https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/01/26/hate-for-anthony-fauci-is-an-attack-on-the-us-state/

Vitriol for Washington’s most prominent doctor goes beyond mere political opportunism.

A striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic as a political phenomenon in the US is a pair of strange cults centered on Dr Anthony Fauci, the unassuming 81-year-old director, since 1984, of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Liberal celebration of him is often exaggerated, and even neurotic. Is there really the need for such an idol? But right-wing loathing often borders on the psychotic.

There are rational explanations for why virulent hatred of Dr Fauci has become a major hallmark of right-wing discourse. But there are also deep-seated ideological and emotional aspects that, while explicable, remain deeply disturbing.

The accusations are absolutely flabbergasting. Tucker Carlson, a host on Fox News, insists Dr Fauci was responsible for “creating” the coronavirus and he was also somehow at fault for the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, according to some leading Republican politicians.

Dr Fauci stands preposterously accused of running a campaign to torture and murder puppies. Fox News host Lara Logan compared him with vicious Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele who conducted infamous human experiments.

Her colleague Jesse Waters urged activists to “ambush” him with questions culminating in one that was called the “kill shot”, after which “Boom! He is dead!” Both Waters and the network dismissed the obvious violence of this rhetoric as purely metaphorical.

Wyoming Senator Anthony Bouchard went all the way, bluntly saying Dr Fauci should be killed and that only the method remained in question. “After prosecution, the chair, the gallows, or lethal injection?” he asked on Facebook.

Unsurprisingly after all that, Dr Fauci and his family have been subjected to death threats and require constant protection.

But why? Let’s start with the obvious. The pandemic has been a defining feature of the past two years. It is therefore either going to be a political benefit or cost to different factions.

Unless one has an effective solution – and with this unpredictable pandemic that’s not easy, as US President Joe Biden has discovered to his political cost – the simplest way of politically exploiting a crisis is to pin all blame on a villain supposedly from the other side.

Had the pandemic begun under a Democratic president, that would have been an automatic solution. Many liberals treated the previous administration, under Donald Trump, as morally culpable rather than confused, inept and completely out of its depth.

But that wouldn’t work for the right because it would involve blaming Mr Trump. So, another figure was necessary and Dr Fauci was quickly identified. That was intensified as he was perceived as challenging Mr Trump’s more bizarre comments, and cast as a political enemy of the beloved leader.

Since Dr Fauci is so enthusiastically embraced by most liberals, during both the Trump and Biden presidencies, it’s almost axiomatic from a right-wing perspective that there’s something deeply wrong with him.

But that doesn’t explain the depth and violence of the hatred towards him on the far right – traditional conservative Republican senators, by contrast, generally say they like and admire Dr Fauci and don’t understand the uproar.

For the first year of these attacks, Dr Fauci basically kept a low profile. But increasingly over the past 12 months, he has angrily countered condemnations of him by right-wing politicians and some media pundits.

He has proffered two main theories for why he is so viciously besieged. First, as he said explicitly to Senator Rand Paul, there is a clear fundraising element to attacks on him. Apparently shamelessly defaming him is indeed good business.

The second argument he makes is that when right-wing ideologues denounce him, “they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science”. This drew howls of protest from the ideological right as the height of bureaucratic arrogance, but there is plenty of truth to it.

For some on the religiously inflected right, science and fact are indeed mistrusted because they challenge the primacy of faith. But, although many liberals might think so, that is not a crucial part of the anti-Fauci cult.

Instead, most who despise him are happy to embrace other self-appointed “experts”, some of whom may even have a science background, but who crucially make alternative and, for their purposes, politically useful claims. It is not a hostility to purported expertise so much as a hostility to Dr Fauci’s version of expertise.

At the heart of this resentment lies not the image of a “man of science”, which few can genuinely judge, but an embodiment of the state and the institutions through which it promotes shared social interests like public health.

In these pages, I recently wrote that the January 6 attack on Congress was fundamentally part of a broader assault on the American state. So is the campaign of vitriol against Dr Fauci.

Mistrust of the state and state institutions was hardwired into 20th-century western conservatism and persists. Bureaucracies run by experts were systematically painted as dystopian nightmares by conservatives, and associated with communism and all centralized administration.

Former communist apostates who shaped modern American conservatism such as James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers viewed the empowerment of experts such as Dr Fauci as the most frightening aspect of modern governance. In the early 1940s, Burnham wrote two remarkably silly books, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, about the supposed rise of a “managerial elite” dominating all modern societies, capitalist and communist alike, by controlling state and even corporate bureaucracies.

It was and remains a downright weird and paranoid fantasy in which Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the US are merely three variations of this intolerable disaster.

So, the attacks on Dr Fauci are not simply grotesque political opportunism. They also reflect a deeply rooted, albeit often cynically feigned, terror of what, in vowing to destroy it, Mr Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon calls “the administrative state”.

Every momentous crisis needs a monstrous villain if it is not to be wasted. And obviously the hard right believes there are political and financial profits, as Dr Fauci accurately told Senator Paul he was cynically seeking, from vilifying him.

But at a deeper ideological level, many Americans are being convinced that they would somehow be better off without the administrative functions of the contemporary state, without health agencies and similar public services.

They may think they hate Dr Fauci and everything he stands for. But how many of his passionate detractors have ever seriously tried to imagine what modern life, completely stripped of government administration to promote the public welfare, would possibly be like?

https://agsiw.org/tremors-from-shabwa-reverberate-from-abu-dhabi-to-vienna/

Houthi missile attacks on the UAE and U.S. military facilities expose a fragile Middle East calm.

On a map, Marib in Yemen and Vienna in Austria seem very far apart. But the space between the two, via Abu Dhabi, turns out to be too close for comfort. Indirect U.S. negotiations with Iran, over its nuclear program, in Vienna were already bogged down. Now the U.S. military has confirmed it participated in intercepting two Houthi ballistic missiles aimed at Al Dhafra Air Base near Abu Dhabi – home to the U.S. Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing and 2,000 U.S. military personnel. In less than a month, a dramatic development in a local Arab conflict has rapidly gone regional and then, in effect, global, as intensifying attacks have erupted, shattering an 18-monthlong process of Middle East de-escalation.

The Houthis have launched this series of deadly missile attacks against the United Arab Emirates in retaliation for major setbacks in the battle around Marib, the economic hub of northern Yemen, due to the intervention of a potent UAE-backed Yemeni militia. Given that such sophisticated Houthi missiles are supplied by Iran, along with considerable evidence of crucial Hezbollah technical support, it will be difficult to ignore Iran’s involvement. And given that a major U.S. military headquarters and air wing have been directly attacked with these weapons, the direct line between Marib and Vienna, cutting through Abu Dhabi, is impossible to miss.

Why the Houthis are So Enraged

This series of Houthi missile attacks against the UAE began January 17, when missile and drone strikes destroyed several Emirati fuel tankers and killed at least three people and injured a number of others. The attacks were evidently retaliation for the dramatic recapture of key areas of Shabwa governorate in southern Yemen from Houthi forces by pro-government troops. This major reversal of fortunes was primarily due to the intervention of the extremely effective UAE-backed Giants Brigades.

While the UAE withdrew most of its own forces from Yemen in 2019, it retains a strong presence throughout the south and in other parts of the country. Indeed, the UAE’s role is one of the key reasons that, while the war pitting the Houthis versus the United Nations-recognized government and its backers in the Saudi-led coalition continues, that conflict has been effectively separated from the south, where the UAE is attempting to strike a balance between various southern factions while continuing a campaign against al-Qaeda and other militant groups.

The Giants Brigades’ intervention, undoubtedly conducted with the approval of the UAE, was facilitated by the ouster of the former governor of Shabwa, Mohammed Saleh bin Adio of the Islamist Islah Party, which is at loggerheads with Abu Dhabi. He was fired by Yemen’s president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, after unusually blunt criticism of the UAE’s role in the country and the increasing sense among powerful local tribes that he was unable to effectively lead the fight against the Houthi assault on the oil-rich governorate. With Adio out of the way and replaced by a new pro-UAE governor, Awad al-Awlaki, the powerful Giants Brigades swung into action with immediate results. By January 10, Awlaki declared Shabwa governorate “liberated” from the Houthis after the rebel forces were driven out of the Ain, Usailan, and Bayhan districts, which the Houthis had occupied earlier in a broader campaign to seize the neighboring governorate of Marib.

Oil-rich Shabwa and especially Marib are crucial to the Houthis as an economic hub. If the Houthis had been able to secure control of Shabwa, Marib would likely have been next, and that would have practically ended the Hadi government’s hopes of retaining a meaningful power base for national political influence. But the sudden reversal of fortunes engineered in a matter of days by the Giants Brigades means that Houthi control of crucial areas remains contested and that developments on the battlefield do not boil down to a series of inevitable victories by the Iran-backed forces.

It means, barring a significant reversal, that either the conflict in Yemen is going to continue into the foreseeable future with significant potential losses to the Houthis, or the rebels will have to engage, for the first time, in serious negotiations for a political resolution to the conflict with the Hadi government. Houthi participation in U.N.-brokered talks has thus far been pro forma and primarily reflected the group’s belief that continued fighting on the ground was more likely to produce additional gains.

The barrage of attacks aimed at the UAE and U.S. military facilities evinces the shock and frustration this abrupt and unexpected defeat has provoked among the Houthis. But what may have begun as an impulse to “bring the battle home” to the UAE by striking their opponents’ backers in their own country made the Yemen war more regional than ever. By attacking Al Dhafra Air Base, the Houthis have dragged in the United States. And by utilizing what are almost certainly Iranian-manufactured and supplied ballistic missiles, and quite possibly Hezbollah technical advisors, the Houthis have taken the battle over Shabwa global.

Washington, Tehran, and the Yemen War

The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has not yet given up on the indirect talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran that was effectively revoked in 2018 by former President Donald J. Trump. These talks have yielded few signs of progress, with U.S. officials suggesting they would not continue open-ended conversations for more than a few additional week. But it will be increasingly awkward to try to engage productively with Iran at this “decisive moment” when its close allies in Yemen are exporting their domestic war against the government by attacking not only an important U.S. partner but also a major U.S. military facility.

It’s extremely unlikely the exact nature of Iran’s (or Hezbollah’s) role in these attacks, beyond providing hardware, will be definitively determined. But given the escalation of the attacks over the past week to include Al Dhafra, forcing direct U.S. military involvement in Patriot anti-missile system interceptions of the ballistic missiles, there is no sign that Tehran has been uncomfortable with this Houthi intensification or has done anything to try to restrain it. Houthi boasting and bluster about the attacks strongly reinforce this impression.

Strategic Implications for Major Players

The Saudi-led coalition has responded with significant airstrikes in Houthi-held parts of Yemen that have inflicted significant damage on infrastructure and Houthi forces and caused numerous civilian deaths. Although the UAE has vowed a more substantial response, that will depend on various calculations, including the U.S. attitude, Iran’s potential reaction, and how significant a threat might be posed by additional Houthi missile attacks. Such strategic concerns might prompt the Emiratis to keep their primary focus on Shabwa and Marib. The continued advance of pro-government forces, especially the Giants Brigade, in Marib’s Juba and al-Abdiyah districts suggests that continuing this potent counteroffensive could be the most effective and least risky means to strike back against Houthi interests.

Beyond the Middle East, things get even more complicated. Given the importance of the Vienna talks to the Biden administration, Washington may try to play down any linkage between the Houthi attacks against the UAE and the negotiations. However, unless chief negotiator Robert Malley and his team can point to some results soon, anger over missile attacks against U.S. military facilities and personnel will inevitably combine with frustration over Iran’s apparent unwillingness to return to the deal on a straightforward compliance-for-compliance basis.

Indeed, in addition to a direct response to a dramatic setback on the ground in Yemen, the Houthi attacks against the UAE in part also reflect the ongoing willingness of Iran’s regional network of Arab militia groups to flex their muscles in highly provocative ways. Among other things this demonstrates a willingness and ability for Iran to boldly strike adversaries beneath the cover of at least semiplausible deniability for Tehran itself. Over the past two years, Iran has undoubtedly found the use of proxy strikes against adversaries an effective tool of leverage with very low, if any, costs – with the notable exception of the January 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Major General Qassim Suleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The overall pattern, however, suggests that Iran continues to view such proxy attacks as a major tool of statecraft, power projection, and even positioning for negotiations.

Finally, these attacks are an alarming reminder of how fragile strategic relations in the Middle East remain despite the past 18 months or more of significant de-escalation between major regional actors. Indeed, among the most dramatic of these budding rapprochements has been between the UAE and Iran. This process reached a high point in early December 2021 when the UAE’s national security advisor, Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, visitedTehran and invited Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to make an official state visit to the UAE this year. Both parties have appeared keen on improving relations. But it will, of course, be extremely difficult for a Raisi state visit to Abu Dhabi to take place as long as Iranian missiles are striking targets inside the UAE.

Moreover, the sudden eruption of regional violence directly out of dramatic battlefield developments in Yemen demonstrates that what takes place in a relatively remote Middle Eastern conflict doesn’t necessarily stay there. In a matter of days, a major regional player can be pulled back into the Yemen conflict from which it is trying to disengage and diplomacy with global stakes can be rendered riskier and more complex than ever. The sudden impact of conflict is still readily capable of producing a wrinkled strategic and political landscape in which Marib, Abu Dhabi, and Vienna are functionally in the same neighborhood.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/01/17/biden-has-had-an-especially-bad-week/

November is a long way off and there are many reasons to think he can bounce back.

Americans may be badly divided but there is one thing they seem to all agree about: President Joe Biden just endured a “week from hell”. It is a tired but apt cliche. Some commentators are even asking if his presidency is already “finished” and who should replace him in 2024.

That is utterly overblown. Yet, Mr Biden has serious problems, especially consistently low approval ratings from the public, now ranging from a wretched 43 per cent approval to a calamitous 33 per cent. This unpopularity is closely tied to increasing inflation, now estimated at about 7 per cent, a 40-year high.

The president has had trouble slaloming between an impatient liberal party base and a few intransigent but hyper-empowered conservative Democratic senators.

Mr Biden focused for months on the Build Back Better social spending bill. In November, a compromise appeared likely between his already pared-back package of $2.2 trillion and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s counter offer of $1.8tn. But in December, Mr Manchin abruptly cut off talks and implied they were over.

That was a painful blow to Mr Biden, although negotiations with Mr Manchin are said to have quietly resumed behind closed doors, and $2.2tn and $1.8tn are hardly irreconcilable figures. And even if the president is ultimately compelled to accept Mr Manchin’s figure, $1.8tn in new social spending would still be another major legislative accomplishment.

Recently, Mr Biden pivoted his public focus to legislation to protect elections and voting access, which many Democrats insisted is much more important anyway. Early last week, he ramped up his advocacy, especially with a hard-hitting speech in Georgia that compared opponents of such legislation to segregationists.

Not only was the Georgia address criticized from the center as well as the right, the whole initiative came crashing down before it got off the ground. Mr Manchin’s fellow Democratic conservative, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, brutally crushed Mr Biden’s new priority by announcing that she will not agree to any reform of Senate filibuster rules, which is necessary for Democrats to pass any such legislation.

To shift Ms Sinema and Mr Manchin on the filibuster, the president could try proposing a far narrower bill focused on the worst election abuses such as partisan gerrymandering and the purging of voter rolls or other extreme measures to suppress turnout. But it probably wouldn’t convince them.

Worse, such limited legislation could infuriate many Democrats, especially if they conclude that the ongoing talks with Republicans to correct the Electoral Count Act are effectively a substitute for comprehensive voting rights protection. Electoral Count reform would block any repetition of former president Donald Trump’s attempt to get Congress to overturn election results but leave many Democrats feeling betrayed and seething.

Meanwhile, Republicans mocked Mr Biden for demonstrating political weakness by allowing himself to be thwarted twice in a row by individual Democratic senators.

It is hardly just Democrats bedeviling the president. Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court last week struck down his most wide-ranging Covid-19 vaccine mandate, which compelled businesses with more than 100 employees to ensure they are vaccinated, routinely masked or regularly tested to maintain safe workplaces.

This ruling is an especially severe blow because, as Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc in the US, vaccine mandates are among the few tools that have proved effective. Most people will not give up their jobs to avoid a jab.

The continuing coronavirus crisis is another obvious source of Mr Biden’s deepening unpopularity. It doesn’t matter that the overwhelming majority of hospitalisations and deaths occur among unvaccinated persons, and that the president is doing more than anyone to try to get the population fully vaccinated.

Republicans condemn Mr Biden for not getting the pandemic under control just as many of them are doing their best to prevent that. But understanding this irony requires political comprehension that may be beyond most voters.

With so many Americans unvaccinated and the Omicron variant spreading with horrifying speed, demands shifted from vaccinations and treatments to tests, which have been in terribly low supply throughout the country. Blame for that inevitably and reasonably falls on the president and he is scrambling to distribute 500 million tests for free. But the damage from this unforced error is done.

Even deeper into the political weeds, but also significant, were the abrupt resignations of Cecilia Martinez and David Kieve from the White House Council on Environmental Quality. That demonstrates and feeds growing anger among activists about the administration’s lack of progress on environmental justice, a key campaign pledge.

This disappointment reflects a broader source of frustration with Mr Biden both among many Democrats and the public: his administration touted an exceptionally, indeed impossibly, ambitious agenda which it has, unsurprisingly, been only partly able to fulfill.

The last election simply did not leave Democrats with the political power or unity to secure a series of transformative victories in rapid succession. That is hardly an argument for not trying to do as much as possible. But Mr Biden could certainly have done a much better job managing expectations as well as touting his very significant, yet easily forgotten, successes.

He secured two remarkable pieces of legislation – a $1.9tn pandemic relief bill and a $1.2tn infrastructure package – both with significant Republican support. That is a whopping $3.1tn in new bipartisan national investment, in just one year and with no Senate majority.

Yet voters invariably ask: “What have you done for me lately?”

There is no reason to think Mr Biden can’t bounce back. Filibuster reform may be dead, and election and voting access protection with it, but social spending could be salvaged. The pandemic is peaking this month and seems likely to subside considerably for the rest of the year. Inflation is more mysterious, but many economists believe it is hardly out of control. And environmental justice activists, unknown to the general public, may simply stay disappointed.

While Mr Biden is particularly unpopular right now, it is not unusual for US presidents to find themselves in big trouble at the end of their first year. That was certainly the case for the now (usually) highly regarded former presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

The November congressional elections are a long way off in political terms, and 2024 even further. Mr Biden’s atrocious week, and several preceding months that were not much better, do not necessarily bolster the prospects of either Republican challengers or potential Democratic successors.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/01/09/the-us-can-prevent-another-coup-attempt/

Fascists and other radicals invariably try to attack and hollow out the state before creating lawless parallel entities,

Last week marked the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Congress. It was commemorated by Democrats, including a hard-hitting speech by President Joe Biden. Republicans, except for the brave but isolated Rep Liz Cheney, were nowhere to be found.

Democrats compare January 6 to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, while mainstream Republicans such as Senator Lindsey Graham largely dismissed it as overblown and the extreme wing suggests it was laudable. But as we now know for certain, it was the culmination of a concerted effort over many weeks by Donald Trump and his supporters to overthrow the election and perpetrate the first coup d’état in US history.

History teaches that a failed coup, especially when essentially unpunished, invariably gives rise to subsequent coups, and that successful coups usually build upon earlier, unsuccessful ones.

What’s crucial about the failed coup, the January 6 violence and the apparent comfort of most Republicans with them, is that they are the logical culmination of a long-developing but rapidly sharpening attack on the US state by the political right.

Mr Trump and his followers are often characterized as nationalists. They are certainly nativists and many are white supremacists. Though they call themselves patriots, they are bitterly opposed to the US government, the actual Constitution, and most aspects of current US society and culture.

The so-called patriots attacking the American state expressed the same irrational double-think when they attacked the Capitol police on January 6, while waving pro-police and “thin blue line” banners, used to show solidarity with the police.

Many among the January 6 mob even claimed they were attacking Congress to “defend the Constitution”. Yet they sought to intimidate and frighten elected officials into abandoning the law and the Constitution.

Mob attacks are the exact antithesis of democracy and the rule of law, which are established precisely to prevent the assertion of power through organized violence.

The underlying premise of the failed coup and attack on Congress is the myth, now apparently accepted by most Republican voters, that the 2020 election was a fraud. This “big lie” means the US government is illegitimate and fraudulent and democracy is a cruel joke. It is hard to imagine a more unpatriotic or anti-American stance. Alarmingly, a “big lie” typically transforms worldviews entirely, and insidiously persists long after its initial proponents have vanished.

Anti-state rhetoric was a mainstay of the Trump era. The former president attacked almost all core American institutions, not just elections, but also the FBI, CIA, the justice department and military leadership. His terrible relations with these “power ministries” was arguably a fatal weakness of his bid to retain power after the election defeat.

His fans, including some radical members of Congress and television manipulators such as Tucker Carlson, insist the January 6 attack was somehow orchestrated by the FBI.

This offensive, not aimed against political opponents but at the state itself, is the key to comprehending how dangerous and pernicious the current right-wing agenda in the US has become.

Both right-wing extremists like fascists and left-wing radicals like Leninists share the tactic of attacking, tearing down or hollowing out state institutions as they accumulate power. They then create a set of parallel institutions that operate outside state structures and beyond the rule of law, through which most real power is projected into society.

In addition to the obvious Nazi and Bolshevik historical examples, this pattern can be seen today in countries like Iran and Venezuela. When Mr Trump’s close ally and campaign manager Steve Bannon described himself as a “Leninist”, this is exactly what he meant.

Mr Trump is a master of anti-state rhetoric. He denounces anything he doesn’t like as the work of “the deep state”, even though the US does not have a deep state, just a government. Mr Bannon constantly boasts about planning to “dismantle the administrative state”, even though administration constitutes almost everything any state does.

Familiar slogans of Mr Trump’s movement – “build that wall”, “drain the swamp”, “lock her up” – identify no protagonist. It is not that the state should act on these demands, (none of which will ever actually be accomplished, as both demagogue and followers fully understand), but that somebody should somehow deal with them.

These slogans were largely concocted by firms like Cambridge Analytica, the British data analysis company hired by Mr Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign. And being performative without agency, the chants point to the loss of power by the state rather than government action. Such mantras in their sinister aspirations and warnings of crises communicate that the state is incapable of meeting their demands. Emergencies are the key tactic. Mr Trump loved emergencies, frequently declaring them where they didn’t exist. He even tried to postpone the 2020 election due to a public health emergency.

The Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt noted that a lawless and authoritarian movement can transform a rule-of-law state by declaring emergencies, putting in place supposedly temporary and exceptional measures to deal with them, and extending them indefinitely.

The rise of armed white supremacist militias in US society, often strongly supportive of Mr Trump, creates the prospect of such parallel sources of power. Two of the largest and most dangerous gangs, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, were key participants in the January 6 insurrection. By attacking Congress and the police, they were effectively challenging state authority, seeking to use violence to replace the rule of law with their own will.

The insurrection failed, and with it the final gambit in the attempted coup. Mr Trump and his allies failed to create the constitutional crisis they hoped would somehow allow him to stay in power. Instead, Congress ratified the election results later that day.

Yet the response of the state thus far has been woefully inadequate. Many foot soldiers of the insurrection have received mainly light prison sentences. But none of the planners and authors of the insurrection, and, more importantly, the attempted coup, have been held to account in any meaningful way.

As Ms Cheney put it, Mr Trump has “gone to war with the rule of law” and if he’s not winning, he’s not exactly losing either.

All this surely invites another such attempt. Unfortunately, the past year suggests that the Trump movement has correctly identified a set of major structural and constitutional weaknesses in the US system, and although they failed in their coup attempt, they also completely got away with it.

The American state does not appear particularly effective in asserting the rule of law and acting decisively to ensure there is no repetition of the coup attempt – especially not one that, building on the lessons of the past, might have a much better chance of success.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/01/02/the-us-democracy-has-its-hands-full-this-year/

Ongoing questions on the pandemic, the economy and the democratic system may get more answers in 2022.

This new year has its work cut out for it. 2021 inconsiderately handed 2022 a set of crucial unanswered questions that make it hard to tell if the American glass is half-full or half-empty. The next 12 months are effectively charged with starting to provide answers.

At present, the biggest socioeconomic trends are unusually resistant to any shared sense of direction, in turn leaving political prospects in an unpredictable limbo.

For example, is the coronavirus pandemic increasingly out of control or instead becoming a manageable part of normal life? It very much depends on where you live and how you look at it.

The Omicron variant appears to spread much more quickly than the Delta strain that dominated 2021. Therefore, cases in many US areas are approaching or exceeding record levels.

That’s the bad news. The extremely good news is that symptoms appear significantly milder. More importantly, as President Joe Biden accurately insists, in terms of hospitalisations this is now largely “an epidemic of the unvaccinated”.

Hospitalisations and deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in the unvaccinated population. Numerous vaccinated persons are testing positive, and often feeling ill, but usually manageably so. That’s a massive game-changer.

Yet the situation is far more critical in Republican-dominated states where governors and other leaders have been encouraging, defending and even – in at least five US states – financially rewarding vaccine refusal by extending unemployment benefits to those who have lost their jobs because they will not comply with mandatory vaccinations. Intensive care units are overflowing. Patients ailing from other illnesses are now dying because unvaccinated, and hence largely avoidable, Covid-19 cases have consumed existing ICU beds.

Republicans angrily complain that Mr Biden has failed to contain the pandemic, even though many of them are among the main obstacles to vaccination and mitigation. In much of the rest of the country, the new variant is a challenge that suggests that if vaccines are embraced, the coronavirus could well become an integrated, manageable part of normal life.

The coronavirus cup therefore seems at very least half-full.

The economy, too, is subject to radically divergent perceptions. Most indicators suggest a truly robust, arguably roaring, recovery. However, inflation continues to erode the spending power of most people and create significant, and politically powerful, anxieties. Again, who and where you are may dictate how you view the depth of the national economic pour.

2022 will probably clarify whether the US economy is bouncing back in a manner that’s felt throughout society. And the great sorting between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations on vulnerability to the coronavirus should become far more evident, giving Americans a clear choice on whether they want to wilfully remain at the mercy of Covid-19.

The political questions that are effectively corollaries of these ambiguous, or at least contested, socio-economic trends and perceptions, are considerably more consequential this year than usual.

The future of US democracy won’t be decided in 2022. But the coming year will tell us much about the direction of the Republican Party, which is the center of efforts to undermine the constitutional system, consolidate a growing pattern of starkly undemocratic minority rule and, possibly, drive the country towards explicit forms of authoritarianism.

The ability of former president Donald Trump, who brought these anti-democratic impulses into the American political mainstream, to continue to lead the Republican Party is extremely uncertain.

His grip on the sentiments and loyalty of the party base remains unmatched. But he is fixated on re-litigating the 2020 election, and endlessly repeating baseless and thoroughly debunked lies about how it was supposedly stolen from him through massive fraud.

Most recently, he announced a January 6 press conference on the anniversary of the violent insurrection he incited to try to prevent Congress from ratifying the 2020 election results. He apparently intends to yet again regurgitate the ridiculous narrative that he was cheated. Mr Trump is so obsessed with this delusion that it appears to be his litmus test for supporting Republican congressional candidates in the November midterms.

Other party leaders plainly understand that neither he nor anybody else can win the White House in 2024 running on thoroughly discredited fabrications about 2020. Yet they do not seem to have found any way to dislodge the party from his grip.

Even that might not slow the GOP’s descent into ever-deeper right-wing extremism. The cutting edge of Republican fanaticism now appears independent of Mr Trump, with numerous politicians seeking to outbid each other in rhetorical militancy and violent incitement.

2022 will indicate much about the strength of the institutions and guardrails that are meant to check efforts to exploit systemic loopholes and weaknesses in the US constitutional system. Evaporation of the requisite civic virtue seems to have depleted the American democratic glass considerably.

In the coming year, Senate Democrats must find a way to pass a national election and voting protection law. Otherwise, state-level Republican initiatives to restrict voting and undermine fair election supervision will go dangerously unchecked.

The past year demonstrated that although the attack on democracy by many Trump-supporting Republicans was a dire menace, opposition from other Republicans, including state officials and even Trump-appointed judges, thwarted the attempt to create a constitutional crisis in a bid to keep him in office notwithstanding his defeat.

Despite ongoing efforts to oust or disempower conscientious Republican officials, this indicates a venerable US democratic chalice that is still at least a quarter full. There is clearly a tenacious sense among traditional Republicans, and even some Trump supporters, that democratic norms and traditions are worth defending, despite that meaning their party might lose.

Even if the pandemic and economic outlooks brighten undeniably over the next eight months, a three-quarters full beaker doesn’t guarantee Democrats a successful midterm result. It is possible, and even likely, that between historical trends, party weaknesses and Republican partisan gerrymandering and vote suppression, they will suffer a significant defeat anyway.

But if they can secure either election protection legislation or some form of expanded social spending, let alone both, as I have explained before in these pages, they will leave themselves in a strong position to retain the White House in 2024.

The prognosis for US democracy won’t be decided in 2022, but the general trajectory will become clearer. And it’s quite unlikely that the pandemic and economic outlooks will be anything like as murky going into 2023 as they are now.

2022 doesn’t seem poised to introduce anything dramatically new into the US scene – although the unexpected is always just around the next corner. But the new year will have its hands full clarifying these murky and contested, yet vital, realities bequeathed by 2021.