Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
There is no exaggeration in my writing that our Republic and what's left of American democracy is on the line Tuesday, November 3rd - and, I regret to say, likely for a month, if not more, after that.
By now, you know what I mean. Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr have Crossed all of Democracy's Red Lines. They have been testing their response to the coming wave of Center-Left protests taking to the streets, and perhaps, going further, as a last resort, having to physically evict the occupant of the White House. Protests might include temporarily occupying the Supreme Court until its runaway ideological freight train can be directed to more balanced lines, to include citizens, workers and voters as first class “passengers” once again. The outlines of the pending Trump-Barr “chess” move were tested in Portland and other places, with strangely mobilized portions of federal agencies sent to protect federal property under the cover story that local officials could not protect the facilities.
How is it that a Republican Right which despises democratic “planning” seems always to be moves ahead of the Democrats?
If that sounds harsh remember the warning about the Court's capture was clearly announced in 2003 by one of Maryland's own Congressional representatives, perhaps the finest constitutional scholar in that body today. Representative Jamie Raskin sounded the alarm with his book on the Supreme Court's twisted and inconsistent rationales in 2000, to not count the votes. And that book contains the roadmap for electoral and constitutional change if we can escape these trials of 2020. Let us all give him his due then for "Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People." Here is just one passage that describes what we now face in the 6-3 Right Wing Court, which implicitly recognizes business as the most worthy “passenger, ” from the first chapter, “The Supreme Court and America’s Democracy Deficit”:
But the Court’s majority, far from acting as the protector of democracy, validates undemocratic arrangements and invalidates any move to open up the system. The Court has openly declared that citizens have no constitutional right to vote in presidential elections. It has struck down many of the the first majority-African American districts to come into being since Reconstruction in Southern States and simultaneously approved the outrageous practice of states drawing districts with the aim of reelecting specific incumbents. It has helped prop up the the “two-party system, “ despite the fact that it is wholly imaginary in a constitutional sense. It has constitutionalized the political free speech rights of private corporations. In 2000, after overturning the state law judgements of a state supreme court, it became the first Court in our history to decide a presidential election, essentially naming the president who, in turn, will name new justices. It has declared that education is no constitutional right and that distributing educational resources on the basis of the wealth of neighborhoods is legitimate. The current Supreme Court takes an already democratically imperfect document — the Constitution of the United States — and grants it indefensibly restrictive and elitist constructions.
Editor’s Note: my emphasis.
Our two leading autocrats have clearly been testing every known method of voter suppression short of pointing a gun at voter heads, including mobilizing the military, disguised in some cases, to preempt the demonstrations adjacent to important symbols of our democracy.
The left is not armed, the Right is, as are the police, the national guard and various militarized parts of the civilian federal work force. And the formal military is as well, of course, all with the most advanced crowd suppression tools, some going well beyond rubber bullets and tear gas. We simply don't know how the police, the armed forces and the Right wing militias will respond. The upper levels of the military seem to despise Trump as much as the political Center does; further down the ranks, it is not clear the extent of the inroads that the Far Right has made among the troops. I take heart that it may well be Black and Latino troops who end up defending democracy in the last resort.
I urge the Center-Left, like Lincoln in 1860-1861, to leave the first aggressive moves to the anti-democratic forces. Then it will be up to the young people, and the young at heart, to make the next counter moves, taking into careful account the symbolism as well as the actuality, and that history will be watching and judging every decision.
The history is mixed:
Some of the West’s proudest moments - as well as its worst - have occurred when the people have had to take to the streets. It can go either way, early or late in the French Revolution, at Peterloo in England, in opposite ways in 1905 and 1917 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The sit-down strikes by the CIO in the automobile plants during the New Deal/1930’s outraged property owners, and bothered FDR himself, but they didn’t damage the means of their livelihood, which they didn’t own. On the whole it was peaceful — and effective.
By the late days of Communism, the bureaucratic socialism in the East so despised by the democratic left in Europe and the US (Irving Howe, Michael Harrington and so many others...the forerunners to the DSA of today) had been so discredited that the appearance of millions in the streets was enough to topple the decayed governance systems without bloodshed. But not in Romania. And not more recently in the Ukraine where militias and disguised military with Russian allegiances brought out the worst. The same today in Belarus, Putin watching carefully in between his poisonings, as another “neighbor” wants more democracy, not less. And we cannot forget how the uprising in Syria in 2011, which started peacefully, went...went “South” so quickly, if you will forgive the expression. These later two examples being instances where tyrants won’t go peacefully.
I hope that by our Nov. 3rd, the margin for democracy is so large that even the awful Electoral College cannot prolong our agony with these two dismal leaders and their spineless Senate.
I know of only two elected leaders today in the U.S. who can, at times match the speaking power displayed by Prime Minister Churchill in 1940, presented in the clips below. And they are our allies in Congress: Representative Raskin from Maryland's 8th and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York's 14th Congressional District. And here I am thinking of the pre-institutional version of Rep. Raskin, who wrote the book I quoted from above, and who can, more than any other public figure today, except maybe Yanis Varoufakis in Europe, fuse passion and reason on the fly, on the spot, without notes, and point the way back to the best in Western democracies. And they are the virtues I saw too in AOC from her very first speeches.
The hour is late.
Now for the Hope, Defiance and Inspiration...
Some of these brief clips from "Darkest Hour" and "Dunkirk" have taken modest liberties with history as to timing and proportion, and one, in the London Underground, never took place* yet their emotional resonance still stands as a beacon for us, 80 years later. For once, for me at least, I will allow political passion its due, and not take you on the journey of critiques of both films launched in the New York Review of Books. I have read it and have mixed feelings about it. I am not in favor of Britain “going it alone” against its long term allies in Europe, and now Eastern Europe. Varoufakis has got it right.
I didn’t want the timing of the movies to stand as an argument for Britain leaving the European Union, but rather the British resistance to tyrants, alone if necessary, as in 1940. Yes, today the very core of European Union governance rests with technocratic austerians, close to the financial oligarchy, but there the analogies to facing the Nazis alone in 1940 come to an end. And to drive that point home, I have called Yanis Varoufakis the leading public man of Europe 2015-2020, and, in addition — and I can’t think of any higher honor — I have also called him “the Churchill of the Left.”
Be inspired:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sikpgjoKVQ Speaking with British citizens face to face...*(that's the one which didn't take place. It’s hard to believe that not one of our Presidents has done it in reality — despite the opportunity offered by the Metro. That’s a commentary on the state of our democracy in itself.
Leading to Churchill's speech to Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skrdyoabmgA In many ways, Churchill’s career prior to this point in the spring of 1940, awful 1940...might in some arouse all the familiar antagonisms we Americans hold about vacillating politicians…
My answer to the Confederate Battle Flag which appeared just across the street from where I live about a month ago: the defense of the Union line atop Little Round Top, second day of Gettysburg, July, 1863, by the 20th Maine, whose flag went up on the porch ten days later to answer the Stars and Bars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL-5uyp44WA
Col. Larry Wilkerson, game planning with other decent souls all the awful possibilities of how and why Trump might try to stay, evoked the 20th Maine’s stand against the treasonous Confederates in an interview with Paul Jay at The Intercept.
and here is what Wilkerson said about Joshua Chamberlain:
Larry Wilkerson
You know, I hope you’re right. Well, I’m just reading about a group that wants to go to Gettysburg and pull all the statues down, including Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Oh, my God. There couldn’t be a more American, American in our history than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the hero of Gettysburg who led the 20th Maine down that mountain into those rebels, into those traitors, myths. And yet they want to go to Gettysburg and pull the statue down. Well, come on, people. Let’s think about what we do before we do it. And this statue business. Don’t pull the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. Down. Don’t pull the statue of what’s his name. The guy that killed, the first grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan down in Memphis. Instead, put a plaque on Lee’s statue. Let’s have the history, This is a man who graduated from West Point, took the taxpayers dollar, took the king’s coin, and then later turned against the king, turned against a state that gave him his education and his profession and became a traitor and old forest pillow on his statue. Put a sign, put a plaque that says, ” This man killed three surrendering black soldiers at Fort Pillow in the U.S. Civil War, later became leader of the Klu Klux Klan and was responsible for killing limitless numbers of blacks across the South.” Don’t take the statues down. Tell our young people who these people were. Tell the young people what our history was.
(Editors Note: I think this last reference is to Nathan Bedford Forrest, not Lee. But Lee allowed the capture of free black citizens around Gettysburg and had them sent back to slavery in the South, which is not in the movie the clip is taken from. By the way: Col. Chamberlain was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at Gettysburg, and was given perhaps the highest honor of the Civil War: he was the presiding Union Officer supervising the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865)
The total viewing time is just 20 minutes.
We will never surrender our Republic to the Republican Right! Never!
And if necessary, we will take to the Streets and evict the Tyrants.
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD