Trump's election and major threats to American democracy

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the outcome of the Presidential election. Because I assume it's obvious to everyone that in two months, the inmates will officially take charge of the asylum.

But I do know the incoming President made it a central campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. Like on most everything, he was vague and sometimes self-contradictory on that. But he did promise that he would make a two-year push to deport them all. He explicitly referred to the deportation program under President Eisenhower, which was literally called Operation Wetback. It was a brutal operation that directly resulted in numerous deaths. And that was under Dwight Eisenhower, who in Republican terms then was considered a moderate or even a liberal.

That also involved about two million people forced out of the country. Today it is commonly estimated that there are 11-12 million, playing a far more significant role in the economy. American agriculture is almost completely dependent on *undocumented* labor. I've seen one historian claim that expelling 12 million people would be the largest forced migration in all of history. I don't know how it may rank in the Guiness Book of Humanitarian Horrors. But it would involve a lot of very real horror. Trump very recently promised that immediately after inauguration he would deport 2 million "criminal" immigrants.

For a bit of history on Project Wetback, see: Joshua Keating, Trump Praises Eisenhower’s Deportation Program, Fails to Mention It Was Called “Operation Wetback” Slate 11/10/2015; John Dillin, How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico Christian Science Monitor 07/06/2006.

Pilar Marrero in Incrédulos, grupos pro inmigrantes prometen “resistir” ante una presidencia Trump La Opinión 09.11.2016:

Donald Trump fue electo presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, sobre una plataforma que incluyó la promesa de deportaciones masivas, la construcción de un gran muro entre Estados Unidos y México y el reforzamiento del sistema policial fronterizo, triplicando la cantidad de agentes de inmigración y anulando medidas ejecutivas de ayuda a los inmigrantes.

[Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America on a platform that included the promise of massive deportations, the construction of a big wall between the United States and Mexico and the reinforcing of the frontier police system, tripling the number of immigration agents and annuling executives measures to support immigrants.]

And she writes, "los grupos que por años han luchado contra las deportaciones y la militarización de la frontera, y por una reforma migratoria, buscan reagruparse y comenzar una lucha que se presenta titánica" ("the groups who have been fighting for years against deportations and the militarization of the frontier, and for immigration reform, are seeking to regroup and to begin a fight that appears to be titanic").

There is also the very real effect of systematic, segregationist voter-suppression efforts targeting especially black and Latino voters. Rick Perlstein summed up the state of play on those recently in GOP Voting Fraud Squads Are Nothing New Washington Spectator 11/04/2016.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to immediately evaluate those, as this article by Justin Elliott notes, What We Don’t Know: The Full Effect Of Voter Suppression and Voter ID Laws ProPublica Electionland 11/08/2016:

As journalist Ari Berman, who covers the voting rights beat, pointed out today, this is the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder invalidated federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination.

But quantifying exactly how much the changes have depressed turnout is nearly impossible.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to measure the effects of voter ID laws,” says David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That’s because, Becker notes, “it’s incredibly hard to know who’s choosing not to vote because of barriers.”

But "not easy" is far from meaning "impossible." There are ways to determine the effects of voter suppression, as the Justice Department did in the early 1960s in court challenging segregationist voter suppression laws then.

Ari Berman, who is quoted there, has been doing great work reporting on this nefarious practice in its various forms. He explained in a piece in May the stakes involved, Voter Suppression Is the Only Way Donald Trump Can Win The Nation/Moyers & Company 05/10/2016:

Unless there’s an unexpected turnaround in his terrible numbers among nonwhite and young voters, there’s only one way Trump can win the general election: by massively suppressing Democratic voters or hoping they don’t show up on Election Day. Trump could do this by supporting new voting restrictions adopted by GOP-controlled states (17 have new restrictions in place for the first time in 2016), urging his supporters to create chaos at the polls and running a breathtakingly negative campaign that demobilizes his opposition.

Trump’s support in the primary directly correlated with racial resentment toward African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims. “The higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump,” wrote Tom Edsall in The New York Times. It’s not a stretch to imagine Trump supporters trying to block these same voters from the polls.

We probably won't have a decent picture of how that worked in yesterday's election for a while. As Ari noted there, "Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters."

Then there is campaign-financing system, which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court made orders of magnitude worse with their Citizens United decision. I wrote just after that decision in 2010:

President Obama addressed the issue in his weekly address on 01/23/09 01/23/2010, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People. As they often do, many of the words sound right (my emphasis):

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

But will he fight for real solutions? Sadly, he pleaded for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama administration and the current Senate leadership at least an offer of preemptive surrender.

We currently have one Party, the Republicans, who are both strongly partisan and willing to fight for their goals. We have another Party, the Democrats, who are lukewarm partisan and not notably willing to fight for the goals that are most important to their Party's own base and to the majority of the people.

Sadly, the Party that is made up of fighting partisans has also become an authoritarian Party hostile to democracy and the rule. (See Bush v. Gore, the Cheney-Bush torture policy, to take two examples among many.)

It really is remarkable for the President of the United States to say of a Supreme Court decision:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

But those words at this particular moment in time remind me of what's been so gut-wrenching disappointing to even Democrats like me, who never viewed Obama as some kind of democratic messiah. His actions haven't matched up to the urgency of his words.

There will be a lot to say about the 2016 election. For a long time. But this are some of the most urgent issues that stand out for me on the morning after.

Obama, Eisenhower and Syria

Jon Western at the foreign policy blog Duck of Minerva draws a comparison between Obama's decision-making on the recent attempt at a military invention in Syria and Dwight Eisenhower's during the French crisis at Dienbienphu, Obama's Dienbienphu Moment? 09/12/2013.

President Dwight Eisenhower, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, Vice President Richard Nixon, 1957

One might get the impression reading about the anti-Vietnam War movement that it was an unprecedented moment of unpopularity for a foreign war.

But the Korean War was also unpopular, though it didn't generate the same kind of protests the Vietnam War would a decade and a half later. Still, Westerns's piece reminds us that the general public in those early Cold War years wasn't in some wild warmongering mood all the time. Writing about the 1953-4 period when France's troubles in holding out in Indochina became acute, he says that Eisenhower faced a real barrier in public opinion to more active involvement in support of the French:

The problem was that public opinion was overwhelming opposed to intervention. In September of 1953, Gallup polling revealed that only 9% of the public supported fighting in Indochina. George Gallup made a striking notation by footnoting an editorial comment in the release of the September poll: "The size of the disapproval vote is unusually significant. Rarely in the polling annals has opinion divided in such a lopsided fashion as it does in the case of the troops to Indochina issue." That number ran consistently below 15% support throughout the spring of 1954 as the crisis escalated. Other polls suggested wider support, but only if the action included broad international support and active contribution from others.

That opposition came from multiple sources. First, in the wake of Korea (and the legacy of a bad war) there was a strong aversion in the public – and among the Never Again crowd in the U.S. Army – against launching another limited land-war in Asia. Second, there was a general opposition on the basis of estimated costs of war. Korea had been initially sold as likely to be a relatively cheap and easy effort, it wasn't. And, finally, there were many who opposed intervening on behalf of French colonialism – both for moral and prudential reasons. Many saw Ho Chi Minh's rebellion more as a nationalist inspired, not communist driven, campaign. [my emphasis]

And there were other times in which public reluctance to getting drawn into war was particularly strong:

There are many cases where we’ve seen the constraints of public opinion on presidential decisions: Roosevelt faced a deeply embedded isolationist Congress and public on the war in Europe from September of 1939 until Pearl Harbor; Clinton, and much of the international community, clearly floundered on Bosnia because of concerns of widespread public opposition to intervention; and, Reagan desperately believed that the United States should do more to support the Contras in Nicaragua – and despite his popularity, landslide victory in 1984, and his label as the "Great Communicator," he was blocked by Congress and overwhelming public opposition in his efforts to shift American policy to support the Contras – a constraint [that] ultimately led to the administration’s attempt to do an end run on Congress and the Iran-Contra crisis.

Western's piece is also a reminder that Eisenhower as President was not the kind of dove some liberal and progressive commentators now try to make him out to be. Yes, he was right about the military-industrial complex and had more pragmatic restraint in foreign policy than some later Presidents. But Western argues that he would liked to have been able to intervene directly to save the French colonial cause in Indochina.

Tags: barack obama, cold war, eisenhower, syria, vietnam war

Imagining Obama as a Republican via Ike nostalgia

I have a love-hate relationship with Michael Lind's writing. And I wonder even with this article that it may be more contrarianism for the sake of being contrary than anything else: Why the GOP should nominate Barack Obama in 2012 06/21/2011. But whatever the reasons, he manages to make an important point. He imagines Barack Obama crossing over to the Republican Party, winning their nomination and giving an acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention:

"I have fought against the failed tradition of New Deal liberalism from the strongest possible position -- the presidency. When the liberals wanted to nationalize the banks, I bailed them out and let their executives reap huge bonuses, thanks to the taxpayers. When the liberals wanted an expansion of Lyndon Johnson’s big government Medicare, I said no and pushed for a version of the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare coverage plan and what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts. When the liberals wanted a bigger stimulus, I drew the line in the sand. When the liberals criticized the Bowles-Simpson plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, I praised it. When the liberals demanded tougher action against Chinese mercantilist policies that hurt our manufacturing industries, I said no and sided with the U.S. multinationals that want to appease the Chinese government. When the liberals wanted America to withdraw from Afghanistan, I sided with the neoconservatives and ordered the surge. When the voices of the old, failed liberalism said that Congress has a part to play in authorizing foreign wars, I ignored that radical liberal assault on unchecked, arbitrary presidential power and ordered the U.S. to war in Libya on my own authority."

And, sadly enough, Lind has a point.

The problem I have with this approach, though, is that it makes use of a trick that can be misleading. Both Democrats and Republicans like to point back to Presidents of the other party from 20 years or more ago to say, look, the other party used to stand for what I stand for now. It's stock political rhetoric. But it generally depends on making fairly superficial readings of the positions of those Presidents. And it often leaves the real context out of the picture.

And I'm am just weary of Eisenhower nostalgia, which Lind indulges, uh, liberally, in his piece:

Of course, there are limits to Obama’s moderate Republicanism. While his economic policy is moderately conservative, Obama’s foreign policy is expansive -- and expensive -- Neoconservatism Lite, not a rebirth of Eisenhower’s cautious, budget-conscious "New Look" strategy of the 1950s.

In spite of an economic boom, Eisenhower worried about the effects of military spending on the civilian economy. In spite of a near-Depression, Obama exempted defense spending from the government spending freeze.

Eisenhower wound down the Korean War that he inherited from Harry Truman. Obama expanded the Afghan War that he inherited from George W. Bush. In Afghanistan Obama pursued the "surge," a strategy backed by neoconservatives that will have led to the unnecessary death and crippling of even more Americans before the inevitable U.S. withdrawal.

Eisenhower refused to take part in the British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt, during the Suez crisis in 1956. Obama, in contrast, agreed that the U.S. would provide most of the muscle in the Franco-British-American attack on Gadhafi’s regime in Libya.

Yes, Ike kept military budgets down. But he did so by relying heavily on a high-risk nuclear weapons policy  known as "tripwire, massive retaliation."

Yes, he was willing to lean on Israel, Britain and France to withdraw from Suez in 1956. But it's only been within the last 20 years that American Presidents adopted a position of never exerting meaningful pressure on Israel in foreign policy. Eisenhower's position on the Suez crisis was sensible. And it put the US on that issue in the role of restraining the former colonial powers Britain and France over a military aggression in the Arab world.

But Anglo-American cooperation was very much the order of the day three years earlier, when Ike had the CIA get involved in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It wasn't exactly a model James Bond operation. As John Prados explains in Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (2006), its success owed at least as much to dumb luck as to black-ops competency. And given that it has become part of the national mythology in Iran, it's probably reasonable to say we're still dealing with the negative repercussions of that "success."

And when it came to French colonialism, Ike was happy to fund the French war effort in French Indochina up until the battle of Dien Bien Phu put an end to that enterprise. Then the US stepped directly into the role of South Vietnam's main Western patron and encouraged them to block the implementation of the Geneva Accords that formally ended the French colonial role in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Ike's Administration didn't even formally recognize those accords as binding. There were a few problems later growing out of American policy in Vietnam. Ike's clandestine operations in Vietnam under Col. Edward Lansdale failed to achieve anything like the (blundering) successes of the the Iranian coup of 1953 or the Guatemalan coup of 1954, the latter also blessed with considerable blind luck.

Ike did manage to end combat operations in Korea, thanks in part to a very reckless threat that he would use an atomic bomb there and also benefiting from the change in leadership in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. The Korean War has never formally been terminated, though hostilities were ended by an armistice in 1954. US troops are still in South Korea. Leaving troops behind permanently after a "small war" has become the standard assumption for Pentagon planning, it seems. Remember the bold Maverick McCain's rambling about staying in Iraq for 100 years, or maybe 1,000 or 10,000? He cited Korea as an example of why that's a wonderful idea.

So let's give the Eisenhower Administration credit for the constructive things it did. But Ike nostalgia by Democrats? That, we should forget.

Once again, Lind manages to make a useful polemical point in this piece. But this approach has its limits. And the Republicans are going to keep calling Obama a Marxist Kenyan socialist Islamunist anyway.

Tags: barack obama, eisenhower, michael lind, obama administration