other surveys. It's no secret that there's a lot of cynicism and disaffection among many voters. Highlighting the country's partisanship, respondents said both men essentially represent equal threats to democracy, and majorities say they dislike both.

Assuming the data is meaningful somehow, whether all of that collectively is good, bad or about equally mixed is not obvious to me. Any thoughts? I just keep getting feelings of unease from a lot of the news these days.

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An AP article reports about what appears to be a surge of radical fundamentalism in the American Catholic church:

‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church 

sees an immense shift toward the old ways

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.

The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.

So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.

At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.

“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

The changes are not happening everywhere. There are still plenty of liberal parishes, plenty that see themselves as middle-of-the-road. Despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority.

This is discomforting. Conservative Catholicism, whatever it is, strikes me as inherently anti-democratic and authoritarian. That mindset seems to be similar to, or about the same as, America's radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement, roughly Trump and his radicalized Republican Party. The mindset also seems to align with the NPR poll data discussed above. 

It is now obvious that America's radical right authoritarian movement is completely comfortable with harsh, aggressive minority rule over the objections of the majority of Americans. In my opinion, that is a solid evidence of anti-democratic authoritarianism. 

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Forced birth advocates are getting very aggressive. The WaPo reports about an apparently new tactic to stop abortions in states where it is legal (not paywalled):

Texas man files legal action to probe ex-partner’s 

out-of-state abortion

The previously unreported petition reflects a potential new antiabortion strategy to block women from ending their pregnancies in states where abortion is legal

As soon as Collin Davis found out his ex-partner was planning to travel to Colorado to have an abortion in late February, the Texas man retained a high-powered antiabortion attorney — who court records show immediately issued a legal threat.

If the woman proceeded with the abortion, even in a state where the procedure remains legal, Davis would seek a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the abortion and “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child,” the lawyer wrote in a letter, according to records.

Now, Davis has disclosed his former partner’s abortion to a state district court in Texas, asking for the power to investigate what his lawyer characterizes as potentially illegal activity in a state where almost all abortions are banned.

The previously unreported petition was submitted under an unusual legal mechanism often used in Texas to investigate suspected illegal actions before a lawsuit is filed. The petition claims Davis could sue either under the state’s wrongful-death statute or the novel Texas law known as Senate Bill 8 that allows private citizens to file suit against anyone who “aids or abets” an illegal abortion.

The decision to target an abortion that occurred outside of Texas represents a potential new strategy by antiabortion activists to achieve a goal many in the movement have been working toward since Roe v. Wade was overturned: stopping women from traveling out of state to end their pregnancies. Crossing state lines for abortion care remains legal nationwide.

Anti-abortion advocates constitute a powerful, aggressive minority that is not ever going to stop trying to impose forced birth law nationwide. These people are theocratic zealots fighting God's sacred war. They do not compromise. If this minority of people ever get enough power, America will be ruled under the iron fist of intrusive Christian Sharia law administered by a corrupt, cruel male Taliban. 

Christian theocrats do not believe 

in that reasoning

Their religion does prohibit everyone

from whatever it makes illegal 

Will the biggest student movement since Vietnam be crushed?

 

In a matter of days, dozens of Gaza solidarity encampments have sprung up on over a hundred university campuses across the U.S. It’s the biggest student movement since the anti-war protests that swept U.S. universities in the 1960s.

As encampments are erected across the country, students have peacefully called for divestment from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. In response, many school administrations are inviting police onto campuses to violently crack down on students.  

For over six months, tens of thousands of Jews and countless other people of conscience have fought to end the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians in Gaza. We continue to demand that the Biden administration end its support for the Israeli military. 

The biggest student anti-war movement since Vietnam

As the movement for a ceasefire grows, students across the country have organized in the thousands to demand that their universities cut ties with Israel’s apartheid regime. Over 100 Gaza solidarity encampments have been established on campuses across the country, reclaiming the space as  “liberated zones” and “popular universities for Gaza.” Student chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace have been involved in organizing at least 47 of these encampments. 

At the University of Chicago, students established the “Popular University for Gaza” on the main quad of the University of Chicago campus. Painted boards bearing the messages “Disclose, divest, and repair” and “In solidarity with Gaza forever” have been erected around the encampment. At the University of Minnesota, hundreds of student protesters pitched dozens of tents on Monday, linking arms to protect the encampment after arrests were threatened. 

And so on, at over one hundred campuses across the country. 

In response to these peaceful student anti-war protests against genocide, many school administrations have invited police onto campus for violent crackdowns.

Violent repression at Columbia University and City College

At Columbia University, negotiations broke down and the university began issuing fresh suspensions on Monday. In response, hundreds of Columbia students and professors occupied Hamilton Hall, one of the buildings occupied by anti-war student protesters in 1968. Faculty linked arms with students to protect protesters inside. 

Students renamed the occupied building “Hind’s Hall,” after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, who was murdered alongside her family by the Israeli military in Gaza. For hours, Hind was left to bleed out as Israeli forces fired on ambulances trying to reach her. 

 On Tuesday evening, the Columbia administration again called the cops on their own students. As student journalists were confined to Pulitzer Hall, and told they would be arrested if they left, hundreds of NYPD police clad in riot gear swarmed Columbia’s campus to forcefully disperse the encampment and remove the students occupying Hind’s Hall. Cops deployed an armored vehicle to gain entry to Hind’s Hall and brutalized the dozens of student protestors who were doing nothing but peacefully occupying a building on their own campus. 

One video shows a protester being thrown down the stairs; another shows cops entering Hind’s Hall with their guns drawn to confront the unarmed student protesters inside. Just a few miles away, dozens of cops were deployed in a simultaneous raid to crack down on protesters at CCNY, where police also used excessive force against peaceful students, arresting dozens. Across the city, hundreds of protestors were arrested.

On air, a student reporter for Columbia’s radio station fought back tears at the news that Columbia President Minouche Shafik has requested the NYPD remain on campus for the remainder of the school year [May, 17]

The first 20 or so minutes of this video is a briefing by Columbia Professors discussing the severe mistreatment of their students by the Columbia Administration and NYPD under Mayor Eric Adams broadcast by Reuters yesterday. Worth a look if you are interested in what really has been going on at Columbia U.

 

Violent repression at UCLA

At UCLA, tens of thousands of dollars were crowdfunded to bus Zionist agitators to campus, where they surrounded student protesters. In one video, a woman waving an Israeli flag is seen shouting at students: “Go to Palestine. I hope they rape you.” 

On Tuesday evening, masked Zionist vigilantes from outside campus attempted to tear down the students’ encampment. They beat students with bats, threw bricks, sprayed mace, and shot fireworks at protestors, all while police stood by and watched. Later last night, UCLA student journalists who were walking on campus were followed and assaulted by Zionist counter-protestors.

[More coverage of UCLA events of April 30 in this LA Times article.  ]

Violent repression across the country

As dozens of encampments are erected across the country, students peacefully calling for divestment from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians are facing an increasingly violent crackdown by the state. 

Police clad in riot gear have been called in to clear encampments by force, and over 1,000 students have been arrested in total. Videos taken of police raids have shown students and professors being thrown to the ground and handcuffed, shoved, beaten, and dragged by militarized police. 

Across the country, cops are using pepper spray, rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas on students, many of whom are still teenagers, at the behest of the university administrators who claim to care for their safety. At Arizona State University, videos showed cops removing the hijabs of female Muslim protesters. At Tulane, mounted police rode through the student encampment. 

Pro-Israel agitators are also doing everything in their power to smear protesters and get encampments shut down by force. When a man waving an Israeli flag showed up to Northeastern University’s Gaza solidarity encampment and shouted “kill the Jews,” the university had 100 pro-Palestine student protesters arrested in response. The Northeastern administration justified the crackdown in a statement citing this antisemitic threat — neglecting to specify that it was a pro-Israel provocateur making that threat. 

It’s clear that the only violence happening on U.S. campuses is being perpetrated by the state and Zionist agitators. Yet the U.S. media and pro-genocide politicians have gone to great lengths to portray peaceful, student anti-war demonstrations as violent, antisemitic mobs, in order to justify the increasingly brutal crackdown on the right to protest.

Fr. The Wire (official newsletter of JVP). Full article here.