Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Caesarism

The Supreme Court may be within a few months of ending democracy in the United States and turning the White House over to a group of billionaires who’ve already funded the GOP takeover of multiple state legislatures.

But don’t just take my word for it. Consider these sources:

• Law & Crime: Election Law Experts Sound the Alarm About ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Voting Rights Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear
• Demand Justice: Republican Supreme Court to Decide If Democrats Are Allowed to Win Elections Anymore
• The Atlantic: Is Democracy Constitutional?
• MSNBC: Moore v. Harper Could Upend Elections as We Know Them

And Moore v Harper is just the latest in a long string of naked assaults on American democracy and the rights of average American citizens, particularly when they conflict with the rights of billionaires and giant corporations.

So, how the hell did we end up here?

Of the six-vote hard-right majority on the Supreme Court, only one of them was appointed by a president who actually won his election (Thomas: Bush Sr.). The other five were appointed by George W. Bush (lost in 2000 by about a half-million votes) and Trump (lost in 2016 by over 3 million votes).

The urgency and ferocity with which they’re ripping our Constitution to shreds seems driven by their knowledge of their own illegitimacy.

Republican appointees across our federal court system are trying to “deconstruct the administrative state” of America, to quote Steve Bannon. Most recently, the majority-Trump-appointed 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is unconstitutional. That case will appear at the Supreme Court soon, in all probability.

The most concerning case right now, however, is Moore v Harper which considers the bizarre theory Trump was pushing Pence to accept, that voters don’t determine who becomes president via the Electoral College but that individual state legislatures can simply award their Electoral votes to whichever candidate strikes their fancy.

It’s loosely based on language in the Constitution, but defies two centuries of precedent and turns pretty much every part of elections over to state legislatures with no oversight whatsoever by either governors or the people, and can’t be appealed to any court, including the Supreme Court.

Judge Michael Luttig — the famous and credible conservative judge, the Edmund Burke of this era — has joined the team fighting the potential outcome of this decision.

Luttig suggests this theory, if adopted by the Court, could very well signal the end of Democratic presidents so long as more than 25 of our 50 states have Republican-controlled legislatures (and their governors can’t even veto their legislatures, according to this theory). Today 30 states’ legislatures are fully under GOP control, up from 14 in 2009.

Luttig, the elders among us may remember, personally ran Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearing and worked for years side-by-side with John Roberts in the Reagan Justice Department. He’s friends with both men and is considered one of the top conservative judges in contemporary America.

The “Independent State Legislature theory” at the core of Moore v Harper is, according to Luttig:

[A]ntithetical to the Framers’ intent, the text, and the Constitution’s fundamental design and architecture.

But that’s just the beginning of the out-of-control and dangerous behavior of the far-right radicals on today’s court. Since there’s been a conservative majority on the Court it has, among other things:

• *Handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush
• *Radically cut back the rights of unions to organize and represent workers
• *Declared that billionaires buying politicians is merely “free speech”
• *Gutted the power of the EPA to regulate planet-destroying carbon pollution
• *And ripped the heart out of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

In just the past year this Court, now stacked with 3 new and deeply unqualified (but young!) hard-right Trump-humping activists, has already ruled to:

• *End the 6th Amendment right of prisoners to challenge convictions when their lawyers were demonstrably corrupt or incompetent (Shinn v Ramirez✎ EditSign). In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
• *Further gut Americans’ right to vote. In 3 separate cases, Merrill v Milligan✎ EditSign, Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, and Ardoin v. Robinson the six rightwing justices endorsed three separate Republican gerrymanders and voting maps in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Alabama that were each unabashedly based on efforts to enhance the electoral power of white voters.
• *Remove from US citizens who move to (or live in) Puerto Rico the right to receive certain Social Security benefits in their US v Vaello-Madero case. Whacking the rights of over 300,000 Americans living in PR, the six crazies on the Court ruled that only Congress could fix the damage they themselves were doing. The problem with that, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, is that because PR isn’t yet a state and has no member of Congress to fight on their behalf the Court was simply “punishing disparities suffered by citizen residents of Puerto Rico under Congress’ unequal treatment.”
• *Take away your Miranda rights to remain silent, avoid self-incrimination, and know you have access to a lawyer. Americans cannot, the 6 “conservatives” on the Court ruled in Vega v. Tekoh, sue police officers who fail to tell them their Miranda rights.
• *Eliminate many non-citizens’ rights under the Constitution when abused by the federal government. While the Constitution refers to “persons” rather than “citizens” in most critical places (like the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law), the Court decided in two cases, Garland v. Gonzalez and in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez, that noncitizens often are not entitled to bond hearings or class-wide injunctive relief when screwed by the feds.
• *Rip away 4th Amendment privacy rights against unreasonable search and seizure for all persons living within 100 miles of an ocean or our borders with Mexico or Canada (that’s two out of three American citizens – even here in Portland, I’m within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean). In Egbert v Boule, the six rightwingers on the Court ruled that border patrol and other federal officers can search you, your home, or your vehicle for any old reason they want because you live in the vicinity of a border or ocean and they consider you suspicious. No warrant necessary anymore.
• *Give police officers who use excessive force immunity from accountability. In Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna and City of Tahlequah, OK v. Bond the Court upheld its own invention, the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” that makes it almost impossible to sue cops when they wail on you or even kill you (in the Tahlequah case they killed a man in his own garage) for little or no reason.
• *Kill the power of the EPA under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon pollution or protect communities from having their water supplies poisoned by industry seeking profits. West Virginia v EPA ended that agency’s power to regulate carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and Louisiana v American Rivers handed polluters, overturning 50 years of precedent, the power to overrule states’ and tribes’ rules against pollution of their waterways.

That was last year, and apparently it was just a warm-up:

• *Now the Court, in addition to taking on Moore v Harper that could guarantee no Democrat in our lifetimes will ever again become president, is planning to take a second large bite out of the Voting Rights Act in Merrill v Mulligan.
• *In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina the 6-judge majority will probably end affirmative action.
• *In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District the Court allowed a coach to impose prayer on public school students because “religious liberty.”
• *Even as guns have become the leading cause of death among American children and gun-related crime is washing over our country like a poisonous bloody tide, the Court is preparing to unleash even more weapons on our nation by gutting gun owner licensure laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Virtually every one of these decisions are or will be based on the power the Court gave itself to overturn laws passed by Congress and signed by the President in its 1803 Marbury v Madison case.

That case caused such a backlash that the next time the Court ruled on a major constitutional issue was in 1856 with Dred Scott v Sanford, which arguably kicked off the Civil War and President Lincoln refused to recognize.

From the founding of our republic until the post-Reconstruction era, the Court rarely ruled to strike down or modified laws based on their reading of Constitution. Mostly it just did its job as the final court of appeals; after all, the buck has to stop somewhere.

That’s how it’s designed in the Constitution: when different judges disagree or cases go back-and-forth on appeal, the Supreme Court makes the final decision about who wins and who loses.

Back in the early days of the republic the Court was sometimes referred to as the “chickens and dogs court” because so many cases had to do with disputes between farmers (most of America was agricultural at the time).

The idea of deciding cases on the basis of the Constitution was considered exotic or bizarre, and the idea of striking down laws made by Congress and signed by the president was so unthinkable it was only done twice in major cases during the first century of this nation’s history.

When the Court voted in 1803 to give itself the power to claim the Constitution as its excuse to overturn Congress’ laws, then-President Jefferson reflected the outrage of the nation.

There is literally nothing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court the exclusive right to decide what the Constitution says or means and impose it on the other two branches of government, or on the rest of America. That is a power the Supreme Court took onto itself in that 1803 decision of its own, Marbury v Madison.

It was such a radical step that it drove then-President Jefferson to declare:

[O]ur Constitution…has given — according to this opinion — to one of [the three branches of government] alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others; and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation…
The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

The popular outrage was so intense that, after that 1803 Marbury decision, the Supreme Court only ruled twice between the founding of our nation and the 1860s on a constitutional issue, and in each case both Congress and the president at the time ignored the ruling.

The first was President Andrew Jackson when the Court ruled the Second National Bank was constitutional and Jackson shut it down anyway, claiming it wasn’t. He said:

The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others… The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.

A generation later, President Abraham Lincoln chose to explicitly ignore the Supreme Court’s expansion of chattel slavery in its 1856 Dred Scott v Sanford decision, as did Congress, and even went on to free enslaved Americans before the Court could weigh in again.

Instead of putting the Supreme Court in charge of American laws, the Framers of the Constitution did the opposite: they put Congress in charge of the Supreme Court.

As they wrote in Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution:

[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Republicans know this well. When John Roberts worked as an attorney for Ronald Reagan, he suggested that both Brown v Board and Roe v Wade could be overturned by Congress by simply stripping from the Court the power to decide on issues of race or abortion (as I detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America).

Most recently, in the wake of the Obergefell gay marriage decision, Republicans in Congress offered a law stripping from the Court its power to rule that gay people could get married. The Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004 but failed in the Senate, explicitly says:

No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.

While this sort of court-stripping is likely to meet resistance both from Congress and from the Supreme Court, a much easier step is to simply reduce the power of the Court to go off on these wild excursions based on their mind-reading of the Founders.

That could be accomplished by Congress creating an “regulation” for the Court that says all decisions involving Constitutional matters must be decided by consensus (the most strict) or with no fewer than 7 out of 9 notes.

Other options include expanding the size of the Court, term-limiting the Court, or — what FDR had proposed — moving all over-70 justices (Alito, Thomas, and Roberts in 3 years) to “emeritus” status so they can continue to participate in deliberations but lose their vote (or all the emeritus members’ votes are consolidated into one when there’s consensus).

Republicans are already talking out loud about state legislatures legally handing the 2024 election to Trump or DeSantis regardless of who wins, no insurrection necessary this time, because they’re assuming the Court will rule their way.

So, with Moore v Harper and even more toxic and democracy-hobbling or even democracy-destroying decisions coming before the Court, what can we do?

At the very least, Congress should mandate that the Court abide by the same ethics rules that every other federal court and judge must follow, and that all arguments and decisions be televised. This would increase the power of dissenters on the Court and raise the integrity-focusing power of the spotlight of public opinion.

All of these options are within the power of Congress, should it choose to end the filibuster and exercise that power.

Whatever strategy Democratic leadership and the Biden administration choose, America is today in the midst of a severe constitutional crisis and action is needed right now or, at the very least, in the weeks immediately after this November’s election.

If we fail, 2024 may be this nation’s last election for president.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently attempted to twist the words of MSBNC’s Tiffany Cross when she delivered her assessment of the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

On Wednesday, October 19, Carlson accused Cross of demonizing white women. During the recent segment, Cross insisted white women played a significant role in the insurrection.

The MSNBC host went on to express how white women were more of “enablers to this very dangerous domestic terrorist movement.”

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson’s latest rant backfires when he accidentally insults Trump

According to HuffPost, white women played a “front-facing role” in the insurrection and more than 100 of them participated in the insurrection. The report also compared white women’s insurrection role to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.

With the emergence of social media, far-right factions now have more outlets to spew hatred and spin conspiracy theories. HuffPost notes that Cross’ assessment appears to align with the historical timelines.

However, Carlson is arguing otherwise. The Fox host, who has been pushing the so-called “great replacement” theories over the last several months, accused Cross of fearmongering.

“So it’s not just whites, it’s white women,” Carlson said. “Their women are bad too! The women, of course, are the key to reproducing the white race, which is clearly a threat, as she says again and again to you and your family. They’re dangerous. They want to hurt you.”

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson stumped by his segment about an ’emotional support alligator’ and its ‘cheesy puff corn’

However, he didn’t stop there. Carlson went on to suggest that the assessment was based on one theory: that white women are a danger to the United States.

“The gist of it is very, very clear. White women are dangerous because white people are dangerous. They are, by the nature of their DNA, potential domestic terrorists.”

Watch the video below or at this link:

u201cTucker Carlson went full nazi going after Tiffany Cross, a black MSNBC host. Tucker directly invoked the blood libel in graphic terms and described white women as the key to the “white race.” nnhttps://t.co/YjC0e1qiwNu201d

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Alejandra Caraballo)
1666234507

READ MORE: Watch: Tucker Carlson levels disturbing attack against VP Kamala Harris

A movement among far-right MAGA Republicans and Tea Party members is hoping that if enough state legislatures get on board, there will be a constitutional convention — one that would rewrite the U.S. Constitution and give it a MAGA makeover. And the movement, according to The Guardian, has a major ally in Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast, former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration and former executive chairman at Breitbart News.

Journalist Ed Pilkington, in an article published by The Guardian on October 19, reports, “Bannon has devoted recent episodes of his online show ‘The War Room’ to a well-funded operation which has stealthily gained ground over the past two years. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate interests, it aims to persuade state legislatures to call a constitutional convention in the hope of baking far-right conservative values into the supreme law of the land. The goal is, in essence, to turn the country into a permanent conservative nation irrespective of the will of the American people.”

Pilkington notes that the constitutional convention that MAGA Republicans have in mind “would promote policies that would limit the size and scope of the federal government, set ceilings on or even abolish taxes, free corporations from regulations, and impose restrictions on government action in areas such as abortion, guns and immigration.”

READ MORE: A far-right movement to ‘rewrite the Constitution’ has ‘immense potential for lasting harm’: historian

In September, Bannon told “War Room” listeners, “This is another line of attack strategically. You now have a political movement that understands we need to go after the administrative state.” And Pilkington explains what Bannon means by “administrative state.”

“By ‘administrative state,’ Bannon was referring to the involvement of the federal government and Congress in central aspects of modern American life,” Pilkington observes. “That includes combating the climate crisis, setting educational standards and fighting health inequities.”

One of the Tea Party activists who is hoping for a constitutional convention is Mark Meckler, founder of Convention of States Action (COSA). During a “War Room” appearance, Meckler told Bannon, “We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’…. The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat — or radical progressive, or Marxist, which is what they are — we are going to lose the gains. So, you do the structural fix.”

Pilkington points out that “by cementing the policies into the U.S. Constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge.” The journalist outlines two ways in which the U.S. Constitution, under Article V, “can be revised.”

READ MORE: 19 states have joined a new right-wing effort to remake the Constitution with their fringe ideas

“In practice, all 27 amendments that have been added over the past 244 years have come through the first route: a Congress-led process whereby two-thirds of both the U.S. House and Senate have to approve changes followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states,” the journalist explains. “Meckler, working alongside other powerful interest groups and wealthy right-wing megadonors, is gunning for Article V’s second route — one that has never been tried before. It gives state legislatures the power to call a constitutional convention of their own, should two-thirds of all 50 states agree. The state-based model for rewriting the U.S. Constitution is perhaps the most audacious attempt yet by hard-right Republicans to secure what amounts to conservative minority rule in which a minority of lawmakers representing less-populated rural states dictate terms to the majority of Americans.”

Former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold is warning that the efforts of groups like COSA need to be taken seriously. Along with Peter Prindiville of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. Feingold addresses this threat in their book “The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It.”

Feingold told The Guardian, “Our goal is not to scare people, but to alert them that there is a movement on the far right that is quietly getting itself to a point where it will be almost impossible to stop a convention being called.”

READ MORE: ‘Today’s Republicans are fascist’: Conservative activist slams authoritarian GOP candidates

Recent polls suggest that the Democrats’ sidelining of economic issues to go all in on the Capitol riot hasn’t borne fruit. While voters are most concerned about inflation, they think the party’s main priority is January 6, which barely registers.

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 16, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When the Democrats embarked on their January 6 media extravaganza earlier this year, there were two schools of thought.

If you read more Democratic-friendly press outlets, the series of sometimes-prime-time hearings were all part of a canny electoral strategy to fire up the party’s base, while also exposing to Republicans and Donald Trump–leaning independents just how criminal, irresponsible, and unfit for office the former president was. If you read left-wing outlets like Jacobin, the hearings, while no doubt revealing some important facts, were a failure of political theater that neglected to address the economic concerns that most preoccupied ordinary Americans, but cemented the Democrats as a party still obsessed with a year-ago riot that vanishingly few voters cared about.

Less than a month out from the midterms, the points made by Jacobin and other left critics seem to have aged far better. According to the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have both seen their approval plateau, while public approval of the GOP has ticked up four points in the last four months. Biden is now the third-most favored political figure in the country, trailing behind, astonishingly, Donald Trump himself and even former vice president Mike Pence.

But more pertinent are the survey results on specific issues. For voters, the most important matters are inflation (37 percent), the economy and jobs (29 percent), and immigration (23 percent). The topics of January 6, cancel culture, and foreign policy rank right down the bottom in single digits, at nineteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-third out of twenty-seven options, respectively.

It gets more damning when you look at what those same voters see as the top priorities of the two parties. What voters perceive as Republicans’ main concerns roughly overlap with their own, in the aggregate, with immigration (37 percent), inflation (24 percent), and the economy and jobs (21 percent) in the top three. For the Democrats, however ― traditionally the US party meant to represent the poor and working class, and in the middle of what is supposed to be a transformation back to its New Deal–era roots ― voters see them as most preoccupied with January 6 (27 percent), women’s rights (25 percent), and the environment or climate change (23 percent). The economy and jobs (15 percent) and inflation (14 percent) rank a distant fifth and seventh.

These results are echoed in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, which gives the GOP a 49 to 45 percent lead over Democrats in the upcoming midterms, after Democrats registered a one-point edge in the previous poll. According to the Times, economic issues had rocketed up the priority list for voters since the summer, and those who saw it as their chief concern intended to vote for Republicans this November by a more than two-to-one margin. The most dramatic shift had come from female independents, previously the bedrock of the Democrats’ suburban strategy, who went from supporting Democrats by a fourteen-point margin to backing Republicans by eighteen points.

It’s not that these women voters don’t care about the Supreme Court’s June gutting of abortion rights. In fact, 84 percent of the Harvard/Harris respondents considered it important to their vote (with 55 percent considering it “very important”) and “women’s rights” — a category that is usually seen as encompassing abortion rights — are the fifth-most important issue for all voters surveyed. But as one female voter told the Times, even though she disagreed “1,000 percent” with the court’s decision, “I’m more worried about other things.”

This is far from the first time we’ve gotten indications of this. Back in July, a different Times/Siena poll similarly found that voters most concerned with the economy — a group that included a significant number of non-white voters — preferred GOP control of Congress to that of the Democrats by a nearly two-to-one margin, even as most of them believed abortion should be legal. That poll showed that in a major shift since the party’s post–New Deal days, Democrats were, instead, most dominant among white, college-educated voters, who were overwhelmingly concerned with guns, abortion, and threats to democracy over bread-and-butter economic issues.

A recent Washington Post/ABC poll got a similar result, finding that even as the economy and inflation were by far the most important issues for registered voters as they decided how to vote, and even as those voters viewed the Democrats as holding views on abortion closest to their own, they trusted Democrats far less than Republicans on both of those issues. A Monmouth University survey likewise found that out of Republican, independent, and Democratic voters, only the last group put “fundamental rights and democratic processes” ahead of concerns about the economy and cost of living.

Besides the fact that the Left was correct to criticize the Democrats’ overwrought fixation on January 6, there are a few other important takeaways here. One is that as inflation has worsened, hitting 8.2 percent in September, more and more voters are gravitating toward politicians who put the economy front and center in their messaging. Unfortunately for the Democrats, that’s not them, with a recent analysis finding that GOP candidates and political groups have spent $44 million since Labor Day on TV ads about inflation and the economy, compared to just $12 million by Democrats, who have instead focused on ads about abortion rights.

Secondly, while Democrats and other voters clearly do, and are correct to, care about abortion rights and threats to democracy, these critical issues are understandably less relevant to the daily lives of Americans struggling through a less-than-robust economy. They’re instead consumed by more immediate concerns about whether they’ll be able to afford rent for another month, or be able to give their kids a decent meal, or if they have enough saved up in case they lose their job or disaster hits. This points to the backward nature of the Democrats’ plans for protecting abortion rights and democracy, to the extent that this is the party’s genuine overriding goal: by failing to appeal to or even do all that much to alleviate these financial struggles, the Democrats end up inadvertently empowering the very reactionary forces most hostile to those principles, whom otherwise pro-women, pro-democracy voters are willing to vote for if they seem like they’ll do a better job guaranteeing their economic security.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was, predictably and dishonestly, attacked for making a variation of this point earlier this month, when he warned that while “Democrats must continue to focus on the right of women to control their own bodies,” it was “political malpractice” to listen to those voices urging them to focus only on that one issue, and to then ignore the wider economic dislocation facing working Americans. In fact, by doing so, the party was rejecting one of the clearest lessons of the 2020 election, when it managed to win the Georgian Senate races and secure flimsy control of the Senate on the back of a populist campaign devised by the Left that sought to make new stimulus checks “the central issue in the Georgia Senate runoffs.”

Finally, this recent polling suggests the phenomenon of elevating issues low on the US public’s list of concerns goes beyond just January 6. “Cancel culture” languishes at the bottom of the Harvard/Harris respondents’ list of important issues, despite the Right’s monomaniacal addiction to the topic, to the point of delusional hysteria. “Foreign policy” is right there with it, especially consequential for a Biden administration that has been criticized for its foot-dragging on trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, a position that is likely at least partially motivated by electoral concerns.

Polls can be wrong, of course — though if that’s the case, they tend to be increasingly wrong in the Republicans’ favor lately — and there’s still a few more weeks to go before the election. Perhaps things will end up more rosy for the Democrats than these numbers suggest. But it’s undeniable that the trend lines aren’t encouraging for the Democrats, and if they’re borne out in the election results, it should prompt some serious soul-searching among the party about not just their ongoing hostility to economic populism, but their entire strategy of shifting their base from working-class voters to affluent college graduates in the suburbs.

Just kidding. This is the Democratic Party we’re talking about, after all.

Al Drago/The New York Times via AP, Pool

• Historian Jon Meacham said the US may soon experience a period of civil chaos.
• The Abraham Lincoln biographer said it is due in part to a “passionate minority.”
• While he doesn’t believe there will be armies, he does think “we are going to see it with violence.”

The US is at “greater risk” of civil conflict than during the 1930s, a presidential biographer says, in part due to a “passionate minority that is putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation.”

In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” historian Jon Meacham, who occasionally served as a speechwriter for President Joe Biden, reflected on the current political landscape ahead of contentious midterm elections.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, who has an upcoming book about Abraham Lincoln, spoke about how Lincoln set an example by putting democracy ahead of politics.

“He was under immense political pressure to say, ‘We’ll settle all that in due course,'” Meacham said. “Well, guess what that meant: If the Confederacy came back, it would all be set and settled and slavery likely would have endured again.”

He added: “And Lincoln said no, that he had made his position clear. Ultimately, we would get the 13th Amendment a few months later, but he was willing to go down politically for that principle.”

Meacham said he thinks that there’s a greater chance that the US could see more “civil chaos” now than during the Great Depression, “when there was such a lack of confidence in our institutions.”

“Tragically, I think we will see more of civil chaos. I think we are going to see it with violence,” he said. “I do not believe we’re going to see the massing of great armies in the way we did in the 19th century. But we are at greater risk of that kind of civil conflict far more, I believe, than we were even in the early 1930s during the Depression, when there was such a lack of confidence in our institutions.”

“And part of it is that there is a passionate minority that is putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation,” Meacham continued. “And without the capacity to both vote perhaps against your short-term interest, without the capacity to recognize that there is a larger force that requires your support of the Constitution over your narrow partisan interests, without that, then we will continue to descend into ever greater chaos.”

On the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol earlier this year, Meacham discussed the historical significance of the insurrection, referring to it as an “inflection point” in US history.

“It’s either a step on the way to the abyss, or it is a call to arms, figuratively, for citizens to engage and say, ‘No, we are more important,” Meacham said. “The work we are about is more important than the will and the whim of a single man, or a single party or a single interest.'”

“To lose this gift through selfishness and a greed for power through autocratic impulse would be beyond tragic,” he added. “I don’t believe that’s going to happen, but I believe we’re as close to that as we have been since Sumter,” referring to the battle that started the Civil War.

Steve Bannon told an audience of Catholics that Christian nationalism can destroy the Democratic party as a political institution.

Taking a pager out of Adolf Hitler’s repertoire, Bannon did not hide his contempt for US Democracy and any opposing views.

“You know what their greatest fear is? What they refer to as Christian nationalism,” Bannon said.

(That’s exactly what Bannon supports and what the MAGA cult thrives on.)

“Did you see June 2020, when they burned down Chicago, Seattle, burned down Portland, burned down NY. Did you see that?” he asked.

This is in reference to the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 in the aftermath of the police killing George Floyd. Their anger had nothing to do with politics, MAGA, or Mao.

“Are there any federal charges on that?” Bannon asked.

Right-wing grievances is at the heart of their extreme religious movement.

Also, BLM did not attack the US Capitol, so no.

“Let’s make sure we understand exactly what we’re fighting,” he said.

“These are more radical atheists than Mao Tse-tung, and the more radical atheists in the French revolution,” Bannon whined.

Discussing the midterms, he let the venom fly.

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