Heather Cox Richardson on Orbanism (and Tuckerism)

This is a good brief description of how "Orbanism" works in Hungary from the historian Heather Cox Richardson (Facebook 08/02/2021). As she indicates, Viktor Orbán's government maintains the formal trappings of democracy but not the substance:

Hungary is a country in central Europe of about 10 million people who have, in the decade since Orbán took power for the second time, watched their democracy erode. On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by the prime minister.

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012, his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to take power. [my emphasis]

Orbán's government isn't kidnapping dissidents or arresting political opponents or hijacking planes like Belarus has taken to doing. Orbán's party relies heavily on the "extreme gerrymandering" Richardson mentions and putting major media into the hands of friendly private oligarchs. (Richardson's reference to "state control of the media" is a bit vague in this context.) But at this point, Hungary wouldn't meet the minimum democracy and rule-of-law criteria for becoming a member of the EU. The EU is taking some formal measures against Hungary's violations of its standards. But EU law is far more effective and focused when it comes to commercial issues than it is when trying to deal with democratic backsliding by member states.

And as she mentions, Tucker Carlson will be broadcasting his White Power Hour show, the most popular program on FOX News, from Hungary this week. Maybe he will surprise us all and spend all week denouncing Hungarian authoritarianism. I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that option, though.

Carlson, heir to the Swanson fortune, will also be speaking at an Orbanist political conference in Hungary: Nick Visser, Tucker Carlson To Speak At Hungarian Far-Right Conference Huffpost 08/03/2021.

Rush Limbaugh, toxic hate-monger

It seems like lately I've been citing Heather Cox Richardson every other day or so. And I'm going to continue, this time quoting her obituary notice for Rush Limbaough in her Facebook post for 02/17/2021:

The crisis in Texas continues, with almost 2 million people still without power in frigid temperatures. Pipes are bursting in homes, pulling down ceilings and flooding living spaces, while 7 million Texans are under a water boil advisory.

Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, put on Facebook: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! [sic]…. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts…. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!” “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic],” he said.

After an outcry, Boyd resigned.

It was Limbaugh who popularized the idea that hardworking white men were under attack in America. According to him, minorities and feminists were too lazy to work, and instead expected a handout from the government, paid for by tax dollars levied from hardworking white men. This, he explained, was “socialism,” and it was destroying America.

Cox has more to say about him in that post. But she is a respectable historian, so she's more kind in her comments that I am.

My first encounter with the now-deceased Rush Limbaugh that I remember clearly was in 1993, when he started running a daily TV show that ran 1992-96 that I believe he at first distributed to outlets free. I watched maybe 10 episodes altogether starting in January when Bill Clinton inaugurated President. Limbaugh was presenting his radio and TV programs at the time mainly as entertainment. He used the slogan “Lighten Up!” for a while to advertise the broadcasts.

I knew he had become an influential conservative commentator, and that whatever “entertainment” value his “political humor” contained, his fans took his political commentary dead seriously. In one episode, he ran a clip of Bill Clinton hosting some kind of religious event with Jewish kids at the White House, with the boys wearing yarmulkas. He showed a moment when some glowing embers fell onto one of the girl’s hair, which Clinton immediate gently patted out, with the girl apparently not noticing her hair almost got burned. And I wondered, what’s the deal? I know Limbaugh hates Clinton, and this was actually a sweet moment where Clinton was doing something any normal person might do. I wondered, is he trying to imply that Clinton is Jewish? Or that there was something wrong about stopping a young girl’s hair from catching on fire?

A couple of episodes later, he mentioned that the famous New York photographer Annie Leibovitz had done a photo shoot with Hillary Clinton. Limbaugh deliberately stumbled on the name, “Leib-o-VITZ”, and repeated it a couple of time. And I wondered whether he was just trying to say that Hillary was hanging out with a hoity-toity New Yorker with a Jewish-sounding name. It was more weird than anything.

In another couple of days, before a break he teased the next segment, which showed an interview with Bill Clinton with some reporter. When he returned from the break, Limbaugh said something along this line, “And now it’s time to look at the Bill Clinton interjew – oh, excuse me! *Interview*, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, I meant to say *interview*.” I guess this kind of fake faux pas was part of the “political humor” he used for his fans to “lighten up” with.

But it told me everything I needed to know about Rush Limbaugh. And nothing he did in the 18 years since improved my opinion of him. That’s an example where that saying applies, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”

This is an article that the late, salty-talking Texas columnist Molly Ivins from a couple years after that giving her view of Limbaugh’s act: Lyin’ Bully Mother Jones May/June 1995.

In the meantime since 1993, the Republicans who won a House majority in the “Gingrich Revolution election of 1994 had named him an honorary member of the House of Representatives. (I’m not sure if that’s actually A Thing.) The incoming Republicans invited Limbaugh to speak at the freshman Republican orientation. (Thomas Rosenstiel, It’s Rush Night for GOP’s Lawmakers-in-Waiting : Republicans: Congress’ incoming conservatives enjoy red meat, apple pie at orientation dinner. But main course at love feast is talk show host Limbaugh. Los Angeles Times 12/11/1994)

Limbaugh told them that once they change the country, it might be a good idea to “leave some liberals alive.” The reason? “So you will never forget what these people were like . . . keep one Marxist and two liberals on the staff of every university so you can show your children . . . living fossils. Living fossils.” Ha, ha, political humor, lighten up, libs.

Trumpism didn’t start with Donald Trump’s Presidential candidacy in 2015. The only surprise is that it took them so many years to get to the point where they could send a lynch mob into the Capitol to kill people and prowl the halls of Congress chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Kill the infidels!”

Yeah, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Alex Shephard writes on Limbaugh in Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse New Republican 02/17/2021: "Limbaugh was not merely bad for the United States, he was bad in uniquely terrible ways, and uniquely terrible right up until the end. He is near the top of any list of malign actors in the post-Vietnam period."

Also in the New Republic, Bruce Bartlett gives a bit of a confessional take to his obit, I Was a Rush Limbaugh Whisperer 02/18/2021. But you have to read down several paragraphs of whining about the Librul Media to get to actual criticisms of Limbaugh. This compliment itelf is pretty telling: "Limbaugh was also a blowhard, and his massive hubris was off-putting. But it was part of his schtick and one of the reasons he was popular." Bartlett says that this "blowhard" commentary in the late 1980s "was a breath of fresh air for conservatives—even those working in the White House—and an essential source of news." He even writes that Limbaugh " frequently had an intelligent spin on the news" (Gosh, I must have missed those!) He says it took him until 2006 to recognize that Limbaugh and FOX News had poor "news judgment." Bettter late than never, of course.

More obituary takes:

• Zack Beauchamp, Rush Limbaugh’s toxic legacy Vox 02/17/2021
• Rush Limbaugh: Pro-Trump mob “undoubtedly” included “some antifa Democrat-sponsored instigators” Media Matters 01/07/2021 (actually a news story rather than an obituary)
• Steve M., The Party of Reagan Was the Party of Trum, and Limbaugh was the Through Line No More Mister Nice Blog 02/18/2021
• Adam Epstein, Rush Limbaugh’s short-lived TV show was the gateway drug to Fox News Quartz 02/17/2021

Here is the PBS Newshour report on Limbaugh's passing, Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh dies at 70 02/18/2021:

Reconstruction as a guiding concept for 2021 American politics

I've been critical of a shift that's been especially notable the last 20 years in the understanding of historical symbolism in politics on the left and center-left in the United States. During my first year of blogging (2003-4), I started a practice I've followed every year since then of posting daily in April in counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month. It focuses broadly on debunking neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideology. But I've also looked more broadly at the history leading up to the Civil War, the wartime itself, Reconstruction, and the later use of neo-Confederate narratives and symbols.

In the last 18 years, the general understanding of the problems of the Lost Cause historical-political narrative has definitely increased, while the QAnon-ized Republican Party are polarizing in favor of it. To the point that former President Trump actually vetoed the defense appropriation - heretofore sacred to the Republican Party - in defense of his desire to keep the names of Confederate traitors on the names of US military bases.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party, even the two major founders of the party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, have largely fallen out of favor. Both were slaveowners who viewed American Indians largely as enemies. Jackson in particular has become notorious for his policy of Indian removal.

It's true that the United States and the colonies that were its forerunners were based on settler colonialism, a local variant of the kind that displaced and largely destroyed the native tribes of North and South America and was a huge factor in the history of Africa. It's also very much the case that the American economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were produced in major part by the slave system. With the current popularity of "postcolonialism" in conceptualizing history, I would expect scholarly and public understanding of those issues to evolve siginificantly in the coming years, as well.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson formulates the challenge as recognizing that good aspects of Amerian history like the growth of democracy, the recognition of human rights, and the development of economic prosperity, were connected to and even dependent on some massively evil things like slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism. This is my interpretation of her perspective. For more of her outlook, see ny post Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": equal rights in theory with actual inequality 08/08/2020 and others that followed.

One encouraging result of this broadening of perspective on the left/center-left is that there is a much greater appreciation today of the significance of Reconstruction as an important moment and a radical advance in American democracy. It was primarily an advance for men formerly held in slavery, although women also started winning the right to vote ("women's suffrage") with Wyoming's entry to the Union as a state in 1869. (Women's History Timeline, BBC News n/d)

This recent piece by Manisha Sinha, The Case for a Third Reconstruction New York Review of Books 02/03/2021), is a good example of looking at Reconstruction as an experience offering insights for American politics today

American democracy is once again at a crossroads, as it was during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the postwar period when the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union. Like the secessionist slaveholders who would break the republic rather than accept the election of an antislavery president, Trump and his enablers tried to disrupt the electoral process rather than accept his decisive defeat in the election. One of the main inciters of the failed Capitol Hill putsch, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, is reminiscent of another politician from that state: the rabidly proslavery David Atchison, whose “Border Ruffians” regularly stole elections in Kansas in the 1850s through a campaign of terror and intimidation. “Bleeding Kansas” was a dress rehearsal for the Civil War that came soon after.

It is not a coincidence that the Capitol Hill rioters carried the battle flag of the Confederacy. The last large-scale instances of domestic insurrection in American history were the slaveholders’ rebellion of 1861 and the racist Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City. Both were quelled by the armed might of the federal government.

The history of Reconstruction reveals that moments of crisis can also provide opportunities to strengthen our experiment in democracy. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, the new administration has just such a chance to inaugurate a much needed “third reconstruction” of American democracy. Trump’s “Big Lie” parroted by large sections of the Republican Party and his attempts to interfere with the certifying of votes in several states expose how vulnerable our complicated electoral system is to illegal meddling. During the original Reconstruction, the republic rid itself of another faithless president, Andrew Johnson. As I have argued elsewhere, Trump’s true antecedent is not the oft-compared Andrew Jackson, who threatened to hang secessionists, but Andrew Johnson, who humored traitors and peddled racial bigotry. Like Johnson, Trump and his followers are fond of Confederate generals and their rebel rag of treaon. [my emphasis]

We always need to be cautious with historical analogies. The history of the Munich analogy in American foreign policy is an excellent cautionary example. But since the US has an evolving written Constitution that dates back to 1789, previous events in the US can be very relevant to current events and to realtime jurisprudence.

I originally called this blog "Old Hickory's Weblog" with reference to the democratic/reformist/proto-left-populist aspect of Andrew Jackson' politics and that of the movement that came to bear his name, Jacksonian democracy. I've posted numerous times about Jackson's Indian policy, so anyone can judge for themselves to what extent I may have defended or minimized it. Here is a post of mine from the time when I decided reluctantly that it was time to change the blog's name, grumping about the fact that Trump and Bannon were able to coopt the symbolism of Andrew Jackson, mortal foe of the Money Power and of pro-slavery secessionism, for their own reactionary political project: Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news 05/03/2017.

But Sinha's reference to Jackson bolded above is key to what I think is a reasonable, historical, democratic understanding of Jackson and his politics. When first confronted with a serious pro-slavery secessionist movement in the Nullification Controversy, one led by John Calhoun, the slaveowner Jackson came down hard against it. And despite being himself a wealthy man, Jackson enunciated a concept of American patriotism that saw democracy and allegiance to the Constitution as an essential element of patriotism. It was at least a rudimentary predecessor of Jürgen Habermas' notion of "constitutional patriotism".

That's why it was so bizarre to me to see even liberals and leftists accept Trump's bogus Steve-Bannon-ish embrace of Andrew Jackson as a symbol. Any remotely realistic comprarison of Trumpism to the politics of the time of the Nullification Controversy would have to put Trump and his idolators in the John Calhoun camp. It's Calhoun's rancid soul that goes marching on today in the form of Trumpism.

Since the left still accepts Abraham Lincoln the Great Liberator as a tolerable symbol of the best of the American tradition, it's worth remembering that Lincoln cited Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his two most important models for his Presidency. It's important to think of early and antebellum American history in a nuanced way with a realistic understanding of the prevalent forms of government and politics of those times. Or, if one isn't allergic to Hegelian terminology, to think of it dialectically.

But I'm very happy to see what appears to be a renewed awareness of and interest in Reconstruction. I've been there for a long time. Sinha reminds us of some unpleasant but relevant facts above the overthrow of the democratic governments in the former Confederacy by the violent, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement: "Periodic riots and massacres in the postwar South upended the rule of law and democracy itself by overturning interracial state governments. Small wonder that Hitler bemoaned the defeat of the Confederacy and held up the Jim Crow South, as well as the violent dispossession of Native Americans in the West, as historical role models for the Third Reich." That's not hyperbole. The Nazis and similar European movements in the 20th century really looked to post-Reconstruction racial policies in the US as desirable model.

And this is a legitimate and important lesson to draw for today from the experience of Reconstruction: "The end of Reconstruction illustrates that the lack of political will to hold domestic terrorists accountable can be far too costly for American democracy."

Trump ramps us the conspiracy talk and demented clown-coup ranting on his way out the White House door

Trump's clown coup has only the smallest of chances of succeeding at this point. But he is keepi9ng up the doomed effort and using it to propagate the most toxic Republican Party claims intended to undermine faith in the integrity of the vote and to justify anti-democratic voter suppression measures.

Yesterday the Orange Clown himself gave what may be the most dishonest, demented Presidential speech in the history of the country. And that's saying a lot!

President Trump gives UPDATE on voter fraud claims The Hill 12/02/2020:

Heather Cox Richardson in a 12/02/2020 Facebook post wrote:

Let me take a step back here for a minute to emphasize that this is dangerous, unprecedented… and crazy. The president of the United States is trying to undermine an election for which there is no evidence there was any irregularity, in order to stay in power. He might be doing so for the money—he has raised $170 million so far on promises to challenge this election—or because he is worried about the lawsuits he can expect as soon as he is not protected by the presidential office.

Or, perhaps, he is simply escalating his rhetoric to continue to grab headlines as he feels the focus of the world slipping away from him and he cannot stand it. For the focus of the world is indeed slipping away from him. [my emphasis]

But she emphasizes how genuinely despicable and anti-democratic Trump's Wednesday speech actually was:

Still, for all that Trump’s posturing seems like a sign that he sees power slipping away from him as the country confronts the pandemic and the recession without him, his words are a deadly assault on our democracy by the man who swore an oath to defend it. This attack cannot be dismissed as Trump being Trump. It strikes at the very heart of who we are.

For all that attacking the election might be reality television for Trump, his supporters take it very seriously indeed. At a rally in Georgia, Trump’s ally, lawyer Lin Wood, insisted he had seen the “real” results of the election, and that Trump won “over 410” electoral votes. “He damn near won every state including California!” The crowd blamed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, for the fact that the state’s recount did not go to Trump. “Lock him up!” they chanted. [my emphasis]

But as demented as Trump's own message is, he is expressing the general position of the Republican Party. This is an obviously prepared speech - it's a safe bet that a lot of it came from Stephen Miller - packed with a litany of the claims that Republicans nationally have been making in support of their dishonest "voter fraud" claims they use to justify greater and greater restrictions on voting by minorities and lower-income people. Although some Republicans like the Georgia secretary of state are unwilling to go along with the increasingly desperate and hysterical Trump's clown coup attempt, what Trump is defending in this speech is the position of the Republican Party nationally.

The speech contains a litany of claims that his own attorneys have been completely unable to demonstrate in court, repeatedly earning scornful rebukes from federal judges, including Trump appointees to the bench.

This speech of Trump's was so unhinged that even the Associated Press called it out bluntly for what it was:

This is good to see. And it only took for years to happen. 😑 https://t.co/xKYJYyvcjA

— Joan McCarter (@joanmccarter) December 3, 2020

The full article by Aamer Madhani and Kevin Freking is In video, Trump recycles unsubstantiated voter fraud claims 12/03/2020. They also report:

Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University, said the nation has seen close elections before — 1800, 1876 and, most recently, 2000. But this year’s election does not fit in that category.

“This is just a random baseless attack on the entire election,” Zelizer said. “Trump has no turning point. I often say there are parallels or precedents, but there aren’t in this case. He keeps bending norms.” [my emphasis]

The Biden-Harris mandate: fight for your own side!

Heather Cox Richardson gives us this historical reminder in a 12/01/2020 Facebook post:

There is an increasing feeling of desperation coming from the White House. Trump continues to insist he won the 2020 election, although the states whose results he has challenged have all certified their votes for Joe Biden. Biden has tallied more than 6 million votes more than Trump, including significant majorities in all the states Trump claims, in the biggest win for a candidate challenging an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged Herbert Hoover in 1932. [my emphasis]

Biden got a mandate for change. He needs to use it to maximum effect. The mandate is not to kiss up to intransigent Republicans or to spend two years seeking an impossible goal of harmonious Bipartisanship. It's to get constructive things done that a Republican President wouldn't even attempt.

The policies on which he won a mandate are laid out the Democrats' unity program.

Only a tiny fraction of Democratic voters will have read even a few pages of that document, which is an all-too-typical Democratic laundry-list rather than a thematic manifesto of some kind.

But there are some painfully obvious priorities for the new administration to address the mandate for substantive change:

• getting a grip on the COVID-19 pandemic, including immediate aid to individual and state/local governments
• make visible and effective public investments to combat the economic depression under way and stop the wave of evictions and mortgage defaults that are a part of it
• start getting real about the climate crisis
• make the Post Office function normally
• stop brutalizing and terrorizing refugees and other immigrants
• make serious federal efforts to hold local governments and individual police officers responsible for racial murders
• limit the flood of big-donor money poisoning and corrupting American politics.

And to achieve any of these things, the Biden-Harris Administration will have to fight the Republicans, who will try to obstruct it all. With today's authoritarian, Trumpified, QAnon-ized, Mitch McConnell-led Republican Party, there isn't going to be any broad consensus from large bipartisan majorities on anything more controversial that Mother's Day resolutions. And the Republicans may even try to load that up with some poison-pill rightwing content.

Biden and Harris will have to do some serious political arm-twisting and be far more effective than the Obama-Biden Administration was in mobilizing public opinion to support vital legislation. They will have to rely on Executive action for at least mitigation measures when Congress blocks legislation.

And they will have to be perceived by their own base voters and the public more generally as clearly fighting for their own side.

It shouldn't be necessary to state something so basic. But after the Obama-Biden Administration's weak, bizarre, failed pursuit of Bipartisanship for its own sake, it does need to be stated explicitly.

Jeff Spross stressed the importance of establishing a stronger reputation of the Democratic Party for supporting policies for the good of ordinary people and showing it will fight against the Republicans to achieve them (Joe Biden’s Four-Year Plan The American Prospect 11/10/2020):

Drawing on history, political science has a pretty good idea what specific characteristics policies should have to create that feedback of voter goodwill leading to large, durable majorities. Social Security and Medicare are the gold standard: benefits that are generous, that go to large swaths of the population, and that are designed and delivered in a straightforward way, so that voters can clearly see they’ve received the benefit, and from whom. As a demographic, seniors moved from an irrelevance to a major electoral force because those policies gave them a stake in governance and something to fight for, plus the resources and material freedom to engage with politics and to organize.

Unfortunately, even when they’ve held total power, Democrats have spent the last several decades deliberately avoiding policy designs that do this. They’ve approached big, ambitious public investment with trepidation; they’ve gravitated toward programs, such as Obamacare and endless tax credits, that are targeted, modest, delayed by years, and delivered through byzantine systems. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us that many such actions can be accomplished by Executive action:

If Biden’s White House feels like getting really ambitious, law and public-policy professor Robert Hockett recently argued that many aspects of a major infrastructure bill and a Green New Deal could be accomplished with powers already at the disposal of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. There’s even a section of law that says the executive branch can give anyone Medicare coverage if they’ve suffered a harmful “environmental exposure.” Since the whole country is at risk from a pandemic right now … Medicare for All by presidential decree, anyone?

It's obvious that such benefit programs are better established by legislation than by Executive action because that makes them more durable and more reliable in the minds of the public.

But Biden-Harris should use the opportunity to take such actions, for instance, by extending Medicare coverage to people who have been suffered serious symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Put the Republicans in the position of condemning that action and threatening to take it away if they regain the Presidency. Fight for your own side.

Why Constitutional "originalism" is a bogus rightwing ideology

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has thrown herself this year into the role of public intellectual and insightful critic of Trumpism and the assumptions of white supremacy, teamed up with Maine Sen. Angus King, Jr., to take on the rightwing legal doctrine of "originalism," Amy Coney Barrett’s Judicial Philosophy Doesn’t Hold Up to Scrutiny The Atlantic 10/25/2020. They open with a good summary of the basic flaw in the idea "originalism," that when the text of the Constitution isn't crystal clear on an issue, judges should look to what the Framers had in mind when they produced the original text:

In some cases, interpreting the Constitution with an originalist lens is pretty easy; for example, the Constitution says that the president must be at least 35 years old (“35” means, well, 35), that each state has two senators (not three and not one), and that Congress is authorized to establish and support an Army and a Navy. But wait a minute. What about the Air Force? Is it mentioned in the text? Nope. Is there any ambiguity in the text? Again, no. It doesn’t say “armed forces”; it explicitly says “Army” and “Navy.” Did the Framers have in mind the Air Force 115 years before the Wright brothers? Not likely.

So is the Air Force unconstitutional, even though it clearly fails both prongs of the “originalist” test? No, a more reasonable and obvious interpretation is that the Framers intended that the country be protected and that the Air Force is a logical extension of that concept, even though it wasn’t contemplated in 1787. This isn’t judicial lawmaking; it’s judges doing what they’re hired to do.

And they give a summary of what the real game of "originalism" is:

Originalism is an intellectual cloak drummed up (somewhat recently) to dignify a profoundly retrogressive view of the Constitution as a straitjacket on the ability of the federal government to act on behalf of the public. Its real purpose is to justify a return to the legal environment of the early 1930s, when the Court routinely struck down essential elements of the New Deal. Business regulation, Social Security, and Medicare? Not so fast. The Affordable Care Act, environmental protections, a woman’s right to choose? Forget it. And this despite the Constitution’s preamble, which states that one of its basic purposes is to “promote the general welfare.”

The Atlantic is publishing a series of articles in conjunction with the National Constitution Center that they label The Battle for the Constitution, of which the Cox-King piece is one.

"Socialism" in the American political vocabulary

My own summary version of the main meaning of the word "socialism" in the mainstream American political vocabulary would be: a one-word way to say, "any public policy that doesn't mainly benefit the wealthiest is evil, bad, really bad."

Here is a great historical account of the mainstream meaning of "socialism" from the historian Health Cox Richardson, who has a talent for explaining precedents of this kind, History and Politics Chat: May 19,2020:

The part about the Paris Commune and the trans-Atlantic cable is an interesting twist.

Here's a shorter and more lighthearted version of it from Francesca Fiorentini AJ+ , Socialism: Republicans Keep Being Forced To Love It AJ+ 10/17/2020:

She concludes with, " So remember, when a Republican calls something socialist, it's not just a tactic to scare you. It means that that something might actually just save your life."

Of course, there has been a strain of political thinking that considers itself socialist, and not in the Republican meaning. Bernie Sanders advocates what is probably the most famous version at the moment, one that he calls "democratic socialism". Here is a description of Sanders' version from Heather Gautney from the Jacobin site that shares the same general perspective, Defining Bernie’s Democratic Socialism 03/14/2020.

Someone who is mainly familiar only with the stock American political-polemical meaning of "socialism" who then decided to research its broader meaning in the world for the last couple of centuries would quickly stumble on the disorienting fact that there are easily ten thousand version of "socialism." And I'm only thinking about the United States!

I took a shot at a big-picture description of socialism as the classic critical alternative to capitalism in "Socialism" and US politics in 2019 (and also 190 years before that) 07/01/2019.

Trump's "patriotic education", aka, white-supremacist propaganda

Kali Holloway has a useful description of how rightwing historical revisionism works in the US. She uses a statue to Benjamin Tillman (1847-1918) of South Carolina, one of the most rancid white racist politicians in American history, as an example. (American History Is Getting Whitewashed, Again The Nation 10/01/2020)

The South Carolina legislature had a statue of Tillman set up on the state Capitol grounds in 1940, "where it remains, a message of white power and racial terrorism sent straight from the state government."

Tillman explains:

The back draft of historical revisionism always explodes when movements for social justice threaten to upset the status quo. The Tillman statue went up just as the NAACP was fighting for laws against lynching around the United States and as Black demands for basic civil rights were swelling. We are facing a similar moment today. In reaction to protests against racism and the removal of white supremacist statuary across the country, Donald Trump has launched a deliberate effort to suppress and sanitize America’s history. He has derided The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay series that examines the way slavery has shaped every American institution (and which he has definitely not read), likening it to anti-American propaganda and calling it “ideological poison” that “will destroy our country.” He has attacked the teaching of critical race theory as a “form of child abuse” and demeaned it as “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” The president has pledged to withhold federal funds from schools that incorporate the 1619 Project into their curricula and has demanded the cancellation of racial sensitivity trainings for federal employees, directing agencies to halt spending on programs that examine white privilege. According to a tweet from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump “has asked people to report any sightings” of critical race theory. Recently, Trump announced that he is launching the 1776 Commission, which will “promote patriotic education” and “teach our children about the miracle of American history.” [my emphasis]

Trump, of course, has no actual idea what "critical race theory" actually is, only that his white supremacist supporters and advisers like Stephen Miller say it's bad.

Holloway gives a gloomy polemic about the dominant narrative of American history, and ends on a oddly fatalistic note:

Trump and his supporters are waging a bitter fight against racial progress. They believe American history is proprietary, and their birthright includes selectively retelling. He recently admitted as much. “We grew up with a certain history, and now they’re trying to change our history,” he stated. “That's why they want to take down our monuments. That's why they want to take down our statues.” That effort ties him to the slavery apologists, Confederate sympathizers, and historical revisionists who preceded him. Proving the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same. [my emphasis]

There is an important difference between fundamental criticism of an historical period and the recognition of the inevitably contradictory interests and perspectives that have shaped a society over a longer period of time. We have a Constitution in the US that dates back to 1789 and political traditions heavily rooted in the experiences of the colonial period and in European (especially British) political institutions and ideas. So that past is still present in substantial ways, for good and bad.

There are also a variety of historical narratives: official ones promoted by the government, scholarly perspectives, popular mythology. Heather Cox Richardson in her work like How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) and the related YouTube lecture series, describes how some major historical narratives about American history developed in the context of a society in which freedom for some really has depended on the unfreedom of others. She gives a fascinating account, for instance, of the way the image of the frontier individualist embodied in the Western cowboy was shaped and integrated by the anti-Reconstruction ideology shaped by class and racial agendas.

In the case of the historical narrative of the role of African-Americans in the US, there were always competing narratives, not only in terms of real-time politics but also in larger historical narratives. For instance, even during the long decades that some version of the Lost Cause ideology of the Civil War and Reconstruction dominated even academic institutions, there were always competing narratives. The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), to take one example, provided alternative scholarly accounts beginning in 1916.

Holloway's closing comment about "the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same," seems to imply a circular cycle of historical development with which I wouldn't be comfortable. But the context she provides for Trump's "patriotic education” notion is really helpful. That project is yet another attempt to sponsor an ideological, dishonest white supremacist view of American history.

Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": slavery vs. democracy

Here the second of Heather Cox Richardson's lectures on the topic of The American Paradox: Part 2 03/30/2020:

This lecture is full of interesting observations and good stories. I may have known but had forgotten, for instance, that both Abraham Lincoln and his famous rival Stephen Douglas had both courted the woman who became Mary Todd Lincoln.

In this lecture, she tells a version of the story of how slavery came to be understood by a large part of the American public as hostile to even a democracy limited to white men. In her telling, the War of 1812 marked a new effort to define a distinctive American identity. As she observes, that war led Britain to give up ambitions of regaining control of the former colonies or establishing a dominating presence in North America west of the US and south of Canada. Prior to that, the main foreign policy concern for the US was to keep Britain out. And this new sense of permanence and the improved prospect of westward expansion produced efforts to define a special mission for America.

In the north, the image of the independent white farmer became a dominant narrative. But in the South, a different narrative grew around the expanding institution of slavery. Richardson stresses something that it seems to me has receded in historical accounts, the critical importance of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton production on Southern plantations had been a relatively low-margin, very labor-intensive business. That contributed to a belief prior to 1793 that slavery would inevitably fade away. That may have been unrealistic or a disingenuous excuse for not tackling the problem. But in the years following 1793, the employment of the cotton gin made it far more profitable.

She describes how the Compromise of 1820 that established a line, north of which slavery would be excluded, was generally accepted by Southern leaders at the time in no small part because they assumed that the US would be seizing large amounts of territory in Latin America.

She also talks about the infamous Wade Hampton (1818-1902) of South Carolina and other slavery defenders who developed an argument that the slave system in the South was actually a much more promising model for civilization that the Northern version of democracy and a free-labor capitalist economy. Slavery was not a static institution. It was aggressively expansive, and Richardson describes some of the very concrete was dramatically restricting democracy in the non-slave states in the lead-up to the Civil War, e.g., Stephen Douglas' "popular sovereignty," Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision.

She also briefly mentions her concept that Abraham Lincoln was responsible for stablishing an entirely new kind of democracy in the US. She also mentions how it important it was that the Lincoln Administration established the first US fiat currency backed by the federal government.

Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": equal rights in theory with actual inequality

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been indulging in some prolific public-intellectual activism over the last year with regular columns on her Facebook page and with a series of YouTube lectures on history. This is the first one in a nine-part series called The American Paradox 05/30/2020 (it appeared on Facebook in late March):

She takes a liberal-left approach to history which takes an approving, enthusastic attitude to democracy while paying realistic and engaged attention to its dark side, which she defines braodly as the notion that political equality in the sense of the Declaration of Independence has from the first existed with major inequality. (Given the name of this blog, it probably won't surprise anyone that I would be more inclined to use the more Hegelian "contradiction" rather than "paradox.")

She covers other useful reminders of what was shaping the world while Europeans were settling the Americas, such as sail technology.

The focus of this lecture is to frame the development of the English political tradition. She stresses the diversity of the population in what is now the US, but focuses on the English tradition because the governmental system of the Declaration and the US Constitution comes primarily out of that tradition. She discusses Shakespeare's play The Tempest (circa 1610) as a European look at the "New World" of the settler colonialism in the Americas. She uses that to describe the emerging European ambiitions and imaginations of what they consider the "New World".

She reminds us of the religious wars going on in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s and how large they loomed in European politics of the day, which shaped the classical liberal notions of freedom of religion and opinion.

This is a good example of how it's possible to take an engaged view of history that it's even partisan toward democracy and equality but also pays close attention to facts and indentifiable historical trends.

One point I want to mention is that, while I can't argue with her estimates of 90% death rates among the native population from illness in the early 17th century on the Atlantic coast being colonized by the English. But I do want to mention that the broader question of the effect on native populations of European diseases in the Americas is heavily dependent on the assumption of the "pre-Columbian" indigenous population. My understanding is that there is no solid general consensus at this point among the relevant experts.