MAGA's nihilism of grievance has been defeated before

It's almost a throwaway line in a post by European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, a post mostly calling out the failings of the New York Times. But I think it's critically important for understanding much of the behavior of much of MAGA:

Key to understanding [Office of Budget and Management director Russell] Vought’s worldview is the idea that the constitutional order - and with it the “natural” order itself - has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what is no more.

Vought is correct, to a substantial extent. Twentieth century America undermined, eroded, and finally largely tore down the unchallenged power of white supremacy and patriarchy (of which homophobia and gender absolutism are features.) Much of MAGA hates the America the majority of us have made. So they call us "the Left." Some of us may identify with some "Left"; but most of us are just ordinary Americans who have moved on from habitual white supremacy and woman hatred. The country is not perfected, but it has moved on from MAGA's cultural grievances. 

And Trumpism is wildly unpopular and getting more so with every price increase and raid on Black and brown neighbors.

So, because MAGA lost the culture, its supporters lost hope for the future. To replace an imperfect democracy, they think they've found their king. MAGA attracts losers, whose only unifying idea is to tear it all down. 

Paul Krugman catches this reality when he digs into the material and consequential stupidity of MAGA's war on science:

... Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want. ... A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. ... 

... Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over.

Historian of fascism John Ganz calls out MAGA as embodying the nationalism of losers. 

... MAGA’s base of support comes from those parts of the country and those social classes and regions that actually did lose out or never gained from the international system. Its bourgeoisie is mostly from the heartland, not from the coasts.  

Its intellectual class, or clerisy, is drawn from those who could not achieve the first rank under the old “meritocratic” system, who couldn’t fully enter the cosmopolitan elite, or decided to defect from its ranks opportunistically to gain pride of place in the new movement. ... 

This fear, hatred, and envy of the cosmopolitan elite, this anti-Atlanticist, anti-globalist current, sometimes called “isolationism,” but more correctly called sovereigntism or even just nationalism, is a longstanding constellation of ideas in American politics ...

Dorothy Thompson recognized these second-raters in her classic 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? 

For that matter, so did my mother, who, though a Republican housewife, recognized and participated in warning against European fascism during its rise in the mid-1930s.

This country has always attracted the world's desperate who hoped to become winners. Are we going to let the MAGA losers kill off that hope? NO KINGS! 

Friday cat blogging

We live with overseers. Yes, Mio is a big boy.

An experiment in neighborliness

Yesterday I participated in an interesting canvassing experiment sponsored by Indivisible. I was sent online a list of 10 near (like almost next door!) neighbors which their data nerds thought should be turned out to support Prop. 50. I found 3 clear YES voters, talked to one probable NO voter -- didn't find the others. I left explanatory leaflets I had printed out where I could.

Not bad. 

The list wasn't as clear or useful as it might have been; whoever created it listed each door as  "LastName:Household" (for example "Vasquez household") -- not particularly useful in a place where many of my neighbors are Spanish speaking couples who use different last names. And others live in group apartments with multiple residents and multiple last names. 

Still, this is a promising canvass plan when there are lots of volunteers who can be organized online to do small chunks of work.

I was pleased to notice this sign on one of these households. Somehow, I'd missed it previously. That can happen when you get to know your neighbors.

Send in some grown-ups!

I should resist the impulse to post this, but I won't.

Do these clones have any idea how stupid they look? 

 

The pink jacket is Pam Bondi, Trump's suck-up Attorney General. The one behind is the unqualified woman he sent to indict former FBI director James Comey. Apparently the only qualification for office these days is bleached hair, a phony smile and Trump-love.

Mamdami offers a history lesson

I hope this YouTube message from Zohran Mamdami is everywhere on the internet. Mamdami is the Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for mayor of New York if you've been distracted and had not heard. He's ahead in the November contest. 

Just in case you missed it, here Mamdami takes a stand for his potential transgender constituents. 

And he proves he is not afraid to go where so many pols are afraid to tred.

Erin in the Morning explains why the ad is so powerful:

The ad, set to transgender artist SOPHIE’s “It’s OK to Cry,” opens with the story of Sylvia Rivera, a trailblazing activist who helped lead the Stonewall uprising and lay the foundation for the first Pride. It then traces landmarks of New York’s queer history ...

The ad serves as a masterclass for Democrats on how to talk about transgender people with empathy and conviction. Many of Mamdani’s own supporters may not know the history he highlights, and so it serves the purpose to educate his supporters in how to humanely talk about transgender people. Through this framing, he grounds his stance in moral clarity rather than political expedience—a rare trait in modern campaigns. 

For voters on the fence, the ad demonstrates that his support for transgender rights isn’t a focus-grouped calculation; it’s a reflection of his core values. In doing so, Mamdani not only strengthens trust among progressives but also draws in those who may have felt ambivalent, offering them something increasingly scarce in politics today: authenticity. 

Dems need to learn that when Republicans try to make you squirm because some of your supporters are their targets for hatred, you can either prove you are chickenshit or step up and stand up for the human dignity of all people. No alternative works. Dodging only makes you look unbelievable and untrustworthy to everyone. 

An historian's credo

The Donald thinks he can rewrite what happened in the past. He can't. When we choose not to enable this fascist project, that, too, is resistance.

On this Indigenous People's Day, which MAGA wants to rename for the Italian adventurer who blundered upon this continent in 1492, Heather Cox Richardson defends the honorable study of history.  

... Estimates of the number of Native people living in North America and South America in 1490 vary widely, but there were at least as many as 50 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. In the next 200 years, displacement, enslavement, war, and especially disease would kill about 90% of those native peoples. Most historians see the destruction of America’s Indigenous peoples as the brutal triumph of European white men over those they perceived to be inferior.

Historians are not denigrating historical actors or the nation when they uncover sordid parts of our past. Historians study how and why societies change. As we dig into the past, we see patterns that never entirely foreshadow the present but that give us ideas about how people in the past have dealt with circumstances that look similar to circumstances today. 

If we are going to get an accurate picture of how a society works, historians must examine it honestly, seeing the bad as well as the good. With luck, seeing those patterns will help us make better decisions about our own lives, our communities, and our nation in the present.

History is different from commemoration. History is about what happened in the past, while commemoration is about the present. We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire.

Because Richardson is a real historian, she points out that the origin of today's Columbus holiday was as a response in the 1920s to the Ku Klux Klan trying to erase southern and eastern European immigrants. Those were the days when the Knights of Columbus functioned as a resistance organization!

As society changes, the values we want to commemorate shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s Indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not “left-wing arson” to want to commemorate a different set of values than the country held in the 1920s.

What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative. Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns. The lessons we learn about how society changes will be false, and the decisions we make based on those false patterns will not be grounded in reality.

And a society grounded in fiction, rather than reality, cannot function.

I'm with her. 

Photo by way of Dave Zirin from occupied DC. 

"What's happening right now just doesn't define America."

What's so striking about George Retes' story of false arrest and abuse by ICE and/or other unidentified federal agents in Southern California is that he is absolutely clear that he's a person with rights. He's suing the federal government because he trusts he should expect accountability for what was done to him.

Civil rights in America have always been about one thing: holding power accountable when it strips people of their dignity and freedom. They are not privileges that government agents get to decide whether to honor. What happened to me wasn’t just a mistake—it was a violation of the very protections that our Constitution guarantees.

On July 10, I was on my way to work when ICE agents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face. They dragged me out, threw me to the ground, and even while I was complying, one agent kneeled on my neck and another kneeled on my back as others stood by and watched.

I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney. I was placed on suicide watch and missed my daughter’s third birthday. No explanation. No charges. No apology. One day, I was just told, “you’re free to go.”...

... [The Department of Homeland Security has] stated that US citizens are not being “wrongfully” arrested by ICE, that their enforcement operations are highly targeted, and that their personnel conduct due diligence to know who they are targeting. DHS also framed criticisms of the operation as “smears” against ICE officers, alleging such claims have contributed to an increase in assaults on law enforcement.

... DHS’s statement ignores reality and is designed to demonize and villainize people who don’t let the government trample over their rights, and aren’t afraid to speak the truth. ... The truth is that I am a US citizen and a veteran, and I will continue to pursue accountability for the rights that were violated that day.

This fight is not just about my case—it’s about ensuring that there is recourse when people are silenced, detained, or dehumanized by the very government meant to protect us. ...

Retes gave a detailed YouTube interview to Tim Miller of the Bulwark which you can watch or listen to. In his own words: 

... I was just trying to get to work. Like I'm clearly not going to get there. So I'm just going to leave. Um, and so I get back in my car and they just surround my car, uh, I have agents on my left, my driver's side, my passenger side, agents behind my car, agents in front, just all yelling at me to do different things. The agents on the side are pulling on my door handles, banging on my windows, telling me to get out. Agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, to leave.

... like they're telling me to leave, telling me to get out and doing like contradicting each other. And I'm just there like coughing, trying to catch myself and just eventually my driver's side window shatters. And so ... , an agent sticks his arm through and pepper sprays me in the face.  

[Miller] they just didn't ask you for ID, nothing?

... glass flew everywhere. I had glass in my leg. Uh, they pulled, they dragged me out of the car. Uh, threw me on the ground.

Uh, and I kind of just went with it. Like I wasn't fighting, like there was no point. I'm not stupid. Like I'm not going to fight 20 agents at once. Like that's stupid. Uh, so I kind of just go through with like, you just got to take it. ...

As much as it sucks, as much as this is stupid and this is shitty, it sucks. But you got to take it. ...

And so they dragged me out. They throw me on the ground. And I'm just trying to comply with them, letting them do whatever. And even though I'm complying and just letting them do whatever, an agent comes and he kneels on my neck and another agent kneels on my back.

Retes' account makes clear that immigration agents who hauled him away from this scrum didn't have any real idea why he'd been arrested. They were pretty soon able to verify his U.S. citizen status and that he worked as security at the farm where they held him. They didn't seem to know what to do with him, so they had him taken to Los Angeles' Metropolitan Detention Center. Authorities there also didn't seem to know what to do with him. Still covered with pepper spray, he was put on "suicide watch."

That Friday morning, they, they put me on suicide watch and, uh, they put me in this, uh, they put me in the cell. I'm naked, uh, in like a hospital dress and just a concrete bed with like a mattress, like a thin mattress. And, uh, they leave the light on 24 seven. Uh, there's a glass door and officers just always standing, like sitting out there, um, The psychiatric nurse comes and checks on me once a day.

And so from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon when I'm released, I'm literally in that cell, naked, just in that room. What the fuck? With a light on 24-7. ...

... eventually another officer comes up and he takes me downstairs. He gives me back my clothes.

They make me sign for my phone, my piercings, my watch and stuff. And that was it ... all they just told me like all the charges on you were dropped uh you're free to go uh and that was it ... 

... After being in the military, after doing all that, through that entire process, I knew to just be calm. I've been through the mud. I've been through the fucking shit before, if I'm being honest with you. I know how to keep my cool. I know how to stay calm under pressure and all that really helped me. And just when I got released, ... I was really thankful if I'm being honest with you, like who knows what else could have happened ...

Retes was thrilled to be back to his home and his kids -- and he's still trying to figure out what it means that his own government could do this to him.

[Miller] ... What are you going to do?

Honestly, just... figuring out my life. Honestly, doing all this is a big responsibility as well. Just sharing my story, keeping it alive, letting it be known. ...  Like some people just like this stuff happens to and they just want to forget about it or they just are scared that the government might retaliate. ...  I'm not, I'm not afraid. I mean, I know I did nothing wrong. ... I know the facts for sure. And I'm a hundred percent confident in my, in my story.

... They can lie all they want. They can make all the tweets they want. They could try to live in their own reality, but the truth is out there. And when it, like, if they want to take it to court, I'm like a hundred percent in and I'm a hundred percent ready. ... 

... Like I still love this country and a hundred percent love the army and I love that experience. I love the brotherhood and just the family I made and just the experience. It made me a better person.

It helped me grow. It taught me a lot. ... I know that just what's happening right now just doesn't define America. What's happening right now just doesn't define the flag that I wore, the flag that like we stand for...

... I have no problem still standing by the flag and standing by and believing in the constitution. ... it's really important. ... I think it's everyone's job to speak about it, to get involved because it's not just my rights that were violated. It could happen to you. Nothing's really stopping them really ... I think it's really important to speak out and just tackle this head on. For the government, it's like what they're doing is completely wrong, and I don't agree with them at all. It doesn't matter if you're left, you're right ... like it affects us all. ...

George Retes did not volunteer to be made a test case about whether federal agents can be held accountable for abuses done while carrying out the Homan/Miller/Trump immigrant deportation agenda. But here he finds himself. We all owe him for his courage to stand up for the freedoms he believes in.

Thoughts from a wise elder

Howard Zinn (1922-2010), historian of American possibility, saw a lot in his long life. His wisdom remains relevant.

It's Frogtifa in Portland

Comment not needed. Has ICE met its match?

We've been here before. This is both hopeful and horrible.

According to her bio on the New York Times website, Kate Andrias is a professor of constitutional law and labor law at Columbia Law School, who studies the role of social movements in changing law. She seems very much the woman for the moment!

Andrias writes [gift link]: 

The Constitution Doesn’t Belong to Trump or the Supreme Court

In case after case over the past eight months, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court have acquiesced to President Trump’s lawless and authoritarian actions, often without offering any explanation. The court has allowed the administration to summarily deport migrants to countries where they have no connection. It has condoned racial profiling by federal immigration officers. And it has suggested that it will jettison 90 years of precedent by holding that the president can fire, without cause, the heads of independent agencies. ...

... For the past two decades, Americans have watched the Roberts court dismantle constitutional rights and disable government from regulating in the public interest: overruling Roe v. Wade; invalidating limits on corporate campaign spending; striking down reasonable gun restrictions; and rolling back environmental safeguards.

But since the country’s founding, constitutional meaning has never emerged solely from an elite cadre of justices. Nor has judicial supremacy — what some call “juristocracy”— ever been the reality on the ground. When enough people have organized around a constitutional vision, they have managed to prevail even against a hostile Supreme Court.

Consider the fight for labor rights. During the early 20th century, the court repeatedly invalidated laws protecting unions; judges even jailed labor leaders who led strikes. When Congress, during the Great Depression, passed the National Labor Relations Act enshrining the rights to organize, bargain and strike, most observers believed the Supreme Court would deem the law unconstitutional. But workers organized to defend their rights, articulating a bold constitutional vision rooted in the First Amendment’s rights of free expression and association, the 13th Amendment’s promise of free labor and Congress’s regulatory authority. In the face of huge protests and strikes, and a threat from President Franklin Roosevelt to pack the court with more justices, the Supreme Court relented and upheld the statute. ...

Read it all for an introduction to another era in which the people had to overwhelm, democratically, another Supreme Court majority which tried to uphold an outmoded, cramped, and repressive former era of legal interpretation of American freedoms.

• • • 

Meet a federal judge who is giving the Trump regime fits in DC.

Judge Faruqui has thrown out indictments [gift link] brought by Trump's DC prosecutors which he thinks are "facially deficient."

• • •

Meanwhile the New Republic's legal commentator Matt Ford sees a truly dire precedent for the current moment. 

Trump Is Following in the Footsteps of a Failed English King 

Our Founders’ designs were studiously informed by the mistakes of King Charles I. Our president seems to want to repeat them.  ...

...[Trump] would likely find a kindred spirit in Charles I, the seventeenth-century English king whose own taxation policies and preference for absolute rule led to civil war. Charles’s downfall during the English Civil War helped transition England from the divine right of kings to parliamentary supremacy. It also inspired the Founders as they built a republican government around rights and liberties on these shores. ...

Trump should probably note that the consequence to Charles I was loss of his head under an executioner's ax. 

Free people don't take well to oligarchy and aspiring kings, though it may take us awhile to assert ourselves. Let us do so, firmly, without violence, knowing our forebears have shown the way.

Doing what could be done when the worst came

At a mass meeting in San Francisco working on responses to the Trump presidency last March, I was hanging about in the back of what felt like a repetitive session. A man who I recognized from many such gatherings and demonstrations, but had never spoken with, approached me to chat. He turned out to be Bruce Neuburger; he handed me a card about his recently released book Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew's Defiance in a Time of Terror, published by Monthly Review Press. This is a small press book very much worth searching out. 

A print copy can be found from Powells, an audiobook (that's what I read) from Audible. The San Francisco Public Library was also my source for a copy. 

Bruce Neuburger has created a vivid history of the life and fates of his grandparents. Benno and Anna were prosperous middle class Jews living in Munich. Benno had served honorably, if without enthusiasm, as an over-age draftee in the German army in World War I. After that war, he built a business and invested in land. The family lived through the terrible postwar inflation of the 1920s and the political instability of the Weimar Republic. Times were sometimes bad -- and sometimes better -- for Germany's Jews and for Germans at large. When Hitler's Nazi movement came to power in 1933, the family could hope this was just another turn in twenty years of both prosperity and sporadic insecurity. 

Nazi rule proved enduring and lethal for Jews. Jewish life -- both business and family -- was forced into smaller and smaller crevices of the society. Some of the younger generation quite rapidly decided to flee the looming catastrophe. Benno and Anna's children were among the very few who escaped to real security in America -- the U.S. in the 1930s was not a welcoming destination for Jewish refugees. 

Benno held out a long time before listening to the entreaties of his children to join them across the Atlantic. By the time he was ready to uproot himself in 1939, German Jews had been forced into ghettos. Germany then invaded Poland, western Europe, and eventually Russia. Benno expressed his secret confidence to his friend that Germany would lose the war -- but he had lost all chance of escape.

And so he performed the one solitary act of resistance he could imagine: he wrote postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazis and dropped them in the postal stream. This wasn't effectual, or even meant to be -- there were no addressees. But Benno had found a tiny way to speak his necessary truth. The book offers an imagined account to the first time he dared to do this:

At the corner, a young woman appeared. Benno looked down. He had an urge to turn away but thought that would look suspicious. The woman looked at him as she passed the corner. 

Did she see the star? [the mandatory star of David sewn on his jacket] All he was sure of was that the mark was doing what it was meant to do -- rob him, rob Jews, of their last remnant of dignity. ... 

[Benno Neuburger] looked down at the words he'd written in large letters where an address would normally be: "THE ETERNAL MASS MURDERER, HITLER, I SPIT ON YOU!" He put the card in the mailbox, turned, and walked back to his apartment. 

It took nearly a year for the Nazi postal service to figure out who was carrying on this treacherous practice. But he was caught, imprisoned, tortured, and, perhaps because of his veteran status, brought to trial rather than being summarily shot. A full judicial record survived which formed some of the raw material for his grandson's book.

The Nazi judicial records from the Berlin People's Court concluded:

Benno Israel Neuburger has been executed on Sept. 18th, 1942. The convicted offender denigrated the Fuhrer, and the National Socialist government and committed high treason against the German Reich.

The Reich Ministry of Justice ordered fifty bright red posters announcing the execution of Benno Neuburger to be put up at visible locations in Munich. 

Anna was killed the next day at the death camp at Treblinka, Poland. Bruce Neuburger makes no suggestion that the date of her murder had anything to do with the date of Benno's. The machinery of extermination just ground on for them both.

• • •

The author/grandson, Bruce Neuburger, makes no pretense of writing a conventional academic history. He certainly consulted as many sources as he could find. The reunification of Germany after the 1990 collapse of the East German Soviet-aligned state led to release of the judicial and other records which enabled him to discover particulars about his grandparents' murders in 1942. Neuburger canvassed surviving family members. Recent German historians have also found many lost details of German Jewish resistance to Hitler. 

On this information, Bruce Neuburger wrote a novelistic account of life and tragedy that honors the experience of his family and so many like them. He explains his aim and defends telling his family story his way:

In my effort to bring to life the people whose stories are told here and the social environment in which they lived, I have necessarily imagined situations and relationships beyond the facts that I acquired directly [through historical sources.] I have sought to use the knowledge I gained through extensive historical research and travel to reconstruct the drama of those times. I can promise you, the reader, that I have taken care to reflect the historical moments recounted here as accurately and truthfully as I can.

Ever wonder what it was like to live under, stand against, and die under Nazi rule? This is a book to be read, experienced, and pondered.

Happy Banned Book Week: #bannedbooksweek

To be honest, I don't know if any authority currently bans either of the two classics on the upper shelf lately. But if the banners were more literate, I'm sure they would.

Click to enlarge.

In its heyday, Coming to Power was certainly one of the more banned books of its era. (I've kept another copy.)

By placing these titles in my local  Little Free Library, I'm participating in a simple local protest against the American right's desperate drive to control what we can read.

Learn more here.