In 2013, 29% of Americans said armed rebellion might be necessary to “protect” liberty — and journalists scoffed
Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital
One of the most indelible images from the January 6 Capitol riot was of Josh Hawley, junior senator for Missouri, graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, raising his fist in support of a riotous mob that would shortly endanger his own life and the life of the institution to which he belonged. Almost immediately after he encouraged the rioters, he found himself in a secured room, being defended from them.
At that moment of supreme crisis, Hawley represented one of the deepest mysteries of the current American predicament: why some of the best-educated men and women in the country, the most invested in its power, the luckiest, have overseen the destruction of their institutions like spoiled teenagers smashing up their parents’ house on a weekend bender.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Abraham Lincoln asked in his Lyceum Address. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” America is approaching the fulfillment of this calamitous prediction. But Lincoln could never have predicted that America’s destruction would come from its most privileged people, that it would be a suicide of the elites.
American populism has always been something of a misnomer. For one thing, Donald Trump never won the popular vote. For another, populists tend to be economically left-wing, and the policies of Trump’s government did nothing to restrict corporate interests or the tech monopolies. His inner circle was every bit as much a part of the American elite as its opponents—Steven Mnuchin (Yale ’85), Ben Carson (Yale ’73), Wilbur Ross (Yale ’59), Stephen Schwarzman (Yale ’69), Jared Kushner (Harvard ’03), Steve Bannon (Harvard ’85), Mike Pompeo (Harvard Law ’94), and, of course, Trump himself (University of Pennsylvania, ’68). Trump’s inaugural Cabinet had more Harvard alumni than Obama’s. In the aftermath of January 6, many of the strongest supporters of the stolen-election theory have been Ivy League graduates. Ted Cruz (Princeton ’92) was one of the first to challenge the election’s certification, and Kayleigh McEnany (Harvard Law ’16) actively spread fraud claims as the president’s press secretary. Elise Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006 and is the youngest woman elected to Congress, has described Donald Trump as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution.”
[David Frum: Don’t let anyone normalize January 6]
Trump’s most remarkable ability as a leader was, and is, his capacity to convince elite people, the people his vanity demands he hire, to destroy their reputation and their career in his service. No fewer than 11 Trump supporters who ran his presidential campaigns or his administration have been indicted, yet he never lacks highly educated and successful people to work for him. The death drive has entered American politics.
The icon of this period is not Trump but Oregon State Representative Mike Nearman (not an Ivy Leaguer, to be clear), who opened the back door of the Oregon legislature to rioters after posting a video saying he would let them in, calling it “Operation Hall Pass.” The crazy part isn’t even that Nearman promoted the vandalism of his own institution. The crazy part is that, after Nearman opened the door at the back of the legislature, he walked around to the front entrance, to await the violence that he had encouraged. In that folly, Nearman represents a generation—one feeding the rage that will eventually consume it.
The Josh Hawleys and Mike Nearmans of this world embody an inherent contradiction. They are trying to be government representatives for anti-government patriots. They are attempting to be the elite of the anti-elites. In 2020, Joe Biden won 60 percent of college-educated voters. Biden-voting counties were responsible for 70 percent of the GDP. America’s less-educated and less-productive citizens drive anti-government patriotism, both in its armed and elected wings, but they mostly, despite themselves, pick their representatives from the ranks of the Ivy League and other similarly elite institutions around the country. Even in their rage against elites, the anti-elitists fall back on the deep structure of American power.
Despite the hyper-partisanship that is roiling the United States, Ivy League dominance transcends political affiliation. And many of the most prominent people fighting to keep American institutions alive come from the Ivy League, too. But what I’ve described so far—GOP elites turning with petulant ferocity on the institutions from which they derive their power—is new. The failure of the elites who have always run the country—on the left, in the middle, and on the right—is not. The greatest study of the failure of American expertise is still David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest; it was written before I was born, but the process it describes, in rich detail, has been more or less completely replicated twice in my lifetime. Institutionally approved people, the top men and women, with the best intentions and the fullest education and access to the best available information, create elaborate policies that misunderstand the most basic facts about the world, leading to immense suffering for ordinary people. That is the Ivy League way— “brilliant policies that defied common sense,” in Halberstam’s phrasing.
Once, after Lyndon B. Johnson rattled off the list of experts who were helping him fight the Vietnam War, his friend Sam Rayburn replied, “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” The Afghan and Iraq Wars were a consensus policy among both Republican and Democratic elites in the civil service, in the political class, and in the media. The repetition poses an important question: Given that America has been let down, repeatedly, by members of the same expert class, why does it keep relying on them?
The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism, which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media. Biden/Harris was the first presidential ticket in 44 years without an Ivy League alumnus on board. For a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court consisted of nothing but Ivy League graduates. And these entities are exclusive and self-perpetuating. Legacies at Harvard are accepted at a rate of nearly 34 percent, compared with just 5.9 percent of ordinary people. Being born to it isn’t the only way in: Buying admittance is the simplest. (Charles Kushner gave Harvard $250,000 a year for 10 years to guarantee admission for his meritless son.)
Whoever attends has been established in the architecture of power before they have had a chance to do anything, and that is key: The network gives power. The aristocracy of the network provides opportunity and security, both materially and spiritually. The network cradles and protects. None of the politicians or journalists or intellectuals who set in motion the past 70 years of failed wars faced any significant consequences for their failures. Quite the opposite. Those who resisted those wars demonstrated that they weren’t part of the network and therefore remained excluded even after they were proved right, while those who failed showed that they were reliably part of the network and therefore remained inside. The network responds to external threats by tightening. As long as you belong, you’ll be fine.
What the Ivy League produces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwarranted confidence. Its institutions are hubris factories. At the bottom of the current collapse of the American political order is a very basic, very widespread distrust of all kinds of institutions, and that distrust is based on ordinary Americans’ distrust of the hubristic people who run those institutions. Can you blame them? The same people who told Americans that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction are now telling them to get vaccinated. Mistrust is inevitable.
For Republicans, the power of the network explains, at least in part, the perverse psychology of the suicidal elites. The network gives them meaning, and to be cast out of that network is to suffer meaninglessness, so they do whatever it takes, become whoever they need to become, to stay inside the circuits of power. Their behavior appears paradoxical from the outside—Josh Hawley, senator, raising his fist to support the ravaging of the Senate—but from the inside, the logic is immaculate: The clearest way he can keep himself in the Senate is to promote its ravaging.
[Adam Serwer: Fox hosts knew—and lied anyway]
In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon could not decide on the ultimate cause of the empire’s destruction. Was it the result of individual failures, such as those of Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Caligula? Or were trends beyond anyone’s control, such as the rise of Christianity and the geographical limitations of expansion, to blame? In the case of the United States, the deeper trends are clear—the hyper-partisanship rendering the country ungovernable on a federal level, the high levels of vertical and horizontal inequality, the environmental degradation. But the truth is that no country can survive when the leaders of its institutions actively work toward the destruction of those institutions. Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. When a man of those advantages oversees the hollowing out of the State Department, allows the president to fire inspectors general who displease him by their inspection, uses his position to cultivate donors for his party, and consistently bends the norms and destroys the traditions that have lifted him to power, what hope can there be for his country? If he cannot manage to keep faith with the system, who can?
The response to the January 6 riots is a surer sign of political breakdown than the riots themselves. Almost half of the men and women whose lives were threatened refuse to participate in the commission to investigate the violence against themselves. Obfuscation and diminishment of the event have become the standard Republican position at this point—held on to by Ivy Leaguers and others with equal capacity for motivated forgetting. Neither the most sophisticated education nor common sense seems to make much difference. They cannot bring themselves to defend government even when their physical security is at stake.
Lenin famously said that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” He didn’t get it quite right. The enemies of the United States have nowhere near as much capacity to damage its interests as do its most educated and most celebrated citizens. Nobody needs to sell Americans rope; they are braiding it themselves.
Lenders purchase banker’s acceptances as safer way to support government policy
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. Originally published on Common Dreams under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
A pair of watchdog groups on Monday called out companies and trade groups that continued to financially support the 147 congressional Republicans who voted last year to overturn the 2020 presidential election results even after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The government watchdog group Accountable.US released an interactive report entitled In Bad Company, which focuses on 20 Fortune 500 companies and 10 industry groups that have contributed over $3.3 million to the eight senators and 139 representatives collectively dubbed the “Sedition Caucus” since a right-wing mob stormed the Capitol last year.
Companies profiled by Accountable.US range from fossil fuel and pharmaceutical giants such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Merck, and Pfizer, to the shipping companies FedEx and UPS, to six major military contractors: Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon Technologies.
“Major corporations were quick to condemn the insurrection and tout their support for democracy — and almost as quickly, many ditched those purported values by cutting big checks to the very politicians that helped instigate the failed coup attempt,” said Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig.
Herrig argued that corporations continuing to donate to lawmakers “who tried to overthrow the will of the people makes clear that these companies were never committed to standing up for democracy in the first place.”
Some members of the Sedition Caucus still cling to former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election involved widespread voter fraud and was stolen from him — a baseless claim that led to the Capitol attack and, ultimately, Trump’s historic second impeachment.
Meanwhile, American voters, progressive lawmakers, and experts within and beyond the United States continue to sound the alarm about the state of the “backsliding” U.S. democracy.
“Even as democracy continues to be in the crosshairs of powerful purveyors of the Big Lie,” Herrig said Monday, “these CEOs would rather amass political influence than stand up for their customers, shareholders, and employees.”
The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) also released a new report — authored by Angela Li and Areeba Shah — detailing how corporate donors have “broken promises and funded seditionists” in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.
“Since the insurrection, 717 corporations and industry groups have donated over $18 million to 143 of the 147 members of Congress who objected to the results of the 2020 presidential election, as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee,” according to CREW.
Li and Shah found that despite pledging to stop or halt donations to the Sedition Caucus, reviewed companies “have contributed a total of $4,785,000 to insurrectionist political groups, including $2,381,250 directly” to lawmakers’ campaigns and political action committees (PACs).
“Boeing ($346,500), Koch Industries ($308,000), American Crystal Sugar ($285,000), General Dynamics ($233,500), and Valero Energy ($207,500) are the top corporate donors to those who objected to the election and their party committees,” the report says.
The report also blasts trade associations, noting that “PACs affiliated with these groups have contributed $7,678,598 to insurrectionist political groups, including $5,251,098 to campaigns and leadership PACs directly.”
This is outrageous:
Companies that pledged to stop or pause their political giving to insurrectionist members of Congress have since contributed a total of $2,381,250 directly to these members’ campaigns and leadership PACs.https://t.co/ECrB1IyYge
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) January 3, 2022
While slamming the companies that “have failed to stick to their commitments to democracy,” CREW’s report also stresses that “it isn’t all bad news,” explaining that “more than half of the nearly 250 companies that said they would evaluate their political giving in the wake of the attack have not made a donation to seditionists since.”
“Toyota stopped giving to seditionist members as a result of public pressure and after receiving pushback from CREW. Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab shut down their PACs entirely,” the report notes, adding that Hallmark Cards even requested that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) return its PAC’s donations.
“These examples show accountability is possible,” the report says, “and highlight the failures of companies who have continued to support the Sedition Caucus.”
Leading up to the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, demands for accountability and scrutiny of political contributions to Big Lie supporters have increased. However, as Judd Legum pointed out Monday in his newsletter Popular Information, a false narrative about the overall state of corporate giving post-insurrection has emerged.
1. Several media outlets have reported that most corporations have already forgotten 1/6 and resumed supporting Republican objectors
THIS IS NOT TRUE
How do I know?
I actually looked at the data
Follow along if interestedhttps://t.co/CoGgwxevfB
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 3, 2022
In response to recent reporting that “relies on anecdotal evidence,” Popular Information revealed that based on Federal Election Commission filings in 2021 and 2019, “since January 6, corporate PAC contributions to Republican objectors have plummeted by nearly two-thirds.”
Legum focused on House members who ran as incumbents in 2019 and were seeking reelection in 2021, and found that “these 94 Republican objectors raised $11,052,925 from corporate PACs through November 30, 2021, the most recent data available.”
“The same 94 Republican objectors raised $27,205,290 from corporate PACs through November 30, 2019,” he explained. “So while the media narrative is that corporate PAC contributions to Republican objectors have returned to normal, the reality is that they’ve dropped by 60%.”
While exposing that “most corporate PACs have not ‘moved beyond’ January 6 and, as a result, many Republican incumbents face fundraising deficits,” Legum also emphasized that if they “shift their normal donations to Republican objectors from 2021 to 2022, the freeze will not be meaningful.”
The post Major Corporations Have ‘Broken Promises and Funded Seditionists’ Since Jan. 6, Reports Reveal appeared first on DeSmog.
The Senate minority leader accused Democrats of “genuine radicalism” as they attempt to reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation.
French president Emmanuel Macron has renewed calls for the creation of a joint EU army. The proposal smacks of a desperate attempt to reverse the old European powers’ declining influence in global politics.
The European Union’s aspiration to become a military power is growing. (Getty Images)
“The idea that Europe is an exclusively ‘civilian power’ does not do justice to the emerging reality.” So wrote Federica Mogherini — at the time the European Union’s foreign affairs representative — in a Die Welt column back in July 2016. With transatlantic relations eroded over the following four years under Trump, the EU’s aspirations to become a military power only grew. Such calls have again gained traction as Emmanuel Macron’s France takes over the formal presidency of the EU for the first half of 2022.
This broad aim is in fact asserted by the European Commission’s own foreign policy guidelines, asserting that “Full spectrum defence capabilities are necessary to respond to external crises.” Indeed, when Ursula von der Leyen became Commission president in December 2019, she proclaimed that the EU “want[s] to be a strong geopolitical union,” and to do that it “must also learn the language of power.” Indeed, today there is hardly a statement from the EU institutions that does not express its longing to become a global power. It has almost become the gravitational field of Brussels politics — and individual policy areas are increasingly aligned with it.
This ambition also goes hand in hand with attempts to breed a kind of European patriotism in which supposed “European values” will foster a sense of superiority over the rest of the world. For example, Martin Schulz, in 2017 the German Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor, declared the EU the “greatest civilizational project in the history of mankind.” His party colleague and erstwhile foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel similarly spoke of the “most successful project for freedom, peace and prosperity the world has ever known.”
The reason for this renewed European assertiveness lies in international upheavals. The rise of China, the shift of the center of the world economy to Asia, and the renaissance of Russia as a great power — and, in all likelihood, also of India and other emerging economies — mark the end of an era. The five hundred years of colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism in which Europeans and their North American offshoots were able to impose their interests on the rest of the world are passé. But this isn’t the only reason the EU feels left out. Even under Joe Biden, the United States is committed to an “America First” policy that takes little account of what EU powers are thinking — as demonstrated by the withdrawal from Kabul and the submarine agreement with the UK and Australia.
The five hundred years of colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism in which Europeans and their North American offshoots were able to impose their interests on the rest of the world are passé.
The fact that the EU lacks resources at the level of military power is especially worrying for its top brass, because in the one field where the EU is actually still a global player — the economic terrain — it is in decline. In 1981, the economies that today make up the Eurozone still accounted for 21 percent of global GDP. Today, that figure has fallen to 12 percent. According to a forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the share will drop to 9 percent by 2050. Tellingly, the EU also lags behind the United States and China in key technologies such as quantum computing, semiconductors, cloud computing, and the like.
In light of this, the left-liberal Die Zeit asks, “How is it possible that the EU is not in the great power league?” Apparently, such a status is also an affront to Europeans’ collective self-confidence — unable to get used to no longer being the center of the world. Yet plans are afoot to stop the decline, through what French president Emmanuel Macron has termed a bid for “strategic autonomy.”
Strategic Autonomy and Its Limits
The exact meaning of “strategic autonomy” remains rather vague — it often appears as a catchall term that everyone can attribute whatever interpretation they like. At its core, however, is the need to establish the EU as an independent actor, including militarily, and to reduce its dependence on the United States. That said, reducing its dependence does not mean decoupling altogether — this is a matter of a gradual shift, and relative autonomy.
This also reveals one of the two major barriers to Brussels’ wishful thinking. NATO, in which Washington — actually a geopolitical competitor — calls the shots, imposes strict limits on genuine autonomy. For example, the Lisbon Treaty already stipulates that member states’ security and defense policy must be “consistent” with NATO (article 42.7).
The second major barrier is the heterogeneous interests of the member countries. This starts with the small fact that some EU members (Finland, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, and Cyprus) are not NATO members, whereas the UK, Norway, and Iceland are in NATO but not in the EU. One concrete manifestation of this is that Finland is ordering sixty-four F-35A stealth jets from the US firm Lockheed Martin for $10 billion, while EU-based competitors like Airbus’s Eurofighter and France’s Rafale have been rebuffed. Another telling case is the Tempest fighter planned by the UK together with Italy (Eurozone) and Sweden (an EU member with its own currency). Poland has also recently purchased thirty-two fighter jets from the United States. There is no end in sight to the complex crisscross of competition for defense profits, national security interests, and supranational integration attempts.
There are also considerable differences in the perception of friend, foe, and ally. In Poland and the Baltic states in particular, a mixture of extreme nationalism and hysterical Russophobia predominates. This is often justified by historical experience. However, a look at the centuries-long “age-old enmity” between France and Germany shows that such extreme ideological hostilities can be overcome if the political will is there.
The differences also find expression in a particular closeness of the EU’s eastern member states to NATO and the United States, in contrast to Western Europe’s relationship to them, exemplified by a French president who speaks of NATO going “brain-dead.” The most spectacular example of these differences was Washington’s 2003 war against Iraq, in which eastern countries soon to become EU member states (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia) joined George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” while France and Germany did not.
These differences also play a major role in the current crisis over Ukraine. While governments in Poland and the Baltics are stoking aggressive sentiment against Moscow — with rhetorical support from German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (a Green) — the good news is that Macron and Germany’s new chancellor Olaf Scholz are seeking de-escalation. The German government’s communiqué on the phone call between Scholz and Vladimir Putin is demonstratively matter-of-fact, arguing for the implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreement, which Kyiv is desperate to get rid of, and for the resumption of talks in the Normandy Format (a four-way process involving France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine). Apparently, an informal decision has been made in Berlin that Scholz (just like Angela Merkel before him) should retain prerogative over the most important foreign relations.
Even under Joe Biden, the United States is committed to an ‘America First’ policy that takes little account of what EU powers are thinking.
Behind all these contradictions, there is ultimately a fundamental fact that tends to be overlooked: the EU is not a state like the United States, China, or Russia but a hybrid of an alliance of nation-states and elements of supranational statehood. This is a complicated fair-weather construction that does not have the capacity to act as a state. So-called multilevel governance is not up to the scale and complexity of the crises of the twenty-first century and not sufficient for anything more than muddling through. Therefore, a simple addition of the military capabilities of the individual member states is a milquetoast calculation. If one takes, for example, the total expenditure on armaments, the EU comes to $231 billion, according to SIPRI figures. That’s third in the world behind the United States ($778 billion) and China ($252 billion), and nearly four times as much as Russia ($62 billion). But as long as that is distributed among twenty-seven nation-states, for which the military remains an attribute of their sovereignty, it does not translate into a common military potential.
Ultimately, this is also reflected in what joint military capabilities exist so far, or are at least planned with some degree of commitment.
Militarization Through PESCO
The central instrument for such military coordination is the so-called Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO). What is interesting is that PESCO is designed from the outset to ensure that military capacity-building is carried out by member states that “meet more demanding criteria in terms of military capabilities” (article 42.6). They can form any subgroups they want, quasi-coalitions of the willing, without the need for the others to join in. This means two things:
First, in terms of integration policy, this is a flexibilization of integration toward a “multispeed Europe.” This creates different categories of member countries in addition to existing fragmentations in the EU, such as divides of center-periphery, north-south, east-west, Eurozone-non-Eurozone, etc. In contrast to the similar procedure known as Enhanced Cooperation (based on a minimum quorum of nine member states), in which the failed project of a financial transaction tax was negotiated, just two partners are sufficient for PESCO. In this respect, the complicated problem of multilevel governance is bypassed from the outset.
Second, the member states that meet “more demanding criteria” are, of course, the large and economically mighty countries — first and foremost, France and Germany, and, in the second rank, Italy and Spain. This solidifies the informal power hierarchy with Berlin and Paris at the top. Among the many other democratic deficits, this quasi-imperial power imbalance is one of the EU’s greatest democratic defects. Indeed, all major PESCO projects are concentrated around France and Germany.
So far, there are forty-seven projects in various coalitions. These include a joint medical command, bug-proof radio technology, and military training centers. The creation of a joint high command has also been announced. However, only three armament projects are really strategically relevant:
- A combat aircraft, the Future Combat Air System, to be produced mainly by France and Germany (Dassault and Airbus), with Spanish participation. The jet is to fly in tandem with combat drones and microdrones, as well as with its own digital cloud. It is expected to be available from 2040. Estimates of its cost currently range from €100 billion to €300 billion.
- A new Main Ground Combat System, also a Franco-German project. The German partner is KraussMaffei; the French partner is the Nexter defense company. Entry into service is scheduled for 2035. Its unit price currently stands at €10 million.
- The so-called Eurodrone, in which France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are involved. Airbus is the leader of the consortium, which includes Dassault and the Italian defense company Leonardo. Seven systems, each with three drones, have been ordered so far. The price tag is said to be €7.1 billion, with delivery scheduled for 2029.
Taken on their own, these projects may look impressive. But in a global context, they hardly fulfil the goal of giving the EU world-power military capabilities.
Paris hopes to regain the leading role in European politics it enjoyed until German reunification.
It is, in any case, by no means certain that these projects will be successfully implemented. An internal evaluation by the EU Commission, for example, concludes that only one-third will be realized. The doubts apply mainly to the smaller projects. But there are also considerable difficulties with the larger ones. For example, French and German defense companies are fighting over access to technologies and patents. So it is always a question of industrial policy and profits.
Finally, in its rivalry with Germany for leadership of the EU, France sees the military as a means of compensating for the Germans’ economic dominance. Brexit has changed the power architecture at the top of the EU. The departure of the British also saw a nuclear power and a permanent Security Council member leaving the EU. But nuclear weapons are still the decisive criterion for membership in the premier league of geopolitics, thus handing Paris a monopoly position in the EU’s ranks as the only nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Paris thus hopes to regain the leading role in European politics it enjoyed until German reunification. It has clearly rejected German attempts to have a say in France’s nuclear weapons and its seat on the Security Council.
Peace Policy?
The reality that nothing will come of plans for an EU army for the foreseeable future does not mean that those who seek an emancipatory peace policy can sit back and let things take their course. For, regardless of the fate of such a force, the security climate between the great powers is currently deteriorating dramatically on several fronts — above all in the Indo-Pacific between the United States and China, and in Europe between Russia and NATO and the EU. The world is on a slippery slope toward a Cold War 2.0.
But this will not solve the really big problems of the twenty-first century, which first and foremost means the climate crisis. To tackle this real threat to our safety, what is needed is a policy based on détente, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence. Instead of embarking on the futile endeavor of an army, the EU should instead reflect on Europe’s traditions of peace policy. From the Peace of Westphalia to Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace to Social Democratic German chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of détente, role models do exist. Peace is not everything — but without peace, everything else is impossible.
Coup plot called “a well thought-out plan based on sound, constitutional law and existing legislative precedent”
The “Just Say No” campaign is remembered today for the huge quantity of kitsch media it produced, like McGruff the Crime Dog. But the campaign was based on the psychological warfare techniques of the Cold War.
Nancy Reagan (center), with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 1990. (Levan Ramishvili / Flickr)
A few months ago, Twitter got a sustained chuckle out of the ill-advised — yet, somehow, also compulsively listenable — 1986 cassette McGruff’s Smart Kids Album. It’s a recording in which anti-drug spokesanimal McGruff the Crime Dog “sings” jazzy, synthy tunes about the dangers of alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants backed by a children’s chorus and some impressive studio musician chops.
McGruff and his musical explorations were but one of the many expressions in 1980s American media of a larger “just say no to drugs” public information campaign, one that enlisted everyone from sitcom stars to cartoon characters to First Ladies in an effort to wipe out the use of illegal drugs and alcohol in the young. The commonly accepted story — that the “just say no” slogan spontaneously originated with a visit First Lady Nancy Reagan made to a school shortly after her husband took office — is a bit disingenuous.
The Just Say No campaign was the culmination of many threads of postwar public opinion shaping that have their roots in both the American military-industrial complex and big business’s uses of mass psychology and media to enforce ideological conformity during the Cold War. Primary among these was, and still is, the Ad Council.
The Ad Council originated during World War II as the War Advertising Council, which redirected America’s massive peacetime domestic consumption propaganda apparatus — the advertising industry — to promoting war bonds and other publicity campaigns for the war effort. In peacetime, its mission changed to “public service” and matched well with the new medium of television. In addition to its work for Cold War propaganda efforts such as the US Information Agency, the Ad Council pioneered the postwar TV “public service announcement” (PSA).
The Ad Council was the Madison Avenue brain trust responsible for famous PSA campaigns like Smokey the Bear, the “crying Indian” anti-pollution ads of the 1970s, and the United Negro College Fund’s series of “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” television spots. The Ad Council also facilitated the creation of McGruff the Crime Dog in 1980, thanks to the contribution of veteran ad man Jack Keil, who also voiced McGruff in commercials and on the aforementioned cassette. McGruff’s remit was public safety and kids, so he became a natural for the Just Say No message.
The Just Say No campaign was designed thanks to a public relations/mass psychology approach known as inoculation theory. Inoculation theory originated in the aftermath of the Korean War, when US defense officials and psychologists believed that American defectors to the Communist side of the conflict had been “brainwashed” by their Chinese captors. These widespread fears during the 1950s Red Scare — based on the premise that no “real” American could ever see the logic and reason of joining the Reds — led opinion makers and national security officials to look for a way to prevent “conversions” like these.
Psychologist William J. McGuire coined “inoculation theory” in the early 1960s in a series of research papers, noting that
we would develop the resistance to persuasion of a person raised in an ideologically aseptic environment by pre-exposing him to weakened forms of the counter-arguments, or to some other belief-threatening material strong enough to stimulate, but not so strong as to overcome, his belief defenses . . .
just like the weakened form of a virus.
In the terms of the typical tropes of 1980s Just Say No propaganda, the weak inoculating factor usually takes the form of a peer on a child-friendly sitcom, after-school special, or PSA offering drugs to a main character — who is already known by the viewer and thus their proxy — using a number of familiar yet easily refuted arguments for taking drugs (“it feels good,” “everyone’s doing it,” “just try it once”).
Over the course of the episode or PSA, the viewer proxy might receive support and advice from authority figures or peers on precisely how to “just say no,” but in the end, the decision and action is taken by the character for themselves, demonstrating individual strength and independence in the face of communal peer temptation. In the process, the viewer has also been “inoculated” with counterarguments to use in their own real-life encounters.
The ubiquity of Just Say No led to parallel campaigns in the 1980s, some of which were organized by local law enforcement. Most famous of these is probably Los Angeles Police chief Daryl Gates’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), which went nationwide but had its roots in Gates’s own militarized war on drugs and gangs.
Of course, we now know a few decades later what happens to a generation raised on these kinds of messages — a fully enshrined carceral state championed by both Republicans and Democrats since the 1980s that continues to incarcerate and oppress people of color in the face of a widening acceptance of drug legalization and an opiate plague that has devastated communities from coast to coast (it’s much tougher to “just say no” to a doctor’s prescription backed by Big Pharma funding, after all).
Just Say No left behind a series of cultural artifacts and memories that evoke the conservative Reaganite desire to turn back the clock, but they also demonstrate that the union of big business, the military, law enforcement, and the makers of capitalist propaganda in the ad industry can still be turned to the manufacturing of consent for any number of ideological projects — and that in order to do so, they’ll always start with the young.
Don’t take what Republicans say to pollsters at face value — they are happy to lie in service of the fascist cause
The past four years have seen terms like “antifa” hit common parlance around the U.S., but have also seen confusing distortions of what that term means. As right-wing pundits work desperately to paint any and all potentially left-leaning protest action as anti-fascist, and then reframe anti-fascism as a series of nefarious terrorist plots, this has shifted much of the climate toward suspicion of anti-fascist activists. Despite the violence related to 2020’s protests being largely from far right vigilantes and the police, the mythology of “antifa violence” has still been spurred on by rumors, conspiracy theories and dubious allegations. This has provided cover to the far right, which uses claims of “community safety” to head into cities and attack anti-fascist protesters, as has been seen in a sequence of confrontations between far right and anti-fascist demonstrators in places like Portland, Oregon. This perception, along with attempts to crack down on activists through state repression, have led to what many people have alleged are excessive sentences that were disproportionate to the charges being faced.
In cases around the country, such as David Campbell in New York City, activists were facing prison terms for what they have claimed are self-defense against violence by far right groups, such as the Proud Boys. For many activists who have made it their job to try and prevent far right groups from parading into marginalized communities, threatening further attacks, they are finding that prosecutors’ offices see them as the antagonist in the situation.
This is what happened to Alexander Dial, a Portland, Oregon, resident who faced a series of serious felonies after a confrontation at an August 19, 2019, anti-fascist demonstration. Dial came to national prominence after photos surfaced of him taking a hammer away from a member of the fascist group the American Guard, which the Anti-Defamation League refers to as “hardcore white supremacists,” amidst what people on the scene referred to as an attack. Dial was wearing a mask and a shirt that said “Beta Cuck 4 Lyfe,” a play on the insult that far right internet trolls try to use to demean leftist men.
Dial said that he has attended protests most of his adult life, and had attended the August 17 event to show his support for the anti-fascists being targeted. The event was organized by the anti-fascist group Pop Mob and a coalition of other leftist and progressive organizations in response to a planned Proud Boys rally. The Proud Boys planned their event after another protest, just a few weeks earlier, where Pop Mob had created a dance party in response to another pair of planned far right demonstrations, one by the Proud Boys and the other by affiliates of a local far right group, Patriot Prayer. The dance party was named the “milkshake” after the then-recent “milkshaking” of English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, known for agitating Islamophobic hatred in Britain, where activists threw milkshakes on him to humiliate him on camera and ruin his clothes. Far right media figure Andy Ngo had milkshakes thrown on him and was assaulted at that event in a well-publicized incident, which launched him to right-wing celebrity status. The Proud Boys, in response, planned a rally “against domestic terrorism,” and hundreds were set to descend on Portland.
The event itself was relatively peaceful as Pop Mob orchestrated a carnivalesque atmosphere less than a mile away from the Proud Boys, but in the same waterfront park. Black bloc activists, who dress in head-to-toe black outfits as a protest tactic and often take on more militant approaches, separated the two groups, ensuring that the Proud Boys could not attack those attending the Pop Mob event. Eventually, the police let the Proud Boys take to the bridge that separates the East and West sides of town. The American Guard members, however, allegedly took a bus back over to the Westside, near the anti-fascist demonstration, where they were met by anti-fascists.
“[I thought] those guys are here to cause trouble. Something is going to happen wherever they are,” Dial told Truthout. He then joined with a group of other activists he did not know to try and stand in the way of the American Guard from reaching other demonstrators. “They started to brandish weapons from inside. Knives. A clawhammer. They had guns,” said Dial.
Dial says that when they came out, one of the American Guard members tripped, was approached by someone else, and the Guard member dropped the clawhammer. That is when Dial got ahold of it, swung it to get them away, and threw it at them. The American Guard bus eventually left, and Dial was later circled by multiple police and arrested. It wasn’t until days later that he found out that he was being charged with multiple felony counts, including assault in the second degree and a riot charge. They charged five additional people with riot charges, making a total of six, the number legally necessary in Oregon to charge that an illegal riot had, in fact, taken place. Dial was taken from his arraignment straight to Multnomah County Jail, where he sat for 11 days until his bail was posted.
“The left is seeking progress, and that means changing institutions in ways that better more people. And if you are running the institutions that are capitalizing off of marginalized populations, you are going to fight back with all the powers of the system,” says Dial. “So overcharging anti-fascists is the easiest, cheapest thing to do.”
Without those levels of support for individual activists and long-term solidarity organizing, state repression could have a chilling effect on other organizers by making it appear too costly and dangerous.
Dial says that the expanded charges came, in part, from the release of video that was taken on that day by Elijah Schaffer, a media person with the right-wing outlet The Blaze, and was amplified by Andy Ngo (including hosting the video on his YouTube channel). Two of the charges that had come down were what are called Measure 11 crimes, those that carry with them “mandatory minimum” sentences of more than five years. Measure 11 passed in Oregon in the mid-1990s as a way of getting “tough” on violent crime, and one of the cases that was used as an example of the time was when an antiracist skinhead shot and killed a neo-Nazi when defending himself during a New Year’s Eve attack.
Because of the current bail system, and the charges that had been tacked onto his case, Dial’s bail of over half a million dollars meant that he had to put up $54,000 to get out. Fifteen percent of that money, nearly $8,000, is kept by the county permanently, and he had to solicit donations from friends and family to get this money, clearing out his savings and “financially ruining” him. Once he got out, he had to pay to have an ankle monitor on, which he wore for months, as well as observing a curfew. Because his court case was extended for over two years, he had to get by on severely limited pretrial release conditions. His ability to work was hindered and he relied on many of these anti-fascist organizations to provide a great deal of support.
“[We] knew that what he needed most was a good criminal defense lawyer,” says “Walter,” an administrator of the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which raises money for anti-fascist activists facing legal or medical costs. (Walter is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation for their activism.) “All mutual aid in anti-fascism is important, but we believe the Defense Fund fills a gap by ensuring that anti-fascists who run into trouble don’t ever feel like they only have themselves to rely on.”
Support came internationally, with donations from across the world and thousands of people signing a petition demanding the charges against Dial be dropped.
Dial eventually took a plea agreement, and then in November of 2021, he had all but two charges dismissed by the judge, and he was given “time served,” three years of probation and 80 hours of community service, which Dial says he will try to complete by working with a nonprofit that helps upgrade the homes of people with disabilities to make them more accessible.
“No matter what you’re choosing to organize or whatever actions you want to take, [you need to] develop and maintain strong community ties with people you trust,” says Dial, who points out that this means real-world relationships and not just virtual ones mediated through social media. “You need connections with people who have your back and who know how to reach out to other people who might be able to help you in ways they can’t. What got me through all of this … was my community.”
These are the types of bonds that many anti-fascist groups are creating, and what can sustain many activists when targeted by state agencies. Community organizing is built on these bonds, and as was seen during the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, mutual aid and fundraising support was a key part of sustaining the organizing itself. Without those levels of support for individual activists and long-term solidarity organizing, state repression could have a chilling effect on other organizers by making it appear too costly and dangerous.
The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund addresses those needs by raising money and disseminating it where needed. Since 2017, the fund has disseminated over $19,000 to a total of 15 recipients who have faced financial hardship from their activism or have been targeted by the far right, according to Walter.
“[We] all recognize that standing up to bigotry [and] fascism is dangerous but necessary work, which is why it is important for everyone to stand behind anti-fascists when they run into trouble,” says Walter. “We believe that this is real solidarity and is true to the saying, ‘We keep us safe!’”
Dial’s story shows that it is these community connections that get activists through these situations, which may become more necessary as leftist protesters deal with the fallout from intense policing practices during the 2020 protests. By connecting different movements through bonds of resource solidarity, social movements become sustainable and individuals can come through these challenges with enough stability to continue.
Dial says that he is going to work to repeal Measure 11 in Oregon, which has reinforced a carceral culture that has been used disproportionately against marginalized communities. By sharing his story, he wants to give insight to those facing similar challenges about what it takes to survive overcharging by the state.
“You need connections to people who have your back and who know how to reach out to people to help you in ways they can’t,” says Dial. “That’s the whole point of why we’re all doing this in the first place. It’s about community.”