E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Is the gun lobby finally cornered?
What makes Orlando different is the clash the attack revealed between two powerful impulses of contemporary conservatism: the reflexive hostility to gun restrictions and the incessant assertion that we must do what it takes to protect the United States from terrorism. If you believe the second, you really can’t believe the first. This has always been true, but the murder of 49 people by a terrorist made the incongruity so stark that Donald Trump was moved to suggest he would talk to the NRA about ways to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists.
One can be skeptical about whether Trump will go beyond the NRA’s ineffectual solutions to the problem. But Trump’s verbal shift was a telltale sign of an intellectual system that is crumbling.
And the demoralization of one side in a debate is often accompanied by new energy on the other. This is why the Senate filibuster last week to force votes on gun restrictions led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was so important.
There was power to Murphy’s witness itself, coming as it did from a politician whose constituents include the families who suffered grievously at Sandy Hook. And his rejection of business as usual showed that the long accumulation of massacres has broken the patience of those demanding action. It was a signal that advocates of sane gun laws have moved off the defensive.
Peter Bloom at Common Dreams writes—What Progressives and Democrats Need is Coalition Not Unity:
While the media has called the Democratic race all but over, the supporters of Sanders are faced with a difficult decision. The mainstream opinion is for them to simply surrender to the “inevitability” of Clinton’s victory and embrace her as a candidate to unify the Democratic Party. However, for many progressives this option is both ethically and tactically problematic—forcing them into a familiar territory of voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Instead they have sought to send a distinct message to the status quo by proclaiming themselves “Bernie or Bust.”
Sanders, for his part, is far from willing to go away quietly. While he admits that defeating Trump must be priority number one, he has vowed to continue his revolution to transform the Democratic Party and the country. The immediate goal is to amass enough delegates and momentum to progressively influence the Party’s present platform and future direction.
However, is there an alternative option beyond the opposing poles of unity or bust? Is there a way for progressives to find a compromise with the Democratic Party without becoming compromised? The answer may be to fight for a coalition between progressives and the Democratic Party.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—A Tale of Two Parties:
Why is Mrs. Clinton holding up so well against Mr. Trump, when establishment Republicans were so hapless? Partly it’s because America as a whole, unlike the Republican base, isn’t dominated by angry white men; partly it’s because, as anyone watching the Benghazi hearing realized, Mrs. Clinton herself is a lot tougher than anyone on the other side.
But a big factor, I’d argue, is that the Democratic establishment in general is fairly robust. I’m not saying that its members are angels, which they aren’t. Some, no doubt, are personally corrupt. But the various groups making up the party’s coalition really care about and believe in their positions — they’re not just saying what the Koch brothers pay them to say.
So pay no attention to anyone claiming that Trumpism reflects either the magical powers of the candidate or some broad, bipartisan upsurge of rage against the establishment. What worked in the primary won’t work in the general election, because only one party’s establishment was already dead inside.
Mitch Albom at the Detroit Free Press writes—Citing forefathers is misplaced in gun debate:
The assault rifle traces back to Nazi Germany. Did you know that? The Germans were trying to develop a more effective weapon for their soldiers, one that rivaled the firepower of a submachine gun but had better accuracy in more confined spaces.
Kill faster, closer in. That was the idea. Adolf Hitler, according to some accounts, even named the weapon: Sturmgewehr. It means “storm rifle.”
Tuck that somewhere in the back of your mind. The first people to really utilize this weapon were Nazis. Not our forefathers. Not Thomas Jefferson. Not George Washington.
No matter where we stand on the volatile gun control issue, we might think twice about that before boldly embracing assault rifles as part of our American heritage.
Lucia Graves at The Guardian writes—Hate killings won't end until toxic political discourse does:
That ugly discourse can have ugly consequences is nothing new. We saw this clearly in the rightwing, anti-government extremism and white supremacy of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and remains America’s deadliest rightwing terror attack. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time,would recall years later the centrality of violent rhetoric in the tragedy.
“What we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or we should reduce our passion for the positions that we hold, but the words we use really do matter, because there are – there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space, and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike,” Clinton said in a speech in 2010.
His words didn’t prevent history from repeating. We saw it a year ago in a racially motivated shooting at a black church in South Carolina, where the white supremacist shooter later admitted he was hoping to ignite a race war. And we saw it six months ago in the shooting of a Colorado Planned Parenthood, where the killer’s comments about “no more baby parts” signaled he’d taken the moral extremism of the right’s war on abortion to an illogical conclusion.
Branko Marcetic at In These Times writes—Government Surveillance Can’t Prevent Attacks Like Orlando. We Shouldn’t Expand It Now:
There are many possible avenues for preventing more mass shootings, whether terrorist-inspired or not. Increased spying powers are not likely to be one, not least of all given that the shooter had already been known to authorities.
In fact, this is a pattern that has been repeated throughout virtually every major terrorist attack in the West of the last few years. Whether the attacks have taken place in member nations of the Five Eyes alliance—the five-member group of countries that have the United States’ powerful surveillance technologies at their disposal—or outside of it, the agencies tasked with protecting their countries’ citizens have time and again missed threats that appeared to be under their very noses. [...]
Policymakers, officials and people in general will have to consider which measures are actually effective for preventing future attacks like the one in Orlando. Re-examining the easy availability of guns would be a start, as might thinking of ways to foster a culture that doesn’t encourage hatred of specific groups. What exact form such policies will take will have to be a product of democratic debate. But if the history of intelligence failures over the last three to four years alone tells us anything, it’s that when that discussion happens, more surveillance should be left out of it.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—The G.O.P.’s Cynical Gay Ploy:
Maybe Republicans want us to forget that, as ThinkProgress reported in December:
“Six of the Republican candidates vying for the presidency have signed a pledge promising to support legislation during their first 100 days in the White House that would use the guise of “religious liberty” to give individuals and businesses the right to openly discriminate against L.G.B.T. people.”
They want us to forget that although people of all political stripes haveevolved on the issue of gay equality — including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton —Republicans are the trailing edge of that evolution.
No amount of the exploitation of fear and the revising of history is going to change what we know about the Republican Party and their continued abysmal record on gay rights.
In the wake of tragedy, you can’t conveniently hang the L.G.B.T. community on the tree of life as a glistening ornament. You must recognize, now and always, that the L.G.B.T. community is a most natural branch of that tree.
James Surowiecki at The New Yorker writes—The Case for Free Money: Why don’t we have universal basic income?
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual experiment: it started just handing out money to some of its citizens. The town of Dauphin, for instance, sent checks to thousands of residents every month, in order to guarantee that all of them received a basic income. The goal of the project, called Mincome, was to see what happened. Did people stop working? Did poor people spend foolishly and stay in poverty? But, after a Conservative government ended the project, in 1979, Mincome was buried. Decades later, Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, dug up the numbers. And what she found was that life in Dauphin improved markedly. Hospitalization rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And researchers who looked at Mincome’s impact on work rates discovered that they had barely dropped at all. The program had worked about as well as anyone could have hoped.
Mincome was a prototype of an idea that came to the fore in the sixties, and that is now popular again among economists and policy folks: a basic income guarantee. There are many versions of the idea, but the most interesting is what’s called a universal basic income: every year, every adult citizen in the U.S. would receive a stipend—ten thousand dollars is a number often mentioned. (Children would receive a smaller allowance.)
One striking thing about guaranteeing a basic income is that it’s always had support both on the left and on the right—albeit for different reasons.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—An Assassination in Britain Calls Us to Recognize Our Duty to Keep Barbarism at Bay in America:
But The Guardian, in a moving editorial published just hours after Cox died on Thursday, recognized the killing as something more than an awful extension of an unsettled and unsettling political moment. It referred to the killing of Jo Cox as what it must be seen and understood as: “an attack on humanity, idealism and democracy.”
“The slide from civilization to barbarism is shorter than we might like to imagine,” observed the editors of the London-based newspaper that has evolved into a truly global publication. “Every violent crime taints the ideal of an orderly society, but when that crime is committed against the people who are peacefully selected to write the rules, then the affront is that much more profound.”
Emma Foeringer Merchant at The New Republic writes—Over Sanders’s Loss. Can They Learn to Love Clinton?
The grieving began in earnest on June 6, on the eve of the California primary, when the Associated Press declared Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“For 24 hours I was very angry with the Associated Press,” says R.L. Miller, president of green PAC Climate Hawks Vote Political Action and the chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental caucus. Miller says that as a Californian she was concerned about whether declaring a nominee would repress voter turnout.
In a “climate primary” of Climate Hawks Vote members, Bernie Sanders received 92 percent of the vote. Miller calls Clinton “mediocre” on climate, and says she won’t get her group’s endorsement, but Climate Hawks Vote will advocate for Clinton over Trump. “We don’t endorse every candidate who is a ‘B’ or ‘C’ candidate on climate just because they’re running against a Republican,” she says.
But Miller says there are signs that Clinton could become a climate hawk, like her solar plan, and she plans to vote for Clinton in the general election.
“I definitely want to defeat Donald Trump,” she says.
Phoebe Malta Bovy at The New Republic writes—No, Gun Control Won’t Prevent Terrorism. But That’s Not the Point:
The left is in a bind where saying absolutely anything about guns, other than that “radical Islamic terrorists” perhaps shouldn’t have them, inspires outrage on the right. This—as well as the nature of this latest mass shooting, but hardly all of them—leads proponents of gun control to cite terrorism. That, in turn, leads the right to reframe the discussion as one about how best to prevent terrorism—and to point out, correctly, that there are terrorist attacks even in places, like Paris, with stricter gun laws.
This is a weak gotcha, one that’s technically, selectively true, but oblivious to actual risk-assessment and how to keep Americans safe. Men like the Orlando killer will probably always find a way, meaning that the very cases that inspire outrage about America’s gun violence problem are not only unrepresentative, but also are likely to happen regardless of the measures taken in their wake. But the measures themselves remain urgently necessary for all the more representative, tragically everyday instances.
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s nearly 15-hour filibuster may not lead anywhere immediately in terms of legislation, but it’s a significant step towards removing gun violence off the list of untouchable subjects.
Chris Hedges at TruthDig writes—Con vs. Con:
During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal media, epitomized by MSNBC, ruthlessly purge those who challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Liberal pundits, such as Paul Krugman, lambaste critics of the political theater, charging them with enabling the Republican nominee. Liberals chant, in a disregard for the facts, not to be like Ralph Nader, the “spoiler” who gave us George W. Bush.
The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.
Change will not come quickly. It may take a decade or more. And it will never come by capitulating to the Democratic Party establishment. We will accept our place in the political wilderness and build alternative movements and parties to bring down corporate power or continue to watch our democracy atrophy into a police state and our ecosystem unravel.