For weeks now, I have vowed that I would finish these letters early and get to bed before midnight, and for weeks now, I have finally finished around three in the morning. That was not the case two years ago, when I started writing these at the start of the Ukraine crisis: it was rare enough for me to be writing until midnight that I vividly remember the first time it happened.
I got to thinking today about why things seem more demanding today than they did two years ago, and it strikes me that what makes the writing more time consuming these days is that we have two all-consuming stories running in parallel, and together they illuminate the grand struggle we are in for the survival of American democracy.
On the one hand we have the former president and the attempts by him and his loyalists to seize control of our country regardless of the will of the majority of voters, while Republican Party leaders are refusing to speak out in the hopes that they can retain power to continue advancing their agenda.
Since the 1980s, this branch of the Republican Party has tried to dismantle the government in place since the 1930s that tries to protect equality in America, regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. Members of this faction of the Republican Party—the faction that is now in control of it—want to take the government back to the 1920s, when businessmen controlled the government, operating it to try to create a booming economy without regard for social or environmental consequences.
Although initially unhappy at Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House, that faction embraced him as he advanced the tax cuts, deregulation, and destruction of government offices they believed were central to freeing businessmen to advance the economy. Believing that Democrats’ determination to use the government to level the playing field among Americans would destroy the individualism that supports the economy, they had come to believe that Democrats could not legitimately govern the country. And so, members of this Republican faction did not back away when Trump refused to accept the election of a Democratic president in 2020.
Almost a year later, the leadership of the Republican Party, composed now as it is of Trump loyalists, is undermining our democracy. It has fallen in line behind Trump’s Big Lie that he and not Biden won the 2020 election, and that the Democratic Party engaged in voter fraud to install their candidate. This is a lie, but Republicans at the state level are using that lie to justify new election laws that suppress Democratic votes and put control of state elections into their own hands. If those laws are allowed to stand, we will be a democracy in name only. We will likely still have elections, but, just as in Russia or Hungary now, the mechanics of the system will mean that only the president’s party can win.
This attack on our democracy is unprecedented, and it cannot be ignored. Tonight, for example, Trump held a “rally” in Perry, Georgia, where, to cheers, he straight up lied that the recent “audit” in Arizona proved he won the 2020 election. And yet, to overemphasize the antics of the former president and his supporters enables them to grow to larger proportions than they deserve, feeding their power. Tonight, for example, Newsmax and OAN covered Trump’s rally live, but the Fox News Channel did not, and the audience appeared bored.
On the other hand, in contrast to the former president's party, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to demonstrate that democracy actually works. Rather than simply fighting the Republicans, which would permit the Republicans to define the terms under which they govern, they are defending the active government the Republicans have set out to destroy. Biden has been clear since he took office that he intends to strengthen democracy abroad, where it is under pressure from rising autocratic governments, by strengthening it at home.
To that end, he and the Democrats in Congress have aggressively worked to pass legislation that benefits ordinary Americans. The wait for such legislation to appear can be frustrating, but that is in part because the Democrats are actually doing the kind of work that used to be commonplace in Congress: hammering out compromises, finding votes, arguing, amending legislation.
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) released a letter she sent to her caucus, telling members they must vote this week to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government, as well as the two major infrastructure bills on which they have been working for months: the Build Back Better Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. While news stories have often turned the negotiations over these bills into a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats, it is important to remember that while a handful of Republicans were willing to agree to rebuild roads and bridges and to bring broadband to rural areas, most of them are simply not negotiating at all. They reject the idea that the government should invest in infrastructure, especially that kind outlined in the Build Back Better measure: infrastructure involving childcare, elder care, and climate change. And if they can run out the clock and convince voters that government can’t get anything done, so much the better.
Democrats disagree about the details of their measures—exactly as one would expect from a big-tent party—but they all accept the principle that the government should actively help ordinary Americans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) might disagree on the size of the infrastructure package they want, but they both agree that the government should support infrastructure.
Republicans reject that idea, standing instead on the principle that the government should simply stay out of the way of businessmen, who are better equipped to manage the country than bureaucrats. The Charles Koch–backed Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business are all pouring money into defeating the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, warning: “A government takeover of our economy is a fundamental departure from the spirit of entrepreneurialism we’ve relied on for generations to drive prosperity, and there’s only one outcome—unmitigated economic disaster that will be difficult to reverse.”
The profound disagreement between the Republicans and the Democrats over the role of government has led to a profound crisis in our democracy. Democrats’ argument that the government should work for ordinary Americans is popular, so popular that Republicans have apparently given up convincing voters their way is better. Through voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the Electoral College, and now with new election laws in 18 states, they have guaranteed that they will retain control no matter what voters actually want. Their determination to keep Democrats from power has made them abandon democracy.
For their part, Democrats are trying to protect the voting rights at the heart of our democracy, believing that if all eligible Americans can vote, they will back a government that works for the people.
And so, the task of writing these letters has gotten more complicated of late. I try to detail the growing threat that the Republicans will succeed in destroying our democracy while also explaining the ways in which the Biden administration is trying to move beyond the current crisis to demonstrate the vitality of American democracy.
And, always, I try to keep front and center that these fights are not academic. They are, fundamentally, a fight to determine whether a nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...can long endure.”
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Notes:
https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/92521
I'm posting two Letters-to-the-Editor of our local Exeter Newsletter (NH) by two very excellent Exeter civic writers of LTE's.....as my comments (see below)
America: Whose Story is Missing, Whose Voice Suppressed?
Posted by Robert Azzi; Exeter, NH - September 26, 2021
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“We believe the one who has the power,” Yaa Gyasi writes in Homegoing. “He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”
For too long, far too many people believed in a sanitized history of America, replete with missing, false, and suppressed stories, some rooted in denial, some in embarrassment, some in racism and prejudice; the persistence of such narratives – uncorrected over centuries and decades – has resulted in the caste system we inhabit today, one that not only elevates whiteness as the national norm but serves to elevate illusionary narratives about a nation that was born not only in aspiration but also in sin – a nation sustained by the erasure of identity and humanity of its non-white peoples.
These are dangerous days: never have so many people had so much access – at their fingertips – to so much information yet been so resistant to any information that might contradict their prejudices, days where some Americans mendaciously scorn rationality and expertise and applaud vulgarity and bigotry; reject the guidance of scientists and embrace charlatans.
These are dangerous days.
No rational person, I believe, could have foreseen that today America would be so roiled by irrationality rooted in racism and prejudice: an irrationality committed to the preservation of a false American identity so frightening that it presents an existential threat to our existence as a democracy, an irrationality determined to suppress the voices of peoples unlike themselves.
Today, no one could have foreseen that when the Taliban’s Minister of Education, Molvi Noorullah Munir boasted: “… You see that the Mullahs and Taliban that are in the power, have no Phd, MA or even a high school degree, but are the greatest of all,” he would be articulating a popular right-wing American trope embraced by millions of people so proud of their ignorance that not only are they willing to sacrifice loved ones on altars of idolatry but willing to try and topple our government through insurrection.
Not only has our history for too long been written – and rewritten – by those in power but even our language has been so appropriated that white people not only want to define racism on their terms, but they want to dictate how victims of racism and discrimination should respond.
Appropriate language so that they can be the ones who define what’s diverse, what’s equity, what’s justice; what definitions comfort them and protect their privilege.
Appropriate language and meaning so they can be free to misquote, misappropriate, and demean the voice of the Other.
“Prejudice,” Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim observed, “saves us a painful trouble – the trouble of thinking.”
The truth is that – even after abolition, Civil War, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, The March on Washington, Civil Rights legislation and innumerable other acts – the fundamental structure of institutions and organizations that enslavers and those who profited from the slave trade created have been not just resistant to change, but continue to advance agendas to protect their dominant – and false – perception that America is primarily a white Christian nation.
Today, Critical Race Theory (CRT) challenges the historic racial hierarchies embedded in American institutions, and questions the legitimacy of power that sustains white America, not by teaching people that they are racist but by exposing how deeply racism is embedded in all our lives.
Rather than understand that “An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect,” as the late Mary Catherine Bateson, a longtime Hancock NH resident wrote. Opponents of CRT strive to deny Americans an understanding of the full Promise of America, deny the existence of an expansive America.
Whose Story is Missing?
Americans like to think we live in an “exceptional” nation – as many developed nations do – but the truth is that in recent years we’ve been most exceptional in witnessing attacks on our Public Square, attacks on suffrage, attacks on artists and authors of color struggling to make their singular visions – visions of a great and diverse nation spawned by challenge, love, and conflict – known.
While it was once common to deify the Founding Fathers and colonial-settlers who claimed this nation as visionaries who sought to create a nation based on values rather than on ethnicity or religion, the reality is that they often fell short of their own expressed aspirational values.They too, were human.
Of the first 12 presidents… eight, along with such luminaries as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, owned and traded in enslaved peoples.
While it’s true that for over 200 years such men were celebrated as heroes, doesn’t mean that America’s “Birthing Story” should not be revisited. “The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism,” Bateson wrote, “is essential to democracy,” and that’s what we’re being called upon to do.
Whose Voice Suppressed?
For too long America suppressed the voices of The Other, the enslaved, the dispossessed and victims of genocide; suppressed the horrors of pogroms and lynchings; committed environmental, economic, educational, political, and cultural racism against minority communities and peoples of color – all without ever being called to full account.
Accounting for such truths affirms, not diminishes, who we are.
These are dangerous days. To acknowledge such truths, to listen to the missing and suppressed, to face down authoritarian challenges and to confront threats to our democracy is essential to our survival – to our belief that all people are created equal.
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To the editor: Freedom of Speech
Don Nolte, Exeter, NH
A September 27 meeting of the NH Executive Council to consider use of federal pandemic funds to promote Covid-19 vaccination was cut short when protestors ran around the room shouting “Shut it down!” and telling state employees who had come to testify “We know where you live!” When witnesses departed in fear for their lives, a protester shouted “Mission accomplished!”
Afterwards, a council member commented "This is a group of fringe activists who are trying to disrupt our government. They will not succeed." And the House Speaker stated: "Our Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but disruption of government meetings and threats to government officials is not acceptable. The events we witnessed today were disgraceful and contrary to civil public discourse."
People see freedom of speech differently. Some say breaking into the US Capitol and assaulting police officers while chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and "Shoot Nancy Pelosi" should be regarded as protected free speech, while marching in the streets to challenge police brutality toward minorities should not.
With all the posturing about "cancel culture," school curricula, media censorship, "fake news" and the "Big Lie," I feel a duty to address misperceptions. "Free speech" is not unfettered. There are restrictions on many things, such as libel and slander, advocating overthrow of the government, hate speech, lying under oath, mislabeling products, disclosing privileged or classified information, etc.
The phrase "cancel culture" is used to challenge the opposing of extreme views. It bothers me when students turn their backs on a lecturer who describes viewpoints they disagree with, but not when they refuse to accept blatant falsehoods. The challenge is to see the difference.
While I see "political correctness" as a positive trait, some use "PC" as a slur while applauding those who “tell it like it is” (by praising neo-Nazis who march the streets, for example, or those who storm the Capitol to overturn an election).
What children are taught in school is a matter for educators to determine based on pedagogical principles. I would only hope that legislators would refrain from exerting partisan censorship. As a people we need not fear the truth of our past – while acknowledging our historic derelictions, we can be proud of the progress we’ve made and the principles we aspire to.
The "Big Lie" (that the election was stolen and our polling procedures cannot be trusted) poses a constitutional crisis that threatens our republic.
The framers had a knowledge of history that guided them in drafting the Bill of Rights. The first of those rights, freedom of speech, is the cornerstone of our democracy. Let's respect it as defined by law. As citizens, let’s speak out against abuses of this right, and let’s elect officials who treasure it.
Professor Richardson. Your understanding of history and how it applies to the current frightening times is valuable beyond words. Your recaps of the key events are now essential reading for us. Thank you. Please never stop.
However, I agree with others, if it means less letters per week to keep your spark alive, please don't hesitate. Whatever it takes to keep your explanations pouring forth longer. Your contributions are epic.
Sleep is essential to health. Please don't lose your health balance. I would be happy with less letters and a longer life for them. Why not take the weekends off? Old school idea, I know. A letter every other day? Whatever works for you. Just stay healthy. Life is short. You deserve to enjoy it fully. And we need you :)