Category Archives: Democrats

Autocracy: Rules for survival

Masha Gessen writes: “Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:

We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world….We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.

The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself — as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one. [Continue reading…]

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President Obama’s responsibility to fully inform the American people about Russia’s role in the election of Donald Trump

On October 7, the Director of National Intelligence released a Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement saying:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.

President Obama has 73 days left in office and during this time he has a responsibility to act on this finding.

It may be pointless and arguably counterproductive to start formulating and enacting a strategic response to Russia’s interference in the election — especially given the likelihood that this plan would be set aside by the incoming Trump administration and given the cozy relationship that Trump and Putin are already developing.

Obama’s primary responsibility is to go to the greatest lengths possible in informing the public about what the intelligence services already know and what further information can be established and revealed in the coming weeks.

What is called for is substance to add to the assertion of confidence that has already been made.

In the absence of clear evidence, the assertions about Russia have thus far been tainted by the appearance of being politically partisan — all the more reason why Trump will easily be able to sweep away the issue. Even before the election, he had already dismissed the intelligence finding.

There is a glaring irony in this situation.

On the one hand the FBI just directly intervened in a presidential election — an intervention that was strongly criticized from many quarters and that arguably tipped the result in Trump’s favor. On the other hand, if Obama adopts the traditional caretaker role of an outgoing president, he will likely end up effectively burying evidence that the Russian government not only interfered but helped determine the outcome of a U.S. election.

As much as there might now be a common desire to heal the divisions in America, the public has a right to know and fully understand what just happened.

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Latino voters show Trump what it means to be American

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: On Sunday, two days before the Presidential election, Donald Trump made five campaign stops, in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In Michigan, Ted Nugent served as the warmup act; in Virginia, it was Oliver North. At the end of Trump’s campaign, he has returned to the theme with which he began: the threat that immigrants pose to American society. In Minnesota, he told his supporters that “you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge.” In Michigan, he blamed refugees for putting “your security at risk.” In Pennsylvania, he said, “You have people being brought into your community. Nobody knows who they are.” In Iowa, he described gruesome murders of Americans that were committed by immigrant killers. “The crime that’s been committed by these people is unbelievable.”

But the real news was about the electoral clout of “these people.” The background to those rallies was the accumulating evidence of a surge of Latino early voters, who may well change the course of this election. On Friday night, in Las Vegas, which has a large Latino population, the line to vote at a Cardenas supermarket was so long — at one point, more than a thousand people were waiting — that poll workers kept the site open until well after 10 p.m. The previous week, an A.P. photographer had captured a row of middle-aged women, most of them wearing casino housekeeper uniforms, standing in polling booths. The influential political analyst Jon Ralston wrote on Sunday that, in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead may have put “a fitting final nail in Trump’s coffin.” In Florida, the line outside an Orlando library was ninety minutes long, and the political scientist Dan Smith noted the “explosive early voting turnout of Hispanics.” More than a third of those early voters did not vote in the last Presidential election. “The story of this election may be the mobilization of the Hispanic vote,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, and a vocal opponent of Trump, told the Times this weekend. [Continue reading…]

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Barbara Kingsolver: End this misogynistic horror show. Put Hillary Clinton in the White House

Barbara Kingsolver writes: When I was a girl of 11 I had an argument with my father that left my psyche maimed. It was about whether a woman could be the president of the US.

How did it even start? I was no feminist prodigy, just a shy kid who preferred reading to talking; politics weren’t my destiny. Probably, I was trying to work out what was possible for my category of person – legally, logistically – as one might ask which kinds of terrain are navigable for a newly purchased bicycle. Up until then, gender hadn’t darkened my mental doorway as I followed my older brother into our daily adventures wearing hand-me-down jeans.

But in adolescence it dawned on me I’d be spending my future as a woman, and when I looked around, alarm bells rang. My mother was a capable, intelligent, deeply unhappy woman who aspired to fulfilment as a housewife but clearly disliked the job. I saw most of my friends’ mothers packed into that same dreary boat. My father was a country physician, admired and rewarded for work he loved. In my primordial search for a life coach, he was the natural choice.

I probably started by asking him if girls could go to college, have jobs, be doctors, tentatively working my way up the ladder. His answers grew more equivocal until finally we faced off, Dad saying, “No” and me saying, “But why not?” A female president would be dangerous. His reasons vaguely referenced menstruation and emotional instability, innate female attraction to maternity and aversion to power, and a general implied ickyness that was beneath polite conversation.

I ended that evening curled in bed with my fingernails digging into my palms and a silent howl tearing through me that lasted hours and left me numb. [Continue reading…]

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The fear election

Ron Chandler, University of Florida

Whether you support Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, fear might be the biggest factor driving you to the polls.

Over the weekend, pollster Peter Hart told NBC News that this has been “an election about fear.”

“Donald Trump’s message was the fear of what was happening to America,” he continued, “and Hillary Clinton’s was about the fear of Donald Trump.”

Indeed, Trump has made fear central to his campaign strategy. Using divisive and isolationist rhetoric, he has invoked images of immigrants and terrorists streaming into the country unaccounted for, of inner cities rife with poverty and crime.

Clinton, on the other hand, has used Trump’s words and actions to instill fears about what would happen to the country under a Trump presidency.

Given the fraught tone of the campaign, it’s no surprise that a poll from over the summer found that 81 percent of voters said they were afraid of one or both of the candidates winning.

For political candidates, why is it so effective to tap into voter fears? And what does the psychology research say about fear’s ability to influence behavior and decision-making?

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As the world looks at U.S. elections it holds its breath, and its nose

Yesterday, Christopher Dickey sought observations about the U.S. elections from Daily Beast correspondents, friends, and colleagues around the globe: No part of the world is watching the American elections with more misgivings and despair than North Africa and the Middle East.

A former Moroccan cabinet minister told Michael Kirtley on Monday, he felt deep “sadness” that America was giving such a poor example of the democratic process, and that it would lessen the ability of the U.S. to preach our bedrock values elsewhere. “It doesn’t make me believe in democracy less,” he said. “But it makes me wonder if America can regain the high ground in representing democratic principles.”

Some in the Middle East are watching with cynical amusement. As one senior Saudi royal wrote to me, “Elections in America are a spectacle, very much like a Bollywood film on steroids, with tragedy and comedy, action and drama, dancing and music, treachery and romance.”

Another friend in Saudi Arabia, a humanist and a stubborn optimist, writes, “We cannot help but feel that the forces of openness and calm judgment that are embodied by Mrs. Clinton offer a more promising future both for the United States and for the world.”
But that sentiment is far from universal.

“There is no damage to the brand [of American democracy], because we never bought into it in the first place,” writes Amal Ghandour in Beirut. “The more serious harm is to your heft as a super power, one that dictates and lectures and cajoles the rest of us, not because of its democracy but because of the seriousness and strength of its system.

“That the U.S., with every possible contraption that democracy affords, would produce a presidential contender in the mold of our own ++Michel Aoun [just named president of Lebanon] is nothing short of astounding. We know — or we think we do — why we have idiots presiding over our dysfunctional states. What’s your excuse?” asks Ghandour.

“Believe it or not, quite a few among the Lebanese elite want Trump to win,” says Ghandour. “There’s a group that is relishing the humiliation to you and yours; another which thinks a Trump presidency will effectively translate to an even lighter footprint in the area; another which, like many Americans voting for him, thinks that the man has chutzpah, that he’s the real deal.”

What’s seen widely as President Barack Obama’s bungling of the Syrian war has damaged American credibility throughout the region, and those who have hopes for a Trump presidency see it as a chance to make, at least, a break with Obama’s policies — although what turns that break might take are far from clear.

“In Egypt we are optimistic that with your change, we’ll begin a new chapter in our relationship, which has witnessed a kind of Siberian storm for some time now,” writes a very well-connected friend in Cairo. “The question is: would Hillary be continuity rather than change, and will Trump be reaching out or confrontational? Our region has suffered much from the policy which led to the burning Arab spring that polluted the area and created an epidemic [of violence].” But nothing about these elections inspires confidence. “They seem in part like a heated comedy, and it reflects how far apart our thinking patterns are. We are all about traditions, respect, and discretion, and this election reveals your DNA, which we like to watch, but not follow or emulate.”

Egyptian politician and activist, Gameela Ismail, went to the United States over the summer to watch democracy in action and came away bitterly disappointed. “I felt like I came to witness the last few days or weeks of democracy,” she writes. “I never thought I would hear terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘treason.’”

Mona Makram Ebeid, a veteran Egyptian academic and politician, was even more blunt. “This whole campaign is debasing America,” she writes. [Continue reading…]

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Republicans attempt to rig the vote by suppressing it

In an editorial, the Washington Post says: More than a third of American voters may have cast their ballots before Election Day under early-voting procedures, a heartening development in the face of aggressive Republican vote-suppression efforts in a number of states with GOP-controlled legislatures. While black turnout slipped by nearly 9 percent during the 17-day early-voting window in the critical swing state of North Carolina — a drop probably caused partly by Republican attempts to dampen turnout in areas with large black populations — an apparent surge in early voting elsewhere by Hispanics and other groups contributed to what is likely to be a record number of early voters: well over 40 million.

Notwithstanding the overall success of early voting, the peril of obstruction, intimidation and even violence at the polls remains, thanks mainly to Donald Trump’s explicit rhetoric and barely veiled messaging to his supporters. In repeatedly urging his partisans to intervene at polling places to thwart a “rigged” outcome, the Republican presidential nominee has invited confrontation and the possibility of chaos. By instructing nearly all-white crowds to scrutinize voting in “certain areas,” he has encouraged racial rancor.

Election monitors, including from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, are key to ensuring that voting proceeds smoothly and that those who seek to impede it are held to account after the elections. If vigilantes from either party obstruct or discourage Americans from exercising their most basic democratic right, they should face legal consequences, on top of the punishment that will surely be meted out by voters with long memories for years to come.

What these voters may remember is that Republican legislatures in some states adopted a strategy intended to win by suppressing votes rather than attracting them, often targeting minorities, youths and other Democratic-leaning blocs. Measures have included new voting ID laws, shuttering some polling places and reducing hours for early voting. Other GOP shenanigans to reduce voting have been underway in the final days of the campaign. Twitter removed bogus ads using Clinton campaign imagery that urged her supporters to cast their vote by text.

The rise of voter ID laws and other laws intended to impede minority voting was enabled by the Supreme Court, which three years ago gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court’s ruling stripped the Justice Department of its power to screen voting laws in nine states, mostly in the South, with a history of racial discrimination. The result was a field day for GOP lawmakers, in North Carolina and elsewhere, bent on throwing up barriers to black turnout. While federal courts have disallowed some of the resulting laws, they have permitted others to stand.

It is critical to American democracy, and to the health of the two-party system, that one party’s efforts to gain electoral advantage by erecting obstacles to voting do not succeed. The alternative — two big-tent parties competing to expand their appeal to new constituencies — is the only way to restore some semblance of comity to a nation deeply riven by factionalism. [Continue reading…]

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A ‘rigged’ vote? Four U.S. presidential elections with contested results

By Robert Speel, Pennsylvania State University

In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that this year’s election is rigged and has predicted rampant voter fraud.

While it’s unprecedented to call an election “rigged” before voting has even taken place, there is a history of candidates and the media crying foul after suspicious results.

The most recent presidential election that had rumblings of rigging was 2004. Two years later, Robert Kennedy Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone claiming that Ohio election officials had made decisions that stole the election from Democratic candidate John Kerry. (If Kerry had won Ohio’s electoral votes, he would have defeated Republican president George W. Bush that year.) But while some Democrats parroted Kennedy’s allegations, Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio – over 100,000 votes – led many to dismiss them.

However, the most plausible claims of a rigged presidential election were made in 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000. In each case, the losing candidate and party dealt with the disputed results differently.

If there’s a close or contested vote this year, perhaps the candidates could take a cue from the past.

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Here are the races to watch if you care about global warming

Mother Jones reports: The climate didn’t get much attention in this year’s debates, but Tuesday’s election will still have major consequences for the fight against global warming. Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax; he’s pledged to withdraw from the historic Paris climate accord and to repeal President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants. Hillary Clinton has said she will continue Obama’s climate legacy and has called for installing half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term.

The debate isn’t restricted to the top of the ticket; there are a number of state races that will play a key role in determining US climate policy, along with a handful of ballot initiatives covering everything from rooftop solar to a proposed carbon tax. The situation in each state is unique. Some races — New Hampshire’s Senate contest, for instance — feature two candidates who want to act on climate change. Others, such as West Virginia’s gubernatorial election, feature two candidates who are champions of the coal industry. The impacts of climate change also vary from state to state: Alaska faces wildfires and melting permafrost; Florida is confronting rising seas; Iowa could be hit with falling corn yields. And of course, the voters in each state are different, too. Coloradans overwhelmingly acknowledge that humans are warming the planet. Their neighbors in Utah: not so much. [Continue reading…]

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Why did the FBI drag out its email investigation on Hillary Clinton for so long?

Michael T Flynn, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a 33-year career military intelligence officer and currently a close adviser to Donald Trump, tweeted this following the FBI’s notification that its review of emails has been completed and its July conclusion remains unchanged:


This is the level of dismay one might expect from someone who is completely ignorant about information technology.

Perhaps this is how Flynn pictures the FBI’s email review process:

 

Or maybe not.

Flynn followed up with an indication he is aware some highfalutin “smart machines” could have been at work, but he remains skeptical about the lightning speed of the analysis:


Let’s see… If it takes one year to review 60,000 emails it should take a decade to review 650,000 — is that what you’re thinking, general?

It turns out, the FBI has a whole division devoted to Operational Technology with stacks and stacks of smart machines at its headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. The bureau acknowledges, “While OTD’s work doesn’t typically make the news, the fruits of its labor are evident in the busted child pornography ring, the exposed computer hacker, the prevented bombing, the averted terrorist plot, and the prosecuted corrupt official.”

The Washington Post drills deep into the information retrieval technicalities of the latest investigation and confirms that it did indeed involve the use of “special software.” (Lead investigator to Comey: “How can we go through 650,000 emails fast enough?!” Comey: “You’ll need to use the special software.”)

We live in an era where roughly two billion people have access to Google. The content of about 50 billion web pages is continuously being indexed by the search giant and information from that index can be retrieved in a fraction of a second. Most people haven’t the faintest idea how search technology works, but everyone knows this: it’s super fast.

So Flynn is right: something doesn’t jive.

If 650,000 emails could be reviewed in 8 days, why did the FBI dawdle for a year over its analysis of 60,000 emails?

It turned out that the recent review was mostly an exercise in matching duplicate documents, i.e. it was highly suited to automated data processing.

The first sweep was much more analytical and interpretative and clearly required more eyeballs and deliberation, considering both content and intent.

Nevertheless, what has become evident over the last ten days is that the FBI is a highly politicized government agency. It appears that among its ranks there are a significant number of individuals who believe they are entitled to use their considerable power to influence the outcome of a presidential election.

For that reason, it’s fair to ask now whether the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was dragged out for as long as possible precisely so that it could yield the greatest damage to her campaign — irrespective of the investigation’s findings.

If that was the intention, it seems likely this effort will ultimately fail. Instead, the FBI has profoundly damaged its own credibility as a politically impartial institution serving the interests of the American people.

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How to rig an election

Paul Krugman writes: It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election.

The election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations.

The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning.

The election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully.

The election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our national security apparatus trying to subvert an election is deeply scary. Unfortunately, Mr. Comey is just the man not to do it. [Continue reading…]

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FBI Director James Comey is unfit for public service

Kurt Eichenwald writes: James Comey should not simply be fired as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He must be barred forever from any form of public service.

In the last 10 days, Comey has whipsawed the election for president of the United States. Now we know he did it for no reason. When his agents found information that suggested there were emails on a laptop that might have relevance to the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her email servers, Comey did not wait until he knew even a scintilla of information before announcing it to the world. Reasonably, lots of voters assumed there must be a there there — who could imagine a person with the power of the FBI director would turn the election on its head for no particular reason, on the basis of nothing?

Then, Sunday, Comey handed down another missive from on high: Never mind. His agents had looked through the emails and decided they were piffle. His majesty, the FBI director, has not yet deigned to officially inform his subjects — the American people — whether the emails related to the Clinton case or what they were. (However, people involved in the case tell Newsweek that almost all of them were duplicates of what the bureau already had or were personal.) He just said “nothing to see here” and waived us on our way. [Continue reading…]

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On election eve, a Brexistential dread

Simon Critchley writes: The mood of nausea at the world, a disgust at the entirety of existence, is familiar to those of us who cut our teeth reading existentialist fiction. Novels like Sartre’s 1938 “Nausea” captured a feeling of disgust with the world and disgust with ourselves for going along with a world so seemingly blissfully happy with itself for so long. For Sartre, the dreadful had already happened, with the rise of National Socialism in the early 1930s, and it was a question of learning to face up to our fate. This is the mood that I want to bring into focus by exploring the concept of Brexistentialism.

For I must admit that I’ve become a Brexistentialist of late, thinking back to that evening on June 23 when I watched the entirety — eight hours or more — of the BBC’s live coverage of the referendum on whether Britain would leave the European Union or choose to remain.

I was home in New York. As the coverage began, the pollsters, the experts and the markets seemed confident that the good people of Britain would act rationally and vote to remain. And then, with the news of early results from postindustrial northern cities like Sunderland and Newcastle (which are strikingly similar to cities in upstate New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania), one became slowly and dreadfully aware that something else was taking place, something was shifting before one’s eyes. By the early hours of the morning on June 24 that smug, smiling, awful face of Nigel Farage was declaring a new dawn, and a day of independence for Britain. The supposedly decent, honest, ordinary people of Britain had spoken. The unthinkable had happened.

Will the same thing happen across the Atlantic? No one knows, least of all me. But the parallels are evident and the anxiety is there, the same nameless dread, that the country that you thought you knew is actually something and somewhere else entirely. That one’s country has unraveled morally and spiritually in such a terribly painful, deeply divisive way. [Continue reading…]

Might I add that us Brits have perhaps an over-developed capacity for existential dread.

But fear that produces paralysis is no better than no fear at all.

My hope in the hours before polls close tomorrow evening is that a sense of dread in the face of a possible Trump presidency cripples no one. On the contrary, it should provide all the more compelling reason to vote.

This isn’t about saying who you like. If that was the basis for voting, the Oval Office would end up vacant. It’s about choosing the next president.

A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump. A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump. A spoiled ballot is a vote for Trump. Staying home is a vote for Trump.

There is only one way of stopping Donald Trump becoming president: by electing Hillary Clinton.

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‘Dear Americans’ … a warning from Germany

The Washington Post reports: In an interview conducted via Twitter, the author of the letter [shown in the tweet above] that went viral over the weekend defended his comparison on Sunday, saying exaggeration was necessary to raise attention in the United States.

“Of course it appears arrogant to claim to speak for the whole Germany. Of course it provokes ridicule if a German, of all people, says these things. That’s fine. But I just had to say SOMETHING,” explained the German author, who published his letter under a pseudonym and did not want to give his real name because he feared a negative impact on his business relations.

Born in 1972, the man said he was frequently asked during trips abroad why his grandparents had not prevented Hitler’s rise to power. “When I traveled outside Germany in the past, I’ve often been asked how the German people could have fallen for Hitler back in the ’30s and ’40s. ‘How could your people NOT have known?’ they often asked. I don’t get that question much lately,'” he wrote in a follow-up letter published on Twitter Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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Violence has long been a feature of American elections

By Jesse Rhodes, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The 2016 American presidential campaign has renewed concerns about the specter of violence in American electoral politics. The campaign has been marked by tense – and occasionally violent – altercations between supporters and critics of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Trump encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, and even suggested he would pay the legal fees of followers who assaulted his critics.

By refusing to commit to accepting the results of the election, he has confirmed the doubts among his supporters about the integrity of American elections. Thereby, he has increased the risk of possibly violent resistance by hard-core Trumpists.

It would be comforting to conclude that the menace of violence surrounding the 2016 presidential election is unique. But my research on the history of voting rights in the United States suggests that this is far from the case. Indeed, the threat and execution of violence around elections has a long, sad history in American politics.

Somewhat like the 2016 election – which has revolved around issues of race and immigration – efforts by disadvantaged (and often nonwhite) citizens to secure greater political influence have been met with violent repression by those already enjoying power (usually more affluent whites) throughout American history.

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From the outset of this FBI inquiry, because of the email accounts involved, the conclusion was already clear

Newsweek reports: The night of the disclosure [Oct 28], Newsweek reported that the emails were from as many as three accounts — one through Yahoo, one on the domain clintonemail.com, and one from an account Abedin used in support of one of Weiner’s campaigns for office. Last week, Newsweek learned that that account was through Gmail. In other words, Abedin’s personal account provided by the State Department for non-classified emails was not involved. Abedin, who did not know Clinton used a private server for her emails, told the bureau in an April interview that she used the account on the clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to the secretary’s personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends. For work-related records, Abedin primarily used the email account provided to her by the State Department.

From the information obtained that first day by Newsweek, it was already clear that, because of the accounts involved, almost all of the documents were going to be duplicates or personal emails. In other words, from the opening moments of this inquiry, there were people in government who already knew what the outcome of this new FBI effort would be, yet it took the bureau another nine days to confirm those details. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: For the last 10 days, the cloud of a renewed investigation hung over Clinton and her campaign as FBI agents scoured yet more emails looking at whether Clinton had committed a crime via BlackBerry. The FBI decided, yet again, that she had not. “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Comey wrote.

But damage was done by Comey’s unprecedented disclosure that they were even going back to the matter in the first place. Clinton’s poll numbers in many states sank, and some of her supporters found themselves again questioning Clinton’s honesty. The October Surprise that fizzled may have had a lasting effect on the election: Voters in many states were already casting early ballots informed by little more than speculation at that point. [Continue reading…]

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A muted alarm bell over Russian election hacking

Liz Spayd, Public Editor for the New York Times, writes: Last winter, as primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire headed to the polls, a covert and cunning Russian plot was underway to disrupt the American political process. With aliases like Guccifer 2.0 and Fancy Bear, Russian hackers were targeting critical computer systems.

In June, they struck, hitting the Democratic Party, and by July its chairman was ousted in the fallout. Soon embarrassing emails were spilling from the computers of Hillary Clinton and her staff. Republican officials were hit, too. So was the National Security Agency. Now, hackers are meddling with the voting systems in several states, leaving local officials on high alert. Come Election Day, they’ll find out what, if anything, the cyberspies have in store.

This is an act of foreign interference in an American election on a scale we’ve never seen, yet on most days it has been the also-ran of media coverage, including at The New York Times.

The emails themselves — exposing the underside of the Democratic political machinery, and the conflicts, misjudgments and embarrassing communications of its top ranks — have received bountiful attention. What rarely makes the main narrative is the spy-versus-spy cyberwarfare: the tactics, the players and the government efforts to tame it. In a calamitous campaign unlike any in memory, it’s not surprising that other story lines get squeezed out. But one of the most chilling chapters of this election is the role of Russian intelligence and the growing threat of digital espionage. With days to go, readers have been shortchanged on this part of history. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin became the Che Guevara of the Right

Peter Pomerantsev writes: “He’s a Kremlin puppet!” has been a clarion call for those rallying to stop U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

But his public pro-Putin positions, and a few unfounded Kremlin links thrown in by his detractors, haven’t hurt Trump in the polls. And he’s not alone. Similar charges have been thrown at the successful campaign to leave the European Union and at right-wing movements gaining traction in Europe.

So is accusing your opponent of being Putin’s pal a good strategy? What if accusing someone of colluding with the Kremlin actually helps their cause?

Imagine, for a moment, you are the leader of an “anti-establishment” political movement. You thrill your followers by sticking it to the “liberal elites” and the “global order.” There’s nothing more “anti-establishment” than showing two fingers to such elite, aloof projects as NATO or the EU, and giving props to the man who wants to undermine them — Vladimir Putin.

What better way to milk the outrage of the “liberal” media than by siding with a Kremlin that has made attacking “liberal values” its motto? And wouldn’t you welcome attacks from liberal elites for associating you with the sort of disruption you wish to emulate?

For the “anti-establishment” Right, giving Putin the thumbs-up has become the equivalent of what pulling on a Che T-shirt has long meant for the Left. [Continue reading…]

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