https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/12/28/gun-culture-anti-vaxxers-and-a-crisis-in-america/

A people who believe they pose profound threats to each other are in a crisis that threaten anarchy.

2021 should be remembered as a year in which American notions of liberty and security became redefined in stark antagonism along the fault-lines of a bitter national divide.

It has taken two major plagues – the coronavirus pandemic and the uniquely American epidemic of routine mass shootings – to bring this predicament to the forefront. But it now means, effectively, that liberty as many Americans, particularly on the right, define it threatens the health, lives and security of much of the rest of the population.

Americans have always had a relatively libertarian culture, albeit, crucially, in some parts of the country far more than others. Compared to other western societies, the hand of government is quite light on average Americans who can opt out of many forms of social control if they choose.

This liberty has been traditionally understood as personal, private and unlikely to threaten the health, well-being or liberties of other (especially white) citizens, albeit with exceptions until the 1960s allowing for a “freedom” to racially discriminate against African Americans.

The government was always there to stop crime, impose order and oversee public health and the general welfare.

So, the freedom of other Americans to do as they please may have been offensive or irritating, even obnoxious, but it has rarely been seen as intolerable or existentially threatening.

That is no longer the case. 2021 laid bare a new reality in which the refusal of your next-door neighbor to get vaccinated or to practice basic pandemic mitigation poses a direct threat to your own health and that of your family, neighborhood and broader environment.

It is not a matter of “my body, my choice”, a phrase teasingly pilfered from abortion-rights groups by anti-vaccination right-wingers. If only! But regarding the coronavirus vaccine and mitigation, it is clearly a case of “my body, your illness”.

It has been especially galling for people who have, or care for those with, high comorbidity conditions, impaired immune systems, the elderly and, of course, young children.

Closure of schools has been a major bone of contention in 2021, but nothing exacerbated that problem more than the refusal of huge swaths of the population to accept vaccinations, largely because they see it as a proxy for a huge range of other anxieties. Effectively, this is an angry rejection of the government, the broader culture, and the cultural and demographic changes taking place in the US as it becomes less white and Christian; a rage against assumed loss of presumed power and privilege.

These often may be unconscious or liminal sentiments, but the anti-vaccine movement on the right stresses the idea that personal liberty trumps public health, the public good, and any notion of civic responsibility to contain a pandemic that has taken over 800,000 American lives in less than two years.

This definition of “liberty” not only declines to help the rest of the country avoid becoming ill. It actively contributes to the spread of the disease, its mutation and the broader inability of the society to reduce infections to a manageable point. And it does all that to score some sort of amorphous debating point about how angry such people are about a range of issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the coronavirus, public health, vaccines or masking.

Even former president Donald Trump has received widespread irate right-wing blowback in recent days after praising the vaccine (largely developed under his own administration) and exchanging surprisingly kind words on the topic with current President Joe Biden.

A dead giveaway is that the part of the population that objects so passionately to the coronavirus vaccine has calmly accepted mandates on other vaccinations, wearing seatbelts, speed limits, and all sorts of other measures, often far more sweeping, to keep people safe, especially from each other.

It is not just the pandemic that reveals this growing gap between the ways some Americans define liberty and others seek to protect their security. Gun violence is completely out of control in the US, as the endless raft of random mass murders and school shootings, above all, demonstrate.

School shootings are both routine and a particularly useful insight into this dichotomy. Schoolchildren shooters invariably get their guns from parents, typically because those adults leave these deadly weapons lying around, unsecured and easily accessed.

The recent school shooting in Michigan, in which, for the first time, parents are being charged with involuntary manslaughter because of their extreme negligence towards a troubled child, including providing him the pistol he used as an early “Christmas present”, is an excellent example.

Most of the US right, and a solid Supreme Court majority, take an absolutist view of gun rights, rejecting virtually any restrictions on sale, ownership or carrying of deadly weapons. Yet the rest of the country increasingly lives in a kind of terror, particularly regarding schools, because this gun psychosis makes it so easy for disturbed children to follow a now long-established American pattern of taking out their frustrations by mowing down their classmates.

Several recent shooting incidents – such as the one involving 17-year-old vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse who was acquitted of shooting rioters in Wisconsin – reveal another source of terror. In such scenarios, gun-happy Americans bring weapons of war into tense situations, and then successfully justify subsequent shootings by claiming they were afraid their guns might be seized and used against them. Their own deadly weapon becomes not only the means, but also the legal justification, for the killings they perform. It’s a virtual carte blanche.

The idea that gun madness – including quite possibly the unsecured, locked and loaded guns next door that could easily find their way into the hands of a disturbed teenager or a clueless toddler – poses an unacceptable threat to the security of other Americans is again rejected because of “liberty”.

In 2021, both the anti-vaccine and pro-gun manias demonstrated the increasing gap between Americans who fret they’re going to have their guns and freedom taken away and others who worry, with good reason, that such freedoms can pose a mortal threat.

There’s an absolutism and burning rage, especially on the right, that makes efforts at balance seem futile.

Across the country these are neighbors who simply do not trust that the guy next door doesn’t pose a major threat to their own rights or safety. That’s a recipe for anarchy in a society in profound crisis.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/12/20/democrats-have-their-work-cut-out/

Blocking Republican efforts to game and distort the democratic system is more important than social spending.

On Sunday morning, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin dropped a bombshell on his fellow Democrats. On the stridently pro-Republican Fox News TV channel, no less, he declared he will not support President Joe Biden’s cornerstone Build Back Better $2 trillion social spending bill.

This forces a reshuffling of Democratic priorities. Mr Biden appears to have anticipated this fiasco, given his sudden emphasis on election protection last week.

He has sought to present Democrats as a party that is serious about governance and secures deliverables for the American people. That pitch is badly damaged but hardly eliminated. Early in his administration, Mr Biden secured a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, and in November added $1 trillion in badly-needed infrastructure spending.

But all year, many Democrats dreamt of sweeping, transformational social legislation. It was at best unrealistic and at worst sheer hubris.

Last year Mr Biden defeated Donald Trump soundly, but the Democrats retained a very small majority in the House of Representatives. And only two stunning victories in Georgia for both of its Senate seats provided Democrats a de facto Senate majority: 50-50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris empowered to cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie.

This left no wiggle room, since they cannot afford to lose a single senator on any vote. It is hard to regard this as a broad mandate for transformational legislation.

Internal divisions still run deep. Democrats from northeastern states demanded the restoration of a generous cap for State and Local Tax Deduction, a regressive measure that would mainly benefit their better-off and wealthy constituents. The rest of the party eventually capitulated.

An even more obnoxious conservative faction of at least two senators, led by Mr Manchin, voted for the pandemic relief and infrastructure bills but did not negotiate in good faith with Mr Biden. Warnings from the party’s most liberal faction that, shortly after the passage of the infrastructure bill, Mr Manchin would simply kill social spending proved correct.

Mr Biden has been operating on the assumption that Americans mainly want deliverables from government and that securing benefits would be rewarded, even in the 2022 midterms. Mr Manchin’s bombshell probably rules out any additional major spending before next November’s election.

Yet Mr Manchin has given Democrats little choice but to focus on protecting elections and constitutional processes from a coordinated attack, which is surely more important and urgent.

Mr Biden had already pivoted.

Last week at South Carolina State University, he implied that preventing efforts to undermine the constitutional system is now his priority. “I’ve never seen anything like the unrelenting assault on the right to vote. Never,” he said, pledging strong support for two pending bills that would block scores of new state laws making voting more difficult and even pointless.

Democrats have been fixated on blocking new obstacles to voting. Thirty-three states have enacted measures restricting, complicating or limiting voting. Some criminalize common efforts to help voters through translation, transportation or even providing water to those waiting in endless lines.

But far more nefarious are efforts by state-level Republicans – animated by the shameless lie that Mr Biden only won because of widespread fraud – to rewrite election rulebooks and shift authority from bipartisan or nonpartisan institutions to entities and individuals that have clearly signaled a willingness to distort the process, and even cheat, rather than lose.

Mr Trump created this template after his defeat by seeking to overturn the result by any possible means. He was effectively probing American institutions for weaknesses and identified many.

He tried to get state-level officials to change the result by suddenly “finding” new votes for him. He failed, partly because results had already been formally certified by the states. He may still fantasize about “decertifying” the 2020 results, but there is no provision for that in US law.

That could change. The Arizona legislature is seeking the power to revoke the state’s certification of election results at any time before the presidential inauguration.

Mr Trump pressed Republican legislative leaders in states he lost to simply ignore the results and send alternate, unelected, electors to the electoral college, giving him a win.

He failed but from this arises a co-ordinated operation to implant pro-Trump election deniers and conspiracy theorists into key election positions to potentially allow Republicans to commit their states to a losing candidate.

These state-level Republicans are trying to ensure that next time, Mr Trump or another political fraud can succeed. They are establishing the kind of undemocratic partisan authority over election results that Mr Trump demanded last year, but which did not exist.

And there is the partisan gerrymandering I described in these pages last week, which, in several swing states, effectively locks in Republican state legislative control.

Mr Trump’s final gambit – armed with numerous coup-plotting memos by his advisors and officials, some involving military intervention – was to unleash a violent mob on January 6 to attack Congress and try to prevent ratification of the national election outcome.

Mr Biden may have been misguided all along to focus on securing deliverables for a people whose basic institutions are being brazenly hollowed-out.

Yet to protect US democracy, he will again confront the same Democrats, led by Mr Manchin, who killed the Build Back Better legislation.

Democrats will have to unanimously agree on establishing a carve-out to the filibuster rule that allows election issues, like budgetary matters, to pass by a simple majority. And, given nation-wide Republican shenanigans, it is imperative they add language that clearly establishes under federal law that state legislatures do not have the power to overthrow valid votes and election results under any circumstances.

These Republican anti-democratic measures are the logical follow-on to the anti-democratic insurrection at Congress that sought to sabotage the ratification, according to law, of Mr Biden’s victory and prevent a peaceful transfer of power.

Protecting the US Constitution and democratic system is not optional. It is essential and urgent. Democrats appear to be the last ones left who can halt and reverse the US slide towards a grim parody of democracy.

Mr Manchin has pointed his fellow Democrats clearly in that direction and the pressure on him to become part of the solution this time should be enormous. It’s one thing to block spending, but quite another to blandly decline to save the constitutional order from mortal peril.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/12/12/is-the-us-a-flawed-democracy/

If Democrats want to heal the increasingly damaged democratic system, they must practice what they preach.

Almost everyone interested in governance agrees that the venerable US democratic system is in decline.

Many Americans seem oblivious though, so used to thinking of themselves as unparalleled practitioners of democracy that systemic breakdown seems absurd. Unflattering comparisons with other democratic systems are assumed to be merely insulting.

However, international recognition of US democratic deterioration is finally overcoming a traditional hesitancy to pass judgment on Washington. In 2016, The Economist newspaper included the US among the “flawed democracies”. It is considered a “deficient democracy” by the Germany-based Democracy Matrix and a “backsliding democracy” by the European think tank International IDEA.

Both domestically and internationally, this corrosion is usually associated with the Republican Party and, especially, former president Donald Trump.

That is persuasive given that, under Mr Trump, Republicans have been developing an ethos of refusing to accept electoral defeat; instead seeking to manipulate or dispense with legal and constitutional processes when they deem that necessary and possible.

If Mr Trump is nominated again in 2024, win or lose, a constitutional crisis of the kind he tried unsuccessfully to engineer following his defeat last year seems inevitable.

Yet one of the most undemocratic, indefensible aspects of the damaged US system is broadly shared between the two parties: extreme partisan gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering signifies politicians drawing electoral districts in otherwise illogical manners to maximize their party’s advantages. It is democracy in reverse, with politicians picking their voters, rather than voters selecting their representatives.

This practice is as old as the American Republic.

The word was coined in a March 26, 1812 Boston Gazette article that noted that the baffling shape of a new Massachusetts Senate district resembled a salamander. Targeting then-Governor Elbridge Gerry, it dubbed it a “gerrymander”.

Yet the power to draw electoral boundaries in the US falls to legislative bodies made up of precisely those politicians whose fortunes depend on the outcome of the elections which they are literally shaping. So, historically, such abuses have been difficult to avoid, and often destructive. But now it is getting much worse.

Efforts to transfer accountability to nonpartisan commissions or other disinterested bodies, or to get courts to intervene, have largely failed.

Though the problem is hardly new, its abuse is reaching a peak, and being practiced by Democrats as well as Republicans.

In Maryland, the Democratic-controlled state assembly recently approved a proposal that seems intended to undo the state’s only Republican-held congressional district. And the New Mexico legislature has proposed a map that would likely ensure that in that state, too, all its congressional seats would go to Democrats. They build on earlier examples of partisan gerrymandering by Democrats in Illinois, among many others.

These cases are alarming because Democrats insist that gerrymandering is a Republican abuse they yearn to eliminate. And, indeed, Democrats in Congress have been pushing legislation that would greatly curb gerrymandering and it is being blocked by Republicans.

But the partisan gerrymandering underway in Maryland, especially, allows these arguments to ring hollow.

Some notable wealthy liberals who support more equitable taxation policy, yet who still pursue tax avoidance and minimisation, are on thin enough ice when claiming they must play by the existing rules even though they oppose them. Despite their claims, gerrymandering Democrats don’t even have this argument, because they are actively making the rules not gaming an existing system beyond their control.

It is a big mistake since Republican gerrymandering nationally is operating at a much deeper level of cynicism and danger.

Following the 2020 census results, Republican legislatures have redrawn enough districts to ensure that gerrymandering alone will probably yield five additional Republican members of Congress.

In Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia, new maps mean Democrats must win huge and highly improbable supermajorities to unseat Republican state legislative control. These minority-rule plans all make the corrupt Maryland shenanigans look high-minded in comparison.

The Joe Biden administration is suing Texas over its extreme gerrymanders. The Federal government is constitutionally mandated to ensure a “republican form of government” in every state. In the language of the Constitutional era, that means effectively a majoritarian and equitable voting system, exactly what gerrymanders seek to deny.

Yet in 2019 the Supreme Court insisted only Congress, not courts, could limit such abuses.

The Democrats’ voting bill would require courts to disallow gerrymanders if they effectively disenfranchise large numbers of voters or egregiously advantage one party. Such legislation is vitally important for salvaging American democracy from the structural imperfections that, like gerrymandering, have become dysfunctional.

However, another structural defect, the Senate filibuster, threatens to block these crucial reforms. Although all Senate Democrats support the bill, at least two of them don’t want to change this rule that effectively allows Republicans to block any legislation that isn’t budget-related.

Democrats would have a much stronger argument on principle, with the public, and arguably even with their two main Senate holdouts – Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – if some of their own state legislatures weren’t ruthlessly engaging in such practices and giving the appearance of also being cynical and power-hungry.

Democrats would protest that their leader is not a would-be authoritarian, who tried but failed to overturn the last election by any means he could muster, including what would have amounted to a coup. And they aren’t systematically placing reliable Trump loyalists in charge of overseeing elections and vote counting – exactly the state power structures being locked in by Republican gerrymanders – so that if he tries again he could succeed.

But that is exactly why it is so crucial that Democrats don’t muddy the waters with the blatant partisan gerrymandering they’re attempting in Maryland. The Biden Administration would have a better claim against Texas if they also acted against the less egregious maladministration by their allies in Maryland.

If, as Democrats convincingly insist, there is now only one American party firmly committed to upholding, protecting and maintaining the fundamental principles and practices of democracy, it cannot be enough to insist you are not as bad as the other side.

Any commitment to principles is only demonstrated by taking risks with significant potential costs. Otherwise, it’s just talk.

Mr Trump invariably rationalizes his transgressions with the fiction that “everybody does it”. Democrats have an obligation to prove to Americans, and the world, how wrong that is.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/12/06/bob-dylans-journey-matches-a-changing-america/

He is performing better than in years and still channeling the national mood with all its profound contradictions.

The Nobel laureate may have turned 80 this summer, but in many ways it is still Bob Dylan’s America.

The singer-songwriter bounded onto the stage in Washington last Thursday with astounding energy, engagement, bonhomie and performative power. His singing was his best in decades – robust, precisely phrased, often delicate and almost always clearly intelligible, the last often not true in recent years.

The COVID lockdown was clearly good for his long-suffering larynx.

Dylan delivered a dazzlingly noteworthy and timely set of songs steeped in “Americana”, a musical genre he essentially invented in his legendary, and long-withheld, 1967 recordings known as The Basement Tapes.

Americana was more broadly popularised by the 1968 album released by The Band, Dylan’s then backing group, entitled Music from Big Pink (the nickname for the house in which Dylan’s “basement tapes” were recorded). Those recordings were so consequential that they totally reoriented the careers of many well-known performers, such as the British musician Eric Clapton. Along with Dylan’s closely related and stripped-down 1967 album John Wesley Harding, these “tapes” established a robust alternative to the (arguably overblown) psychedelic rock of The Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and innumerable imitations.

Another and still-ongoing Dylan deep-dive into the American songbook and cultural bayou decades later in his career commenced with his 2001 album Love and Theft. That title, tellingly, was adopted from a book by the historian Eric Lott that investigates how white Americans have engaged with, mimicked and suppressed black culture, especially music. That’s a theme close to Dylan’s own career and concerns. After all, the young Dylan began as both a champion of African-American civil rights and a keen student and, indeed, thief, of blues songs and styles (among countless others).

On Thursday night, his songs were largely performed in the “Chicago blues” musical style, which he hasn’t employed so powerfully since his earliest electric performances highlighted by Chicago blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield.

Would a young Dylan be denounced and cancelled for appropriation if he repeated that career path today? Perhaps. But clearly the old man is beyond such attacks.

In his early 20s, Dylan emerged as a symbol of the budding counterculture of the early 1960s. Then he famously alienated much of his folk music and left-wing fan-base by morphing into a rock musician specialising in highly personal, often obscure, songs that did little to inspire social protest.

In a 1966 Manchester show, a spectator notoriously summed up the outrage over this supposed betrayal by shouting “Judas” at Dylan before he and his band launched into a blistering version of Like a Rolling Stone, his new hit at the time and arguably his most vicious song of contempt. For a songwriter steeped in Biblical symbolism, though to an extent not recognised yet then, “Judas” was a pointed barb indeed.

From then, Dylan performed innumerable self-reinventions while remaining the artist of his generation most successfully expressing and shaping American culture and also straddling popular and fine arts.

Yet, he remains mysterious. In Brownsville Girl, one of his best songs of the 1980s, he wrote: “The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.” Much the same can be said of the man born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and has been a master of personal obfuscation ever since. The only thing we know for sure about him is that his name isn’t Bob Dylan.

Like many American heroes, Dylan exemplifies the archetype of self-reinvention, except that he, along with a few others, has adopted it as a continuous process. Just when you think you have him figured out, “the carpet too is moving under you”, as he explained in his key 1965 song It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.

Dylan’s most startling metamorphosis came in the late 1970s, when he horrified much of his established audience by re-emerging as a fundamentalist, literalist and apocalyptic born-again Christian.

Initially, he even refused to perform his earlier works and harangued stunned audiences with fire-and-brimstone sermons about an immanent day of judgement and the agonising eternal punishments awaiting infidels. Yet, those concerts, and some of the songs, were among his best, and well-attuned to the era of then president Ronald Reagan, if not his pre-existing fan-base.

These fundamentalist passions appeared to fade, along with record sales, after a few years, and under heavy pressure from his recording company, Columbia. Yet, a strong Biblical pretext was evident in the album John Wesley Harding, and a more overtly Christian legacy has been very slowly re-emerging in Dylan’s more recent releases.

This was unmistakable at the Washington concert. In perfect sync with America today, the show might well have been entitled “The Sacred and the Profane”, as Dylan carefully oscillated between songs with worldly and identifiably Christian themes. This pattern fits perfectly into the zeitgeist of an America that is torn between politically empowered fundamentalists and a largely moderate and secular public.

Among the more unusual aspects of the concert – not only for Dylan but for any well-established performer – was a striking lack of any classics, hits or golden oldies. The lone exception, perhaps, was Gotta Serve Somebody, one of his best Christian fundamentalist songs, but which was probably included more for thematic than nostalgic purposes.

The set showed Dylan far more upfront about his distinctively Christian sentiments than at any time since the early 1980s, but thankfully without the fundamentalist tones. The ongoing American racial reckoning, religious passions and ambivalence, and the ageing yet often surprisingly robust quality of American society, were all enacted on stage by this now-elderly savant.

In the early 1960s, in many ways Dylan was America. And, decades later and in many other ways, he still is. Sixty years ago, an almost impossibly young Dylan seemingly emerged from “nowhere” – geographically and culturally – to express and define a suddenly transforming national culture. He retains an uncanny ability to channel a reviving, and as he portrays it, dynamic and still potent America.

Dylan’s Washington concert seemed anything but a swansong. Instead, it felt like another new beginning for one old man and the country he still seems able to instinctively express and embody.