Now thatJoe Biden has won the presidency, we can expect debates over whether Donald Trump was an aberration (“not who we are!”) or another instantiation of America’s pathologies and sins. One can reasonably make a case for his deep-rootedness in American traditions, while also noticing the anomalies: the early-morning tweeting, the fondness for mixing personal and government business, the obsession with ratings befitting a reality-TV star—the one job he was good at.
From an international perspective, though, Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin’s opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates this era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the “right” people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) —just like the other populists. And so on.
But there’s one key difference between Trump and everyone else on that list. The others are all talented politicians who win elections again and again.
In contrast, Trump is a reality-TV star who stumbled his way into an ongoing realignment in American politics, aided by a series of events peculiar to 2016 that were fortunate for him: The Democrats chose a polarizing nominee who didn’t have the requisite political touch that can come from surviving tough elections; social media was, by that point, deeply entrenched in the country’s politics, but its corrosive effects were largely unchecked; multiple players—such as then–FBI Director James Comey—took consequential actions fueled by their misplaced confidence in Hillary Clinton’s win; and Trump’s rivals in the Republican primaries underestimated him. He drew a royal flush.
It’s not that he is completely without talent. His rallies effectively let him bond with his base, and test out various messages with the crowd that he would then amplify everywhere. He has an intuitive understanding of the power of attention, and he played the traditional media like a fiddle—they benefited from his antics, which they boosted. He also clearly sensed the political moment in 2016, and managed to navigate his way into the presidency, though that probably had more to do with instinct than with deep planning.
Luck aside, though, Trump is not good at his job. He doesn’t even seem to like it much. He is too undisciplined and thin-skinned to be effective at politics over a sustained period, which involves winning repeated elections. He seems to have been as surprised as anyone else that he won in 2016. While he hates the loser branding that will follow him now, he’s probably fine with the outcome—especially since he can blame it on fantastical conspiracies involving theft or ballot-stuffing or the courts—as long as he can figure out how to escape the criminal trials that are certainly coming his way. (A self-pardon? A negotiated pardon? He will try something.)
Trump ran like a populist, but he lacked the political talent or competence to govern like an effective one. Remember the Infrastructure Week he promised? It never happened. Remember the trade wars with China he said he’d win? Some tariffs were raised here and there, but the jobs that would bring relief to America’s decimated manufacturing sector never resurged. In Wisconsin in 2018, the president announced “the eighth wonder of the world”—a Foxconn factory that was supposed to employ 13,000 in return for $4.5 billion in government subsidies. However, going into this election, the building remained empty, and the president lost Wisconsin in the Electoral College. (Foxconn hired people in the final weeks of 2019 to fulfill quotas for the subsidies, and laid off many of them right after the new year.) Most populists globally deploy wide patronage networks: state spending that boosts their own supporters. Trump’s model remained attached more to personal graft: He encouraged people to stay in his hotels and have dinner at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for access, rather than develop a broad and participatory network that would remain loyal to him for years. And when the pandemic hit, instead of rising to the occasion and playing the strongman, rallying the country through a crisis that had originated in China—an opportunity perfect for the kind of populist he aspired to be—he floundered.
Erdoğan has been in power nationally since 2003. After two decades, he has arguably lost some of his political magic, evinced by increasing missteps and a deteriorating situation around democratic rights. Still, he is among the most talented politicians in Turkey’s history. He has been able to navigate multiple challenges, including a previous global financial crisis. In Russia, Putin has won many elections, even managing to subvert term limits. In India, Modi has also been reelected. One could argue that these elections were far from perfect, but they were elections. Brazil’s Bolsonaro has bungled his country’s response to the pandemic but is giving the poor emergency aid and increasing his popularity. The CARES Act did the same thing, providing a significant subsidy to businesses and improving household finances, especially for people with low incomes, but it ended right before the election; Trump erratically tweeted about having nuked a new deal.
I suspect that the Republican leadership is sanguine, if not happy, about Trump’s loss. It’s striking how quickly Fox News called Arizona for Biden, and how many Republican leaders have condemned the president’s rage-tweeting and attempts to stop the count. They know that Trump is done, and they seem fine with it. For them, what’s not to like? The Supreme Court is solidly in their corner; they will likely retain control of the Senate; House Republicans won more seats than they were projected to; and they are looking at significant gains in state Houses as well, giving them control over redistricting for the next decade. Even better for their long-term project, they have diversified their own coalition, gaining more women candidates and more support from nonwhite voters.
And they have at their disposal certain features that can be mobilized: The Electoral College and especially the Senate are anti-majoritarian institutions, and they can be combined with other efforts to subvert majority rule. Leaders and parties can engage in voter suppression and break norms with some degree of bipartisan cooperation across the government. In combination, these features allow for players to engage in a hardball kind of minority rule: Remember that no Republican president has won the popular vote since 2004, and that the Senate is structurally prone to domination by a minority. Yet Republicans have tremendous power. This dynamic occurs at the local level, too, where gerrymandering allows Republicans to inflate their representation in state legislatures.
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. Perhaps it will be Senator Josh Hawley, who is writing a book against Big Tech because he knows that will be the next chapter in the culture wars, with social-media companies joining “fake news” as the enemy. Perhaps it will be Senator Tom Cotton, running as a law-and-order leader with a populist bent. Maybe it will be another media figure: Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, both men with talent and followings. Perhaps it will be another Sarah Palin—she was a prototype—with the charisma and appeal but without the baggage and the need for a presidential candidate to pluck her out of the blue. Perhaps someone like the QAnon-supporting Representative-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who first beat the traditional Republican representative in the primary and then ran her race with guns blazing, mask off, and won against the Democratic candidate, a retired professor who avoided campaigning in person. Indeed, a self-made charismatic person coming out of nowhere probably has a better chance than many establishment figures in the party.
What can be done? First and foremost, we need to realize the nature of the problem and accept that elite failure cannot be responded to with more of the same. A good deal of the Democratic Party’s messaging has been wrapped in nostalgia. But populism’s resurgence is a symptom of the failures of the past. Pearl-clutching for the good old days will not get us out of this. Yes, it’s important to highlight the value of norms and call for the restoration of democratic institutions. But what we need in order to move forward goes beyond more politeness and the right rhetoric. The failures of the past aren’t to be yearned for. They’re to be avoided and, crucially, understood and fixed. There will be arguments about how to rebuild a politics that can appeal to the moment, and how to mobilize for the future. There should be. Our American crisis cannot be resolved in one sweeping article that offers easy solutions. But the first step is to realize how deep this hole is for democracies around the world, including ours, and to realize that what lies ahead is not some easy comeback.
At the moment, the Democratic Party risks celebrating Trump’s loss and moving on—an acute danger, especially because many of its constituencies, the ones that drove Trump’s loss, are understandably tired. A political nap for a few years probably looks appealing to many who opposed Trump, but the real message of this election is not that Trump lost and Democrats triumphed. It’s that a weak and untalented politician lost, while the rest of his party has completely entrenched its power over every other branch of government: the perfect setup for a talented right-wing populist to sweep into office in 2024. And make no mistake: They’re all thinking about it.
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society.
Marc Ash, Reader Supporetd News Ash writes: "It's easy to want the new Biden administration to do many things. Including but not limited to doing no harm. The executive branch has unto itself vast powers. And there are already clear indications that Biden will use those powers early and often to right the administrative destruction wrought by Trump and his army of obedient flunkies."
However, if legislative support is required to get things done, the outlook is bleak for as long as the Senate is in Republican hands. Winning both Senate runoff elections in Georgia to wrest a majority in the upper chamber is not the only path forward for the new Biden administration, but it would greatly expand the palette of possibilities and is certainly worth mounting an all-out effort to accomplish.
Stacey Abrams should lead/coordinate the Georgia runoff campaigns. No one understands Democratic voters in Georgia better, and no one has greater respect among them. It’s a difficult assignment with a low probability of success. But the stakes are high enough to warrant the A-Team.
The two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, face an uphill battle in the slimmed-down runoff field. It’s a safe bet that without new energy and a new game plan, both will lose. Such a game plan might well include less reliance on television advertising and a far more robust ground game. If Biden could beat Trump in Georgia, then Ossoff and Warnock can win too, but it’s going to take a significantly better effort.
Stacey Abrams, while not viewed as a progressive, has a significant amount of respect among progressives, and of course with black voters, she’s a legend. Absolutely she deserves a place in the new Biden administration. One from which she can continue her voter justice and empowerment campaign on a national level.
Biden flipped Georgia, but it’s still Georgia. For Democrats, black voters, mostly in Atlanta, hold the key. Democrats need the Senate, black voters and their elected leaders need more seats at the leadership table. Somebody call Stacey Abrams.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Behind Joe Biden's Georgia Surge, a State Ready to Boil Over George Chidi, The Intercept Chidi writes: "A political truism here has long held that a Democrat needs to poll above 30 percent of the white vote to compete in Georgia. Stacey Abrams's campaign in 2018 fundamentally challenged that math by showing that increased nonwhite voter turnout could counterbalance white conservative antipathy to progressive politics."
The results are bittersweet for Southern Democrats.
eorgia might flip. It might not. It’s leaning that way, but it’s not going to matter. Joe Biden’s expected win in Pennsylvania seals the deal.
But the results are bittersweet for southern Democrats hoping to retake the state House in a redistricting year. Immense turnout didn’t bring enough liberal and progressive voters to the table. The many failures of the Trump administration did not alone change many minds. And racial polarization here continues to putrefy politics.
A political truism here has long held that a Democrat needs to poll above 30 percent of the white vote to compete in Georgia. Stacey Abrams’s campaign in 2018 fundamentally challenged that math by showing that increased nonwhite voter turnout could counterbalance white conservative antipathy to progressive politics. Abrams lost Georgia’s gubernatorial race by a whisker (amid accusations of voter suppression) while only winning about 25 percent of white voters. Turnout exploded in 2018; the 2020 election seemed like a continuation of the effort here.
Initial exit polls show that about 30 percent of white voters backed Biden in Georgia. Turnout was astronomical — about 5 million people voted in this election, which is about a million more than in any previous election. And yet … here we are. The election will be decided by the margin left after counters in a soggy office in a downtown Atlanta basketball arena and a former Home Depot-turned-elections office near Decatur finish counting the last ballots. If more than about 75 percent of the outstanding absentees from the bluest part of Georgia go to Biden, he wins the state.
It is also possible that those ballots contain the margin between Jon Ossoff advancing to a runoff against Sen. David Perdue, or not. Right now, Perdue has 50 percent of the vote with 60,000 ballots to count, most of which are in urban counties. Donald Trump has a 19,000-vote lead. It’s a game of less than 10,000 votes deciding the winner.
Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, will face Sen. Kelly Loeffler in January, regardless. Democrats so far have netted just a single Senate seat, bringing them to 48. To take control of the chamber, Georgia’s runoff in January will be pivotal.
Nonetheless, Democrats cut a few notches on their knives now.
Republican Rep. Rob Woodall’s successor will be a Democrat: Carolyn Bourdeaux, a public policy professor who has worked closely with the Republican-controlled state legislature on budget issues. Bourdeaux lost to Rep. Rob Woodall by 423 votes on about 280,000 cast in 2018. Woodall did not run for reelection. Bourdeaux defeated Rich McCormick, an emergency room doctor, by about 8,600 votes this try.
McCormick drew fire for rejecting a mask mandate as a health care worker. In the later days of the race, McCormick accepted the endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who’s expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory and who won the 9th Congressional District race last night after the last-minute withdrawal of her Democratic opponent. Greene’s politics mesh poorly with the low-drama business orientation of Gwinnett County’s suburban Republicans.
Republicans seemed to think that portraying Bourdeaux as some wine-drinking effete and a “multimillionaire bureaucrat” would be effective political strategy … in Gwinnett. Never mind the mixed messages of pushing that line with Trump, Loeffler, and Perdue at the top of the ticket; 40 percent of the county has a college degree and a disproportionate number of those who do not are immigrants.
But the writing seems to be on the wall for Republicans in Atlanta’s suburbs. Gwinnett County’s long-serving Republican Sheriff Butch Conway retired this year. In a county where 1 in 4 residents was born outside of the United States, Conway was an immigration enforcement hard-liner. He gives way to Keybo Taylor, a Democrat and the county’s first Black sheriff.
The equally long-serving (and highly regarded) district attorney, Danny Porter, also lost his reelection bid in an acrimonious race against Democrat Patsy Austin-Gatson, the chief investigator in the Gwinnett County Solicitor’s Office. Porter has worked in the county’s prosecutors office since 1981 and has been district attorney since 1992. He considered switching parties earlier this year.
“There’s a one-word answer: demographics,” Porter said. It would be easy to reduce that to a simple racial equation, but Porter resists. Development density — again, not a reference to “apartments” as a euphemism for race, but to simple urbanization — changed Gwinnett from cow country to suburban sprawl over 20 years. Population growth exploded, he said. And high-population areas favor Democrats. The county’s politics are shaped by the demands of a larger community.
“People moved here for good schools and a high quality of life,” he said. “I think Democrats did a much better job on the long game in building a base of support than the Republicans did. And you have to acknowledge the Trump effect. The only product the Republican Party has to sell right now is Donald Trump. And the visceral hatred for him drives people to partisan voting.”
Democrats also took the Gwinnett County commission chair, and a majority of the commission and other down-ballot races there as well.
“We want to see representation in our leadership and policies that are reflective of the issues we care about,” said Nicole Love Hendrickson, the incoming commission chair, and the first Black person to serve in the role. “I want to be the model of a democratically run county that is safe and prosperous and that our residents feel heard.”
Even as she talks about the coming deep dive into the zoning practices of Gwinnett, which leave what affordable housing that can be found in the middle of food deserts, she’s also waiting for the last 4,400 votes to come in to see if the county managed to pass a light rail transportation referendum … on its fourth try. It’s failing. Again. And the referendum is failing in part because Black voters in southeast Gwinnett County have tepid support for it. Again. She’s utterly exasperated.
Georgia’s local politics resist facile assumptions about what white working-class voters or suburban Black voters “must” want. But national politics infect everything.
All of the legislative races in which Democrats flipped seats came in Atlanta’s middle class and affluent northern suburbs: Alpharetta, Lawrenceville, Marietta, Sandy Springs, and Snellville. Republicans lost the chairs of the ways and means committee, state House higher education committee, a major transportation committee, and the health care committee on Tuesday night. Two Senate seats also flipped.
But none of the losses threaten a Republican majority in either chamber. And Republicans exacted a toll: Democratic state Rep. Bob Trammell, the leader of Democrats in the House, had a target on his back. Republicans carpet-bombed it with money. David Jenkins, a retired Army helicopter pilot and farmer, beat him by about 1,000 votes.
“[The Republican State Leadership Committee] said it wasspending $1 million,” said Trammell. “And they pretty much did. Attack television, digital, and mail started here the day after the primary and was sustained all the way through. They like to be able to say Democrats aren’t for rural Georgia. It’s inconvenient for them for me to be here.”
In a race with about 20,000 votes cast, that works out to about $50 a vote. And it’s one of a half-dozen local races with similar spending, in a state where House seats are usually contests of under $100,000 spent by both candidates combined. Republican state Rep. Chuck Efstration had to spend $1 million to beat Nakita Hemingway in exurban Gwinnett by 1,200 votes on 25,000 cast. A half-dozen other races ended with a margin of 5 percent of less.
One might expect elections to resolve things. But today it feels like this state — and the country, perhaps — has more questions than answers.
Polling in Georgia has been remarkably consistent, in that it always projected a razor-thin margin. But how were the polls so wrongagainin the Rust Belt? For Republicans here, looking at eroding support in suburban Atlanta, what appeals can be made to the emerging nonwhite majority that won’t cost them more voters among their white voting base? Democrats have the opposite problem: finding a message that can resonate enough with Black voters to draw them to the polls without equally energizing reactionary white voters.
And, more to the political health of society: Where do we find a unifying message that can cut across racial boundaries and lower the heat a bit, so that everyone isn’t openly wondering when the American equivalent of the IRA and the Red Brigades will arise, with disaffected lower-class white people drawing lines in the suburbs, I-285 becoming the River Bann in Belfast, troops checking backpacks for bombs at Wild Bill’s in Duluth and Black Panthers patrolling South DeKalb.
A polarized America frays at the edges. And the purple places like Atlanta are those edges.
Joe Biden speaks with audience members during a bus tour stop in Mason City, Iowa. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Biden Plans Immediate Flurry of Executive Orders to Reverse Trump Policies Matt Viser, Seung Min Kim and Annie Linskey, The Washington Post Excerpt: "President-elect Joe Biden is planning to quickly sign a series of executive orders after being sworn into office on Jan. 20, immediately forecasting that the country's politics have shifted and that his presidency will be guided by radically different priorities." READ MORE
A Philadelphia police officer at a protest on October 27, 2020. (photo: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Police Unions Are Enemies of Reform. It's Time We Take Them Head On. Anthony L. Fisher, Business Insider Fisher writes: "More than five months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, this story out of Philadelphia served as a timely reminder of why police unions remain the greatest impediment to meaningful and lasting criminal justice reform."
he nation's largest police union used a two-year-old boy — whose mother had just been violently thrown to the ground by Philadelphia police after breaking her car's windows — as a prop in a social media post. The family's lawyer called the post "propaganda...using racism and fear."
After months of protest, some reforms have been passed, like bans on chokeholds and increased body camera requirements. But all these reforms are opposed by police unions. In New York, police unions are fighting basic efforts at greater transparency regarding officers' disciplinary records.
Unfortunately, the protests have had little effect on actual policy. And nothing's going to change unless citizens demand that local lawmakers — of both major parties — resist police unions' influence and deflate their political power.
Police beat an innocent woman and then exploited her baby
During a protest following the death of Walter Wallace, Jr., a Black man whose shooting by Philadelphia police was captured on video, a 28-year-old woman made a wrong turn into an area where police were confronting protesters last week.
As she tried to turn her car around and flee, nightstick-wielding officers surrounded her car and busted up the windows. Then they yanked her and her 16-year-old nephew from the glass-strewn vehicle and threw them both violently to the ground.
While the woman was bleeding out of her head, another cop took her two-year-old son to "safety." The whole thing was caught on video. (The woman was later released without charges, but she did have to get medical treatment at a hospital.)
At some point during the fracas, someone snapped a photo of the terrified baby clinging to a concerned-looking female police officer. The National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) — the largest police union in the country — posted the photo with a caption that deserves to be judged in its totality:
"This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.
We are not your enemy. We are the Thin Blue Line. And we ARE the only thing standing between Order and Anarchy."
Police unions can't fix the problem because they are the problem
While the idea of a union is to protect the interests of workers, police unions have demonstrated a willingness to take this to a level that's decidedly not in the best interests of the public.
They myopically defend the worst officers, resist any reasonable attempts to increase accountability or curb their ability to act as extralegal enforcers, and ridiculously depict police officers as a besieged minority in need of hate crime legal protections.
Seriously, that's what Blue Lives Matter is. While rolling eyes at the mere mention of "systemic racism," or the pervasive culture of police in the US acting like they're troops occupying a hostile nation, police unions are their industry's grievance lobbyists.
That's how you get police unions in New York completely fabricating a story about Shake Shack employees allegedly poisoning officers. They need to push the fictions that being a police officer is a uniquely dangerous profession (which it isn't, not even close) and that it's in the public interest if police approach every interaction with civilians with the utmost fear and force.
A report from the US Conference of Mayors this August said that police unions' political power has led to collective bargaining agreements that curtail independent investigations into alleged police abuse, purge or otherwise obscure disciplinary records, and resist attempts to better train officers in de-escalation tactics. Mayors are telling us flatly: We'd like to help, but the unions have contracts.
During the months of protests over racism and police brutality, talk of "defunding the police" dominated the national conversation. It quietly failed in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed.
Despite the protests and public opinion on the side of reform, the warrior cop industry continues its work unabated.
This is all far less publicized, which is how the police unions like it. They'd prefer us all to flip out over the radical and wholly impractical proposition of "defunding the police," while they dig in their heels behind the scenes.
It's a shame and a waste of the energies of a massive protest movement that when non-violent, remains overwhelmingly popular.
The movement to reform police should be conducted with laser-focused efforts to decrease police unions' political power and influence.
On the state and local level — the only places where real reform can take place — Republicans need to be challenged on their fealty to police and Democrats need to be challenged on their fealty to public sector unions.
Police unions can't be trusted to reform themselves, and judging by their participation in spreading hoaxes and willingness to use a two-year-old boy to propagate a "compassionate warrior" image, they can't be trusted to even tell you the truth in front of your own two eyes.
Rudy Giuliani speaks to the media at a press conference held in the back parking lot of a landscaping company on Saturday in Philadelphia. (photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Trump Team Holds News Conference Outside Drab Landscaping Firm, Next to Adult Book Store Daniel Politi, Slate Politi writes: "On Saturday morning, shortly before the AP and other news outlets called the election for Joe Biden, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to announce that his lawyers would be holding a 'big press conference' in Philadelphia."
But there seems to have been some major confusion about where it would be held. First Trump tweeted it would take place at the “Four Seasons, Philadelphia.” Trump later corrected himself and said that the news conference was going to be held at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping. And the Four Seasons Hotel sent out its own tweet, making sure everyone knew that the news conference would not be held there but rather at the landscaping business that has “no relation with the hotel.”
Trump, a hotelier at heart, announces a press conference at Philadelphia's "Four Seasons" at 11, before specifying it's at Four Seasons Total Landscaping at 11:30. pic.twitter.com/HmTIPeukNG
I feel like we didn’t focus enough on the fact that someone in the Trump campaign meant to schedule the “four seasons hotel” but definitely accidentally scheduled this “four seasons landscaping” store and they had to follow through with it. Veep was not this good. pic.twitter.com/DTJIQGsKHG
When journalists arrived at the site of the news conference, they were flabbergasted by the scene and many quickly speculated that someone in the Trump campaign made a serious mistake. After all, the parking lot of a landscaping business in the outskirts of the city in an industrial part of town was a drab backdrop for a news conference by a president who wanted to convince Americans he still had a chance of winning. And making matters even stranger, the landscaping business was between an adult bookstore and a cremation center. The location led to lots of mockery online, and many people were very happy with the scene that was ripe for mockery, and some saw as a poignant metaphor of the failure of the Trump campaign.
This is not over. For we shall mount our righteous stand at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Next to Fantasy Island Adult Books. Across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center. Between the fire extinguisher and yellow hose. #MAGApic.twitter.com/hxuAsbEjXi
When the history books look back at this period, the first sentence should be: “It started with a ride down an escalator and ended with a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.”
the switcheroo from the four seasons hotel to “four seasons total landscaping” feels like an metaphor for the president’s standing in the Pa tally as the week has progressed https://t.co/lkCTtWguge
At the news conference, Rudy Giuliani insisted that Trump was not going to concede the election and claimed without presenting any evidence that ballots had been tampered with in Pennsylvania. It seems Giuliani first heard that that the networks had called the election for Biden at the news conference, and he vowed that the campaign would file several lawsuits because Republican observers were not allowed to inspect ballots. “Seems to me somebody from the Democratic National Committee sent out a note that said don’t let the Republicans look at those mail-in ballots,” Giuliani said without any evidence.
Robert Fisk, who worked as a Middle East correspondent for the Independent, has died in Dublin at the age of seventy-four. (photo: Mohamed Nanabhay/Wikimedia Commons)
Robert Fisk Was a Reporter Who Brought the Wars Home and Shaped the Thinking of a Generation Harry Browne, Jacobin Browne writes: "British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last week, produced decades of outstanding work, from Ireland to the Middle East. His greatest impact on public opinion came after 9/11, when he mounted a brave challenge to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
hen word got out last weekend that the veteran British journalist Robert Fisk had died in a Dublin hospital, one of the strongest expressions of sympathy came from the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins.
I knew that his taking of Irish citizenship meant a great deal to him, and his influence on young practitioners in journalism and political writing was attested by the huge audiences which attended the occasions on which he spoke in Ireland. Generations, not only of Irish people but all over the world, relied on him for a critical and informed view of what was taking place in the conflict zones of the world and, even more important, the influences that were perhaps the source of the conflict.
Michael D (as this popular president is invariably called in Ireland), who himself rose to fame as an excoriating critic of US imperialism, was always bound to emphasize Fisk’s Irish connection. But this was not some opportunistic “one of our own” blather: Fisk’s influence in Ireland was profound.
The Other Side of the Story
As I reflect on that influence, my mind returns to September 11, 2001. That afternoon in Ireland, the grief and immersion in the suffering of New York City was palpable. (Boston and New York are both occasionally — and sometimes competitively — referred to as “the next parish over”). Irish Times journalist Conor O’Clery spent part of that day reporting live on RTÉ, the Irish national radio station, from his Battery Park City apartment, with a view of the towers.
As a transplanted New Yorker in Dublin, I was asked to appear on an evening drive time show, to share my sadness but also, I promised myself, to tell some hard truths about what lay behind the attacks.
I had to join the queue. On air the conversation was sad, but also informed and penetrating. Off air, the host and guests talked of the “chickens coming home to roost.” By the next morning, the same phrase was being used on RTÉ with the microphones on. Here in the Republic of Ireland, where for decades it had been virtually illegal to broadcast explanations and excuses for the IRA, people were on air explaining, if not excusing, Al Qaeda.
Robert Fisk’s voice was everywhere, and his ideas were vital in both creating and meeting that Irish urge for explanation. Ireland’s colonial and anti-imperial history, its political sophistication, and its strong Palestinian solidarity movement are significant factors in the opening of a discursive space that is unusual in the English-speaking world. So it would be wrong to exaggerate Fisk’s individual role — but it would also be blinkered to ignore it.
When liberal-centrist writer Kathy Sheridan of the Irish Timesemerged on September 15th to complain that it was “too soon” for the “other side of the story” that had been ubiquitous in Irish media all week, she felt compelled to concede a list of imperial sins that could have been ripped straight from Fisk’s dispatches:
…the million Iraqi children dead from US-led sanctions; the third of the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank which survives on £1 a day, cheek by jowl with a US-subsidized, first-world Israel; the Afghans condemned, not only to the barbarous rule of the Taliban (who began life as the well-funded pets of the US), but also to be the victims of other mass-murderous US hunts for Osama bin Laden; the swaggering, ignorant disdain with which a neophyte US president has been trashing international treaties…
Yes, that passage is not Fisk himself but rather an incredible imitation, coming from a reliable pillar of the Irish establishment — a tribute to his influence.
“The Best Touchstone”
It’s not every posh-sounding English accent that emerges as such a trusted and quotable voice across the political and media spectrum in Ireland. But Fisk had earned the respect that made him the explanatory mainstay in Ireland on 9/11 and beyond. As a young journalist, he covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland for the London Times, then did a PhD at Trinity College Dublin about Irish neutrality during World War II, later turned into a good book, In Time Of War.
But it was in Lebanon during the 1980s, when he served as a correspondent while thousands of Irish soldiers served as UN peacekeepers, that the popular bond with an Irish audience was forged. His reporting of the massacre at Sabra and the Shatila refugee camps in 1982 was the most memorable moment, but Fisk was in it for the long haul.
Irish Army colonel E. D. Doyle wrote in January 1991 that Fisk “was the best touchstone” for understanding the military situation in the Gulf War, partly because Irish soldiers knew he was solid: “We used to say [in Lebanon] that when Fisk criticized us in a UN operation we should examine our performance.”
By that time, Fisk worked for the London Independent. The Irish Times subscribed to the Independent’s wire service, and Fisk’s stories often featured more prominently in the Dublin newspaper than in the London one. In April 1991, Noam Chomsky told an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that the Irish Times had the best coverage of the Gulf War of any newspaper in the English-speaking world.
That quality was by no means all about Fisk: Maggie O’Kane contributed brilliant coverage from Baghdad and Michael Jansen in Cyprus used her contacts across the Middle East to illuminate the crisis. But Fisk’s unmistakable, bespectacled picture-byline, accompanying reporting and analysis mostly from Saudi Arabia, was a large part of the package.
Big Pictures and Small
Five years later, when Israel shelled civilians sheltering at a UN compound near Qana in southern Lebanon, the phones lit up on Ireland’s main radio phone-in show, and Fisk was, again, the “touchstone.” As I wrote in the Irish Times at the time, many callers
…were citing Robert Fisk’s brilliant, heartbreaking reporting. Fisk could not only be read most days last week in this newspaper, he was on the radio around the clock . . . unafraid to provide context, history lessons, straight good sense about proportionality and eyewitness evidence that contradicted official versions of events … a Fisk strength is the ability to move from the big picture — strategy, geopolitics — to the small — a woman carrying the body of her father.
A friend who produced TV and radio shows over those decades recalled this week how readily Fisk would go out of his way to appear in Irish media, where even conservative presenters mostly deferred to “Bob.” His influence was evident when, in February 2003, Dublin hosted one of the world’s largest demonstrations, per capita, against the impending Iraq war.
Fisk was, even then, controversial: in the early 2000s, the right-wing columnists in Ireland’s Sunday Independent (then owned by the same company as his home paper in London) made him something of a target. But he seemed to like arguments and tended to swat opponents away with authoritative ease.
On one occasion in 2010, I was the moderator at a debate about the media and the Middle East where Fisk was the major draw for a paying audience. Backstage before the event, Fisk mischievously asked me and others whether a particular opponent had ever been to Israel/Palestine. When we replied that to the best of our knowledge, the man had not, Fisk prepared the inevitable and entertaining ambush: “I assume you’ve been to the Middle East … no?!”
Over the years, Fisk’s public appearances in Ireland, for those “huge audiences” to which Michael D referred, were generally at such widely marketed events — book festivals, summer schools, prestigious campus debates — rather than events within anti-war circles or the Left. His door-stopping books, Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation, still turn up in the most surprising Irish households — homes that carry no other hallmarks of left-wing tendencies. Popular understanding here of the sins of empire rests heavily on his shoulders.
Until a decade ago — and probably to this day for that majority of people who have not been caught up in arguments over the Syrian civil war — a reference to something said or written by Robert Fisk would be enough to settle a debate in Ireland, insofar as such a thing can ever be said to be settled.
A Role Model
For my journalism students in the early days of the Afghan and Iraq wars, Fisk was an obvious if intimidating role model. For their family members, he was likely to be the name that came to mind: “Ah you’re studying journalism — Robert Fisk!” When a relation of one recent graduate encountered Fisk at an Italian literary festival in 2007, the result was a signed festival program brought home as a gift and bearing a command from the Great Man: “Monitor the centers of power!”
Of course, among journalists, here as elsewhere, some of the esteem for Fisk came through gritted teeth. He could be contemptuous of other reporters and was the scourge of those war correspondents who were “embedded” during US wars. There was some schadenfreude when, traveling without military protection in December 2001, he was assaulted by Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
He had learned his mistrust of the military — and of the reporters who get too close to it — the hard way, here in Ireland. When, in 2010, the Saville Inquiry published its long-awaited findings on Derry’s Bloody Sunday massacre, nearly four decades after the event, Fisk put his own profession in the firing line:
[D]id we British journalists have something to answer for in our slavish adherence to the notion of the British Army’s integrity? I don’t think we cared about the Irish — either the Catholic or the Protestant variety. I don’t think we cared about Ireland.
Fisk, self-evidently, cared about Ireland. His own historical “touchstone” was the settlement of empires after World War I: in his telling, the world of war that he covered across Eurasia for nearly fifty years was the rotten fruit of that bloody soil, stretching from Ireland in the northwest to Iraq in the southeast. He was scathing about “peace processes” that attempted to pave over unjust history.
In his mostly warm-hearted recollections of the late John Hume in August this year, Fisk recalled scolding the Irish politician, over dinner in Derry two decades ago, for glib efforts to translate “peace-making” from Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine: “The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli-Arab struggle, I suggested, would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the 17th century dispossession of the Catholics.”
It is difficult to imagine a more “Fisky” passage, in its stentorian tone, its historical reach, its political acuity, its intellectual confidence, its personal cockiness — the shine was still on Hume’s Nobel Peace Prize, after all, as Fisk lectured him about making peace — and yet also its context of affection and conviviality. In Ireland as elsewhere, such moments will be missed.
At the beginning of the night on Tuesday, it looked like election forecasts that had predicted a blue wave were plagued by a 100 percent margin of error. But as time went on and mail-in ballots rolled in, the former vice president steadily edged ahead of incumbent Donald Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The Keystone State finally pushed Biden over the 270 electoral vote mark. At about 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, Biden finally claimed victory.
It’s likely that Trump will continue dismantling the nation’s environmental protections until January 20. But the good news is there is now an end in sight. The next administration aims to be the polar opposite of the Trump administration on most issues, and especially the environment.
Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan is a cheaper version of what Green New Deal advocates have been publicly pushing for since February 2019. The plan calls for a massive investment in renewable energy, emissions technology, green jobs, and environmental justice. Ahead of the election, Biden surrounded himself with a diverse group of climate advisors, seeking input from Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the youth-led climate group the Sunrise Movement, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Green New Deal co-mastermind herself, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
In the final days of his general election campaign, Biden did what few other presidential candidates have done by making climate change one of his main closing arguments. His campaign pushed out climate ads in Michigan, on cable TV, and on Twitter. At the final presidential debate in Nashville, Biden made history by promising to “transition” the U.S. off of oil (something Trump thought, incorrectly, would tank the Democrat’s favorability).
eorgia might flip. It might not. It’s leaning that way, but it’s not going to matter. Joe Biden’s expected win in Pennsylvania seals the deal.
he nation's largest police union used a two-year-old boy — whose mother had just been violently thrown to the ground by Philadelphia police after breaking her car's windows — as a prop in a social media post. The family's lawyer called the post "propaganda...using racism and fear."
hen word got out last weekend that the veteran British journalist Robert Fisk had died in a Dublin hospital, one of the strongest expressions of sympathy came from the 
fter more than three days of uncertainty, 
