The Michigan Senate race and the politics of antisemitism – and alleged antisemitism - in 2026

Antisemitism is a continuing plague on the world. It has certainly done centuries of damage in Europe, most notably in the Holocaust that resulted in the death of six million Jews and massive dislocation and dispossession of many more.

In recent years, especially since the Gaza War began in 2023 with the October 7 attack by Palestinians on Israel, political debates in the US and Europe have had a new set of debates over antisemitism, and particularly in relation to criticism of the State of Israel, its leaders, its wars, and its effects on US foreign policy.

And in the Senate campaign in Michigan, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed criticized US aid to Israel – which is in line with the position a majority the of Democratic base nationally support. His Republican opponents and supposedly nonpartisan advocates for the policies of the Netanyahu government in Israel have been boosting the accusation against El-Sayed that this criticism is antisemitic.

Before looking at how El-Sayed has been dealing with this issue in the final days of the campaign, it’s worth mentioning some more details about the current Israel/antisemitism debate.

Is criticizing Israel antisemitic?

In some ways, the question is absurd. Despite the widespread agreement on general Israeli policies toward the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (1), there has been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu’s government, which was reflected in last week Israeli national elections. So if criticizing the policies of Israel is antisemitic, then a good majority of Israeli Jews would be guilty of antisemitism themselves by criticizing their government’s policies.

There is an influential definition of antisemitism known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016 that has become an influential one for governments and civil society organizations.

The definition has been criticised by academics, including legal scholars, for equating antisemitism with the criticism of Israeli actions and policies. The examples relating to Israel have been criticised by academics, including legal scholars, for being open to weaponization of antisemitism used to stifle free speech relating to criticism of Israeli actions and policies. High-profile controversies took place in the United Kingdom in 2011 within the University and College Union, and within the Labour Party in 2018. Critics say weaknesses in the working definition may lend themselves to abuse, that it may obstruct campaigning for the rights of Palestinians (as in the Palestine exception), and that it is too vague. Critics say weaknesses in the working definition may lend themselves to abuse, that it may obstruct campaigning for the rights of Palestinians (as in the Palestine exception), and that it is too vague. Kenneth S. Stern, who contributed to the original draft, has opposed the weaponization of the definition on college campuses in ways that might undermine free speech. The controversy over the definition led to the creation of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, both of which expressly draw distinctions between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. (2)

In Germany and Austria in particular, the government and political parties have used their aid to Israel and political support for Israel’s position in foreign policy as a key sign that they have rejected the legacy that produced the Shoah (Holocaust). Which has led to unusual measures against demonstrations and political meetings critical of the Netanyahu government’s war-and-starvation policies against Gaza civilians. Yanis Varoufakis has speculated, “My hypothesis is that Germany’s political class has a penchant for national catechisms that unite its members behind a common will: net exports as Germany’s strength; China as German industry’s playground; Russia as its source of cheap energy; and Zionism as proof that it has turned a page, morally.” (3)

The New Republic on Substack summarized the background in 2024:

And this is where we get to the question of the Republicans’ motivation in introducing this bill. The IHRA definition is not without controversy, precisely because of some language about criticism of Israel that many consider blurry. Two other definitions of antisemitism have been promulgated—the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document. Choosing to rely solely on one of the three definitions struck some critics as concerning. Even the author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, has become a sharp critic of using it with respect to speech on college campuses, and Nadler told me that Stern opposed this bill.

But: The IHRA definition did have a notable champion in the United States: Donald Trump. As president in 2019, he signed an executive order to protect Jewish students under the Civil Rights Act, using the IHRA definition. Sounds good and uncontroversial, but numerous critics, including progressive Jewish groups, worried about its potential chilling effect on campuses. Stern, writing in The Guardian argued that his definition "was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude.… It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week." [emphasis added] (4)

Stern himself discussed his view of the matter in some detail in 2024 (5):

Attacks against El-Sayed as antisemitic

Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press described two types of the accusation against the now-elected Democratic candidate for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed:

First, some Jewish voters and their allies argue that El-Sayed is antisemitic, or, at least, not strong enough in his defense of Jews and Israel in the face of antisemitism, despite his repeated denunciation of the targeting of Jews or any violence against them, and that it puts them and their community at risk.

Second, his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, and his allies have allowed their claims that El-Sayed is linked to terrorist groups, which have not been directly supported by any evidence, to stray into bias and prejudice, if not bigotry, during the waning weeks of the campaign. (6)

Trump has completely normalized dishonest attacks against critics and opponents and anyone who annoys him as terrorists who hate America. It’s just plain sleazy to make that a standard practice the way the Trump cult does. But Trump himself has been making that accusation specifically against El-Sayed. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers has also “made unsubstantiated claims linking [El-Sayed] to terrorist groups.” Candidates have a lot of leeway for what they say in campaigns. But those kinds of accusations seem like the kind worth suing someone over.

As Spangler reports:

El-Sayed won in the primary against Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who is from the establishment wing of the party, while El-Sayed is a progressive. El-Sayed defeated Stevens, who received tens of millions of dollars in outside help from pro-Israeli groups, in the Democratic primary, though Stevens later endorsed El-Sayed and still says she backs him. (El-Sayed has been unmoving in calling for military aid to Israel and other countries to be cut and critical of the Netanyahu government's counteroffensive against Hamas in Gaza, calling it genocide against the Palestinian people.)

In the week before the election, there was news and controversy over an ad run by Cenk Uygur’s Resistance PAC that Stevens criticized as being antisemitic. El-Sayed said that his campaign had nothing to do with releasing the ad and that he disapproved of its content. Stevens attracted media attention by continuing to complain that El-Sayed had not been strong enough in his disavowal. In effect, she was boosting Republican attacks on him. (7)

El-Sayed refused to be drawn into the “don’t think of an elephant” trap of boosting an oppo slogan against him by constantly refuting it and thereby helping to keep it in voters’ minds. Stevens had been scheduled to appear with El-Sayed on November 1, two days before the election. But El-Sayed disinvited her after she used the run-up to the election to promote Republicans smears against him.

What he didn’t do, but could have, was to point out that not only did she endorse El-Sayed immediately after the primary and continued to say she backed him. And he or his campaign could have asked, look, if Stevens thought he was antisemitic, why did she ever endorse him in the first place?

This is another reminder that for some establishment Democratic politicians and donors, they would rather lose an election with a milquetoast centrist than to win with a progressive. That is partly because of their opposition to programs like Medicare for All and adequately taxing billionaires, reducing US dependence on fossil fuels, and regulating AI in the public interest.

Yeah, that whole scene she staged the last couple of weeks of the campaign doesn't make her look good at all. She was pretty blatantly doing the Republicans' work for them even though she continued to claim to be endorsing El-Sayed. Plus, it rases the obvious question: if she really thought al-Sayed was an antisemite, why did she endorse him in the first place? And maybe it's kind of petty to say, but she often sounds like one of the Munchkins from The Wizard Of Oz. I can't believe she would have been a stronger candidate for the general election than El-Sayed, who is obviously a good communicator and very telegenic. And her bizarre behavior at the end of El-Sayed’s campaign has made a continuing care in Democratic politics highly doubtful.

Notes:

(1) Kaminer, Matan (2026): Only Israel's Palestinians Vote Against Genocide. Jacobin 10/31/2026. <https://jacobin.com/2026/10/israel-elections-joint-list-palestinian-arabs> (Accessed: 2026-01-11).

(2) IHRA definition of antisemitism. Wikipedia 10/02/2026. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IHRA_definition_of_antisemitism&oldid=1378015296> (Accessed: 2026-11-07).

(3) Varoufakis, Yanis (2024): Banned by Germany. Project Syndicate 04/30/2024. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-germany-bans-and-arrests-israel-critics-including-jews-by-yanis-varoufakis-2024-04> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).

(4) A Dem’s Principled Opposition to a Grandstanding GOP Antisemitism Bill. The New Republic Substack 05/03/2024. <https://thenewrepublic.substack.com/p/a-dems-principled-opposition-to-a> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).

(5) He Helped Define “Antisemitism”; Now He Says the Term Is Being Weaponized. Amanpour and Company YouTube channel 05/02/2024. <https://youtu.be/6FFAcHMO488?si=enXB4YheSec87Gnd> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).

(6) Spangler, Todd (2026): Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the lines of attack against El-Sayed. Detroit Free Press 10/29/2026. <https://eu.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/10/29/abdul-el-sayed-antisemitism-jihadism-claims-us-senate-race/92498401007/> (Accessed: 2026-11-01).

(7) US foreign aid to Israel highlighted in campaign ad in support of El-Sayed. Aljazeera 10/26/2026. <https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/10/26/us-foreign-aid-to-israel-highlighted-in-campaign-ad-in-support-of-el-sayed> (Accessed: 2026-11-01).

Reactionary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin

Alexander Dugin is a reactionary Russian Christian nationalist who has often been mentioned as a representative of Vladimir Putin’s general worldview. And that’s true in that Putin is also a Russian Christian nationalist.

60 Minutes (pre-Bari Weiss) ran this short segment on Dugin recorded in 2017: (1)

It’s worth being cautious about Western assertions about Putin operating on a grand historical viewpoint. For one thing, Western pundits and even some scholars are tempted to treat Putin’s Russia as the reincarnation of a Western understanding of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Communist governments from Lenin to Gorbachev did have a Communist/Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. Even that evolved over time.

But the “realist” foreign-policy theorists would point out – correctly – that Soviet leaders understood that they had to take into account the competitive and anarchic nature of the international system. In 1918 before Russia pulled out of the First World War via the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Bolshevik leadership was considering offers from the Entente powers, Lenin expressed his position this way: “I request that my vote be added in favor of the acceptance of potatoes and arms from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” (2) Later examples would include the clandestine postwar collaboration with Weimar Germany to help Germany clandestinely build up its armed forces. And in the infamous German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The latter was an example of cold-blooded realist diplomacy on the USSR’s and Germany’s part – in response to the cold-blooded (if misguided) and even more infamous Munich Agreement of 1938.

Manfred Quiring describes Dugin’s Big Vision of Russia’s world-historical mission this way:

Eurasia, and thus Russia, is entrusted with a "historic mission," Dugin preaches, which should ultimately lead to success in the confrontation with the West. “The Russians understood the meaning of their existence in history as the fulfillment of a unique mission. It is entrusted only to us, but it must touch all others ... We took universal responsibility for the fate of the world, for the difficult matter of saving the spirit that seeks completion and perfection. (3)

Much of the Western foreign policy establishment, particularly in Europe at the moment, are inclined to see Russia as a relentlessly imperial power determined to take back control of at least the former Warsaw Pact countries. Which, from a realist point of view, would be a spectacularly dumb goal for Russia to adopt. Most foreign-policy realists and “restrainers” would presumably argue that NATO, Ukraine, and Russia all made some bad decisions leading up to 2014 (Crimea) and 2022 (the current war) which a more hard-headed realist approach on all sides could have avoided.

We can be reasonably comfortable assuming that Putin does see his foreign policy goals as including “universal responsibility for the fate of the world, for the difficult matter of saving the spirit that seeks completion and perfection.”

It turns out the Dugin has his own Substack, called “Alexander Dugin Channel.” (I couldn’t locate any source commenting on whether it’s actually Dugin’s or not.) I’m not linking to it here because I don’t want some algorithm to start sending me lots of crap on the Dugin kind. But his post of June 11 is called, “Alexander Dugin on Trump, the Deep State, and the Future of America.” He harshes on J.D. Vance but describes a recent X post of his as “sincere and honest.” Dugin also says it’s time to “start the Great Turning,” which presumably means in the immediate sense that the US should abandon Ukraine and adopt a full-on pro-Russian foreign policy. Which Trump could likely be persuaded by addition bribes and threats to do. Although actually doing so would require some real ability to conduct a coherent strategic foreign policy, which Trump very obviously does not have.

Whether the English version comes directly from him or through a translation, it’s pretty poor. For example:

The communism is wrong target. The real evil is liberal centre. It is the core of Epstein’s class - left liberals + right liberals. They are the System, the Deep State, the Swamp.

The left changed the strategy from woke/DEI to the left populism, social justice. The woke and DEI on the left is the same repulsive block as Israel and interventionism (neocons) on the right.

Maxim Trudolyubov and Ekaterina Kotrikadze explained in 2024:

Dugin is important to the Kremlin because he is a radical pro-war agitator. In May 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Dugin gave an interview to a Donetsk-based media outlet in which he exclaimed: “Kill, kill, kill those who allow atrocities in Ukraine!” That happened after forty-two anti-Maidan and pro-Russia activists died in a building fire in the Ukrainian city of Odesa during pro-Russia protests that turned deadly.

Dugin’s position on Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s territories is, in his own words, “opposition to the [Ukrainian] junta and Ukrainian Nazism that exterminates civilians.” He is also an ardent supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s steps “in his confrontation with Kyiv and Washington.” (4)

Dugin promotes a quirky version of the original theory of “geopolitics” associated with Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) and Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). The latter in particular stressed a concept of “Eurasia” as the more-or-less inevitable center of world power, which essentially viewed Russia as the center world power. And so does Dugin, albeit in a kind of fuzzy-mystical sense. In a view at least vaguely related to Mackinder’s, Dugin considers the world to be divided between two sets of value systems. Dugin, writes Quiring, works the Mahan-Mackinder notion of geopolitics into the idea of the “special meaning of Russia in the world.”

Quiring describes how Dugin sees Russia’s position in this scheme: "Russia, as the ‘core of mainland civilization,’ is therefore condemned to wage the centuries-long struggle with the Anglo-Saxon world. Its core used to be the British Empire, today it is the United States.” (5)

As Quiring explains:

[Dugin] paints a picture of an unavoidable, natural antagonism between two value systems, that of the "mainland" and that of the "sea". He attributes to the mainland the values that are in harmony with those of the "Russian world" as the "heartland of Eurasia": "tradition, faith (for Russians, Orthodox Christianity), empire, people, the sacred, history, family, ethics." For Dugin, the world of the sea is described by such gruesome terms as "modernization, trade, technology, liberal democracy, capitalism, parliamentarism, individualism, materialism, gender politics."

Liberalism - in the classic sense of democratic government with the rule of law and traditional capitalism - is the central target of his philosophical hostility. Homophobia is also a key element of the Dugin worldview. (5)

This view is broadly consistent with Putin’s polemics against Western democracies. But it would be mistaken to assume that Putin is some kind of devotee of Dugin’s particular religious-political worldview. Dugin himself argues, “The salvation of Europe lies in Orthodox Christianity.” (Quiring, 194) Quiring describes Dugin’s viewpoint as “fascistoid.”

Dugin is a fan of Putin’s sometime idea of a Eurasian Union. Putin put forward that idea during his campaign for the 2012 Russian presidential election. Uwe Halback explained then, “He placed particular emphasis on the partnership with the European Union. … [But] Putin is likely fixated on Russia’s position in the post-Soviet region, the main priority in terms of foreign policy.”

Dugin seems to function as a cheerleader for a broad Russian nationalism which Putin shares. But it would be misleading to assume that Dugin somehow speaks for Putin. Even though he has been referred to as “Putin’s Brain.” Anton Shekhovtsov wrote in 2014 about Putin’s concept of Neo-Eurasianism, which is how Dugin has identified his ideology:

Despite the name, Neo-Eurasianism has a limited relation to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian emigre movement that could be placed in the Slavophile tradition. Rather, Neo-Eurasianism is a mixture of the ideas of Guenon, Evola and the ENR, as well as classical geopolitics and National Bolshevism to which Dugin was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s by Belgian New Right author Robert Steuckers. In Russia, for the sake of political and cultural legitimacy, Dugin argued for continuity between interwar Eurasianism and his own ideology, but his Neo-Eurasianism is firmly rooted in western, rather than Russian, far right intellectual tradition. (6)

It’s even misleading to assume that Dugin’s ideas derived from Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) and Halford Mackinder in any meaningful way. As Shekhovtsov puts it:

Putin never revealed that his foreign policy was guided by any kind of ideology and always stressed the "pragmatic" nature of the Russian approach to the West. Had Putin named any particular guiding ideology, then he would have been challenged intellectually - a battle that he would have been doomed to lose. Moreover, the assumption that the Kremlin was following Dugin's ideas made Putin predictable. At the end of the day, Dugin has put forward a very clear, "ready-to-use" geopolitical strategy, but it is Putin's unpredictability that plays to his advantage in foreign relations.

He also explained Dugin’s background in his 2014 essay:

Despite the metapolitical nature of the ENR, its ideas have influenced many radical right parties in Europe. One particular idea of the ENR, namely ethnopluralism, is especially popular among the ideologues of the party-political far right, as it champions ethno-cultural pluralism globally but is critical of cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) in any given society. The ENR thinkers have supplied Dugin with the most important ideological ammunition that he employed to create Neo-Eurasianism.

Despite the name, Neo-Eurasianism has a limited relation to Eurasianism, the interwar Russian emigre movement that could be placed in the Slavophile tradition. Rather, Neo-Eurasianism is a mixture of the ideas of Guenon, Evola and the ENR, as well as classical geopolitics and National Bolshevism to which Dugin was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s by Belgian New Right author Robert Steuckers. In Russia, for the sake of political and cultural legitimacy, Dugin argued for continuity between interwar Eurasianism and his own ideology, but his Neo-Eurasianism is firmly rooted in western, rather than Russian, far right intellectual tradition.

This is another example of the present-day Nationalist International: nationalist ideologues in various countries all borrowing each others’ ideas.

Masha Gessen, like other experts on Russian politics debunks the notion of Alexander Dugin as "a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology." But:

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground [during Soviet times]. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. ...

His star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin had developed an entire arsenal of language for this occasion. He had called for the creation of a “Russian World,” a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion. Annexing eastern Ukraine would have been the first step to building the Russian World. In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language. (7)

And she observes:

Dugin taught himself languages in order to read the thinkers who interested him most. By the late nineteen-eighties, these were apparently mostly far-right, traditionalist, and fascist philosophers. The first book that Dugin translated was by Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher currently popular with a faction of the right wing in the United States. Steve Bannon has deployed Evola’s ideas. To the extent that the Russian political world can be compared to that of the U.S., [Steve] Bannon can serve as a useful reference: not only are his views related to Dugin’s—and not only are both Dugin and Bannon connected to European neo-Fascist networks—but Bannon’s and Dugin’s relationships to actual political power are complicated in similar ways. There were certainly moments, early in the Trump Presidency, when Bannon’s ideas seemed to exert great influence on U.S. political life. But, in the end, Bannon’s vision of the world—and himself in it — served Donald Trump for a limited time only. [emphasis added]

Although Putin has made formal agreements in the past with far-right parties in France, Italy and Austria, he is not claiming to lead a global political movement or ideology. Although his government encourages sympathetic attitudes toward Russian foreign policy over Ukraine in particular, Putin does not promote an elaborate common ideology that could be compared to the way did with Communist parties in the West. Even Putin’s own political ideology appears to be a fairly vague mixture of nationalism, theocratic Christian conservativism of the Russian Orthodox variety, and a spattering of notions from assorted anti-democratic, rightist cranks like Dugin.

Notes:

(1) Aleksandr Dugin: The far-right theorist behind Putin's plan. 60 Minutes YouTube channel 04/12/2022. <https://youtu.be/Du7fOoW_euE?si=IUkIyxW-rHNiJ84M> (Accessed: 2026-06-11).

(2) Kennan, George (1956/2014): Russia Leaves the War: Vol. 1 of Soviet American Relations, 501. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

(3) Quiring, Manfred (2020): Russland-Auferstehung einer Weltmacht?, 75-76, 194. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. My translation from German.

(4) The US Right-Wing Media Embrace Russia’s Far-Right Ideologue. Wilson Center 05/10/2024. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue (Accessed: 2026-06-11).

(5) Halbach, Uwe (2012): Vladimir Putin's Eurasian Union. SWP Comments Jan. 2012. <https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/comments/2012C01_hlb.pdf>

(6) Anton Shekhovtsov. "Putin’s Brain?" New Eastern Europe 04 (13):72-79. <https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=429899>

(7) Gessen, Masha (2022): The Mysterious Murder of Drza [Darya] Dugin. New Yorker 08/26/2022. <https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-mysterious-murder-of-darya-dugina>

How should the new Democratic-dominated Congress proceed against Trump and Trumpism?

This was one of those rare weeks where Democrats could watch the news for days on end and feel like celebrating!

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries offered a cautiously vague to MS NOW on how Democrats in Congress should proceed the next two years: “The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf. We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.” But as Paul Waldman notes, unlike mayors such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani or Governors like Michigan’s newly-elected Jocelyn Benson, Members of Congress can’t do much to directly affect how quickly potholes are filled, or expediting processing of building permits in municipal planning departments, or impose local rent controls.

And with a hostile, far-right President holding veto power, enacting specific policies that will deliver immediate relief on the cost of living will be a big challenge for the new Democratic Congress.

The truth is that there is very little Democrats can do in the next two years to “get things done” and bring down the price of groceries, healthcare, housing, or much else. They can pass some bills that Trump will veto, and from a political perspective that’s fine. But this is what they most need to learn from the 2026 midterms: They have nothing to fear but fear itself. ...

[T]he administration tried to use federal power to meddle in the election, attempting to deploy the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots, intimidate state election officials to bar people it erroneously identified as non-citizens from voting, and even void the Alaska Senate election. It all failed - because Democrats and state officials fought back.

In all of these cases, the weapons the GOP and the Trump administration deployed were indeed powerful, and most had worked in the past. It was because Democrats were resolute in opposition that those weapons were defused. [emphasis in bold added]

David Rothkopf of the DSR Network assembled three of his favorite commentators to evaluate Tuesday’s results.

Longtime Congressional observer Norm Ornstein on the panel warns that the Democrats will need to manage the hearings very differently than we have too often seen before, including from Republican-run hearings the last two years: “You get an opening statement by the chair, [then] an opening statement by the ranking member, and then they go on these back-and-forth ping-ponging, five minutes by a majority, five minutes by a minority.” Instead, the Democrats need to keep investigations focused and not let the Republicans turn them into FOX News entertainment.

He also suggests that the Democrats’ focus need to hold hearings on various topic sequentially to avoid having hearings on three or four different problems and scandals competing with each other in a single week for public attention.

David Rothkopf’s panel members also emphasize the need to investigate the misdeeds of the TechBroligarchy, including Elon Musk and Big Balls and the rest of Musk’s DOGE project.

Another important tool the Democrats will have is to introduce and clearly publicize important legislation.

Rosa Brooks in particular warns against complacency by the Democrats embracing an attitude of “oh, just back to business as usual, things are normal again.” That would be politically disastrous.

And Michael Tomasky strongly recommends that the Democrats get rid of Senate filibuster. Otherwise, the Republicans will be able to use the filibuster to block any legislation that the Democrats pass. Then instead of saying, “We passed popular bills A, B, and C” and Trump vetoed them,” they will be stuck with the standard inside-the-Beltway excuse of, oh, gee, we tried to pass bills A, B, and C but those mean Republicans wouldn’t let us. This has never been a persuasive argument and is basically an excuse. The filibuster rule is a Senate rule. A majority of the Senate can abolish it altogether at any time by a simple majority vote. And a majority of the Senate can suspend the rule for any particular vote.

Scott Lucas joined Maddie Hale on The Trump Report to discuss possibility for constructive political fights the Democrats can undertake the next two years. Such as impeaching Pete Hegseth. And using their investigative powers to highlight abuses of Trump 2.0 regime, including:

• Creating maximum pressure to release the Epstein files
• Exposing Trump foreign deals and the Trump family’s highly-dubious cryptocurrency business
•  Publicizing the outrageou misconduct of Trump’s ICE Gestapo and how they often like a violent political militia
• Highlighting the most outrageous instances of corporate influence, donations, favoritism. Including those involving Elon Musk.
• Trump’s Executive Orders

The new Chairman of the House Oversight Committee will be Robert Garcia of Long Beach, California, who sounds like he’s willing to take on major instances of abuse and corruption:

As Josh Marshall recently put it, “The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it.” And those participants include the American voters, of course!

From the Oversight Committee website:

As Josh Marshall recently put it, “The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it.” And those participants include the American voters, of course!

So if the Democrats have a Senate majority and fail to pass important legislature because of “golly gee, the filibuster rule,” that means that the Democratic leadership failed to get 51 of their caucus members to pass it. Period. They failed to deliver. One of the worst instances of the Democrats trying to run such a pretense was on the 2022 vote for the renewal of the Voting Rights Act that the reactionary Supreme Court has largely nullified. Fifty-one Senators voted in favor of it, including the rightwing Democrats Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema. But Manchin and Sinema voted against suspending the filibuster even for that one bill. So the Democrats failed to pass a critical protection for basic voting rights that still is very much needed, period. The filibuster rule was a sad excuse for their failure on that critical bill.

As Waldman observed of the Republicans’ voter-suppression efforts this year, “It all failed - because Democrats and state officials fought back.”

That’s what the Democrats in Congress will need to do in the next two years: show the voters that they stand for constructive and serious governance – and that they will fight for their own side. And that means making sure that Trump’s continued efforts to rule by corruption, ICE cruelty on American streets, and abuse of Presidential powers fail. Just as the Republicans failed in the 2026 elections on Tuesday.

This post originally appeared on the ProDA Progressive Caucus Democrats Abroad Substack.

Polarization and Democracy

Lilliana Mason recently published an article in the Journal of Democracy recalled "Polarization is Not the Problem." It’s part of a series on “Polarization and Political Violence.” (1)

The Journal of Democracy is a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has come in for criticism over some of its "democracy promotion" efforts abroad. But that's not the fault of individual contributors to the journal.

The first three pages or so had me thinking it might be a standard, lazy, both-sides-do-it take. But it includes useful factual observations like, "Vilifying and dehumanizing attitudes are indicators of moral disengagement, which allows people to harm one another while still feeling morally good."

But after that, she makes it very clear that she's not making a both-sides-do-it" pitch. Including this: "The problem is the existential threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic U.S. democracy writ large." (The same can be said for some European countries.)

To restore a functioning and pluralistic democracy in the United States, reversing over a decade of democratic backsliding in the world’s oldest democracy, the thing to 'fix' is not polarization. Polarization is the country’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic, and intentionally divisive faction grabbing for disproportionate power to the detriment of national success, reputation, and democratic self-government. Tamping down that immune response only allows this minority faction to have greater control. [emphasis added]

The people causing the backsliding are definitely not dope-smoking hippies, feminists, or black and brown immigrants attempting to impose "transgender for everybody" - the latter being one of the weirdest concoctions emerging from Trump failing brain.

A piece in the same issue by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way looks at the state of democracy in the US now, which they describe as currently being in a state of “competitive authoritarianism,” a category in which they include Türkiye and Hungary under Viktor Orbán.

When we began writing about competitive authoritarianism a quarter-century ago, we never imagined applying the concept to the United States. Our initial study of 35 post–Cold War competitive authoritarian regimes centered overwhelmingly on postcommunist and lower- and middle-income countries with weak states and weak civil societies. But in the early twenty-first century, a set of “new” competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in countries with more established democratic institutions. ... The United States joined that group during Donald Trump’s second presidency, which began in January 2025. The U.S. slide into competitive authoritarianism was modest and reversible - but it was real. ...

Competitive authoritarianism is a regime in which parties compete in meaningful elections but incumbents systematically abuse state institutions to tilt the political playing field against their opponents. Unlike traditional dictatorships, opposition parties genuinely compete for power. Parties are legal and operate above ground, and they view elections as the principal route to power. Elections are often highly competitive affairs in which incumbents are forced to sweat. Occasionally, incumbents lose - as they did in Malaysia in 2018, Poland in 2023, Botswana in 2024, and Hungary in 2026. (2)

They go on to describe the various authoritarian measures undertaken by the Trump 2.0 regime: intimidation of law firms and universities; frivolous investigations and lawsuits; purging of civil service professionals; and efforts to bring major media under partisan regime control. The partisan misuse of the Justice Department is a particularly ugly concern. As PBS/AP reported early this year (3):

Justice Connection, a network of department alums, estimates that more than 230 lawyers, agents and other employees from across the department were fired last year, apparently because of their work on cases they were assigned or past criticism of Trump, or seemingly no reason. More than 6,400 employees are estimated to have left a department that at the end of 2025 had roughly 108,000, the group says.

The Justice Department says it has hired thousands of career attorneys over the past year. The Trump administration has characterized some of the fired and departed workers as out of step with its agenda.

The Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch of the federal government. But its obligation is to enforce the rule of law. And to do so requires a commitment to independent administration of justice. There have been structures and practices established over more than two centuries to achieve that goal. Political democracy and the rule of law are not separate concepts. They are two sides of the same coin. Democracy has to have laws and procedures that are reliable and that apply equally to all political actors. And the rule of law does not mean only that laws are enforced fairly and consistently. Rule of law also means that that the laws are made with the consent of the people through democratically elected representatives, a concept that was central to the Magna Carta tradition in England. Christian Tomuschat refers to the development of the concept in the US, Germany and France:

In the German legal tradition the concept of Rechtsstaat and Rechtstaatlichkeit [both terms for democratic rule of law] emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and today it constitutes the core element of the constitutional system, after the abominable crimes committed during the Nazi period. The Basic Law of 1949 establishes that ‘the legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice’ (‘Gesetz und Recht’), a proposition that encapsulates the essence of the rule of law. It is significant that the text does not confine itself to manifesting confidence in the law (Gesetz as statutory law), but species that ‘justice’ (‘Recht’) as a concept including both customary law and elements of legitimacy, that may, if need be, correct undue rigors of the law (in the Anglo-American system, the principles of equity serve a similar function), binds government institutions. In France, the concept of ‘état de droit’, originally derived from the German ‘Rechtsstaat’, has also taken its place in the legal literature. Despite learned examinations of the different virtues, shortcomings, overlappings, incongruences, and minor inconsistencies of the various terms mentioned, it appears that they have a largely identical content. (4)

Polarization in itself is neither good nor bad. The current sense of democracy, including concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, evolved through a long history as a constructive way to resolve conflicts – aka, polarization – without the necessity of bloody civil wars and violent religious conflicts. Rainer Forst has done a good job of explaining this history in the modern West. (5)

For instance, the Trump regime’s current effort to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship is an act of intolerance that shows contempt for democracy and the rule of law. And, yes, partisans of democracy and the rule of law are polarized against it. And they should be. (6)

In the current European context, democracy supporters including conservatives should be polarized against far-right, anti-democracy parties like Germany Alternative for Democracy (AfD) – instead of trying to pander the way too many conservative parties are doing to the far right’s central issue of promoting xenophobic hatred. (7)

The Shrub Bush polarization

The disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush – who the late, great Molly Ivins famously called “Shrub Bush” – who was still President two decades ago, managed to provoke a notable amount of polarization. Looking at the situation in a 2007 book, George Edwars and Desmond King wrote:

Bush is the most polarizing president in polling history. The first Gallup poll of Bush's tenure found that he had the highest level of disapproval of any new president since polling began (Gallup Poll 2001). Similarly, Gary C. Jacobson reported that the public's initial reception of Bush found the widest partisan differences for any newly elected president in polling history. In the 28 Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls taken before September 11, 2001, Bush's approval ratings averaged 88 per cent among self-identified Republicans but only 31 per cent among Democrats (Independents averaged 50 per cent). This 57-point difference indicates an extraordinary degree of polarization (Jacobson 2003). Yet this gap between the assessments of Democrats and Republicans was just the beginning. In the 21–3 May 2004 Gallup poll, the difference between his approval among Republicans (89 per cent) and Democrats (12 per cent), was an astounding 77 percentage points! That gap of 70 points or higher has been common since Bush's fourth year in office. ...

These are extreme and unprecedented levels of polarization. No president, dating back to Harry Truman, has had a partisan gap above 70 points in any Gallup poll in a re-election year. Moreover, Gallup had never before found such a high proportion of partisans with such strongly opposing views of a president. ...

The war in Iraq has been the most important policy of the Bush Administration. Although the president enjoyed majority support for going to war in the spring of 2003, by 2005 the public's evaluations of both the war, the postwar US occupation of Iraq, and the president's management of it split along party lines. This division was much greater than it had been for any other US military engagement since World War II including the Vietnam War, widening the partisan gap in overall evaluations of the president in the process. [emphasis in bold added] (8)

So polarization isn’t new. There had been high polarization in US politics before, including over the post-World War II Red Scare/McCarthyism period, over the Korean War, over desegregation policies in the 1950s and 1960s, over the Vietnam War and Watergate.

One distinction between the Shrub Bush years and earlier instances is that from the 1940s into the 1970s, there were still substantial numbers of conservative Democrats in the South who still voted for the Democratic Presidential nominees. So measures of partisan polarization prior to 1970s or so would not reflect the level of ideological polarization. And even in the 1970s, there were still “liberal Republicans” like Oregon’s Sen. Mark Hatfield in Congress.

It’s worth remembering that the polarization during the Shrub Bush years was the role of Bush’s Vice President, Dark Lord Dick Cheney. That particular polarization played a significant role in the 2024 Presidential election, when polls showed that Democratic turnout was depressed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ ill-considered decision to campaign with the Dark Lord’s daughter, Liz Cheney, who had fully supported her father’s worst policies, including the criminal torture program for which he so strongly advocated. The Bush II Presidency made the name Cheney a polarizing element in US politics until this day.

Finally, it’s also worth remembering that the best known of the Federalist Papers is James Madison’s Federalist #10 essay, which was about, yes, political polarization and “factions.”

Notes:

(1) Mason, Liliana (2026): Polarization Is Not the Problem. Journal of Democracy 37:4, 105-114. 10/04/2026. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/1001900> Publicly available at this writing.

(2) Levitsky, Steven & Way, Lucan A. (2026): Competitive Authoritarianism in America. Journal of Democracy 37:4 10/04/2026, 5-25. <https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2026.a1001893> Publicly available at this writing.

(3) Tucker, Eric & Richer, Alanna D. (2026): How the Trump administration erased centuries of Justice Department experience. PBS/AP 01/16/2026. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-the-trump-administration-erased-centuries-of-justice-department-experience> (Accessed: 2026-29-10).

(4) Tomuschat, Christian (2013): Democracy and the Rule of Law. In: The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law, 475-476. <https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780199640133.003.0021>

(5) See: Rainer Forst, ed. Toleranz: Philosophische Grundlagen und gesellschaftliche Praxis einer umstrittenen Tugend (2000); English version: Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (2013); Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (2014).

(6) Barrett, Develin et. al. (2026): Homeland Security Agents Search Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. New York Times 10/12/2026. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/us/politics/ilhan-omar-home-searched.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFE.xdZp.o34iHMTWLRli&smid=bs-share> (Accessed: 2026-12-10).

(7) Fischer, Leandros (2026): Nur eine politische Polarisierung von links kann die AfD aufhalten. Jacobin (Germany) 09/25/2026. <https://jacobin.de/linke-afd-polarisierung-sachsen-anhalt/> (Accessed: 2026-27-09).

(8) Introduction to The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush (2007). <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217977.001.0001>

Foreign policy concerns on US election day and beyond

Trump in his continuing, obvious mental decline has been threatening to resume the Iran War after the election. And there’s news about some US strikes resuming already:

The ⁠US launched limited strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island late on Monday, ⁠according to reports in US media, hours after vice-president JD Vance said he was optimistic diplomatic efforts to end the war were moving in the right direction.

The strikes were reported as being “defensive”, and not thought to be a signal of a return to full hostilities, but came on the eve of crucial midterm elections in which Donald Trump’s Republican party is expected to be punished by voters for the cascading effect the war has had on the US cost of living. (1)

There will be plenty of foreign policy drama after today’s election. With the US President unable to conduct anything resembling normal diplomacy. And the Iran War is obviously not the only major foreign policy issue right now.

Here’s Anatol Lieven assessing “Who’s Actually Winning the Ukraine War?” (2)

Short version: It’s still a nasty war of attrition. And, for better or worse, Russia has the advantage. And without a minimum of competent diplomacy from Washington, any stable halt in the war can scarcely be expected. It’s an ugly picture. And there will likely be continuing jockeying, vague threats, and low-level shadow war. And headlines like this: UK and European peacekeepers in Ukraine would be allowed to fire back at Russians Guardian 11/03/2026.

John Mearsheimer gives one of his dour but highly informative perspectives on the concept of limited nuclear war. With the US now a highly dubious entity as a NATO ally, this is increasingly important for European defense planning. We’ll be hearing a lot more about it. And very possibly in the Middle East, too. (3)

And, of course, this will be a big week for American political news!

Notes:

(1) Yerushalmy, Jonathan (2026): US reportedly strikes Iran’s Qeshm Island as Vance voices optimism about a deal. Guardian 11/03/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/03/us-strikes-irans-qeshm-island> (Accessed: 2026-03-11).

(2) Quincy Institute YouTube channel 11/01/2026. <https://youtu.be/PnwrKy9uxx8?si=r5pJMIZqlC80FoqB> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

(3) International Law Only Binds the Weak. John Mearsheimer-Offensive Realism YouTube channel 11/02/2026. <https://youtu.be/z7JtiVQQPqs?si=76DnBHNxfNmgWV34> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

The Democrats’ fight against Trumpism after November 3

The invaluable Dan Froomkin is looking forward to what a Democratic majority in one or both Houses of Congress can do over the next two years.

Writing for The New Republic, he quotes Ezra Levin on the Democrats’ task of rebranding themselves over the next two years – revitalizing is as a party willing to show the voters it is willing to seriously fight for its own professed goals and promises:

Democrats are running “on an argument of corruption and affordability,” says Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with over 2,500 local chapters. “If you then don’t use the power available to you, you will undermine your party’s reputation—for good reason—because you will have demonstrated that on the campaign trail, you’ll say whatever it takes to get elected, but once you’re governing, you’re not going to do s***.”

Levin says, “That’s the number one problem that the Democrats face now and in the future. It’s not an individual policy disagreement that they have with the voters. It’s that most voters think Democrats are feckless and don’t mean what they say. And so, a major project at the Democratic Party over the next two years has to be to revitalize its brand; prove [to] the voters that when you elect us, change happens.” (1)

As Froomkin puts it, “By staking out bold territory on policy, Democrats can make what’s at stake in 2028 more vivid.”

There are many things that go into an individual winning candidacy: a candidate who’s serious about the race; an campaign organization who can organize TV and podcast appearances, public events, and get-out-the-vote operations; and at least enough funding to make sure his/her candidacy reaches a large number of voters; competent messaging; and a clear focus on issues that mobilize their voters.

All of these things are actually interrelated. Name recognition is important, so just getting the candidate’s name well known is a necessity. Some commentators draw a clear distinction between “messaging” and “issues.” Most candidates require some of both. And some people are just better at campaigning than others whether by temperament or experience or what pundits might call “natural talent.”

Issues do matter. But offering a rote checklist of issues – no matter how popular the individual issues are – doesn’t accomplish what candidates like Zohran Mamdani (now the popular Mayor of New York) and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been able to do: articulate clear and popular positions on issues but also display the confidence to respond to Republican attacks without giving added credibility to the attacks to which they are responding. Once in office, Mamdani quickly followed up with popular actions consistent with his campaign positions, i.e., filling potholes. In other words, he campaigned on doing things voters wanted, then followed up and started doing some of them and also making sure his constituents knew he was doing so.

When voters see a candidate get elected and follow up on what they claimed to stand for in their campaign, voters can see they are fighting for their own side, i.e., the Democratic voters who elected them!

It’s worth noting since Mamdani ran explicitly as a “democratic socialist” within the Democratic Party, that he has been following up by practicing what was once known in the first half of the 20th century as “sewer socialism” – a term that referred to pragmatic accomplishments, not to dirty and dishonest accusations against the other side. Milwaukee, Wisconsin was one of the most prominent examples of decades in which politicians who identified themselves as democratic socialists provided capable and politically popular local government. Ironically, the self-identified Socialist practitioners of such policies disliked the term “sewer socialism,” because they worried it detracted from their larger long-term vision of a better national society.

A lot has changed since Milwaukee elected an explicitly Socialist mayor in 1910. But the challenge of showing immediate, popular results in governance without sacrificing a larger vision is a perennial challenge for politics across the ideological spectrum. If a party can do what the Republicans under Trump have done – making “owning the libs” (e.g., making Democrats angry) the prime goal of their voters, they don’t have to worry so much about articulating a broader vision.

If the Democrats win one or both Houses of Congress next Tuesday, they will have an excellent opportunity to use their Congressional investigative power to constantly hold the abuses, corruption, and criminal acts of the Trump regime and the Republican politicians who support it up to public light. If the Democrats hold both Houses, they can pass one popular bill after another and force Trump to veto them. Trying to sell the public on the abstract value of “bipartisanship,” vague appeals to vaguely-defined “centrist” voters, or issuing strongly worded letters that neither Trump nor anyone else will take seriously are not likely to show the voters that Democrats are serious about restoring functioning democratic government and holding Trump officials who committed cruel and/or criminal acts to account for their actions.

Joe Biden’s famous prediction that the Republicans’ “fever” would break on the Republican side was well-intentioned. But it sadly proved to be a false hope. (He was making that prediction in 2012 even before Trump took over the party!)

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2026): The No Kings Movement Is Already Planning for 2028. New Republic 10/26/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/article/216864/no-kings-movement-election-2028> (Accessed: 2026-28-10).

A weird group of rightwingers being financed by RFK Jr.’s HHS

Michael McGrady, Jr. writes about one of the many scams run by rightwingers with Republican ideological allies and friends in the government. The entity involved is called Our Rescue, formally known as Operation Underground Railroad. Our Rescue has received $158.1 million from Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a no-bid contract. The group’s CEO is Derek Brenner. During his tenure, McGrady writes for the City Weekly, “Our Rescue has continued to serve as the central node within a network of strange bedfellows.” Brenner served as a senior ICE official during Trump’s first term: “When he held that position, Benner was instrumental in ‘sting operations’ to mass-arrest immigrants. He occupied the role during a highly controversial HSI sex trafficking sting, Operation Asian Touch, which was an effort to probe illegal conduct at Asian massage parlors in Arizona.”

The HHS contract:

... is for Our Rescue to provide legal aid to unaccompanied migrant children currently in the care of the government.

But Our Rescue has little prior experience in that field, and critics have warned that its new revenue stream comes at the costly expense of legitimate aid networks specializing in such legal representation.

“I think it’s clear that the priorities of this presidential administration are to deport as many people as possible,” said Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative and a visiting associate clinical professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles. “Threatening the legal services for youth, who are some of the most vulnerable, shows the administration’s commitment to that.”

Our Rescue was contacted several times for comment on this story. No response was given by press time. [emphasis added] (1)

McGrady goes on to explain that some of those “unaccompanied migrants” are children whose parents have been snatched by Trump’s ICE Gestapo and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And Richard warns:

... that the children Our Rescue is now paid to represent are also the children who face the greatest risk.

“What I can say is that if these kids are not provided appropriate legal services and support, it is more likely they will end up trafficked,” she observed.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and gone. But his disgusting heritage lives on.

McGrady reports for The Pitch:

Hundreds of secular and religious organizations exist in this space, working to counter human trafficking. Many of these groups are led by recognized human rights activists and human services practitioners, emphasizing care and recovery in the overarching frameworks of bodily autonomy, gender equity, and mutual respect.

Many of these so-called “anti-trafficking” groups, however, are antithetical to the human rights viewpoints on these matters, citing “tough on crime” and mantras characteristic of the many right-wing and far-right groups operating in this space.

Missouri and Utah are what I consider two leading hubs of an explicit brand of anti-trafficking activism that is a blend of modern white slavery myths and conservative, dominionist Christian nationalist viewpoints of our society. In collaboration with Salt Lake City Weekly, The Pitch uncovered and traced a powerful influence network of so-called anti-trafficking and anti-pornography activists, law enforcement officers, and far-right politicos all tied, directly or indirectly, to the highly controversial Tim Ballard and the charity he formed, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which rebranded to Our Rescue in the years since his tenure. [emphasis added] (2)

If Democrats in Congress in 2027-28 don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time investigating, exposing, and legislating against these kinds of corrupt, sleazebag, and criminal activities, that will be political malpractice of the first order by the Democrats! And when Trump and his cult followers scream and cry and how the Mean Dem-u-crat Party is persecuting sex traffickers in league with corrupt government officials, well, let them cry.

McGrady’s long report in The Pitch gives us a disturbing glimpse of a particularly seedy corner of the Republican Right where Christian Right prudery mixes with racist xenophobia and highly dubious contacts with the sex-trafficking and private-prison worlds.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2023: (3)

Notes:

(1) McGrady, Jr., Michael (2026): Tim Ballard’s fall from grace hasn’t stopped big money flowing through Our Rescue’s disputed charity work: Anti-Trafficking, Incorporated. Salt Lake City Weekly 10/21/2026. <https://www.cityweekly.net/news/tim-ballards-fall-from-grace-hasnt-stopped-big-money-flowing-through-our-rescues-disputed-charity-work-91870b66> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

(2) McGrady, Jr., Michael (2026): Savior Complex: Inside the right-wing money machine behind anti-trafficking performance politics connecting Missouri and Utah. The Kansas City Pitch 10/21/2026. <https://www.thepitchkc.com/savior-complex-inside-the-right-wing-money-machine-behind-anti-trafficking-performance-politics-connecting-missouri-and-utah/> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

(3) Women accusing OUR founder Tim Ballard of sexual assault speak out. The Salt Lake Tribune YouTube channel 11/22/2023. <https://youtu.be/wq17yH_31XI?si=RsliNKG8nrKXy20r> (Accessed. 2026-23-10).

Court Reform priorities for Democrats after the election

Kate Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania has been looking at ways the Congress can reign in real abuses by the judicial branch, and especially by the Roberts Supreme Court, which has been remarkably partisan. As Shaw observes:

It also feels different because this is a precarious moment for American democracy and for the mechanisms of democratic participation — and because it’s impossible to ignore the Supreme Court’s role in creating this instability. In this election cycle, state legislatures have aggressively redrawn congressional districts to maximize their partisan advantage and, in Southern states, to extinguish Black political power; the ultrarich are spending tens of millions of dollars helping to elect their preferred candidates; and the president has sought to radically change the rules for voting by mail, while openly promising voters payouts for helping his party retain control of Congress.

True, the court has rebuffed some of the most egregious efforts at election subversion this year. But it has laid the foundation for the electoral upheaval we are experiencing.

In that essay, she makes the argument that a rogue Court can be a real danger to democracy and the rule of law.

There are still Trump cultists who would surely argue that decisions like the 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional were illegitimate overreach by the Court. Even though Brown was based on a straightforward reading of the actual language of the 14th Amendment. And, in any case, subsequent Court decision like Milliken v. Bradley (1974) and Parents Involved (2007) have nullified much of the substance of Brown. They also set the stage for Chief Justice Roberts’ majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which then laid out the course the rightwing Court took to nullify the Voting Rights Act, which had been renewed in 2006 for 25 years by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in both Houses of Congress and with the backing of then-President George W. Bush. As Kevin Morris wrote earlier this year:

This week [in April 2026], the Supreme Court destroyed what little remained of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, the Court eliminated the law’s protections against lawmakers drawing maps that dilute the political power of minority voters. The decision continued more than a decade of the Court’s assaults on what is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.

The opinion’s reasoning is based in part on a claim that is simply not factual. Pointing out that Black and white turnout reached parity in “two of the five most recent Presidential elections,” Justice Samuel Alito assured Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem. But Alito’s claim represents egregious cherry-picking, as he was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012 — the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible. [emphasis added] (1)

Shaw calls attention to the Court’s anti-rule-of-law decisions allowing Trump to break the law in his role as President: “Since it declared presidents all but above the law in Trump v. United States two years ago, the court has created a permission structure for much of President Trump’s second-term lawlessness.”

This is the background in which Democratic majorities in either or both Houses will have to use their Congressional powers to dramatically call attention to the dangerous situation the Court has created through its reliance on the rightwing theory of the Unitary Executive - for which Dick Cheney deserves credit among his many attacks on democracy and the rule of law in his long career. Congress can use its investigative power to highlight and publicize the many abuses of the Trump regime and propose remedies.

Since the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women equal treatment before the law failed to be ratified, Democratic members of Congress seem to have effectively forgotten about the power to amend the Constitution. There have been 27 Amendments since the Constitution first took effect, so they can scarcely be considered a radical new idea. So the Democrats can propose, for instance, a Constitutional Amendment that says straightforwardly that the US President is required to obey the laws of the United States. And they could make sure in demanding it that a large majority of US voters understand that the Republican Party in Congress is overwhelmingly opposed to the idea that the President should obey the law!

Shaw’s editorial and this podcast interview put forward a number of ideas on how the Democrats can highlight the problem of a rogue President whose abuses are being enabled by the very partisan position of the current Republican-dominated Supreme Court. And by the extreme laxity of the oversight of the Court even on serious corruption concerns. One of here suggestions is a dull idea that has been in the Constitution from the start and has been used by the Congress, which is known as “jurisdiction stripping.” While this may sound like a wild-and-crazy concept, it isn’t. And the Supreme Court since the days when John Marshall was its first Chief Justice has explicitly recognized that limitation on its own power.

A quick look at the Supreme Court’s “liberal” reputation

Certainly, from the late 1930s to at least 1980 (the beginning of the Reagan era), the Court had generally been seen as liberal, in both the ideological and in the broad “liberal democracy” (competitive elections and the rule of law) senses. This was not an unbroken record, however. In Korematsu v. United States in 1944, the Court upheld the legality of the race-and-national-ancestry-based imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War, now rightly remembered as one of the Court’s most notorious acts. (2)

Sad to say, the majority opinion and the and a concurring opinion included some of the best-known liberal Justices in the Court’s history: Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter. Black had been a literal member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1923-25, so perhaps the ruling was not so surprising from him – and Black was the Justice who formally delivered the opinion. In the 1960s, no Justices were hated by segregationists and Nixon Republicans more than Hugo Black and William Douglas, because of their generally liberal rulings. Except perhaps Earl Warren, Chief Justice from 1953-69, who as Governor of California during the Second World War was an enthusiastic booster for the Japanese-American internment program.

By far the most notorious and destructive Supreme Court decision was the Dred Scott decision of 1957, which had denied freedom to the slave Dred Scott, whose white master had taken him to a free state and argued that therefore he should be considered free. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion went even further, declaring explicitly in what is probably the most notorious pronouncement the Court has ever made:

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. …

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” [emphasis added]

That decision effectively eliminated the realistic possibility of ending slavery without a civil war. Which is what we got.

Roger Taney, the most infamous Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

There is some bitter irony as well in Taney’s decision. As a young lawyer in Baltimore, he had done pro bono work defending escaped slaves whose masters were seeking to have them returned to bondage. Taney was the brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He later became Attorney General in Andrew Jackson’s Administration, where his biggest task was to fight to abolish the Bank of the United States, which Jacksonians took as the chief symbol of what they called the Money Power. Although the term “populist” had not yet been invented, that fight was in today’s terms a populist one, in which the Jacksonians claimed – legitimately in this case – to represent “The People” against “The Elite.”

But Taney will forever be remembered as the author of what is still considered the Supreme Court’s most infamous moment, and certainly the one with the most obviously destructive consequences.

Summary: No, the Supreme Court does not have the last say when it comes to defending democracy and the rule of law. It’s a job for all three branches of the federal government - and most of all for the American people whose government it is. Democrats could certainly benefit from recalling Franklin Roosevelt successful fight with the reactionary Supreme Court that was striking down New Deal legislation on the flimsiest of legal justifications.

This post originally appeared in the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Kevin Morris, Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over – Again. Brennan Center 04/30/2026.

(2) David Neiwert’s 2005 book on the internment, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, has recently been republished.

Protests and familiar responses to them

As various commentators have recalled recently, mass protests France have been a part of the European scene since at least 1789.

FRANCE 24 has this report from October 22 on the current European protests – which aren’t restricted to France (1):

The actress Pamela Anderson attracted attention eight years ago by speaking out on the “yellow vest” protests at that time:

The French protests first began as a response to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed fuel tax increase, something he has said would help the country’s green initiatives. But they have since encompassed everything from the minimum wage and taxes to demands for the dissolution of parliament and Macron’s resignation.

“I despise violence … but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French – and global – elites?” Anderson tweeted on Monday.

The photos of the destruction in Paris made for captivating viewing, she said, but it was important to examine what the motivation behind the protests were.

“[It] came from the rising tensions between the metropolitan elite and rural poor, between the politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world,” she added.

On her Pamela Anderson Foundation site she further elaborated the following day.

The yellow vest movement, she wrote, “is a revolt that has been simmering in France for years. A revolt by ordinary people against the current political system which – as in many other western countries – colludes with the elite and despises its own citizens.”

Despite what critics of the movement have said, she wrote, the average person in France is not opposed to environmental initiatives, they simply don’t think the burden of paying for it should fall on them while the wealthy are given tax breaks.

“When some protesters destroy cars and burn shops, they symbolically attack private property that is the basis of capitalism. When they attack police officers, they symbolically reject and challenge repressive state forces – forces that primarily protect the capital.” (1) [emphasis added] (2)

Lots of things are involved in political protests. People who are upset about something. There is a government or a company or some other entity they want to do something about it. There are streets and parks and bridges and buildings they use for their protest. Other people will be inspired by the protests. Police, administrators, schools and businesses and property owners will have opinions to express on the protests. Politicians, parties and political activists will try to use the protests somehow to their advantage. Some churches and religious groups may be sympathetic to the protests, others will consider them a revolt against God and basic decency. If the protests are large enough to rate “front page” coverage by urban newspapers – or top promotion by digital algorithms – there will be at least some minor vandalism in the form of broken windows or spray-painting or at least excessive trash on streets and sidewalks.

Far be it from me to throw shade on decisive actions by political leaders, like Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s famous “sternly worded letters” to President Trump. But public protests are also an essential part of democratic politics.

How public officials, particularly the police forces in places where the protests are occurring, is obviously very important. As are the responses by politicians. The reporting on recent protests in France suggest that the police have been fairly ham-handed in their responses in some cases. And the far right, notably including former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, part of the Peter Thiel’s stable of sponsored politicians, to rant about foreigners and Muslims causing all the trouble.

Le Monde/AFP reported on some of the events on Saturday:

French police fired tear gas on Saturday, October 24, to prevent protesters in several cities from advancing to their centers, in fresh nationwide demonstrations held a week after riots broke out, AFP journalists saw.

Police fired tear gas at protesters in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Montpellier and Nantes, hours after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez warned: "We will not tolerate any violence or any disturbance of public order."

Authorities deployed 70,000 security forces across the country for the new marches held against the cost of living, after ones a week ago degenerated into street violence that saw public buildings vandalized, hundreds of shops looted and 2,700 people arrested. …

Police said 110,000 people were taking part in a protest march in Paris, where shops were boarded up and the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay museums closed. Scores of riot police stood guard to prevent protesters getting onto the city's ring road.

The main demonstration in the capital, pushed to its southeast rim under a last-minute order by authorities, was held largely in a calm and festive manner, with some parents and their toddlers looking on from the sidelines.

But there was also widespread anger at President Emmanuel Macron for banning non-union demonstrations his government deemed "illegitimate" and keeping all protesters away from city centers. [emphasis added] (3)

A New York Times report summarized the recent French protests and related events with this introduction:

The nationwide unrest in France began with a handful of student demonstrations at high schools in suburban Paris last month.

Now, in cities across the country, antigovernment marchers are protesting expensive living conditions, high fuel prices and conditions in schools. Using the unrest as a smoke screen for vandalism, rioters and looters have also joined in.

With the protests in their second month, the police have arrested thousands, and politicians are divided over how to respond. (4)

In the late 1960s in the US, various mass protests around civil rights and the Vietnam War produced a lot of discussion often polarized around conservative “law-and-order” rhetoric, which has persisted on the right. Except, of course, in instances when rightwing gun nuts murder somebody and claim that hate a stand-your-ground right to do so. Republicans as a group were remarkably lacking in outrage after Donald Trump on January 6, 2026 knowingly sent an armed, violent, howling mob into the US Capitol to attack member of Congress and stage a coup. Republican legislators in Oklahoma passed a law in 2021 to allow drivers to legally ram their cars into protesters.

Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, signed HB 1674 on Wednesday, even as advocates excoriated their elected officials for undermining democracy. ...

Legislators passed HB 1674 following historic protests against police brutality and racial injustice last summer, both in Oklahoma and across the country. The mass demonstrations – most of which were peaceful – faced sharp criticism from Republicans, who decried property damage and violence by some protesters.

Meanwhile, cars have become a weapon among those hoping to disrupt demonstrations, or drivers who get flummoxed and enraged. People drove their vehicles into protests more than 100 times last summer, and at least two protesters were fatally struck, according to USA Today. [emphasis added] (5)

On the one hand, it’s ridiculous to see such organized mass protests as we’ve seen recently in France and elsewhere in Europe as just some kind of nihilist phenomenon, as their rightwing critics would prefer to have it. Seeing them as an Islamist uprising against Western civilization as xenophobic politicians would prefer to see it, is pretty much on the insane spectrum of opinion.

In the case of the French students and also with some of the large recent protests in other European countries, there are valid complaints, such as the seriously deficient funding for public school systems. France’s national government is directly responsible for schools, a more centralized structure than in other European countries where it’s more of a function of state/provincial governments than it is in France.

But austerity economics as practiced in the EU – particularly in the eurozone, the countries which have adopted the euro as their currency – has been causing deficiencies in public services from schools in France to maintaining the railway system in Germany, and much else. A central plank of austerity economics is to protect the wealthiest and most profitable countries and individuals as far as possible from requirements that they pair a fair share of taxes to support the countries and the communities who make their wealth and profits possible.

Notes:

(1) How far will youth-led protests go? <https://youtu.be/4v0G5lXPK_4?si=AnSAoKHtYAz4Y6KG> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(2) O'Neil, Luke (2018): Pamela Anderson's political activism – from French riots to broken capitalism. Guardian 12/06/2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/06/pamela-anderson-political-activism-is-no-flash-in-the-pan> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(3) Le Monde/AFP (2026): French police fire tear gas during fresh protests, say 110,000 marched in Paris. Le Monde English 10/24/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/10/24/france-braces-for-new-protests-tightening-security-and-boarding-up-shops_6762835_7.html> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(4) Sands, Leo (2026): How a Small Student Protest Spread Across France. New York Times 10/24/2026. Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/world/europe/france-protests-timeline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LFE.Cwsh.20AT8u9z27fO&smid=url-share (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

(5) Villarreal, Alexandr (2021): New Oklahoma law targets protesters while protecting drivers who hit them. Guardian 04/22/2021. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/oklahoma-law-protesters-drivers> (Accessed: 2026-24-10).

Democrats and progress in the next two years

David Cay Johnston has been covering Donald Trump for decades. In the first part of this recent interview, he talks about various ways that Trump may try on Election Day to suppress the actual vote. It also discusses the recent reception that Trump and J.D. Vance are encountering in public and Trump’s recent authoritarian performances. (1)

 

He also comments on some ongoing disgraces including the fact that the US minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009 when it was set at $7.25/hr. So the feeling of voters that the Democratic Party too often fails to deliver on its basic promises is not simply the result of effective Republican marketing. This will be a particular challenge if the Democrats successfully win control over both the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3 election.

Democrats can’t stop the Republicans from using messaging like: “See? The Democrats control all of Congress and they still can’t deliver on anything!”

But the Democrats do have real possibilities to make sure the voting public can see that they are promoting popular policies. They can pass bills on popular issues, like a minimum wage increase and legislative solutions aimed at limiting campaign contributions, i.e., to remedy the damage done by the Supreme Court with Citizens United and related decisions. The raising of the minimum wage and undoing Citizens United have been consistent Democratic talking points since early in the Obama Administration.

But it’s one thing to make issues like that part of a list of issues on a fundraising e-mail. It’s another to convince the majority of voter that the Democratic Party is collectively serious about doing something to fix the actual problems.

Selling pardons, corrupt business deals, shady deals favoring foreign oligarchs from whom the President’s family and business allies benefit in large and even spectacular ways – these are all issues that ordinary voters understand are connected to bad governance. It’s a hopeful sign that Democrats have been stressing the corruption issue in the final weeks of this year’s campaigns.

But the Democrats cannot afford to let the corruption issues become blurred into some vague “good government” idea. With control of one or both houses, they can use both legislative initiatives and the extensive investigatory power of Congress to keep the focus on problems caused by the Republican President and Republican policies.

“Bipartisanship”

When Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention famously declared, “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America” – a theme that John Kerry used as the Presidential candidate that year – that sounded to at least many Democrats like a welcome relief from the ugly partisanship of the Clinton and Bush II years.

What the country needs are good policies, like elections that can’t be bought by billionaire oligarchs. Like secure health insurance for everyone, i.e., Medicare for All. Like much more progressive taxes on those oligarchs. Like practical regulations on AI (“SI” in TrumpSpeak). Like a higher minimum wage. Like requiring the President to obey the laws of the United States.

But one of the peculiar features of American politics is the strange hangover of the idea that “bipartisanship” is somehow a virtue in and of itself. From the end of the Civil War until around 1980 at the latest, the ideological divisions in US politics were played out across both parties. There were conservative and liberals in both. FDR relied on Republican support for his major New Deal programs. The Republicans (at least until recently) would periodically remind the public that Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act could only pass with Republican votes.

That era of that kind of bipartisanship essentially ended with Ronald Reagan’s election as President. The Trumpist Republican Party doesn’t bother with such bipartisan posturing. They’re currently calling the whole Democratic Party communists and terrorism supporters of terrorism.

But in 2026, essentially no voters actually consider “bipartisanship” as somehow a virtue in itself. And the Republican Party certainly does not. Of course, we need both parties to support the basic Constitutional structure with democracy and the rule of law. And when the Democrats get solid legislation passed with Republican votes, that’s great! But they should make sure that everyone knows that those Republican votes were welcome because they supported a good Democratic bill. The same is obviously also true for foreign policy.

The author Gil Duran is one of many people currently calling urgent attention to the threat to democracy from TechBro oligarchs, as in the following interview. (2) This is an issue the Democrats need to urgently address – no matter how much or how little “bipartisanship” Republicans may decide to show.


This post was originally published on the ProDA-Progresssive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) Trump Frantically Looking For Ways to Dupe Voters as Hecklers Take Over Rally. Mark Thompson Show YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/HGKHdT42bUQ?si=bgqiMC9zO-CB6Nyy> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).

(2) 'You're with the billionaires or you're with the people' — Interview with Gil Duran. DW News YouTube channel 10/21/2026. <https://youtu.be/2176dnVR02E?si=5a2jrV3yk9NldDiY> (Accessed: 2026-22-10).