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.

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.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/11/29/inflation-isnt-bidens-biggest-problem-right-now/

His administration has done a good job on COVID and the economy, yet it is failing to sell this to the public.

US President Joe Biden remains mired in alarmingly low poll numbers, with the latest figures showing about 43 percent approval of his performance compared to 52 percent disapproval. In addition to the cyclical, historical patterns of US politics that I recently outlined in these pages and which are obviously a major factor, most observers on all sides point to two primary, and closely related, issues at play: the economy and the pandemic.

For many Democrats, this unpopularity makes little sense. On the economy, they argue that the media is fixated on negative stories involving inflation while ignoring the roaring comeback on many other fronts. They have a powerful case.

More than 5.5 million jobs were created in the past 10 months, leading to the lowest unemployment figures in 52 years. And while gross domestic product growth sagged a bit this summer, it’s now anticipated to run between 5-7 percent in the last quarter of 2021.

Stock market values have soared. And while there is a tight labour market, that has resulted in a significant strengthening of bargaining power for many workers, whether individually or collectively.

Yet, ongoing inflation carries a powerful negative political punch. The October rate of 6.2 percent was among the highest in recent memory and slightly exceeded already gloomy forecasts. Whenever inflation is outpacing growth in spending power and wage increases, there is bound to be political blowback.

The Democrats offer both a sophisticated and a ridiculous response to such criticism.

The serious response, which tends to be made more quietly and aimed at better-informed audiences, holds that by allowing the economy to, in effect, overheat somewhat in favour of greatly revived consumer demand, the administration and the Federal Reserve Board have erred in favour of job creation and economic growth at the expense of higher inflation.

The core argument is that both the economy and ordinary people would be far worse off with an unemployment crisis than rising but manageable inflation and a labour shortfall. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t play well, or even really register, on main streets.

The second argument, usually spouted on television, is that corporate greed is responsible. This is ludicrous, though it may appeal to the anti-big business sentiment of many Democrats and even some populist Republicans.

Corporate profits are up, they say, therefore there must be gouging. But when demand for many goods and services cratered during the lowest points of the pandemic, most corporate profits similarly tanked. Now that demand is back up, predictably so too are profits.

This resurgent demand is helping to fuel inflation, as ongoing supply-chain bottlenecks continue to make many high-tech goods, especially those requiring computer chips, scarce and pricey. Higher wages due to the extremely tight labour market add additional inflationary pressure.

Across the economy generally, demand is overwhelming supply, and therefore, inevitably, prices are going up.

Not only is this not Mr Biden’s fault, his relative success in managing the pandemic has actually contributed to a strong recovery that made significant inflation virtually inevitable.

In their quest to shift blame, Democrats are especially targeting the oil and gas industry, because rising petrol prices are the most obvious signs of inflation that Americans see in giant numbers on huge signs everywhere, every day.

The administration is reduced to investigating the oil industry for supposed malfeasance and collusion, despite the emergence of a global energy crunch based on the very same dynamic of resurgent demand confronting reduced supplies.

Mr Biden is even releasing 50 million barrels of crude oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, which will account for one day’s supply in the global market, and therefore probably won’t even dent prices at the pump. But, hey, we tried.

Thus far, the administration and the Fed are resisting calls to raise interest rates to keep the roaring recovery going and prioritise jobs and growth over inflation. Depending on coming trends, they may have to revisit this judgment, possibly quickly.

Harping on inflation is good politics for Republicans, and apparently has an inordinate appeal to much of the media. But there’s definitely a good news story Democrats could tell if they decided to get serious and disciplined about messaging.

The other major Republican attack on Mr Biden is truly topsy-turvy. Their main talking point in recent days is that he campaigned as the man who would, single-handedly, defeat the coronavirus (though he never said anything like that) but since it continues to plague much of the country, he failed, which accounts for his low approval ratings.

In fact, from ubiquitous new vaccines to new treatments, and effective wide-ranging mandates, the Biden administration has performed well.

One of the primary reasons the pandemic continues to rage in much of the country is that many Republicans have systematically discouraged Americans from getting vaccinated or masking and other mitigation, blocked or banned mandates, and much of the party has spread wild disinformation about this deadly disease.

Yet, Mr Biden’s significant, if badly hampered, successes on containing the pandemic have come at the price of a virtually inevitable surge in inflation given renewed demand and have fuelled paranoid Republican culture war talking points.

Though there is ongoing bad news on both, Mr Biden doesn’t really have either an inflationary or economic crisis or an out-of-control pandemic at present. But he plainly has a serious messaging crisis.

Far too many Americans do not realise or register how much improvement has occurred in 2021, despite the wide-open Thanksgiving holiday last week in stark contrast to last year’s lockdown non-feast.

Yet, by dismissing inflation, first as imaginary and more recently as the function of “corporate greed”, the administration and the Democrats more broadly are doing themselves no favours. They need to be much more honest with the public about real inflationary pressures and the defensible, logical choices they’ve made.

They should certainly take a cue from former president Donald Trump, whose hyperbolic grandiosity was as effective as it was repulsive. Though they need not replicate his pathological dishonesty, they could learn a thing or two about politically useful boasting about their actual successes from the man Mr Biden derisively dismisses as “The Former Guy”.