I suspect each phase of the continuing dismantling of America will begin with “In a 6-to-3 vote the U.S. Supreme Court decided …”
This was the term the Supreme Court decided to simply ignore the speed bumps. With sweep and speed, Supreme Court’s conservatives ignite a new era.
4 July 2022 – Say what you will, the final season of America has been absolutely amazing. I mean, it starts with an attack on the Capitol and ends with a new Supreme Court actively dismantling democracy. That’s some top notch writing. And it perfectly sets up the Netflix Civil War miniseries that will follow. American exceptionalism at its best.
There’s no shortage of digital pixels these days on the latest Supreme Court decisions, the U.S. political divide and the (eventual) death of the American Republic. The following is part of my long-form essay (at present clocking in at 20,000 words) – incomplete musings in search of a conclusion. But for this post I shall try to be brief – though difficult when you are moving across such a wide landscape. Sometimes you cannot easily wrestle a lot of ideas to the ground. So they just float out there for a time.
And this is a very visceral comment. The anger – the deep, pervasive anger and hate – that wracks my body, and my soul, is something I have experienced over the 4 months covering the slaughter in the Ukraine War, now spilling over into the America political divide. As I have noted before, although I am no longer a U.S. citizen I find myself irrevocably tangled in America’s hopes, arrogance, and despair.
And as I have also noted before, Americans just do not know their history. Nor do they care. They are just too dumbed down. As I have chronicled in numerous posts, America has laid waste to its principles of “democracy” event after event after event in its history. Granted: the United States was founded as a republic, not a democracy. But it loves the myth of being a democracy. Somehow forgetting a long history of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. What is happening now is merely a renewal of the triumph of that history – confounding the experts who greatly underestimated how powerful old white guys still are.
As the court’s conservative majority has been bolstered in recent years – even last term, when a sixth conservative justice joined the ranks – the court has at times opted to hold back, substituting doctrinal baby steps for dramatic change.
No longer. This past term the Supreme Court decided to ignore the speed bumps. Even had the court not voted to eliminate constitutional protection for abortion rights, this would have been an immensely consequential term. The aggressive new majority expanded the scope of gun rights, tossing out the approach endorsed by every federal appeals court to have weighed gun restrictions in favor of a history-focused analysis that seems destined to pose daunting constitutional hurdles for gun regulation.
This past week I took the time to read all of the opinions, concurring opinion and dissents issued over the last few weeks (a true glutton for punishment). How the conservative majority went about its rulings was as telling – as alarming – as its results. In asserting that it was simply following statutory text, the majority applied an inconsistent, self-serving textualism. Dissenting in the EPA case, Justice Elena Kagan quoted her now famous line, “We’re all textualists now,” but with a bitter twist. “It seems I was wrong,” she wrote. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.” The Court is no longer a court. It is a legislative body.
What did the Court do? In summary:
• It dismantled the remaining bricks in the wall of separation between church and state – requiring rather than merely allowing states that subsidize private education to fund explicitly religious instruction and dismissing constitutional concerns over a football coach’s 50-yard-line prayers with his public school students.
• It hobbled the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with climate change, ushering in a new era of limits on federal regulators’ power to tackle complex problems at a moment when Congress has proved itself incapable of rising to the array of policy challenges. But as I wrote last week, the EPA case is a stalking horse, laying the groundwork for the neutering of the S.E.C. The target is Jarkesy v. SEC now making its way to SCOTUS. In that case the plaintiffs argue that Congress’ delegation of certain regulatory powers to the SEC is unconstitutional. The case was weak but they now have the ammunition they need. If the Court rules in Jarkesy’s favor – and with this new conservative Court, that is the likeliest possibility – it could open the door to all kinds of challenges to the SEC and other regulation.
• Chief Justice Roberts is a bullshit artist. He complained he was “unable to rein in his conservative colleagues in their zeal to undo abortion rights”, an act he labeled a “serious jolt to the legal system”. No, he is a proud member, eager participant in the majority’s mischief-making. Roberts assigned himself to write the opinions in the EPA and religious instruction cases, the culmination of his years of patiently steering the court in his desired conservative direction.
• As the liberal justices lamented the real-world consequences of rulings on guns, climate change and abortion, the majority was defiantly heedless of the practical effects.
As you read the cases, you realize the majority is simply using a “results-oriented” approach, an in-your-face new touchstone determining the scope of constitutional rights. Read the gun and abortion cases carefully and you’ll see the majority baldly cherry-picked from the past, dismissing examples that did not support its preferred conclusion. This was history as practiced by Goldilocks: this gun law was too early, that one too late to matter. Only some historical examples – which just happen to support the Second Amendment side – are just right. The majority, Breyer wrote in his dissent, offers “a laundry list of reasons to discount seemingly relevant historical evidence,” giving judges “ample tools to pick their friends out of history’s crowd”. Conservative judges in the lower courts will have a field day quoting these cases.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor nailed it. In her dissent in the 6-3 decision in Egbert v. Boule her description of a “restless and newly constituted court” seemed to signal major changes ahead by the court’s six conservative justices and bitter dissents.
The “Egbert v. Boule” case deserves a read. The majority explicitly states it cannot create a new cause of action or assign new private rights and liabilities. That is a power that resides only in an act of legislation. Robert Boule brought his damages suit in what is known as a Bivens action, named after the court’s 1971 decision in “Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents”. The Bivens decision authorized a damages action against federal officials for alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment. That is now gutted. And as Sotomayor painstakingly lays out in her dissent, the plaintiff did not request a “new cause of action”.
In her dissent calling out the “restless and newly constituted court” she said the court has lunged to decide cases where restraint would have been wiser. The EPA case, for example, involved an Obama-era regulation that never took effect, that was overtaken by changes in the industry and that the Biden administration said it had no intention of reviving. Where was the dispute that required the court’s intervention, she asked? As Kagan observed, “this Court could not wait – even to see what the new rule says – to constrain EPA’s efforts to address climate change”. Just another step by the majority to dismantle the administrative state.
And five justices flagrantly abandoned the court’s ordinary reluctance to disturb precedent in overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the 1992 case that reaffirmed the right to abortion. Sotomayor wrote:
“The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed. Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.”
But the conservative bloc is just getting started. Next term they are taking on cases that mean the end to using race as a factor in college admissions, and severely limit the reach of the Clean Water Act, and one that will further gut the already neutered Voting Rights Act.
But the most explosive new case added to its docket will supplant state courts from protecting voting rights in federal elections and, taken to an extreme, give legal cover to election subversion. See next section immediately below.
Last week the Court said it will consider what would be a fundamental change in the way federal elections are conducted, giving state legislatures sole authority to set the rules for contests even if their actions violated state constitutions and resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering for congressional seats. The case, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina, could have enormous impact on the 2024 election, and it is the second major election law case the justices will review in the term that begins in October. They have already taken a case from Alabama that will allow them to reconsider the scope of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. Once again, Alabama is the battleground over Black voting rights. And once again, Blacks will lose.
Both cases were brought by Republicans challenging adverse decisions in lower courts. In North Carolina, Republicans want to restore a redistricting map that was drawn by the GOP-led legislature but rejected as a violation of the state constitution by the state’s supreme court. Richard Hasen, an election law expert, wrote on his Election Law blog (a “must read” if you really want to follow the stuff):
“This case has the potential to fundamentally rework the relationship between state legislatures and state courts in protecting voting rights in federal elections. It also could provide the perfect, legally sanctioned path for election subversion”.
I know. Not too alarmist. But read on.
The Supreme Court in March let the North Carolina high court ruling stand for the fall elections. But three of the court’s conservative justices at the time said they were skeptical that state courts had a role in refereeing the rules for federal elections, and a fourth said the issue was ripe for consideration. State courts have played an influential role in the congressional redistricting battles following the 2020 Census. Judges have reined in Republican gerrymanders in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, for instance, and rejected maps drawn by Democratic-led legislatures in New York and Maryland.
But the effort to have the Supreme Court examine what is called the “independent state legislature doctrine” has been a Republican-led effort. The GOP controls both houses of the legislature in 30 states. The doctrine comes from the U.S. Constitution’s election clause, which says that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” While most often invoked in the redistricting process, the independent state legislature doctrine would also give lawmakers control over issues such as voter qualification, voting by mail and other election procedures. In the past, that has been widely interpreted as giving states that power, but in a shared manner between residents and the executive, legislative and judicial branches.
In all of the election disputes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh expressed support for the view that state courts could not usurp the role of the legislature in prescribing rules for federal elections. In March, Alito said that he would block the North Carolina court’s adoption of the new congressional map and that he thought the legislature had the better argument:
“If the language of the Elections Clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections. I think it is likely that the applicants would succeed in showing that the North Carolina Supreme Court exceeded those limits.”
Kavanaugh did not agree to block the state court’s action, saying it was too close to the election. But he said the issue should be considered next term – and Republicans jumped through the window to get it on the 2022-2023 docket.
In a post early last year, Richard Hasen (the election law expert I noted above), wrote about a 2019 decision (Rucho v. Common Cause) in which all members of the court – including Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – seemed to envision some role for state courts. But in rejecting a role for federal courts in settling partisan gerrymandering lawsuits, Chief Justice Roberts specified that challenges could go through state courts:
“Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply in policing partisan gerrymandering”.
Hasen also noted that in 2015 (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission), the court ruled that the constitution’s election clause did not bar Arizona’s voters from giving an independent commission, rather than the legislature, the power to draw congressional districts. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the five-member majority:
“Nothing in that clause instructs, nor has this court ever held, that a state legislature may prescribe regulations on the time, place and manner of holding federal elections in defiance of provisions of the state’s constitution”.
The liberal Ginsburg died in 2020, and was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who likely will be pivotal in the outcome of the new challenge. North Carolina is a purple state, with a legislature controlled by Republicans, a Democratic governor and an elected state Supreme Court with four Democrats and three Republicans. Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 50 percent of the vote compared to 49 percent for Joe Biden.
In Moore v. Harper (in the lower courts) analysts said the map created by Republican legislators after the 2020 Census would have given the GOP an edge in 10 of 14 congressional districts. Democratic justices on the elected state Supreme Court said the redistricting maps had a partisan tilt “not explained by the political geography of North Carolina.” The court concluded the maps “are unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause, and the freedom of assembly clause of the North Carolina Constitution.”
The state’s Republican legislative leaders told the Supreme Court in their petition that state courts have no power to second-guess the legislature:
“By its plain text, the Elections Clause creates the power to regulate the times, places, and manner of federal elections and then vests that power in ‘the Legislature’ of each State. It does not leave the States free to limit the legislature’s constitutionally vested power, or place it elsewhere in the State’s governmental machinery, as a matter of state law.”
But the state’s department of justice said North Carolina presents a poor example for the Supreme Court to examine the issue. That is because the legislature itself granted state courts a role in redistricting, they say:
“Two decades ago, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law expressly codifying the state courts’ authority to review legislative redistricting efforts. At the same time, the legislature specifically authorized the state courts to ‘impose an interim districting plan’ in situations like the one giving rise to this appeal. The North Carolina state courts thus have not ‘taken it upon themselves to set’ federal elections rules — the state legislature itself designed a statutory redistricting regime that expressly contemplates the courts’ involvement.”
But for this Supreme Court, it will not matter. They have been ruling far beyond the immediate question of the case before them. As NPR noted in short history of the Moore v. Harper case:
“The independent state legislature theory was first invoked by three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices in the celebrated Bush v. Gore case that handed the 2000 election victory to George W. Bush. In that case, the three cited it to support the selection of a Republican slate of presidential electors.
Those three were Rehnquist, Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, now the seniormost member of the Court. They wrote in their concurring opinion in Bush v Gore:
“The federal questions that ultimately emerged in this case are not substantial. Article II provides that “[e]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” … But as we indicated in our remand of the earlier case, in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”
That doctrine – the basis of John Eastman and Donald Trump’s effort to get states to submit multiple slates of electors – asserts that a plain reading of Article II and the 12th Amendment of the Constitution says that each state’s legislature has final say in which candidate gets their states’ Electoral College vote, governors and the will of the voters be damned.
And eight months before the 2020 election, Thom Hartmann, a popular American radio personality and progressive political commentator, had predicted Trump would do what Bush considered trying twenty years earlier:
“This is not rocket science. Through simple brute force, if Trump, Fox News and Limbaugh, et al, were to loudly claim that there was “voter fraud” in any or all of those states and succeed in casting doubts about the integrity of an election that would put a Democrat in the White House, the manufactured conflict could be resolved in the House and the election given to Trump by one or more state legislatures as Florida threatened to do in 2000”.
This has been a long time coming. The Republicans are beating one drum: the Constitution says that it’s up to the states — “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” — to decide which presidential candidate gets their Electoral College votes.
But the Electoral Count Act requires a governor’s sign-off, and half those states have Democratic governors. Which has precedence, the Constitution or the Act? If the Supreme Court says it’s the US Constitution rather than the Electoral Count Act, states’ constitutions, state laws, or the votes of their citizens, the scenarios outlined all over the web (the outright theft of the U.S. Presidential election) become not just possible but very likely. Republicans, answering to their rightwing billionaire donors rather than voters, play hardball and consistently push to the extremes regardless of pubic opinion.
After all, the Constitution only mentions the states’ legislatures – of which 30 are Republican controlled – so the unwillingness of the Democratic governors of Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to sign off on the Electoral College votes becomes moot.
GOP-controlled states are already changing their state laws to allow for it, and Republican strategists are gaming out which states have Republican legislatures willing to override the votes of their people to win the White House for the Republican candidate. Those state legislators who still embrace Trump and this theory are getting the support of large pools of rightwing billionaires’ dark money.
It comes down to this, as summarised by the highly respected conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig:
“Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine – and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency”.
Trump’s January 6th effort failed because every contested state had laws on the books requiring all of their Electoral College votes to go to whichever candidate won the popular vote in the state. That will not be the case in 2024. As we are watching, the Supreme Court – in collaboration with state legislatures through activists like Ginny Thomas – are setting that election up right now in front of us in real time.
Simple, really. States’ rights, national reach. Much of this is hypocritical and inconsistent. But to point to hypocrisy and inconsistency among Republican lawmakers and Republican justices is to miss the larger picture: a government of reactionaries, by reactionaries and for reactionaries. The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is.
Or, put a little differently, Heads we win, tails you lose.
As a writer, as a journalist, you need to try and see beyond the immediate cycles of news. And that’s a real challenge. All of the current stories that seem to have led the news over the past two years – the U.S. Supreme Court decisions, political fracture in Europe and the U.S., COVID rising (again), supply chain disruption (again), economies running amok – boggle the mind. To take any one of them seriously is to believe that the direction they point is the direction we will go, that we stand on the cusp of a future far, far different from our past. And I do believe that. We are going to break new ground here. In this, George Orwell had it right: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”.
I have watched a lot of the January 6th Capitol “attempted coup” hearings, and followed the political machinations in Florida and Texas. It seems to me this is a weirder moment in America than we think. The animating question behind much commentary on the January 6th select committee hearings is, “Will they change anything?” I think the answer is “no”. No one believes the Republican Party will bar Trump from the 2024 primary for his actions. If anything, the Republican Party has moved more firmly in Trump’s direction. And if they do go with Trump they will still go with “Trumpian” ideas.
And I think it is hard to get people to pay sustained attention to the congressional inquiry into the attempt to steal the 2020 election, even though it revolves around one of the front-runners for the 2024 election. It is an almost Olympian refusal to confront the present. I used to think it’s unlikely that the American political system collapses in the next few years. But how unlikely is it, exactly?
It’s why when I have done any deep reading into American history I keep coming back to the diaries of John Adams who wrote when describing the First Continental Congress convened in 1774: “Delegates were strangers, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences and diversity of opinion. There was no unity of political beliefs”.
It is why I think we need to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. What we have, really, is two blocs of fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space. When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people. But in truth, it has never been one nation. More like a federated republic of two nations. To borrow from Michael Podhorzer: what we have is a “Blue Nation” and “Red Nation”. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.
Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute of which I am a member, puts out a private newsletter for a very small group. He recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of these two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space. I want to share a few of his thoughts and augment with some of mine.
To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation’ – but never became one nation”.
Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country — with or without majority support.
This is not an entirely new thought. As I have noted in many previous posts, scores of serious writers – most especially Lewis Lapham and George Packer – have laid out in detail the structural attacks on U.S. institutions which paved the way for Trump’s candidacy and will continue to progress, with or without Trump at the helm.
But I was comforted (if that is the appropriate word) to find out he and I were on the same page as to what was causing the enormous strain on the country’s ripped and mythical cohesion: “Trumpian” electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6th insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule – and democracy as we’ve known it – can survive this offensive.
Politico also had a long piece last week that defined modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years. By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states, where state-government control has typically been divided. Measured that way, the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent. On its own, the blue nation would be the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only China. The red nation would rank third.
Podhorzer offers a slightly different grouping of the states that reflects the more recent trend in which Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.
All of that has led to the flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures. Not raised by Podhorzer but critical (I think) in understanding how far this will go is by looking at the experience of Jim Crow segregation – an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties. Not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but recent red state rhetoric (it is impossible to name all the conservative leaders that espouse this) is that that they are comfortable with “a time when states had entirely different laws” that they created a form of domestic apartheid. As the distance widens between the two sections, there are all kinds of potential for really deep disruptions, social disruptions, that aren’t just about our feelings and our opinions.
And if you read my essay from 2016, the growing separation means that after the period of fading distinctions, bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that is the return of what Podhorzer calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”
Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who studies the differences among states and will publish a long piece this coming fall, details how conservative Republicans have skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support. Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures, and at least 10 new Congressional seats. He says “they have really stacked the deck in these states because of this democratic backsliding”.
The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart.
I need to wrap up this section so I’ll close with this:
It’s clear the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will not be satisfied with just setting the rules in the places now under their control. The MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. Or as Podhorzer concludes his piece: “The MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls. It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible”.
And as a European I would be remiss in not mentioning the perspective from Europe. Which is more of a foreign policy view, not a domestic politics view, but tied to U.S. domestic politics.
The great paradox in the world today is that the “dumb simplicity” of America’s self-perception is both obviously bogus and fundamentally true. The story that America tells about itself and its “exceptionalism” is both the source of many of its foreign-policy disasters and the necessary myth without which much of the world would be a more brutal place.
But the dumb simplicity of America’s interventions is often infuriating and obtuse, or even disastrously naive and destructive. And yet if America stops believing in its myth, if it scurries back into the safety of its continental bunker, having decided it is now just another normal nation, then a cold wind might start to blow in places that have become complacent in their security. When the dumb simplicity is removed, the complexities of the world start growing back.
And it is a never-ending loop. The dumb simplicity of the idea means that the U.S. will continue going around the world offending people and annoying them. It will continue to make catastrophic mistakes, causing much more than offense, overreaching, and being resisted by rival powers. And it means that the U.S. will carry on pulling back when it realizes its myth has bumped up against a different reality.
It is in full form in Ukraine. Here is a country that is not in NATO, not covered by an American security guarantee, and without almost anything of central importance to the U.S., and yet is able, so far, to resist Russian colonization in large part because the U.S. has decided that it is in the West’s interest for Russia to fail. For Ukraine to carry on surviving, the West, led by the U.S., cannot step back from this calculation, or from America’s idea of itself.
Because despite the war being in Europe, involving European powers, with largely European consequences, America remains the essential partner for Ukraine. For most of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Britain, in particular, the reality that Ukraine would likely already be lost were it not for American military support has only proved the intrinsic value of living in an American world order. For others, including the French, such dependence is now a source not only of shame, but of long-term vulnerability. America might care enough to supply Ukraine today, but with Donald Trump limbering up for his second shot at the presidency, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture a time when this is no longer the case.
And that is were French President Emmanuel Macron – despite his foibles, his mis-steps, the “just-what-in-hell-does-he-want?” cloud he spews over all of us – has it right when he warned: whichever American president is in office when this is finally all over, Russia will remain – its preoccupations, fears, interests, and myths the same as before.
Europe is thus trapped between an immediate calamity on its doorstep and the whims of an unhappy American electorate. The question is not whether the U.S. will still be capable of defending what was once called the “free world” under a future Trump presidency, but whether it will any longer have the commitment to do so.
To many American policy makers, it is axiomatic that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, an indispensable power. America, unlike the British empire that came before it, supposedly embodies universal values, and it follows that what is good for America is good for the world. Yes, the U.S. might fall short of its values from time to time, and yes, it might occasionally have to do the dirty work of a superpower but, at heart, it is better than other superpowers — both current and former — because it is driven by what is good for everyone, not just for itself. Ukraine helps confirm this belief.
But that is pure myth. That myth, that idea is circular, powerful, and useful. It infuses the American order with a moral purpose as well as a justification, and in doing so drives the country to both greatness and calamity. It is an idea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers, because America is not imperialist.
This fallacy, however, lies at the core of its most costly foreign-policy miscalculations. George W. Bush really did believe that he could liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, and that such liberation would be good for everyone, if only they could just see it. Even the intervention in Vietnam was partly driven by this idea. American power was necessary to protect the Vietnamese from communism, which in turn was necessary to protect the world from communism.
Yet, regardless of the totalitarian horror of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the American centurions that toppled these regimes came to be seen as oppressors, just as they were in Vietnam. Equally, the arrival of American forces was not seen as benign by the powers bordering these countries, whether Pakistan or China or Iran. No amount of money or troops could ever convince these countries that their national interest was the same as America’s. What’s more, in each of these wars, the U.S. could never care as much as the neighboring power, for whom there was never an option to cut and run. In each case, geography trumped interests.
For Ukraine, America is and will remain a force of liberation. Yet, it is not unreasonable for the rest of Europe to worry that history may repeat itself. What if Ukraine is not Greece or South Korea — where American might guarantees somebody else’s freedom — but Afghanistan where it tried, failed, and eventually gave up? Ukraine, too, has a country on its border that has decided on a policy that cannot be brought into line with America’s. Neither carrots nor sticks are likely to change Russia’s fundamental assessment of its interests.
Even the current U.S. administration is under no illusion that so long as Russia remains in conflict with Ukraine, even if Moscow is stuck and unable to achieve its goals, it will always be able to rain down missiles on Kyiv, making it almost impossible for the West to restore a settled free, democratic Ukraine, just as Iran was always able to destabilize Iraq, Pakistan likewise in Afghanistan. What then?
And that is what Ukraine fears – and others in Europe expect. In the end, what really matters is which story America believes, and for how long.
The Fourth of July in the U.S. is usually a day of community, celebration, and joy. It is the country’s national birthday party – the commemoration of a Declaration of Independence that changed “the course of human events.” It is a day of star-spangled banners and national pride – and of course the requisite hot dogs, fireworks, and parades.
But today, this year, the unity of that nation, its destiny, its self-confidence, the self-evidence of its truths are being pulled apart by forces of such strength that many wonder whether that nation, “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Is there reason to celebrate this Fourth, or is a more fitting response to mourn what once was and what is currently in jeopardy?
This U.S. Supreme Court term will be remembered as the moment a cynical and anti-democratic movement, decades in the making, reached its zenith, empowered by bad faith and opportunism. Now the cabal lords its power over a broken political system from a perch of increased influence and lack of accountability. This is power politics by unelected actors, appointed largely by men who lost the popular vote for president. Its path was paved by Mitch McConnell’s Machiavellian exploitation of the deaths of two justices. He was a master of shamelessness with a single purpose – to accomplish via judicial appointment what he could never have achieved through democratic means.
The damage he and his hard-right radicals have wrought touches all aspects of society, from abortion rights to commonsense gun control to the environment to the evisceration of the separation of church and state. What we have are the ruins of what many took for granted as our constitutional rights. And nothing suggests these justices are anywhere near sated.
We have now firmly left behind the realm of the theoretical. This is real, and it will get only more so. For years there were those who warned that Roe wasn’t safe, and neither was anything else, that these justices were licking their chops to devour a modern America and spit out a distorted version of the past. Too many of these prophets were dismissed as hysterical, their fears histrionic and overblown. Surely, they were lectured, precedent matters. Certainly there would have to be some legal basis to rewrite America’s social contract and decades of settled rights.
It is undeniable that the hard-right majority is doing what they have telegraphed for years they would do — shackle, destabilize, and dismember the federal government until it is powerless to govern this diverse country. They’ve now shown they will do this any way they can. In Dobbs, the strategy is to shift power over the most consequential domestic issues of freedom, autonomy, and survival to 50 state legislatures, splintering the U.S. into clashing societies with no consistent definition of justice. In West Virginia v. EPA, the strategy is to decide that Congress never meant to give the country’s critical regulatory agencies the power to deal with any “major question” — certainly not climate catastrophe.
Each of the recent major decisions are weapons the right-wing justices have chosen to stop the United States from ever being a single, unified nation with consistent laws, universally recognized freedoms for all, and a coherent national purpose. The injuries Dobbs will inflict on the country are the best example of this. They reach far beyond the realm of abortion care, even far beyond “women’s rights.” The idea that any group of people can be singled out and given different human rights in different states is an existential threat to the basic sustaining ideal of an American nation that is “the land of the free” — a country where all people are treated equally. But so far, the Democrats have failed to recognize and enunciate the scale of the threat and have no realistic plan to counter it. They are powerless.
But when we look back at the course of the human story, a broader perspective becomes even more salient as we begin to consider the intervals of centuries and millennia. There the vagaries of daily life and human governance tend to recede. How much do we know about the palace intrigue of the Mayan court? The factions that drove the Mongol invasions? All the kingdoms and empires that rose and fell with little archaeological documentation?
As the pop group Kansas sang we are but dust in the wind. Or as the poem “Ozymandias” reminds us, the legacy of once-powerful leaders is often measured in ruins and dust.
Relax. Celebrate with the Americans and go out and eat a hotdog.