David K. Shipler's Blog, page 9

By David K. Shipler 

                If President Biden were to act on all the competing (and unsolicited) advice that he’s getting about how to handle Vladimir Putin when they meet tomorrow in Geneva, here’s how it would go: Threaten to harden sanctions, promise to relax them. Threaten to invite Ukraine into NATO, promise not to. Brandish cyber weaponry against Russian infrastructure, propose a cyber treaty against hacking and ransomware. Trumpet outrage over Russia’s rights abuses, make the points quietly and create a working group of mid-level officials for private discussions. Rattle the nuclear saber, seek new arms control. Compete in the Arctic, cooperate in the Arctic. And so on.

It is crucial to get this right, not only to reduce the risk of nuclear miscalculation but also to forestall a dangerous new alignment between Russia and China. A Russian-Chinese rapprochement has been discussed for more than two decades. “If the West Continues the Expansion, Moscow Will Drive East,” was the headline of a 1997 piece by Alexei Arbatov, head of the International Security Center at Russia’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations. It’s not a prospect that has delighted Arbatov. “We currently have wonderful relations,” he said a year ago, “but Russia needs to keep its distance. We cannot go back and forth between extremes, from China being the world's greatest threat to it being our strategic ally or partner.”

A couple of old jokes from Soviet days underscore the issue. One quotes a headline from fifty years in the future: “All Quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border.”

Another is one that Biden could update at his summit.

Putin: Joe, I had a dream last night that Washington was all in red. The White House was red, the Capitol was red, there were red banners everywhere.

Biden: What a coincidence, Vladimir! I had a dream last night that Moscow was all in red. The Kremlin walls were red, there were red stars on the towers, there were red banners across the streets.

Putin: What’s so strange about that? What did the banners say?

Biden: I don’t know. I can’t read Chinese.

Putin has surely heard this joke, so if he has even a shred of self-deprecating humor, he’d probably steal the punch line before Biden could get it out.

Whatever. That’s my advice for how to begin their meeting. Then, Biden needs both a mailed fist and a velvet glove, as all U.S. presidents have in dealing with Russia, both before and since the Soviet Union disintegrated. That is because—contrary to popular misconceptions in Washington—Russia is not a monolith. Its history and cross-currents of concerns make it as complicated as the United States. There are many Russias: Russia the bully and Russia the neurotic, Russia the opponent and Russia the ally (remember World War II). There is Russia the bold, and there is Russia the scared, the Russia that can wipe out the world with ICBMs and the Russia that trembles at the prospect of a mildly unfriendly government on any of its borders.

                Therefore, no single-minded approach will do. Fawning over Putin, in the peculiar habit of Donald Trump, emboldened the Russian leader even as relations with the U.S. plummeted. At the opposite extreme, sticking a finger in Putin’s eye without compensatory offerings of benefit won’t work, either. Enormous issues of common ground exist between the two superpowers, and they need tough, practical exploration, which Biden seems prepared to try: climate change, cyberwarfare, terrorism, the pandemic, the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran, the protection of the Arctic and other pristine regions of the world, and on.

Empathy and dignity—feel-good terms rarely heard in hard-nosed foreign policy circles­­—are central to success. Empathy for Russia’s viewpoint is key to intelligent decision-making—not to excuse malicious behavior but to explain it. Respecting dignity is also crucial—not by capitulating but by avoiding deeds and declarations designed to humiliate. (It didn’t help for Biden to agree when asked if he thought Putin was a “killer.”)

Within limits, the United States can adjust its own behavior to minimize adverse reactions from Moscow. And Moscow could obviously do the same with respect to the United States, where Putin has achieved a villainous specter. Both sides are sharpshooters at hitting each other’s nerves. Let’s see how accurately than can assess each other’s worries.

For example, given Russia’s historic fear of hostile encirclement, nobody should be surprised that Moscow is alarmed when NATO expands to Russia’s western frontier. After the Cold War, the western military alliance incorporated the former Soviet satellites of Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (which by then had divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic), plus Albania and the new countries of the former Yugoslavia. In other words, Russia’s formerly communist Eastern European borderlands allied themselves militarily with the United States.

 In 2004, even three former Soviet republics joined NATO: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. If that hadn’t galvanized Russia’s anxiety, it would have been as strange as if Washington had sat back while Russia formed a military alliance with the new countries of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

In addition, given Russia’s deep sense of inferiority vis a vis the U.S. and Western Europe, let’s not be amazed by Putin’s macho reaction to Western disparagement. And given Russia’s traditional aversion to political pluralism as chaotic and weak, let’s be indignant but not shocked by Moscow’s attempts to sow disorder in U.S. democracy by posing online as Americans to exacerbate polarization. Discrediting democracy is a useful tactic by Putin at home to play to his own society’s affection for authority and order.

Then, too, let’s acknowledge reluctantly that Russia is not going to allow Ukraine, whose very name derives from the Russian word for “border,” to join the anti-Russian western military alliance. It would be nice if Ukrainians were allowed to make their own decisions about this, but if they are treated as pawns in a great power competition, they will lose badly, and so will the United States. Imagine if China and Russia coordinated, with China moving on Taiwan as Russia moved on Ukraine.

 Would a balanced posture of neutrality by Ukraine, of economic ties with both Russia and Western Europe, make Putin relax? Perhaps, but Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union, seems to be on Putin’s wish list for reconstructing the Soviet empire. He’s not going to let it go into Western hands if he can help it. And he can help it. If Washington didn’t get the message after Russia seized part of Ukraine outright—Crimea—and then dispatched thinly disguised troops to wage warfare in eastern Ukraine, then obliviousness has become the new pandemic among American policymakers.

Biden needs a clear order of priorities. Geographical competition with Russia in its own back yard should not be one of them. Tilling all that common ground should be. And maybe Biden, with his winning smile and charming wink, can bid adieu to Putin by saying, “I can’t read Chinese.”     

By David K. Shipler 

                Dr. Megan Sandel, a pediatrician, experiences a troubling revelation whenever she sees a patient in the Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic. The clinic seems like a normal health-care facility in an advanced country, she notes: a waiting room, a medical assistant taking a child to be weighed and measured and then into an examining room.

“But that’s where, in some ways, the picture changes,” said Dr. Sandel, the clinic’s co-director, “because when you walk into the room you see this really cute, what you think is a twelve-month old, but it turns out it’s a two-year old. It’s a two-year old who hasn’t outgrown their twelve-month-old clothes yet.” [Listen to Sandel here.]

Even more serious than what you see is what you do not see: the brain of the child during a critical window of cognitive development. And in that largely invisible universe of neurons and synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that are supposed to be generating the abundant future of every small person, lifelong damage is being done. The medical diagnoses are “stunting” and “failure to thrive.”

 That is malnutrition in America, which is chronic among the poor and has soared during the pandemic. Its long-term harm will be one of the most severe legacies of Covid-19.

 The usual incidenceof what the government calls “food insecurity” ranges from 13 to 21 percent of American households with children, varying with the state of the economy. Most of them are white, although Black and Hispanic families suffer at higher rates. As school meals ended and vulnerable parents lost jobs during the Covid-19 outbreak, the Grow Clinic’s caseload jumped 40 percent. Nationwide, the rate of food insecurity in families with children roseto 29.3 percent last spring and summer from 13.6 percent in 2019, before the pandemic. With the return of some jobs and bursts of government assistance, the level has gradually declined to 17.8 percent, according to a large sample of adults with children in their households, surveyed by the Census Bureau in April. Seven out of ten who reported that they “sometimes” or “often” did not have enough to eat said they simply couldn’t afford to buy more food.

The recent $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan will help, but not sufficiently or indefinitely. It raises grants by what used to be called food stamps--the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—by up to $100 a month per family. More significantly, the plan’s $3000 to $3600-per-child stipend for one year would re-conceptualize governmental aid if made permanent, evading bureaucratic red tape by providing direct cash payments. Medical professionals say that getting money into parents’ pockets is the best way to treat children’s malnutrition.

Without broader policy overhauls, though, food insecurity seems likely to remain both a result and a cause of hardship, a key link in the middle of a complex chain reaction. For poor families without government housing subsidies, for example, rent on the private market can soak up 40 to 60 percent of income. Paying rent is not optional. The bills for electricity, water, heat, phone, and car loans cannot be ignored. The part of the budget that can be squeezed is the part for food. And that’s what happens.

                Furthermore, nutritious food is scarce in many poor neighborhoods, one reason that obesity and malnutrition can coexist. When you don’t have the resources to make rational choices, Dr. Sandel observes, you go for the less expensive soda, chips, and other junk food whose prices are lowered by government subsidies of the sugar and corn industries. And when her patients know that their SNAP and other funds are going to run out before the end of the month, they overeat when they can, stuffing their kids and using heavy cream to stretch dishes.

 â€œHunger” is an unscientific term that can embrace everything from starvation to passing discomfort. In deeply impoverished countries, it can kill by compromising the immune system to expose children to serious disease. In the United States, too, poorly fed kids get sick and miss school more often than their wealthier peers. When they are hungry in class—or online during the pandemic—their attention flags, they do not do well. “Learning is a discretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, who founded the Grow Clinic nearly forty years ago.  

But something even more pernicious is happening to younger children who aren’t getting enough micronutrients during their first thousand days—the second and third trimesters in utero and the first two years after birth. For at least half a century, scientists have been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron, iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, all found in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. The alarm is sounded in study after study, including the succinct warning in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stunting may be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”

Brain growth comes early. A newborn’s brain is about 10 percent of total body weight compared with an adult’s 2 percent. By her first birthday, her brain reaches about 70 percent of what it will be in young adulthood, and by age two, about 77 percent.

At the microscopic level, the target of malnutrition’s assault depends on the timing. Neurons, generated during the second trimester of pregnancy, are reduced in number; their maturation is impeded if inadequate nutrition occurs in the third trimester. Nutritional deficiency in that period can also lower the production of glial cells, which support and protect neurons. Midway into the first year, synapses develop in the part of the brain governing vision, a little later in the auditory and receptive language areas, and between one year and mid- to late adolescence in the prefrontal cortex, responsible for high-level cognition. The networks of synapses are generated and pruned by an interplay of genes, behavioral experience, learning, and nutrition.

“The stages of development are numerous and complex,” the biologist Mohamed El Hioui wrote in a 2019 summary of research studies. “Neural cells must proliferate, migrate to the right place, establish the right connections, form the right receptors for neurotransmitters and be well covered with myelin, a protective substance essential to the proper transfer of nerve messages. This meticulous assembly of neural cells is vulnerable to environmental stressors, including of course, malnutrition.”

 The process is rapid at times, always delicate, and easily disrupted. Although the brain gets first priority in harvesting scarce nutritional resources, at the expense of the rest of the body, even slight food insecurity has been shown to affect young children, and “any sustained interruption to their nutrition or to their care, if not treated early, can result in irreversible damage to their development,” warned a 2007 paper from the Drexel University School of Public Health.

For example, protein deficiency diminishesthe thickness of the cerebellum and the visual cortex, among other areas of the brain. During pregnancy, inadequate choline protein may be associatedwith a reduced transfer of nutrients by the placenta and adverse brain structure in the child. Since chicken eggs contain high amounts of choline, undernourished children in Ecuador who were fed eggs in a study reported in 2017, the youngsters “had significantly higher concentrations of biomarkers associated with improved child development and important physiological processes in the brain.”      

Some early injuries never heal. Seventy-seven infants who had been hospitalized with protein deficiency in Barbados carried the effects into adulthood, despite getting nutritious food between ages one and twelve. In their thirties, they had compromised“verbal fluency, working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to a healthy group from the same classrooms.

Among poor pregnant women and young children who don’t eat enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, ruinous iron deficiency is widespread. Anemia decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whose fatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction. Inadequate iron also affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical for memory. And it can lead to low birth weight, which is associated with cerebral palsy and other neurological problems.

Even children who get adequate iron later do not recover fully. Decades of studies following anemic infants into their school years have found them scoring lower in “arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and . . . spatial memory and selective recall,” according to a collection of research, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, assembled by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

Low iron also makes the body more susceptible to lead from the old water pipes often found in slum housing. “Iron and lead are absorbed in the same pathway,” Dr. Sandel explained. “If you’re iron deficient, you create more receptors, you’re iron hungry, you’re looking for iron wherever you can find it,” and you absorb lead more readily as well. “So part of the treatment for kids who are lead-exposed is iron therapy.”

Research on the brain has gone far beyond the most demonstrable biological effects of malnutrition into areas of behavior and mental illness, where food deprivation is hard to isolate from  such other factors as parenting, family stress, poor housing, and the myriad hardships of poverty.

 It’s been established that the brain generates and whittles away synapses as the environment demands, so that emotional support during infancy can shape a person’s later ability to form attachments. And kids who don’t get enough iron and protein often lack the energy needed for curiosity and communication with others, reducing interactions essential to cognitive development.  Proven remedies have included both nutrition and increased psychosocial stimulation.

 The Barbados study and other research have reported correlations between early malnutrition and later attention deficit disorders. Causal relationships have been hard to establish, but children who once suffered from malnutrition have displayed hyperactivity, poor socialization, and difficulties in emotional regulation. A studythat followed children in twenty American cities from 1998 to 2000 found lower self-control and higher rates of delinquency among those who had experienced food insecurity. Increased schizophrenia afflictedadults whose mothers during pregnancy had suffered in the “Dutch famine” during World War II.

A family’s anxiety over insufficient food can spread to children, with a particular neurological impact. “There is growing evidence from both animal and human studies,” a group of scientists reportedin 2016, “that persistently elevated levels of stress hormones can alter the size and architecture of the developing brain, specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.”

Then, writinglast year in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a team at the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, added together the findings of numerous studies into a devastating litany of mental health implications that are expected to outlast the pandemic: “Individuals experiencing food insecurity,” their paper concludes, are “more likely to experience symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as suicidality. Qualitative research suggests that financial and food insecurity can fuel feelings of sadness, shame, guilt, anxiety, and hopelessness.”  

The Grow Clinic’s caseload might decline, and the virus might diminish quite soon. Its effects on children will not.

    First published by the Washington Monthly

 To watch the PBS documentary, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, click here: https://vimeo.com/550030784 Free of charge.

By David K. Shipler 

                For many decades, Israel has calculated that neighboring Arab counties would think twice before attacking, knowing that a punishing Israeli military reaction would follow. The practice has sometimes worked against nation states. But it has rarely been effective against the non-state actors arising as significant players in the Middle East—among them, as is now obvious, Hamas in Gaza.

                Israel persists nonetheless. “You can either conquer them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign ambassadors Wednesday, “and that’s always an open possibility, or you can deter them. We are engaged right now in forceful deterrence.”

An early demonstration of the strategy came in 1953 after a band of Arab terrorists stole into Israel from Jordan to attack Israelis. The retribution was conducted by a young Israeli colonel, Ariel Sharon, whose Unit 101, known for ruthlessness, crossed into Jordan and ravaged the border town of Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers.

Later, during the War of Attrition in 1969, Israel responded massively to repeated Egyptian attacks on Israeli positions in Sinai by bombarding Egyptian villages along the Suez Canal. Some 55,000 homes were destroyed, 750,000 civilians were forced to flee, and numerous Egyptians were killed and wounded.

 Along certain frontiers, Israel’s strategy of defense by retaliation—even against civilians—brought peace without peace treaties. Decades before its 1994 treaty with Israel, Jordan worked hard to deny Palestinian terrorists the use of its territory. Jordanian troops patrolled their side of the border as assiduously as Israeli monitored its own.

Syria, despite its refusal to make a formal peace, has kept its border with Israel on the Golan Heights mostly quiet and has been slapped hard for infractions. Egypt’s frontier with the occupying Israeli military in Sinai calmed down in the years between the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the two countries’ historic peace treaty in 1979.    

But failed states can’t be leveraged into compliance. Lebanon’s long civil war weakened the reach of the central government, opening a vacuum in its southern territory that was later filled by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO, within artillery range of Israel, had no stake in Lebanon’s stability or security, so no threat of retaliation deterred occasional shelling and terrorist attacks on Israel’s north. The solution—the temporary solution—was an Israeli invasion in 1982, which expelled the PLO, only to see an equally hostile replacement eventually take its place: Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which recently fired several rockets into northern Israel. Israel responded with shelling.

If it seems that the kaleidoscope is just being given another shake, and then another, that’s a fair analysis. Take Gaza, that strip of arid land teeming with impoverished Palestinians. In 2005, after thirty-eight years of military occupation that began with Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, it was Sharon, ironically, who as prime minister decided to withdraw unilaterally with no formal agreement or international guarantees. Because Sharon thought like a soldier, not an ideologue, he assessed the Gaza occupation, in conventional military terms, as more of a burden than an asset. Furthermore, an associate of his once told me that Sharon had begun considering that his historic legacy should include some gesture of peace. History has not been kind to him, however, as it rarely is to anyone in that part of the world.

Under Sharon as Defense Minister, Israel itself contributed to the rise of Hamas. As I recalledin a recent letter to the editor of The New York Times, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, told me in 1981 that he had been given a budget to help fund the Muslim Brotherhood, a precursor of Hamas, as a counterweight to Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements. Odds are that Hamas would have evolved without Israel’s financial contributions. But the funding was consistent with Israel’s strategic blunders in trying to manipulate internal Arab politics in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.

The list of self-inflicted wounds by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders runs too long for less than a book-length piece of writing. To summarize: Each side has radicalized the other. Each side has a marksman’s eye for striking the other’s nerves of fear and indignation. Each side has eroded its own middle ground of reasoned compromise. Each side has empowered the most extreme, violent elements of the other.

Palestinians, deprived of ethical, visionary leadership, have missed opportunities for peacemaking with Israel. They have protested with uprisings and terrorism rather than non-violent passive resistance, by which they probably could have impeded Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank in the 1970s and 80s, when Israel still nurtured moral objections to the occupation. They launch rockets from Gaza indiscriminately to feed the political fortunes of Hamas rulers. And Netanyahu replies with an onslaught to cling to his prime ministerial sanctuary as he is put on trial for corruption. A word more deadly than “cynical” is needed.

Aside from “forceful deterrence,” Israel’s other strategy has focused on converting areas from Arab to Jewish by settling Jews in place of Palestinians. It is happening in East Jerusalem, whose Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was the point of friction that lit the latest conflagration. There, near the supposed tomb of Simon the Just, a Jewish priest in the Second Temple, right-wing Jews have for years been hectoring Palestinians to move out, sometimes combining intimidation with lucrative offers to buy their property. Israel’s Supreme Court is due to rule on a set of evictions based on a claim that Jews actually purchased the land in the nineteenth century.

But the symbolism is as potent as the law, and more compelling than actual census data. The Arab population of the Jerusalem District continues to rise--from 277,000 in 2008 to nearly 372,000 in 2019. Yet for Palestinians, the evictions resonate with the longstanding injuries of displacement—during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, during the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from the attacking Jordanian army, and since then as Jewish communities have mushroomed among the Arab villages of the West Bank.

Sharon used to call those settlements “facts on the ground.” Much of that ground was seized without due process as Israel exploited the absence or vagueness of land titles from Ottoman times. Still, the modern use by Palestinians was clear enough: vineyards, olive groves, and villages’ common pastureland.

What Israel chooses not to notice is this: Every bulldozed grape vine and olive tree is added to the arsenal of memory. Every vigilante act by Jewish settlers against Palestinians is written on a kind of  cultural balance sheet for the sake of future retribution. That is Israel’s second strategic failure.

The third is based on the assumption over decades that Israel proper can be walled off from the surrounding indignities experienced by Arabs in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Yet while many Arab citizens of Israel—now 20 percent of the total population—yearn for belonging and participation in Israeli society, they are not fully embraced and are not insulated from grievance.

Israeli governments—especially Netanyahu’s—have increased aid to Arab villages. Economic conditions have improved, along with more access to higher education. Before the recent outbreak of warfare, an Arab party was poised to enter a coalition government for the first time. Yet also for the first time since the 1948 war, the country has been rocked by communal violence between Arabs and Jews, often thugs who project their violence onto a big screen of religious and historic righteousness.

The intoxication with righteousness drives the strategies, which continue to fail, again and again and again.

Also published by The Washington Monthly.

By David K. Shipler 

                In a perfect world, everyone would be able to distinguish between ridiculous absurdities and reasonable possibilities. Everyone would be curious. Everyone would be open to revising preconceptions. Everyone would be canny enough to drill down beneath the superficial slogans to the facts, to hear the counter-argument, to entertain an opposite viewpoint, and to arrive at an informed opinion based on a foundation of truth.

                In that perfect world, populated by perfect human beings, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would not have banned former President Donald Trump; The New York Times would not have fired its editorial page editor; and the Supreme Court would not now be considering whether a school can punish a student for lobbing online obscenities at the cheerleading squad. Trump’s pro-violence fulminations would have fallen on deaf ears, a senator’s published call for military force against protesters would have lacked resonance, and school officials would have merely shrugged.

                Freedom of speech in that utopia of reality-based common sense would be practically unfettered. The restrictions imposed by law—which are very few in the United States thanks to the First Amendment—would be even weaker. Informal restraints and punishments in the private sector (where the First Amendment does not apply) would not be necessary: Neither the racist slur, the conspiracy theory, nor the personal smear would gain traction in a decent public forum.

                Thinking about that imaginary world is kind of sad, isn’t it? Because it’s not what we have. It’s a fantasy. Instead, in Pogo’s cartoon words, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We ourselves are the enemy of free speech, because our behavior invites the impulse to censor. We allow pernicious words their impact. We filter facts through sieves of ideology and identity, selecting beliefs only within our zones of comfort. Our gullibility, our stubborn aversion to ambiguity, our political tribalism and dogmatism, our resistance to contradiction have all accumulated into a sense that we are acutely vulnerable to words, that our very democracy might tumble down in a torrent of ugly, nutty, vile words. Hence the supposed remedy: the wave of erasing, cancelling, punishing, banning to satisfy a yearning for blank spaces and blessed silences.

                Think for a moment how cheerless it really is for an open, pluralistic democracy to be deeply relieved not to read or hear the utterances of a former president. Think how bizarre to depend on a few private companies to suppress lies that fuel insurrection. How many of us devotees of free speech quietly celebrated the other day when Facebook’s oversight board ruled that banning Trump was legitimate after the January 6 invasion of the Capitol? Yes, the board took issue with the “indefinite” nature of his suspension, because open-ended uncertainty was not in Facebook’s rules. Yes, the board urged that the ban be reviewed in six months under clarified policies. But for now, at least, he is denied that platform, which feels merciful. Is that healthy?

                Wouldn’t it be healthier for Trump to be able to rant openly at the margin, where he belongs, and be widely rejected for what he is—a racist con artist, a dangerous demagogue, an aspiring dictator? Wouldn’t it be healthier to have an American public that could be trusted to decry speech that is factually wrong, scorn speech that is intellectually corrupt, and condemn speech that insults and incites?

In truth, though, the United States is not a healthy democracy. It is an unhealthy semi-democracy. It faces a rising far-right now channeling its major themes of white supremacy through the Republican Party, which in turn grows brazenly bigoted and anti-democratic.  

Are limits on speech the answer? Curbs on speech might soothe the moment, but they don’t foster informed and responsible thinking. And they certainly don’t curtail the spread of extremism. Germany’s strict laws against hate speech, which would be unconstitutional in the American system, have not prevented the flourishing of neo-Nazi and other far-right movements there. According to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the author of Hate in the Homeland, German activists have found clever evasions. These include removing the vowels of certain prohibited words and arguing, successfully, that the resulting strings of consonants are not words in the legal meaning.

In the United States, banned users of social media have migrated to corners of the dark web or smaller platforms, where they carry on as before, on sites more difficult for law enforcement to monitor. It may be that their disinformation is less easily available to the wider public, but with Republican conduits for its distribution, it still works its way into the mainstream as relentlessly as a river finds the least resistant pathways to the sea.

The First Amendment has been interpreted by the courts to restrain the government from limiting the inherent right to freedom of speech except in such egregious cases as libel, incitement to violence, some forms of threat, child pornography, and invasions of privacy. There are high bars to proving those violations, though, and the prohibitions must be content neutral—that is, not disfavoring one viewpoint over another. A local ban on loudspeaker political campaign trucks at 2 am, for example, must apply to all candidates, not just one party or another. This leaves a broad landscape for speech in America, as it should be, and it’s quite hard for people to bump up against its frontiers.

In the private sector, however, the First Amendment generally does not apply, leaving institutions empowered to punish employees who post racist tropes, for instance, or even have their pictures taken at the Capitol uprising. Just as privately owned newspapers and broadcasters can pick and choose which viewpoints to publish or air, social media platforms may allow or prevent whatever opinions they wish. No law requires or prohibits them from distributing or barring Trump or any other figure whose posts they find offensive. And that’s where controversy about policing speech is now located.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms are neither publishers nor public squares, neither responsible for the ideas they distribute nor entirely exempt from informal accountability outside courts of law. If you libel someone in an article for The New York Times, the victim can sue both you and the paper. But if you post it on Facebook, only you can be sued. Facebook and other social media companies are immune from libel suits under a federal protection that some politicians want abandoned. If that happens, the platforms will presumably have to screen every post to be sure it’s not libelous or an invasion of privacy.

Yet as we’ve seen, the platforms come under strong social pressure to censor and to ban, and most now have rules and staff combing through postings to purge bigoted, inflammatory, threatening, inciting, and other memes and statements that strike the owners as offensive or dangerous. The standards are inconsistent and erratically enforced, and maybe that’s to the good.

Raucous debate that includes even despicable statements provides the oxygen of a pluralistic democracy. So calls for more vigorous private censorship raise the obvious concern: If too few people have too much power to control speech through their private companies, nothing guarantees that they will be the highest-minded models of civic virtue. Malice, bias, and propaganda for one side or another can poison the air we breathe.

Nor can government jump in to regulate, as some have advocated. Imagine a Trump-like administration deciding what Facebook could and could not post. The effort would probably fall under the weight of the First Amendment, if the Supreme Court stays faithful to its robust defense of the right to speech in the recent past. But maybe not. You never know. Terrible tweets of big lies and conspiracy fantasies are not benign, as we saw on January 6. In a mood of fear, rights can vanish.

There are two answers, neither of which is a complete solution. First, because no private or governmental censorship can truly silence, diversity of media is a natural protection against the tyranny of speech control. If you can’t say it here, you can say it there.

Second, the enemy is us, and every teacher in every classroom and every school needs to step up to the patriotic duty to preserve our open democracy by teaching and teaching and teaching how to read and think critically, how to read and hear with discernment, how to judge sources, check facts, and apply good sense to negotiate through the whirlwind of falsehoods that rip around us. Only then will we retain our footing in a world that won’t be perfect, but might be more perfect than the one we have.

By David K. Shipler

                There is a whiff of familiarity in the promised American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The parallels are uncanny, bringing to memory my one brief foray to the country, in the spring of 1988, as Soviet troops prepared to leave after nearly nine years of bloody warfare that ended in their defeat. Their departure opened the way for a fundamentalist Islamic movement to take power, now poised to take power once again.

                “One week from now, I’m going home,” Pvt. Yuri Moshnikov told me then, a grin lighting up his face. He was in a bush hat and light khakis and leaned casually against the gate of a base outside Kabul. Then the smile faded. He had lost friends during combat in Kandahar. “This war is evil,” he said bravely—bravely, for freedom of speech was not established in the Soviet Army. “No one needs this war. Afghanistan doesn’t need it. We don’t need it.” Yet, he continued, “I fulfilled my duty.”

Defeat in Afghanistan comes gradually, like a slow realization. For the Americans, it has taken nearly twenty years as mission creep evolved into mission impossible. For the Russians, it was spread by the US-supported mujahideen, the Islamist forces that received weapons from the CIA via the Pakistanis. These included shoulder-launched Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, so deadly that when I flew into Kabul from Moscow aboard an Aeroflot passenger jet, we had to spiral down tightly in a falling-leaf approach while Soviet helicopters whirled around us firing flares to deflect any heat-seeking Stingers heading our way. For a guy with a US passport, being defended by the Soviet military against American weapons felt truly bizarre.

It was also odd, especially in retrospect, for the United States to be arming the wrong side, the side that oppressed women and barred girls from going to school. That side was the one that morphed into the Taliban, which harbored Al Qaeda, which struck on September 11, 2001, which prompted the United States to invade in order to—yes—oust the Taliban, the younger generation of fundamentalists who ruled the country with religious totalitarianism.

Pretty soon, they are going to be back. President Trump wanted out, so in a rare spasm of good sense he hired the skilled Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. But the agreement is turning out to be reminiscent of the Paris accords, which covered the US departure from Vietnam, leaving South Vietnam to fight and lose alone, as the Afghan government is likely to do as well.

In that sense, President Biden is implementing Trump’s policy, but with a difference: Biden seems like a man without illusions. He is the first president since George H. W. Bush with enough experience in foreign policy to know the limits and potential of American power in all its forms: diplomatic, economic, military, and moral. He also appears willing to face two realities about Afghanistan. One is the reality of the incomprehensible Afghan quilt of unconquerable tribalized fiefdoms. The other is the reality of American impatience and reluctance to play the long game with lives and treasure. As a people, we favor wars only as long as we are winning, which we could have done in Afghanistan if we’d left after toppling the Taliban. But we decided—or slipped unwittingly into the temptation—to remake the country in something of our own image.

The United States had smaller ambitions there after the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. The American role was more spoiler than constructor. Washington was not truly interested in Afghanistan—nor in Moscow’s motives, evidently. It was the Cold War, and through that myopic lens just about everything looked like a zero-sum game: the Soviet invasion looked imperialist, not defensive; a Soviet advantage even on its own border meant an American loss. Containment shaped US policy, blocking and parrying was the reflexive methodology. Just as the United States supported dictators because they were anti-communist, so the United States supported a religiously autocratic movement because it was anti-Soviet.  

What drives a country to war is usually complex, and it would not do to simplify Moscow’s calculations. But a few salient points should have been clear enough to alert Washington to Soviet concerns, perhaps enough to argue for a hands-off American approach.

Popular in American policymaking was the strategic, or historic, analysis of Soviet intentions, holding that the invasion was a natural continuation of the Russians’ impulse toward contiguous expansion, their century-old thrust toward warm water ports and their contemporary desire to be within striking distance of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. But while Afghanistan lay along the Soviet Union’s southern border, the rugged, transportation-deficient country was hardly the best route.

The theory was flawed. Projecting such carefully drawn thinking onto a Soviet government crippled by an ailing leader, Leonid Brezhnev, gave Moscow more credit for canniness than was probably due.

A more plausible scenario had origins in Iran’s Islamic revolution the previous year, which had rekindled Russians’ traditional fear of hostile encirclement. It stoked worries in the Soviet hierarchy that fundamentalism could spread across the border into the vast Muslim population of Soviet Central Asia.

Then, a series of coups and counter-coups in Kabul caused consternation. An anti-communist president was ousted, then a pro-Soviet government was overthrown by an American-educated president suspected by Moscow of links with the CIA—all while an insurgency of Muslim fundamentalists controlled two-thirds of the country.

Imagine a similar scenario in Mexico. A pro-American government in Mexico City is beleaguered by a rural guerrilla movement rooted in social grievances and religious issues--and drawing support from countries hostile to the US. The pro-American president is overthrown, killed, and replaced by a pro-Soviet defense minister who orders the former president’s supporters arrested. Washington is riveted by the specter of strong Soviet influence across the southern border of the United States. At the height of the Cold War, would anyone be amazed if the US sent troops to Mexico to straighten things out?

Misunderstandings lead to war, and as generals are fond of warning, war is easier to begin than to end. Biden is right when he argues that if the US waits for the right conditions to leave Afghanistan, they will never arrive and the American military will be there for a year or two or ten.

I’m averse to quoting myself, but I can’t resist mentioning that in talks I gave shortly after the 2001 invasion, I heard audiences gasp in derisive disbelief when I said that US troops would be there for twenty years.

And in 1988, I visited the hilltop Martyrs’ Cemetery, where the sorrowful wind blew silently, and has continued from then into today and tomorrow. “Somewhere far off, behind the silence,” I wrote in The New York Times, “came a woman’s voice in a thin wail. Here, weeping over a grave, a widow knelt and prayed from a pocket Koran; there, a brother stood, holding firmly onto another brother’s arm.”    

By David K. Shipler 

                According to Sir Isaac Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—a principle of physics, of course, but also true in politics and policy, at least currently in the United States. The country is moving in two directions simultaneously, as if two revolutions in thinking and practice are taking place, one progressing into a new era mobilizing government for economic and social reform, the other pushing hard into an old indifference to social injustice marked by blatant racial and class discrimination.

                Although the two revolutions frame their respective arguments around the size and role of government, they are driven by more fundamental clashes of concept. At root is the question of how inclusive a democracy should be, what problems it can solve, how the common good should be defined, and how near or distant the horizon of vision should be drawn.

Joe Biden, the 78-year-old Washington insider, did not raise radical expectations when he took office just over two months ago. He was forecast as a caretaker president who would decompress the political atmosphere with boring normalcy. Instead, he has quickly emerged as the unlikely catalyst of the most imaginative Democratic movement in at least a generation, perhaps since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His aspirations are broad and intensely sophisticated, forming an agenda that would apply expansive ideals in mobilizing the nation’s expertise and financial power against the most vexing problems of race, class, health, education, climate, environment, energy, communication, low-paid work, elderly care, aging transportation networks, and just about every other failure in the American landscape.

The opposite revolution would leave all the failures in place, unresolved, and would add to them. It is more than a counter-revolution, led by Republicans who have become more than the Party of No. They go beyond saying no to every advance—no eased voting, no true help for malnourished children, no cleaner air or water, no safer workplaces, no better health care, no sufficient funding for schools, no mandatory wages high enough to support families. The new Republicans—for they are new in the history of the Republican Party—do not merely stand still and block. They are moving at speed back in time.

Take access to the ballot box, now caught up in the two competing revolutions. Last November, more Americans votedin absolute numbers than ever before: 159,633,396, a 66.7 percent turnout, the highest in 120 years. That was prompted not only by the high stakes of the election, but also by the broadened opportunity that had been put in place over decades and enhanced because of the risks of going personally to the polls during the pandemic. Easier registration, early voting, mail-in ballots, and drop boxes encouraged citizens to participate.

American history is pockmarked with voting denials—aimed at women, at Blacks, at felons, at the poor. Breaking down those obstacles has been part of a revolution that modern Democrats are continuing, as illustrated in their voting rights bill passed by the House and stuck in the divided Senate.

The more Americans who vote, the less chance Republicans have of winning elections. That is the party’s obvious calculation in introducing dozens of bills in state legislatures aimed at making voting harder. Many strip power from local election officials who stood as bulwarks against Trump’s effort to overturn his loss. Some, such as those recently passed in Georgia, are so obviously designed to suppress the turnout of Blacks that Biden has called them a return to the Jim Crow era, when legal segregation included poll taxes, absurd intelligence tests, and outright intimidation to prevent African-Americans from exercising their most basic right.

The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court opened the door to this reverse revolution in 2013 by effectively throwing out Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required pre-clearance by the Justice Department of any changes is voting procedures by states and localities listed as having a history of discrimination. If the new laws survive the conservative Court’s scrutiny, democracy would be severely wounded.

The Republican revolution is pedaling backwards in many other areas. When it comes to fighting poverty, the party retreats under the flag of victim-blaming, implying that the poor (most of whom are white, by the way) are immoral and irresponsible and don’t want to work. This stereotype underpins the patronizing and punitive approach of government programs, and Democrats haven’t been immune to its pernicious effects. Witness President Bill Clinton’s signature on the 1996 welfare bill that required recipients to seek, train for, or obtain jobs, even when they weren’t available or paid little.

But the moral fantasy resonates more now with Republicans than Democrats. It’s why Republicans cheered when Donald Trump imposed onerous obstacles to getting benefits such as SNAP, the food card that keeps hungry Americans just barely afloat. It’s why congressional Republicans opposed Biden’s additional $300 in weekly unemployment benefits, arguing without evidence that recipients wouldn’t look for jobs—jobs that might pay decently if Republicans hadn’t also refused to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. The old Soviet joke comes to mind: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.

That American Rescue Act, which barely passed over unanimous Republican opposition, contains the seeds of a revolution it itself: a $3,000 to $3,600 per year payment per child, even if you don’t earn enough to pay taxes. The benefit begins to phase out at income levels of $112,500 for the head of a household and $150,000 on joint tax returns. It lasts only one year, but if extended will mark a new role for government in providing a guaranteed income minus the red tape that accompanies SNAP, housing subsidies, and other programs.

Indeed, affordable housing would be the single largest item--$213 billion—in Biden’s proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which would engage government in the broadest repair and reform effort in generations. It would put federal dollars into promoting electric vehicles; fixing decaying roads, bridges, airports, and ports; improving public transit; expanding high-speed broadband; workforce development; and on and on.

 This is an unusually sensible time to borrow money for such projects, with interest rates on government bonds ridiculously low. If you need a new roof and have to get a loan, you know that this is the moment. Why wait until rates go up, as they inevitably will? Yet Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell says without reading the legislation that every Republican will vote no. One suspects that he and his colleagues don’t want Biden to chalk up any achievements that will please American voters.

To be fair, there is a conservative principle buried in the swamp of political rhetoric. Conservative Republicans say they want to shrink government, make it less intrusive—unless governmental power extends into a woman’s body by opposing her right to an abortion. Conservative Republicans say they worry about the federal debt—except when they don’t worry about it, by slashing taxes for the wealthy and the corporations as they did gleefully under Trump, raising the debt by $7.8 trillion during his four years. Conservative Republicans say they care about the future of children and grandchildren—except when they don’t, by tolerating child malnutrition and poorly funded schools.

And of course Republicans say they care deeply about democracy—except when they don’t, by coddling the anti-democratic extreme right and trying mightily to impede voting by American citizens who they think will vote against them.

It’s anybody’s guess which revolution will win. The United States is at a tipping point in its democratic norms, its compassion for the less fortunate, its crumbling infrastructure, its millions of untrained workers, its confrontation with embedded racism and misogyny. It is a fateful hour.   

By David K. Shipler 

                In the mid-1990s, a conservative named Joseph Overton devised a brochure with a cardboard slider showing how the parameters of acceptable political possibilities could be shifted. Called the Overton Window, it has helped explain the changes over time in society’s views on women’s suffrage, prohibition, racial segregation, gay rights, and the like. And now the window has been slid open to the flow of monstrous ideas from the white supremacist right into the public square of political discourse.

The conduit is the Republican Party, which is serving to normalize radical visions by reshaping them just enough to make them seem slightly less shocking. “Ideological beliefs once thought of as extreme have—with relative speed--become more widely accepted by the general public,” writes Cynthia Miller-Idriss in her book Hate in the Homeland.  â€œMainstreaming is critical to the growth of far-right movements globally, because it helps them recruit, radicalize, and mobilize individuals toward violence, while reducing the likelihood that the public will raise the alarm about their efforts.” She was prescient: Her book was published even before the January 6 invasion of the Capitol.

A professor of education and sociology at American University, Miller-Idriss has made a specialty of studying right-wing extremism in Europe and the United States. Her catalogue of far-right themes, theories, fantasies, fears, and apocalyptic remedies offers an instructive lens through which to see the mainstream arguments of many Republicans and their supporters. Conservatives’ statements that initially look merely controversial jump into focus as menacing once your eyes adjust. You can see in many Republican declarations the features of dangerous extremism.

Those features include: anti-government and anti-democratic ideas; exclusionary beliefs that dehumanize “others” such as Jews, blacks, Muslims, Asians, Latinos, and immigrants; geographical identity that attaches historical purity to a land; existential fears of “white genocide” in a “great replacement” of Christian whites by non-Christian nonwhites; hypermasculinity; and conspiratorial fantasies culminating in violence to accelerate the rise of a new order.

When these convictions are taken from the margins and reshaped by Republicans into policy positions and political assertions, they slide into the public square in a pattern of ominous normalization. By placing Miller-Idriss’s depiction of far-right movements next to Republican and conservative themes, the symbiotic relationship becomes clear:

Anti-government, anti-democratic: The far right’s distrust of government was echoed by former President Trump’s repeated sloganeering against Washington corruption (“Drain the swamp!”) and his denunciation of governmental actions and agencies, including trade deals, the Iran nuclear agreement, the judiciary, the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Then, exploiting the far right’s anti-democratic suspicions, he assailed a Congress controlled by his own party and undermined faith in the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. That appealed to far-right beliefs that the system must be destroyed. The alternative--gaming the system—is being advanced nationwide by state Republicans, bent on power above all, who are flooding legislatures with bills to reduce access to the ballot box. That approach coincides with far-right goals of exclusion.

Of course railing against Washington is a perennial campaign theme with such a long tradition that decades ago, James Reston quipped that politicians who excoriate Washington often end up living there after retirement. Yet Trump took the polemics to unprecedented levels, channeling a populist antipathy for government. In this he led less than he followed; he heard and amplified the resentful chants of his supporters.

 â€œDrain the swamp, look at that sign. Drain the swamp in Washington, DC.” Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally. “I didn’t like the expression, drain the swamp in Washington. So I said it three days ago. The place went crazy. I said, you know what? I’m starting to like that expression.” It did not seem to matter to the far right that Trump wallowed in the swamp. The slogan inspired.

Exclusionary beliefs and white ethno-states:  â€œPlaces and spaces are fundamental to a sense of belonging and identity,” Miller-Idriss writes, “and are imbued with emotional attachment and meaning.” That has been true historically of Nazism and other far-right movements into the present. “Space and place are constant backdrops to contemporary far-right fears of a ‘great replacement’ and conspiracies about Europe turning into Eurabia.”

At the extreme right, she notes, “issues of territory, belonging, exclusion, race, and national geographies are foundational for imagining collective pasts as well as anticipated futures.” The remedies of “border walls, along with language about national defense, incursions, and invasions” reinforce the sense of existential threat. The 2017 white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia, included chants of “Jews will not replace us.”

Those themes play harmoniously into the Trump Republican anti-immigration rants. They have gone way beyond rational policy arguments. Instead, they ignite far-right fervor by demonizing immigrants as mortal dangers to the very nature of America. “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Trump tweeted as convoys of Central American families approached the border in October 2018. On another occasion, he declared, “If we can save American lives, American jobs, and American futures, together we can save America itself.” At a rallyin Panama City Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, he wondered aloud what to do, cleverly suggesting violence while rejecting it. “We can’t let [border officers] use weapons,” he said. “We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?”

“Shoot them!” a woman yelled. The crowd cheered. Trump gave a slight smile, then said, “Only in the Panhandle you can get away with that.” Cheers, applause. “Only in the Panhandle.”

In accord with some of his staff’s affinities for the far right, Trump also fed the yearning for a white ethno-state by explicitly naming the racial and religious components of his anti-immigration stand. He banned entry from seven Muslim countries. He deridedimmigrants from Haiti and Africa. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he asked. Nigerians won’t ever leave, won’t ever “go back to their huts.” He expressed preference for immigrants from countries like Norway. He went as far as to tweetthat four congresswomen of color, three of whom were born in the US, should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Republicans did not object to the tweet.

Apocalyptic Imagery and the Great Replacement: The far right’s fears that minorities will replace whites through demographic change or genocide were cited by Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh Synagogue, and Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 at an El Paso Walmart frequented by Latinos. The anxieties have found resonance in some Republicans’ remarks and retweets.

Speaking at the 2020 Republican convention, Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old head of Turning Point USA, declared: “Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life.” (Kirk founded a think tank with Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University.)

 The country’s demographics are a grave concern. One of the far right’s goals, Miller-Idriss says, is to get whites to have more children, a theme picked up by Representative Steve King of Iowa in a 2017 tweet about immigration: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” In a follow-up CNN interview, he declared, “You’ve got to keep your birth rate up and teach your children your values and in doing so, you can grow your population and you can strengthen your way of life.”

King’s record is significant. He flirted with the far right for years before the Republican establishment and its funders finally had enough. In 2018 he gave a long interview to the magazine of the rightist Austrian Freedom Party. He retweeted comments by Lana Lokteff, a white nationalist who argued for a white ethno-state, saying, “Alt-right is the fight for a white future and white lands, free of invaders and traitors who actively seek to ruin us, to make us feel guilty for the success and might of our ancestors as a means to conquer us.”

He also endorsed a Canadian white nationalist, Faith Goldy, for mayor of Toronto. She had recited “the 14 words,” a catechism that reads: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

After a long history of this, King began to lose corporate campaign donations, but only some. In October 2018, Land O’Lakes stopped contributing, but others continued, including AT&T, Nestle Purina, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Citizens United, the National Association for Gun Rights, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the American Association of Crop Insurers, and the American Soybean Association.

He won reelection in 2018, though barely, but was stripped of his committee assignments by fellow House Republicans in 2019 after saying in a New York Times interview, ““White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in class teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” He lost the 2020 primary, 45.7% to 36%.

Of course there’s a lot of rhetoric at both ends of the spectrum about saving or losing America, and Republicans have no monopoly on specters of Armageddon. The difference is that Trump and Republicans have spoken to a set of far-right movements that sees a race war as essential to a new world order very much like the ISIS drive to recreate the Caliphate, Miller-Idriss writes. “In this sense, Islamist and far-right extremists share a similar apocalyptic vision and use the same kinds of violent terrorist strategies in an effort to accelerate the process toward the end times.” The fastest path, according to the most extreme believers, is by “speeding up polarization and societal discord as a way of undermining social stability overall.”

Whether Trump was acting deliberately or instinctively or inadvertently in fueling the far right through polarization and instability is an open question. But he did it nonetheless by hyperventilating right to the end of his administration. Two days before the Senate runoff elections in Georgia last January, Trump told a rally, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.” Three days later, at the Save America March, an insurrection of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and halted the Electoral College vote count in Congress.

Hypermasculinity: Gyms and mixed martial arts centers are important youth recruitment sites for the far right, Miller-Idriss reports, and physical fitness, strong masculinity, bravery, and toughness are promoted as central values of patriotism and ethnic purity. Trump has keyed into these themes. He tweeted a doctored video showing him body-slamming a man who had a CNN logo over his head. He posed as the tough guy recovering from Covid-19. Back in 2000, he effectively rescued from bankruptcy the organization sponsoring mixed martial arts competitions, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, by inviting them to hold two tournaments at his Atlantic City hotel. “Today,” Miller-Idriss writes, “the UFC broadcasts in over 150 countries to more than a billion households.” The far right champions such combat sports “as a perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defense, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets. Hitler himself had advocated for the importance of combat sports for training Nazi soldiers.”

In the vein of faux masculinity, the right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently disparagedwomen in the military: “Pregnant women are gonna fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military. While China’s military becomes more masculine, as it’s assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.”

All this huffing and puffing might be written off as comical fringe warfare if it weren’t reflected in real-life attitudes on a broad scale. Some of the crazies are now in Congress—and they didn’t get there by breaking in past Capitol police. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has bought into the conspiracy theories that school shootings were faked and space lasers owned by the Jewish Rothschild family started the California wildfires. Before her election, she had also endorsed the notion of executing Democrats. But only 11 Republicans joined Democrats in removing her from committees.

Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who spoke at a white-nationalist conference last month, was “scheduled to appear on a QAnon conspiracy-supporting talk show,” MSN News reported. The Arizona Mirror that the conference organizer, 22-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes, followed with a speech calling the Jan. 6 riots “awesome” and demanding that Gosar and others pass legislation to protect America’s “white demographic core.’”

The penetration of the far right’s ideas was documented in a Vanderbilt survey taken in 2020 before the election. A slim majority (50.7%) of Republicans agreed with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” A plurality (41.3%) agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” Others said they were unsure, and only 20 to 25% registered disagreement with those statements, which can be read as prescriptions for insurgency.

By David K. Shipler 

                Again and again, we are cheated. Those of us who celebrate the embrace of justice are allowed elation only for a while. Then the inevitable bigotry awakens from what turns out to be a shallow slumber.

                The saga of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is the latest to lift the mood and then crush it. Their royal wedding in 2018 drew an estimated 1.9 billion viewers worldwide, not only for the splendor but also for the elevation of racial inclusion: a biracial American joining the British royal family, an expansion past ancient limits into the broader world. And how fitting, given the United Kingdom’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity. We were entitled to our euphoria, as naïve as it was.

                Barack Obama gave us that, too. On election night in 2008, television screens radiated with tears for the healing of history, notably the streaming eyes of Jesse Jackson, no fan of Obama but a courier of reform. Who will forget his face? But then, the first “black” US president—also biracial—became the target of ugly caricatures and epithets, facilitating the prejudices that Donald Trump rode into the White House eight years later. Euphoria, it seems, is always stalked by hatred: Emancipation by Jim Crow, Obama by Trump, voting rights by voting suppression.

                Last year, the murders of blacks by police—nothing new, but now recorded for all to witness—propelled the largest outpouring in history of white Americans demonstrating for racial justice. In big cities and small towns across the country, week after week, whites went with blacks into the streets, driven by the terrible, long video of the white Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling fatally on the neck of the unarmed black man George Floyd.

                Not since the brutality of segregationists against nonviolent civil rights demonstrators in the 1950s and 60s had the conscience of white America been animated so intensely. It was uplifting. It brought a kind of indignant ecstasy, a declaration that Black Lives Matter, meaning of course that black lives also matter, that black lives matter, too, not just white lives, that too often have black lives been seen as not to matter. Pride in this arousal of morality was not allowed to last long enough.

That slogan of decency, “Black Lives Matter,” was immediately devalued by the racially biased right—institutionalized in the Republican Party, in Fox News, in radio shout shows, in social media—which replied, “All Lives Matter,” as if to imply that protesters were saying that only black lives matter. The absurdity struck a chord at the meanest level of bigotry.

Then, too, the looters and arsonists who often flock to disorders put the stamp of violence on the movement for police reform, allowing the Republican right to tarnish the legitimate and generally peaceful protests with the specter of fear. The tactic worked to an extent, helping Republicans in some down-ballot races as all Democrats were smeared with the actions of a few hooligans and the extreme demands of a few radicals.

Now, in the upcoming trial of former officer Chauvin, the country is presented with another opportunity for some measure of satisfaction—not euphoria for sure, but in the case of conviction, at least a thin faith that perhaps, just perhaps, Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he declared, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And a not-guilty verdict? Or a hung jury? What will that mean for the country’s sense of itself? Precious few police officers are held to account for violence against unarmed citizens. Evidently, we want our cops free to kill. So even a conviction in this one case, which would say that at least one black life mattered, would not stamp out the worm of bias that eats at the foundation of America.

When our fellow citizen, Meghan Markle, ran into the racist buzz saw of the British tabloids, which make fortunes through lies and ridicule, she said she found no support from “the firm,” as insiders call the royal apparatus. Misery and suicidal thoughts drove her and Harry from the gilded cage. Now factors besides race might have been in play—anti-Americanism, personal chemistry, clashes of style. But race is never absent from the space between blacks and whites, on either side of the Atlantic. Its weight is often hard to measure, but to wish it away is to wish away the centuries of colonialism, slavery, class, the film and literature steeped in stereotyping, the panoply of deep assumptions triggered by that most superficial quality—the color of the skin. Indeed, as Meghan told Oprah Winfrey in this week’s bold interview, there were “conversations with Harry about how dark your baby is going to be and what that would mean or look like.”  

                “What?” Oprah exclaimed. And in that single word rested our shock, rage, and total lack of surprise.

By David K. Shipler

The second in an occasional series

                A great American paradox is playing out dramatically on the Texas stage following the destructive winter storm: millions are unemployed, and millions of skilled jobs are vacant. Texans cannot find enough plumbers, electricians, and other hands-on specialists to restore life to decent levels of comfort and safety. The state—and the country at large—simply does not have enough men and women trained in the panoply of manual professions needed to keep an advanced society running.

There is a solution to this, and it’s recognized by labor unions, employers, and economists. It fits the general proposition, which I heard some twenty years ago from a leading economist, Robert Lerman: If a good idea exists, he said, you can be sure that it is being tried by somebody somewhere in the United States.

And for more than those twenty years, Lerman has been on a campaign to expand an idea already proven in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere. It is the ancient institution of apprenticeship—not in the medieval form but in a modern combination of in-class study and on-the-job learning that enhance practical skills for Americans who do not finish four years of college.

The hard fact is that if you don’t go to college or, once there, don’t get a degree, you’re in danger of falling through a hole in the economy. Unless you’re a whiz kid like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you’re likely to be lacking the skills necessary to sell your labor competitively in a free economy. You could end up in dead-end, underpaid jobs that can consign you to a life near or below the poverty line.

And you will not be alone. Although 90 percent of Americans over age 24 have completed high school, only about two-thirds go immediately to college, and 40 percent of them drop out. Especially vulnerable are the first in their families to attend college. Their drop-out rate is 89 percent. Lerman reportsthat just 22 percent of all students and 12 percent of black students who began community college in 2012 graduated within three years.

The hardship on families is evident. Less visible is the damage to the economy as a whole. It means a chronic mismatch between skills and positions, especially in technical fields. A 2015 survey found 84 percent of manufacturing executives reporting a shortage of talent, leaving 60 percent of production jobs unfilled. That thwarts business expansion, denies needed services, and in some cases propels jobs overseas.

There have always been apprenticeships to a degree, many run by labor unions in commercial (not residential) construction and in manufacturing. But manufacturing has declined, contributing to a reduction in union jobs, which now total just 6 percent of those in the private sector.

Over the years, social aspirations also shifted away from manual labor to “college-for-all,” the mantra of a country steeped in the national ethic of equal opportunity. Vocational schools and occupational classes in high schools came into disrepute as a tracking system that funneled teenagers from working-class families away from college, while channeling their wealthier peers into college prep courses.

Yet career academies focusing on particular industries have yielded benefits in the last fifteen to twenty years, Lerman noted. “I don’t think anybody had ever shown a negative impact of vocational education,” he said, “but it did get a bad reputation for shoving people aside. The education elite decided you should beef up academic courses in high school, and vocational courses declined.”

A new wind is now blowing. “College for all” has not been achieved. The cost of a liberal arts education has soared, and student loans are debilitating. The connection between a bachelor’s degree and a good job looks tenuous to more and more young people and their parents. The apprenticeship idea could be about to ride a growing wave of pragmatism, and Lerman in determined to help it along.

From his perch at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, he has pressed for increased federal funding for state agencies, training centers, and employers to support apprenticeships. He has compiled evidence on their effectiveness to persuade employers to launch programs. He has designed templates of skill standards that ease applications for government grants.

Just before the country was hit by the Covid pandemic, the federal Office of Apprenticeship reported about 550,000 registered apprenticeships in the civilian sector (and another 110,000 military apprenticeships), with an additional half million or so unregistered, operated informally by employers, Lerman estimates. Furthermore, the concept is gaining broader acceptance in fields beyond construction and manufacturing, such as health care and accounting.

Some programs coordinate with community colleges to combine the necessary academic work with hands-on training. Others operate their own training centers, and about 35 to 40 percent of registered apprenticeships involve unions, usually in joint union-management partnerships that are self-funded and require no government grants.

Some employers are leery of going in with unions out of concern “that if they have an apprenticeship program they’re more likely to become unionized,” Lerman said. And some unions object to financial support going to non-unionized companies.

Yet government money is necessary to much of the effort, both for training costs and apprentices’ wages. The Obama administration’s 2008-9 stimulus package did not include anything for apprenticeship, Lerman said, and he pressed for funding. By 2015, the annual budget for the federal Office for Apprenticeship in the Labor Department was $30 million, and under Trump went up to $150 to $200 million. “But it’s a drop in the bucket,” Lerman said.

If the United States put as much commitment into apprenticeships as the United Kingdom, he calculated, it would mean $8 to $9 billion annually, adjusted for population. With adequate investment, “England was able to scale their program. They have one thousand training companies all over the country. Each occupation gets government funding for offsite training and a bit for mentors.” In Switzerland, he reported, “95 percent of 25-year-olds have an occupational credential (70 percent through apprenticeship) and 25 percent hold bachelor’s degrees.”

Of course apprenticeship programs, like any other schooling or training, has its dropouts, which overall amount to 45 to 50 percent of enrollees, he noted. But the concept also appeals across the political aisle as a hand out and a hand up, rewarding work that justifies higher wages than the hourly minimums that federal and state governments impose.

Lerman is a man of more than tables and numbers. He understands the sense of dignity brought by a profession. “A good apprenticeship gives people a kind of identity, an occupational identity,” he said. “If you’re an electrician or a plumber or a maintenance person, and it embodies a lot of skills, which an apprenticeship program does, you can do things your neighbor can’t do. We’ve sort of lost that aspect of the job. A lot of people today have had no experience with the manual jobs, the factory jobs. They don’t know the complexities. People confront a different issue every single day. It’s more complicated than it seems.”

Here, then, our knowledge as a society outstrips our action. We know what has to be done. We just don’t do enough of it, at least not yet.

By David K. Shipler 

                Rush Limbaugh, the witty, right-wing propagandist who died this week of lung cancer, gave his millions of listeners formulas for expressing anti-black bigotry without seeming to do so. Here is a description of his methods as directed against President Obama, in an excerpt from my book Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword:

                Given that blatant racial slurs are broadly unacceptable in twenty-first-century America, you could say that freedom of speech has its limits, restrained here not by law but by culture. And the punishments are inconsistent. People may lose jobs, promotions, reputations, and their chances for political office—or they may not. They can’t predict with confidence. Therefore, either instinctively or deliberately, people inclined to indulge in racial stereotyping find ways to disguise their messages in raceless terminology.

That leaves much room for disagreement over what is really being said. Is it encrypted prejudice or honest commentary? Which criticisms of Obama should be taken at face value, and which reverberate with echoes of age-old racial contempt? How can hidden implications be identified? Bias is agile and from time to time shifts into keys that sound race neutral to some Americans but are “dog whistles” audible to those who hear the notes of bigotry.

So, in polite company you cannot say that Obama is an “uppity” black, but you can call him “arrogant.” You can’t say derisively that Obama’s got rhythm, but you can accuse him of empty eloquence. You can’t say that he’s dumb or lazy—his obvious brilliance can even seem threatening—but you can say again and again that he has to read speeches from a teleprompter, an accusation not made against previous presidents who used the tool routinely. You can say he’s incompetent, but you can’t say that his blackness makes him so. Instead, you can say that his blackness got him elected to a job that’s over his head—a kind of political affirmative action by voters who didn’t want to oppose him for fear of seeming racist. Rush Limbaugh has actually made this argument.

You can’t tell whites that Obama will mug them because he’s black, but you can stir fears of black danger by saying, as Limbaugh has, that he hates whites, that he “has disowned his white half, that he’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side” of his father. You can’t conjure up the scary image of an angry black man, but you can imagine that he’s Muslim, which today is code for menacing.

You can’t say explicitly that he is not “us.” You can’t say that he is really “other” and doesn’t know his place. You can’t say that he “doesn’t belong” in mainstream America because he’s black, but you can say that he wasn’t born in this country, that he’s a closet socialist, that he doesn’t understand or value what is authentically American. You can’t say that his race makes him a dark, frightening mystery, but you can say (again, as Limbaugh has) that we know less about him than we’ve known about any president—although, in fact, we know much more, owing to his autobiographies, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. In other words, you can find ways to accentuate the sense of distance that many whites already feel from African-Americans.

                In any given case, however, it’s an open question whether the purveyors of prejudice themselves are fully aware of what they’re doing, especially if they’re not well versed in the long legacy of anti-black images. The calls to bigoted thoughts are often so encrypted that they require some key of knowledge to unlock the code. Even listeners who can’t do that—who can’t clearly identify a statement as racially biased—may be subliminally affected by the racial message.

The result is a curious paradox: that such commentary can seem both benign and pernicious, that it can appear racially neutral and yet stir inchoate racial aversion. It would be simplistic, therefore, to brand someone like Rush Limbaugh an avowed racist, even as he plays on the stereotypes. Is he cunning or just unknowing?

Intentionally or not, he and others on the right trade in charges against Obama that probably wouldn’t stick if he weren’t black. Many of their accusations just don’t compute for most Americans, because the images stand so far from what the general public sees in the president. He has been under close scrutiny since 2008, after all, and widened his margin of victory in his 2012 reelection. So the extremists have to reach for timeworn racial assumptions designed to generate contempt and fear. The hard rightists accuse him of laziness, for example, and of fostering violence—two of the most durable anti-black labels in American history.

The dread of rage and brutality derives from the time of slavery, when it seemed only logical that those who lived under the whip would, if they could, rise up in rebellion and revenge. Thomas Jefferson imagined ominously that if blacks were freed, as he believed they should be, racial coexistence would succumb to racial war. He proposed instead that a colony for freed blacks be established on the coast of Africa. “Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Even at today’s distance from slavery, vestiges of the images and fears survive in some quarters of white America, and they are handy for rightist commentators. Limbaugh, America’s master propagandist, skillfully strikes those chords of anxiety. In a 2010 monologue nimbly touching on the indolent, the unpatriotic, the arrogant, and even the sexually uninhibited, Limbaugh said:

Let me focus mostly on the lazy . . . He’s on his sixth vacation, he really doesn’t appear to work very hard, gets to the Oval Orifice [yes, that’s what Limbaugh said] at 9:30 in the morning . . . Obama is late, he doesn’t spend a lot of time in there. I don’t think it’s laziness. I think it is arrogance. I think Obama thinks of himself as above the job . . . I don’t think he likes the White House. I think he looks at the White House as confining . . He and his wife do not like living there. To them the White House is not a great place of honor, it’s a prison, and a lot of presidents have felt that it’s a prison, but to them it’s like some African-Americans, “Fourth of July ain’t no big deal to me, yo.”

Limbaugh went on, in a rare violation of the unwritten cultural rule against the word “uppity”: “Obama is uppity, but not as a black. He is an elitist. He does think he’s smarter and better than everybody else. That’s what he was taught. He’s a Harvard man.” Later, Limbaugh also accused Michelle Obama of “uppity-ism” because she flew separately to a vacation in 2011.

Obama’s supposed anger, as one of Limbaugh’s favorite themes, surely strikes the nerve of those listeners who share many whites’ low threshold of tolerance for black men’s rage. “I think he’s motivated by anger,” Limbaugh said of Obama in 2012. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them.” (The “chip” turns up regularly in Limbaugh’s comments.) “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry,” he said in June 2009, four and a half months after Obama’s inauguration. “And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry; he’s going to cut this country down to size. He’s going to make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made—its mistreatment of minorities. I know exactly what’s going on here.” Two years later, Limbaugh predicted racial violence as “part of the program,” saying, “There are going to be race riots, I guarantee.”

To drive home the terror that whites should feel, Limbaugh pictures a vast policy conspiracy driven by black grievances. “Obama has a plan,” he said in January 2012. “Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here.” What’s more, he and Michelle Obama view the presidency “as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking, Well, we deserve this, or we’re owed this because of what’s been done to us and our ancestors.”

Soon after his inauguration in 2009, Obama was branded by Limbaugh as “more African in his roots than he is American.” This implication of “otherness” has animated the right. It recalls the historical ethnocentrism of this land of immigrants, which has marginalized and disqualified one group after another, from one era to the next: Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Latinos, blacks, and on through the phases of decades.

On May 27, 2015, after I called Limbaugh “America’s master propagandist” on an NPR show, I had the honor of hearing him rail against me for many minutes, even playing sound bites of me citing a Soviet professor’s explanation of propaganda: a truth, a truth, a truth, and then a lie. Limbaugh seemed as pleased as I was to have this debate, going on and on—denying that he was a racist, of course, but relishing the term “propagandist” by attributing its origin to “propagate” in the Catholic Church’s lexicon.  His web site then put up a logo bragging: “America’s Master Propagandist” with a big footnote: “As declared by state-run NPR.” I just wish that footnote had given credit accurately.