Ruth López committed no crime: she has been imprisoned for an entire year for exposing corruption in El Salvador without any kind of legal process. Her friends at Cristosal ask that we ensure she is remembered -- that the Bukele regime cannot simply disappear this champion for justice.
Pass it on: We continue demanding #FreedomForRuth and a #PublicTrialForRuth. #FreeRuth
Yesterday thousands of Alabamians and friends from all over marched in Selma in support of a "National Day of Action for Voting Rights - All Roads to Lead to the South." The Supreme Court has decreed that racist white politicians can rig elections so NO Black politicians can have chance to represent their communities anywhere that white Republicans control state legislatures. That's just fine, say the infamous black robed six. No more Voting Rights Act in practice. No, this is not fine. Too many people have fought and died for the right to a meaningful vote.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts the struggle to win voting rights for all people in 1960s which culminated in Alabama.
... Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Mickey Welsh / Advertiser Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
Mickey Welsh / Advertiser On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6....
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| Mickey Welsh / Advertiser |
The photos included here come from a wonderful photo gallery at the Tuscaloosa AL news site. It's well worth your time.
• • •
I'm old enough so that the deadly SNCC Mississippi Summer project the year before, the Alabama voting rights campaign, and the Selma march over the bridge are part of my personal memories. A white teenager in a GOP household in Buffalo, NY, could follow the civil rights struggle in newspapers and short TV news broadcasts. I remember being mesmerized by the righteousness and bravery of the marchers.
And I was not as alone in that, as many white teenagers might be today. The private girls high school I attended had never had any Black students until my senior year; I bet the powers that be looked far and wide for the one shy girl who integrated that culturally rigid white place. She was enough younger that I never got a sense of how it turned out for her.
But I do know that my graduating class were moved by the events of our time. It was the custom that each graduating class collect a sum of money to donate to the school toward something we thought would make the place better. We took a vote, all sixty-some of us, and made a plan. I was part of a delegation that went to the head of the school to present our plan: we wanted our class gift to begin to fund a scholarship fund for Black students. We more or less thought the school was a good place and we should share it.
As I remember, the principal seemed aghast. He was probably correct, even then, that there were legal impediments to such a racially conscious fund. I don't remember what we ended up doing for a class gift.
But in the mid-60s, it was possible for white teenagers to feel something in the wind, to identify with changing times. Can we again find that hope for a better, more just, more equitable country? There's nothing else to do ...
The result is pensive and sobering. This seems a war in which everyone loses, most especially ordinary citizens of Iran.
... Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.…I can't help wondering whether that conclusion might also hold true for the USofA.
As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants.
In an email from the NYRB introducing de Bellaigue's piece, the author reflects:
... I think one should pull back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and consider the balance of forces in the longer term. The Iranian regime was, if not on the ropes, then in very serious trouble as recently as January, when, amid a terrible economic situation with an eviscerated middle class, a large proportion of the population—disgruntled, unhappy, insurrectionary, revolutionary—came out to protest on the streets.
The regime’s reflexive exercise of force was a big message: we’re ready to kill thousands of our own citizens. In fact, we don’t really regard them as our own citizens but, essentially, enemy combatants in our midst. They killed thousands of Iranians and left tens of thousands more bereft, which in the end cost them even more credibility, in particular among Iranians who had otherwise been unsure where they stood on the question of regime change. There was a crisis of ever-straitening economic circumstances, terrible violence, and an ever-more unhappy population.
Back in January it seemed there was only one way this was going to go: disaster for the regime and possibly for the populace.
But then the war started, and it returned to the regime a lot of the legitimacy it had lost. The very government that had slaughtered its citizens in the streets was now, it seemed, heroically defending the country against the most powerful militaries in the world, and with very little in the way of advanced military hardware. And they were doing so with extraordinary bravery, dedication, and ingenuity.
There have been two important moments in the war so far. The first was when Ayatollah Khamenei was killed. Many Iranians were pleased with that; they had wanted him to be taken out in part because they thought the regime, once decapitated, couldn’t survive.
But then almost exactly at the same time, American bombs obliterated a girls’ school. Trump blustered and lied and displayed himself in the worst possible light ...
Iranian citizens certainly could not feel that anyone was coming to rescue them.
So the moral argument that the United States and Israel were making for regime change is dubious at best. Iranians who had wanted regime change at any cost now came to see how horrible the cost could be. They don’t want insecurity, and they no longer want, for example, the police to be disbanded because, during wartime, some force needs to prevent looting and rioting and chaos.
The other surprising outcome was how little Khamenei’s death mattered. I lived in Iran for years, and have been writing about it even longer, and I was sure that after Khamenei’s death, power would be up for grabs. But in fact, the regime has rallied, and whatever complexities there are in the decision-making system that is now in place—and we really don’t know much about it—it has been functioning. ...
The Middle East is in a state of great flux. That sense of imperviousness and safety that the principalities and sheikhdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf enjoyed for many, many years—and that they employed to offer themselves as safe havens for investment—is now in doubt. From that perspective, Iran is in a strong position.
Where Iran remains weak is that the economy is getting worse, so dissatisfaction will return. How that will manifest is difficult to say because it is now comprehensively a security state. There is zero tolerance for political disobedience.
I just spoke to someone in Iran today—I got a call from an Italian number, which is the convoluted way Iranians have to make international calls now, through VPNs and rerouting and such workarounds. Anyway, it was an elderly woman calling to express her condolences because my father recently died. This is a typically Iranian thing to do in a time of extraordinary stress: to think of other people, to think about their moment of loss.
But then she said to me, Everything’s been worse since Mr. Khamenei died. And this was someone who’d been praying for the end of the Islamic Republic and for the demise of Khamanei. Now that he’s dead, people are wondering if he was in fact a restraining influence on the regime. ...
Americans are perhaps less confused than Iranians at the strange moment. Fully seventy percent of us view this as Donald Trump's war of choice, foolish, deadly, even evil, all at once. And now the Orange Toddler can't figure how to back out of it and we all live with the consequences.
Well, here's one way it happens:
Since the start of the [current] 119th Congress, five members of the House—four Democrats and one Republican—have died. Several others have missed significant periods of work because of illnesses that either remain mysterious or have been revealed by the president as being quite serious.
In recent history, the deadliest session of Congress was the 117th, which took place in 2021–2023, when seven lawmakers died. With five deaths among the ranks, the 119th Congress is among the deadliest since then; the 115th Congress also had five deaths during its two-year span.
According to an analysis from Slate, 16 lawmakers have died in office in the past decade, which is greater than any stretch of three consecutive Congresses since the new millennium.
Replacement by mortality seems an extreme way to achieve generational transition.
Congress is old. The nation is in general not young; our median age is about 40, half younger, half older. Perhaps that's why we seem to have an enduring tolerance for politicians who have long reached their sell-by date.
Congresscritters of both parties take extended absences for health reasons. Republican Tom Kean Jr. who apparently has been absent for months is only 57. Maybe he's got a good excuse, but he's not saying. Meanwhile "Representative Frederica S. Wilson, 83, a Florida Democrat, has been absent from the Capitol for over a month." Apparently she had an eye ailment and apparently she is running for reelection. Despite Florida redistricting which favors Republicans, her Miami district remains a safe D seat, so expect her to be around for awhile.
Re-electing an 83 year old doesn't suggest dynamism. I'm grateful my Congresscritter Nancy Pelosi, 86, has decided to hang it up. Over her many years in office, I'd describe her as growing in wisdom.
Despite the impression one gets that Congress is stuffed with old people, the tilt toward the old has very slightly moderated in the last four years. The Pew Research Center reports:
The median age of voting members of the House of Representatives is now 57.5 years. That’s down from 57.9 at the start of the 118th Congress (2023-25), 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-23), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-21) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-19).
The Senate, following the death or retirement of some of its oldest members, has reversed its aging trend. The new Senate’s median age is 64.7 years, down from 65.3 at the start of the previous Congress. The median age of the Senate had previously risen for three Congresses in a row: from 62.4 (115th) to 63.6 (116th), to 64.8 (117th) and to 65.3 (118th).
I'm a boomer, but I'm well aware that the time for the political dominance of my generation is so over. Last year New York Times Opinion published this delicious jeremiad against our monopolization of the power and wealth. I can't figure out how to embed the video here, but click this link for an experience.
Our money, even tiny sums, does much more for candidates and causes we support when we give in June than when we join the last minute rush in October.
Oh, they'll keep asking all the way until election day in November. But, once primary elections are completed, this is the time when our cash enables campaigns to turn a trickle of interest into a torrent of support.
If you are going to give any candidate cash for their campaign, do it now!
And then, when we get to the fall, do more later. Those of us whose small donations may feel like nothing can help campaigns directly with voter contact, whether in person or on phones.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
• • •
Here's an assessment of where US democracy stands since the Supremes did their bit to break the coming elections. From Democratic Party stalwart Simon Rosenberg:
... what the Rs have found is a way to steal more Congressional seats, giving them a brief respite from the unrelenting bad news and terrible polling data; but the overall political landscape has gotten far worse for them in recent weeks.
Trump’s war has failed, and he and America are far weaker today; his tariffs were declared illegal (again); the new inflation data was much worse than expected, and the chance of inflation returning to a comfortable place before the election has become very, very unlikely; the damage from their health care cuts are starting to be felt far more acutely; their close, vital ally Orban fell, and Magyar has become a new potent global symbol of democracy; like Trump’s war Putin’s war is failing too, further weakening the Putin-Trump-MAGA political project...
Trump’s poll numbers keep dropping, we keep winning elections and overperforming everywhere; and we could very well flip two Supreme Court seats in Georgia on Tuesday, something that will be rightly seen as a powerful rebuke of the corruption of the courts by Trump, Roberts and their allies.
It is also critical that we see the right’s spasm of racist gerrymandering as a sign of weakness, desperation, and fear, not strength and confidence. They are scared of the American people and of us.
As they should be, for these MAGAs have done more harm to the country and to our democracy than perhaps any other political leaders in our history, and the American people are right to be pissed, highly motivated to vote and throw them out of office.
Despite their illicit gaming of our electoral system Democrats are still favored to win the House, perhaps by not the same margins, and the Senate is still very much in play.
We knew taking power away from Trump and the Rs this year would be hard so what is happening now is nothing new. We must stay resolute and determined, and keep working as hard as we can.
This remains a year of extraordinary opportunity for us, one where we can expand our maps and win in red places and red states where we have not been regularly competitive in many, many years….
My emphasis. I think this is more than spin, though watching southern racist whites crow about getting rid of the Black members in Congress is rage inducing. It's on all of us to work harder. We know we can have a better country if we make it.
Karen Attiah is done with being anyone's good girl. The journalist from Texas was something of a rising star at the Washington Post, before Jeff Bezos decided to rein in "his" writers. She led the newspaper's Global Opinions section. She wrote her own opinion pieces about race, gender, culture, human rights -- the stuff that disquiets billionaire boys. She was fired for, perhaps among other causes, not being properly respectful about the murder of right wing agitator Charlie Kirk, condemning the crime, but posting on BlueSky: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence." Seems merely accurate to me, but apparently too much for her boss. There are lawsuits ...
The Met Gala was one of her beats -- beautiful people performing varieties of beauty for charity and ego gratification. On her Substack, she lets loose on that scene, now sponsored by Bezos.
... Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence.
When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.
In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people.
We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past.
No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress.
Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.
But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.
A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.
We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans. ...
Now there's a terrifying picture of the future, one which is not the only way to envision where we are going, but certainly a possible way. I am grateful for Attiah's incisive courage. I am grateful for her rage.
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill's newsletter makes a clear call to us all. Republicans seek to drive the diverse majority which we are on the way to becoming out of public life. That's what the current redistricting push to make southern congressional delegations all white amounts to. Voters will lose their options and their power. It all starts with disenfranchising Black Americans, as it always has.
When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs.
What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence.
The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind. ...
But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country.
... No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.”
If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama?
... Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can.
Read the whole thing. And vote. And let's harass our electeds to make whatever structural reforms to the system that are required to make democracy work for all of us ...
I remember Jonestown. I was shopping in a San Francisco thrift store in November 1978 when the news came over the store radio that hundreds of members of Jim Jones' weird cult had "drunk the koolaid" and, along with Jones, were dead in a Guyana jungle. So was a Congressman who had gone to investigate what was happening to his constituents. Staff and journalists had also been shot.
Jim Jones' followers, mostly older Black citizens, had been a visible presence in San Francisco. He'd bus them in to demonstrations for cheaper housing. The white hippies who made up the rest of the crowd were both welcoming and bemused at this addition to their numbers; then off the People's Temple folks would go, usually insulated from much interaction with rest of us. Jones' ability to deliver a crowd gave him a local political potency. Eventually Jones led his followers off to remote South America, and, in his madness, murdered them.
That's the sort of thing that can happen when a cult takes hold of a mass of people. We should be warned.
Paul Waldman believes it is appropriate to think of MAGA as a cult. That resonates with me. And Waldman expects more madness all the way through the midterm elections.
When the cult goes bad
In cults like Jonestown, the leader’s own descent into madness pulls everyone down with him, and that’s pretty much what’s happening now. There may not be any way to avert a midterm blowout [written before the Supremes allowed Southern states to resegregate their elections mitigating the likely blowout], but a different president would at least be promoting policies that weren’t so directly and dramatically damaging to his party’s political fortunes. He wouldn’t be knocking down buildings and talking constantly about his ballroom, and he wouldn’t have started a war like the one we’re in and telling people that they just have to suck it up and tolerate $5 a gallon gas because things will magically get better.
But now you have two factors that together are dooming the party. First, Trump is basically decompensating; whatever ability he once had to attract and persuade people has withered away, and all that’s left are the most unappealing parts of his personality. He is gaining no new adherents; instead, he’s losing support among the electorate every day.Second, he built the current incarnation of the GOP around absolute loyalty to him, enforced through the kind of petty revenge he’s still trying to carry out. With just a couple of exceptions (e.g. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump is trying very hard to defeat), Republicans all decided that they would not only support him unequivocally but engage in regular rituals of public fealty, the result of which is that their own identities were subsumed and voters who are mad at Trump can reasonably take out that anger at anyone with an R after their name.
Put it together, and every Republican on the ballot is little more than an appendage of a mad king who grows more unstable by the day. ...
It's up to the rest of us -- we're the majority -- to work every way we can to enforce that we've had enough of the cult of the Mad King. And at the same time, to seek to break the spell holding so many voters in the cult.
She loved being a mother. I think she was rather good at it, possibly because she'd been through a lot and was fully matured when I came along. I loved her very much even when we didn't understand each other.
And now for some observations from somebody else's elections. Britain has just come through a round of local votes and the results seem to imply big changes in how that country's democracy might function in the next decade.
The New York Times summarizes:
... Millions of Britons voted in elections to Parliaments in Scotland and Wales, and to municipalities in England. And they delivered a damning verdict on [Prime Minister] Starmer’s governing Labour Party. ... [Labour is analogous to our Democratic Party; it has a large majority of the seats in Parliament which means its elected leader runs the government.]
The main victor on Thursday was the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party [Britain's MAGA], which gained more than 1,400 seats on municipal councils across England. The party took seats from the Conservative Party and from Labour and consolidated its status as the dominant party of Britain’s political right. But the left-wing Green Party also made gains at the expense of Labour.
The results shattered the grip on power long held by Labour and the Conservative [Party], and signaled a new political landscape in which at least seven parties are vying for votes across Britain.
Although this complicated set of local elections won't mean the end of the central Labour government for now, clearly something's stirring -- and even looking from the US, this seems to mark a significant political shakeup -- something bigger than the fact that Starmer seems a literally unappealing leader.
The British left-wing political blog Another Angry Voice, by Thomas G. Clark, has lots to say about the apparent crack up in British politics, one section of which might seem highly familiar to us in the U.S.
What did we learn from the 2026 elections?... Demographics
This topic always provokes fury from the "not all boomers" brigade, but it’s absolutely undeniable now.
The biggest determining factor in how people used to vote in the 20th Century was social class. The biggest determining factor in how people vote these days is age.
If only the votes of working age people were counted, the results would be very different, with the Greens, Labour, and the Lib-Dems faring dramatically better.
If only pensioners votes were counted, we’d be looking at even more massive Reform gains.
... The working age population want some hope; and affordable housing; and decent wages; and workers rights; and investment economics. The boomers want a [radical fascist Nigel] Farage-style demolition job on the last remnants of the post-war [welfare state]settlement. You know, the mixed economy economic conditions that made them the richest generation ever.
Their parents’ generation fought in WWII to stop the extreme-right, now they’re absolutely gagging for the extreme-right to tear down the last remnants of the post-war legacy that their parents’ generation left them.
It’s not all of them, but it’s a huge percentage of them. ...
Makes me wonder how much of the strength of MAGA can similarly be largely attributed to Donald Trump's (and my) age cohort.
The Pew Research Center provides some suggestive data from 2024. They explicitly include both people who are willing to say they identify with a US political party and also those whose lean toward one or the other; lots of voters claim independence, but actually possess a persistent lean as a consequence of the system offering election after election with only two choices.
Age, generational cohorts and party identification
As some Brits might say, we too have a boomer problem ... Since older people are more likely to vote than young people, these differences have powerful consequences.Today, age is strongly associated with partisanship – and this pattern has been in place for more than a decade.
The Democratic Party holds a substantial edge among younger voters, while the Republican Party has the advantage among the oldest groups.
• About two-thirds of voters ages 18 to 24 (66%) associate with the Democratic Party, compared with 34% who align with the GOP.
• There is a similarly large gap in the partisan affiliation of voters ages 25 to 29 (64% are Democrats or lean that way vs. 32% for Republicans).
• Voters in their 30s also tilt Democratic, though to a lesser extent: 55% are Democrats or Democratic leaners, 42% are Republicans or Republican leaners.
Neither party has a significant edge over the other among voters in their 40s and 50s:
• Half of voters in their 40s associate with the Democratic Party, and 47% are affiliated with the Republican Party.
• The shares are reversed among voters in their 50s: 50% align with the Republicans, 47% with the Democrats.
Among voters ages 60 and older, the GOP holds a clear advantage:
• Republican alignment is 10 percentage points higher than Democratic alignment (53% vs. 43%) among voters in their 60s.
• Voters ages 70 to 79 are slightly more likely to be aligned with the GOP (51%) than the Democratic Party (46%). [Might this slight counter trend show we were 1960s rebels once?]
• About six-in-ten voters 80 and older (58%) identify with or lean toward the GOP, while 39% associate with the Democratic Party.
My cohort of progressive boomers do our bit by working to encourage the younger folks to participate!
The despicable racist hacks on the Supreme Court have eviscerated the hard won national Voting Rights Act passed in 1965: an email from the national citizen action group Indivisible speaks to this moment.
Civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis advised us. “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
He encouraged us. “Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.”He challenged us. “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
Waging a Good War: a military history of the Civil Rights Moment: 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks could not be a more timely read if we are to take up John Lewis' challenge to continue his good struggle. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post covering our wars and military affairs, Ricks long wrote a fascinating blog in Foreign Policy in which he dialogued with past and present military personnel about their profession.
In this 2022 book, he explores the civil rights campaigns, "the Movement" as it was known, from the perspective of a war correspondent.
In the1960s the United States became a genuine democracy for the first time in its history, as laws and practices that prevented many Black Americans from voting were challenged by the civil rights movement. ... Now, six decades later, a significant part of the American political establishment has succeeded in repealing many of the voting rights gains of the 1960s.
This national arc led me to go back and read hundreds of books on the civil rights movement. The more I delved in that history, the more I found myself calling on my own experiences as a war correspondent to interpret what I was reading. I saw the overall strategic thinking that went into the Movement, and the field tactics that flowed from that strategy. ... I began to see the Movement as a kind of war -- that is, a series of campaigns on carefully chosen ground that eventually led to victory. The Siege of Montgomery. The Battle of Birmingham. The March on Washington. The final assault at Selma.
He saw what was coming and what is now before us:
... The same antidemocratic faction of American life that opposed the Movement in the 1960s has been resurgent lately ... there are signs we are once again threatened by the ancient and powerful forces of caste and oligarchy. If America is to have what most Americans want -- a multiracial, multiethnic democracy -- we will need to renew the promise of the peaceful voting rights crusade ...
And he brought a prescription for understanding that past which has lessons for our future struggles:
... to my surprise no studies have looked at the Movement through the prism of its similarity to military operations ...
... the perspective of military history is helpful, even perhaps imperative, if we are to discern how to apply its lessons to our predicaments today. No, the civil rights movement was not a traditional army with weapons and a single command structure. Yet from 1955 to 1968 a disciplined mass of people waged a concerted, organized struggle in a cause greater than themselves.
Many died; many more shed blood; thousands were put behind bars. In conducting their campaigns, activists made life changing decisions with inadequate information while operating under wrenching stress and often facing violent attacks -- circumstances that are similar to the nature of leadership in war, making the military lens a useful one in understanding what happened and why.
The bulk of the book is a vivid telling of the incidents of the culminating civil rights campaign of the mid-1960s. There was plenty of drama and not a few setbacks along the way, but there was also planning and strategic brilliance.
... Overall the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. ... Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a veteran of the Movement who served for years in Mississippi, summarized it as "struggle -- disciplined, thoughtful, creative struggle." ...
Discipline in military operations is most often thought of as following one's training and obeying legal orders, and both are indeed crucial. But the foundation of it all is self-discipline, most often in simply being persistent, of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, of keeping control of one's own emotions and fears in order to serve a greater good. In the civil rights movement, an additional form of discipline was maintaining the message that is being sent out to the world. ... As King once put it, "Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks."
... Strategy... involves ... understanding who you are, and next identifying one's goals, and only then developing an overarching plan for using tactics to achieve those goals. One of the Movement's great strengths was that its leaders formulated a strategy, then developed tactics that fit their approach, and finally gave to the people who were assigned to execute those tactics the training they needed to do so. Each of these levels fit together, with each action carrying a message -- the flesh carrying the word, as it were. That meshing is harder than it looks.
The contemporary American military, by contrast, often tends to be good tactically while lacking an overarching strategy ... tactical excellence without a strategic understanding resembles a Ferrari without a steering wheel -- the vehicle may be powerful and look good, but it won't get you where you need to go.
The Orange Toddler's "excursion" into Iran sure confirms that last point.
As a movement foot soldier of the Sixties and also of the subsequent women's and gay movements which were spawn of the Civil Rights Movement, I was also interested in how Ricks applied his military frame to the time after the Voting Rights Act was won -- and Movement leaders asked themselves, "what's next?" His observations hold lessons for us today as we envision turning back MAGA fascism. We have a chance to win that battle and we must, as decisively as possible. But then what? Ricks writes about the problems of successful struggles:
... Success in war inevitably unleashes a new set of problems. As the end of the struggle comes into sight, bonds between allies begin to fray. This is not just a failing of human nature, though festering personal grievances, feelings rubbed raw in the friction of war, often are part of the cause. There are realistic political reasons as well. As the danger presented by the enemy recedes, allies lose much of the incentive they have had to submerge their differences. Instead they begin to focus on them ... As Winston Churchill said midway through [World War II], "The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are still no less difficult."
... as resolution nears, leaders necessarily begin to contemplate the next task, and because of their differences they often disagree on what that should be. For the civil rights movement, a set of questions arose: ... what is our next step? Is it to go into elective politics? ...Or to remain outside the system, pressuring it...? ... centrifugal pressures worked on the Movement during the Selma campaign. And so by its end, old comrades began to look at each other in new and more critical ways. ...
We're in a battle; we're in campaigns. We don't know how any of our agonies will turn out. But we can learn from those who went before.
it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strong man, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator — and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
The maxim used to be of Mexico: “So far from God and so close to the United States." Extend that to the states of Central America, to El Salvador, but also Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala under the current North American regime.
Corruption is a descriptor that commentators throw up endlessly in relation to the Trump shit show -- but what do they mean?
As I read around the news, I've realized I'm often confused by how the word is being used.
I know instinctively what corruption means: it's what is going on when a powerful person's favor can be bought, when the recipient of a gift is bribed, is "for sale." Certainly we see plenty of that from the regime, from immigration enforcer Tom Homan's taking a fifty thousand dollar bribe in a paper bag, to the Trump spawn hitting up oil sheiks for billions, to the Orange Toddler demanding tribute from corporations, ostensibly for his ballroom.
But the word "corruption" carries a lot of connotations less instinctive to me that are even more applicable to the Trump regime. I see the Justice Department prosecution of James Comey for seashells called "corrupt", for example and wonder how that is meant.
So -- on to the dictionary. To my surprise, in an online dictionary, the equation of "corruption" with bribery doesn't emerge until fifth definition. The first few meanings cited are "corrupt" instances of impurity whether in metals or other objects, or of sexual morals, or of integrity and honesty.
I guess I need to revamp my internal definition. "Corruption" means first and foremost "rot on the inside," which the Donald displays extravagantly and encourages in the people who surround him.
Democratic politicians denouncing Donald Trump use the label "corruption" -- meaning rotten at the core -- constantly. For example, I got this today in a fund appeal from Gavin Newsom: "the Trump administration is a corruption story."
• 8 or 9 countries he's done major golf course or development deals with.
• Meme coins and stablecoins.
• The Peace Board is about getting a piece for Witkoff and Kushner.
• Donald Trump Jr. with the drone and mineral companies.
• This isn't about bibles, sneakers and watches on the Trump store ...It's the greatest grift we've seen in our lifetime.
Gavin is not my guy, but he knows where GOP rot is and calls it out.
The deepest example I've seen of using the label "corruption" to describe expansively what decent citizens are up against comes from James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas.
"We are living in an era of corruption. When I say corruption, I don't just mean illegal activity. I mean corruption in the deeper sense -- the rotting of something from the inside.
Politicians serving billionaire mega donors instead of their constituents. That's political corruption. the top one percent owning more wealth than the entire middle class -- that's economic corruption. For profit social media algorithms sowing division in our communities and turning neighbor against neighbor -- that's social corruption. Our systems are rotting from the inside out. The ties that bind us together are unraveling.
The most powerful people in this country are profiting off our pain. Profiting off our division. Profiting off our disconnection from one another. This is, at its root, a spiritual crisis. And it will require a spiritual solution."
Clip by way of Simon Rosenberg. Talarico sees rot and claims to want to help us do better; maybe he will, though his electoral challenge is great.
Anand Gopal's New Yorker article about how Syrians overthrew their long time dictator Bashir Assad in 2012 and how the new democracy degenerated over time into despair has haunted me. Here's Gopal and what I find myself thinking about (emphasis added):
Eight months of painstaking political work—building coalitions, establishing civic front organizations, circulating propaganda, well-timed theatre—had won ISIS a decisive following. Revolutionaries had braved bullets and prison to overthrow the dictatorship and build a fledgling democracy. In the beginning, they had the allegiance of the masses, who marched through the alleyways and plazas chanting in praise of freedom. But now people spoke only of the prices at the grocer, the cost of rent. The city had exhausted itself, and people hoped not for liberation but deliverance.
Syria is hardly the only example of this phenomenon. Persistent economic inequality has long sounded democracy’s death knell. In the latter years of the Roman Republic, landowners amassed unprecedented riches while plebeians floundered, spawning resentment that infected many corners of society. In the context of this soaring inequality—that is, of ordinary people’s loss of power—there appeared, for the first time, populist politicians like Julius Caesar, who promised reforms while accruing dangerous degrees of power themselves. Other élites fiercely resisted the populist surge but refused to make meaningful concessions to address the citizenry’s core grievances. Ultimately, civil war led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of dictatorship.
In 1848, a popular uprising in France overthrew the monarchy, demanding universal manhood suffrage and wealth redistribution. The revolution established government-owned workshops that employed the poor, but were bitterly opposed by the wealthy. A conservative government shut them down, prompting bloody riots. Eventually, the masses voted for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the famed emperor, in a landslide. He styled himself as all things to all people—a paragon of order to the right, a champion of the poor to the left. As soon as he was elected, he cracked down on the freedoms of press and assembly, and later dissolved parliament. Before long, he declared himself emperor. ...... the tyrannical impulse of authoritarian populists is the same across the world. In one context, the authoritarian is railing against non-Muslims; in another it is immigrants. No matter the trope, the forms of mobilization are identical: those who feel powerless and hopeless, who are embittered by the rapacious greed of élites controlling their democracy, will begin to question the idea of democracy. If tyranny is where democracies go to die, inequality is the cause of death.
The current regime in Washington is flaunting its oligarchic nature and tyrannical pretensions. What else to make of Trump's gilded ballroom and his proposed triumphal arch? Should the people ever take our government back, his edifices should be torn down and ground to landfill to be used to fight waters rising due to climate warming.
What to do about the physical markers of Trumpism is easy to envision. How to rebuild a responsible, responsive democracy is harder, but that's the project.
Our ballots for the California June primary have arrived -- and I'm not going to do a damn thing with mine for the next few weeks.
It's not my usual practice to delay voting. Usually I deposit the ballot in our nearby drop box right away and sigh with relief, or at least resignation.
But given the chance that our stupid "top two" primary voting system means we could get stuck with two Republicans as the only choices for governor if they come out ahead of the gaggle of Dems running, I have to wait and probably go with the Dem who seems most likely to make the November ballot. Even if that individual is not my top choice of governor.
The combination of the state's electorate having done away with party primaries for this dumb system and the indiscipline of the Democratic Party in throwing up so many candidates leaves me in this absurd position. Let me offer applause to Betty Yee who had the decency to pull out when her campaign didn't catch fire. Let me denounce Mat Mahan who jumped in at the last minute with a ton of billionaire money, making this mess worse. Forget that guy!
If this were a time when I could vote my true choice, I'd vote for Katie Porter. That woman is enough a policy wonk to be able to be a good governor, after a learning curve. I don't care if she is sometimes abrasive; that's often the rap on very sharp women.
But responsible citizenship may force me to vote for whichever Dem looks able to be one of the top two when we get to June. This silly election system robs me and many Californians of their chance to support their first choice of candidate for governor. That's an improvement?
In the morning, my candidate to fill the Congressional seat that the ageless Nancy Pelosi is finally leaving joined airport workers from the Service Employees International Union in blocking an airport road way and was arrested. Connie Chan stands up for workers. The San Francisco Chronicle was there and reported:
“San Francisco airport is the people’s airport,” Chan told supporters before her arrest. “We know our workers deserve fair pay, a fair contract, health care and benefits. We’re demanding that the workers get that benefits and fair pay right now.”
Later in the day, protesters from among unionized workers and activist groups gathered in Civic Center plaza.
It should probably not come as a surprise that this very cogent denunciation of the Republican Supreme Court's murder of a pillar of racial justice under law should come from a writer whose experience is in studying and teaching the American Civil War to school groups and other ordinary citizens.
Kevin M. Levin pulls no punches about the Callais decision:
Jim Crow Didn't Die. It Went to Law School.
... The Voting Rights Act was written in blood following years of sacrifice and bloodshed. It came directly after Selma. After the clubs and the fire hoses were unleashed on African Americans trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.
It came after centuries during which Black Americans were systematically oppressed and for decades following the end of Reconstruction, when they were legally stripped of the franchise. The Act was the hard-won answer to a hard, ugly question: will this country actually mean what it says?
Alabama police assault John Lewis, Selma, Alabama, 1965 For sixty years, imperfectly but meaningfully, it tried to. Today, that answer is being rolled back.
But this ruling does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader campaign of manipulation and erasure.
Look at the push to return Confederate monuments to public property—statues of men who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery and white supremacy. The argument made for these monuments is almost always framed as “heritage” or “history.” But heritage is a choice.
We choose what to honor. Returning these statues to pedestals of prominence is not a neutral act of preservation. It is a statement about whose history matters, and whose suffering can be brushed aside in the name of regional pride.
Look at the Trump administration’s assault on how Black history is taught and remembered. Federal pressure on universities and schools, the gutting of diversity programs, the reframing of civil rights history as divisive “ideology” rather than documented fact. These are not random culture-war skirmishes. They are part of a systematic effort to make the full truth of American history inaccessible, uncomfortable, or simply illegal to teach.
It’s a cliche, but true. You cannot understand where you are going if you are not allowed to honestly reckon with where you have been.
Self serving, exploitative lies about the full humanity of all people, and enshrining those lies in an economic system and laws, got us a Civil War once. It seems all too likely that the philosopher George Santayana's aphorism will be proved out again: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Little as the MAGAs might understand this, an important way to avert more civil conflict is to fight back against their attempt to erase accurate history. Oddly enough, truthful history can make possible a path forward.
It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:
A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU).
Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .
• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri:
... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.
And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.
I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?
... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.
My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow...
Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice.
Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:
On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws.
The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....
... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects.
“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...
The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:
... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit.
Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years. ...
The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."
If you live in a blue state -- and especially in a blue city -- it's easy to forget that a part of the MAGA authoritarian project is to rob women of our bodily autonomy.
If you live somewhere where the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision empowered state governments to outlaw abortion and the people have not been able to stop anti-abortion pols from implementing the ban, this will probably not surprise you.
... After years of anti-abortion pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that states test their drinking water for abortion medication and birth control, putting the drugs on a federal list of potential “contaminants.”
The move clears the way for Republicans to restrict abortion and contraception under the guise of protecting the environment—including humiliating regulations that could force women to bag up their pregnancy tissue as medical waste. And at a moment when pregnancy-related arrests are rising and states are moving to punish abortion patients, it marks a dangerous acceleration toward a full-blown reproductive surveillance state.
... Anti-abortion activists claim that when women use medication to end their pregnancies, remnants of the drug poison the environment and water supply. They also say that pregnancy tissue is getting into the drinking water, and that Americans are all “drinking abortions.”
As you can probably guess, there is no truth to any of this. ...
She explains that, yes, the scientific studies have been done.
We metabolize abortion and birth control pills like any other medication, and only trace amounts leave our bodies at all. Using anti-abortion logic, every single drug people take—from antidepressants to Viagra—would be a “pollutant.”
This, like all the right's anti-abortion and anti-contraception hysteria, is about controlling women. We've had enough of this BS!
