This November, Democracy Is on the Ballot

We all know people who are furious at Joe Biden because he has not reined in Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and because Biden has not stopped arms shipments to Israel, and because Biden has continued to insist on the “special” relationship between the US and Israel. People who are deeply angry about the continuing devastation of Gaza can and do make credible arguments to support their criticisms, including their indictment of Israel for war crimes. A good portion of those people, those voters, say that they cannot morally justify voting for Biden.

 

I can make many of the same arguments about how American policy toward Israel has failed to serve the national aspirations and humanitarian interests of the Palestinian people. I have felt exactly that way for at least the last four decades. And I can name all the presidents who have led the administrations that have done so much for Israel and so little for Palestine. Nixon. Carter. Reagan. George Bush. Clinton. George W. Bush. Obama. And now, Biden.

 

But I should add here that I never saw any previous president struggle with the moral implications of arming Israel. Biden does. Or at the very least, he struggles with the political consequences of his policies.

 

In an election year, which critical voting block does he satisfy? Center-right Jewish voters? Arab-Americans? Progressive youth? Biden’s apparent wish to satisfy everyone may damage his reelection campaign, but after four decades of presidents who never behaved as if they had any doubt about unequivocally supporting Israel, it comes as something of a relief to see Biden equivocate.

 

To be honest, I understand that the tiny bit of cheer I feel in response to Biden’s small displays of ambivalence won’t endear me to pro-Palestinian activists who decry Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestine and have arrived at the conclusion that Israel is an apartheid state, a colonial settler regime. But, I must cop to something here. I have been negotiating with my conscience for years, voting for Carter, for Clinton, for Obama, for Biden, not to mention Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, and all the while millions of Palestinians have been shot, beaten, raped, dispossessed driven into exile, and robbed of their careers, professions and land.

 

In 1992, Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, emerged as the Democratic nominee for President. I had voted for Jerry Brown, I think, in the primary, but in the general election, I voted for Clinton. I did so aware that during the primary season, Clinton had briefly suspended his campaign so that he could performatively return to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so intellectually compromised that he reportedly wanted to save the dessert from his last meal to eat after his execution was over. Clinton’s theatrical move was meant to send the message that, unlike other Democrats who were soft on crime, he would be tough.

 

I voted for Clinton despite knowing about how his had campaign exploited Rector’s execution and ignored the tragedy of Rector’s life. Once installed in the Oval Office, Bill (and Hilary) weaponized so-called “super predators” for political effect, and presided over the fastest growth of the federal prison population in history. The fact that I didn’t see that coming may not be further evidence of the erosion of my moral character, but it likely raises legitimate doubts about my political chops.

We all also know people who do not feel that the benefits of an economy that has strengthened substantially under Biden have reached them. People who have been hit hard by inflation. People who can't buy a home. People driving older, balkier vehicles who can't afford to buy a better one. People who can't find affordable daycare. Many of them don't see why who they vote for (or, even, if they vote, at all) would make any difference to the quality of their lives.

And there are still others who are being pushed out of their neighborhoods because of rising rents; people who can't afford the elements of a healthy diet because they live in food deserts; people who use up valuable family time and can't run necessary errands because they commute to work on congested roads, or because they don't have decent access to quality public transit; people for whom access to quality healthcare is a dream; people who don't have access to reproductive healthcare or to gender-affirming medical treatment. Some of them will vote for Biden, but many might not vote, at all.

We hear Democratic campaign officials tell us that the best response to Trump and MAGA, the best way to prevent a Trump victory, is to focus extensively on what Biden has accomplished. Okay, I hear that. His presidency has been marked by many positive achievements, including substantial investment in infrastructure expansion in all 50 states, more affordable (or free) access to high speed internet in rural communities, increased federal investments in green energy sources and next generation technologies, reduced healthcare and drug costs for seniors, expansion of benefits and services to veterans who have suffered from severe toxic exposures, expanded student debt relief for more than 40 million borrowers, increased tax collections from wealthy tax evaders, and more. Set your web browser to look for a list of what Biden has accomplished. It's quite long and, almost certainly, will benefit and has benefited working people and families more than any administration has since the New Deal.

But here's the rub, I don't think that all those messages affirming Biden's accomplishments are going to persuade substantial percentages of the people who fall into the groups specifically outlined in the first three paragraphs above. Too many of them are likely to feel that those messages are describing improvements in other people's lives, but not their own.

I think the only thing that's going to motivate past Biden voters or potential Biden voters who are right now angry or demoralized is to go down the list of groups of people whose lives will get worse, if Trump wins. Part of what I am arguing here is that the Trump who might win in November, and the people who will have played a pivotal role in electing him and will run the country after the election, are much worse than the goons and clowns who ran Trump's presidency from 2016-2020.

Trump himself has made clear that he will be coming after everybody whom he considers a political enemy. And that is a very long list.

 

You're angry about what's happening to Palestinians now? Under Trump, it will get much worse. After all, it was Trump who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, breaking decades of explicit American policy that refused to make such a move; a move that sent a clear signal to Netanyahu and the Israel right: "We're okay with you doing things that previous presidents have always opposed."

 

Concluding that the worst is already happening to Palestinians, some folks might disagree with my assertion there is a meaningful difference between Biden and Trump; after all, if what is happening now is not genocide, all the momentum points to a genocidal conclusion. And, yes, the ongoing strangulation of the West Bank will continue, but any number of further escalations could result in complete ruin and death for Palestinians living there.

 

Under Trump, there will be no opening for a reversal of policy. And, into the bargain, during another Trump presidency, advocacy for BDS will almost certainly be criminalized, and pro-Palestinian activists might find themselves the target of federal prosecutions for a variety of felony charges, including conspiracy. At the very least, under Biden, activists are more likely to find effective political action.

Trump admires Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, the guy who celebrates white heterosexuals and considers virtually every deviation from whiteness and heterosexuality to be a sin (and a crime). Just this past May, the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held a two-day conference in Budapest and invited Orban, who maintains dictatorial control in his own country, to be the keynote speaker.

 

Orban was explicit and effusive in his support for Trump, whom he describes as the politically persecuted victim of American liberals. And, shortly after the CPAC conference in Hungary, Orban and Vladimir Putin met in a highly publicized two-man summit of their own. Both leaders have arrested and tortured, perhaps assassinated, political opponents. They have jailed gay men and lesbians. Criminalizing homosexuality outright is not apparently on Trump’s agenda, but his base would enthusiastically support state bans on gay marriage and already approves of state efforts to ban gender-affirming medical care.

 

Who else will come under sustained attack from Trump, who has already talked about building large new prison camps? Who will be indefinitely detained there? The most vulnerable parts of the LGBTQ+ community? Undocumented immigrants? Doctors and nurses who provide reproductive healthcare or gender-affirming treatment?

 

Trump talks about mobilizing the national guard to attack “criminals” in big cities with a measurable probability that military units will arrive first in the big blue cities of the east and west coasts. Or would Trump’s posse show up first in Chicago, which is frequently the focus of his fiery attacks?

 

Defense attorneys who represent racial minorities and the poor should also assume that their clients will face increased jeopardy. If the Trumpian past is prologue, we can safely assume that new federal judges and prosecutors appointed by Trump will be equally casual about justice in the future. And don’t forget about local, MAGA-embracing judges and prosecutors who will be further emboldened by a Trump victory.

 

Dreamers will be primary targets of a restored Trump administration. Student loan forgiveness will be a vanishing possibility, but harsher collection activities are a certainty. Progressive activists will find themselves the targets of intensified local and federal police investigations not seen in this country since Cointelpro. The fossil fuel industry will be deregulated, and drilling and mining will escalate on public lands and in environmentally fragile geographies.

 

In an April 26^th, New York Times article, writer Charles Homans quotes from a Trump speech delivered at a CPAC conference in March of 2023. “'In 2016,' Trump said, 'I declared I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.'”

 

The only force that stands opposed to the devastation that a Trump administration will perpetrate on the country and on our democracy will be voters who prioritize democratic norms. If we fail at protecting our democracy, there may not be another chance to stop the accelerating erosion of democratic norms. No one can sit out this election and assume that they will get another chance in subsequent elections. This November, democracy is on the ballot.

Stephen Markley’s book, The Deluge

A history of our frightening future

 

The Deluge is both a fine novel and a frightening and convincing history of our future. At almost 900 pages long, the book is unlikely to reach the full audience that ought to absorb the lessons about climate change, climate-driven catastrophes, and climate activism that Markley is trying to convey. And the book could use a table of contents that would demonstrate up front both The Deluge's time and geographical sweep, and it's obsession with detailing a wide sample of the heat waves, droughts, dust storms, floods, wildfires, famines, political confrontations, climate denialism, capitalist opportunism, totalitarian actors, craven capitulations, terrorist attacks and grassroots activism that will dominate the next decade and a half of life in the United States and around the world.

 

There can be no succinct summary of The Deluge, but on page 639, in one character's attempt to capture what life had been like and why no one had been able to predict, in full, all that they had experienced, there's this:

 

"Little did we know the self-reinforcing crisis of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone."

 

The destruction and loss of life that dominate the news cycle in this book, and will materialize in similar forms in our own lives in the years to come, are horrifying. The destruction and loss of life as the book proceeds, and as we navigate our own future, will relentlessly and persistently bend the arc of the universe in the world of The Deluge, and in our own parallel universe, in unpredictable ways. And those "ways"will create conditions that some significant number of us will not survive, regardless of the extent of our personal privilege.

 

The Deluge is full of engaging and generally well-defined characters. But one colossus of a character stands astride them all. Kate Morris, both an obsessive-compulsive truth teller, and a devious hero with little interest in playing nice, seems like an amalgam of dozens of charismatic and relentless activists that dot the history of American resistance to power; take your pick of figures like, say, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Wilma Mankiller, or make your own list. Kate Morris stands on the shoulders of all those heroes that came before her and goes as hard and moves the needle as far as any of them were able to do. Kate is the founder of a wildly successful organization, the Fierce Blue Flame, that fights the giant fossil fuel corporations and all their lobbyists and political servants, to a virtual standstill. It is with the description of her musings on page 459, that I realized that I had better begin writing:

 

"Instead, she couldn't stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peals of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don't change, don't learn, don't fall, don't flinch. All she'd ever feel was sorry for people who didn't know what it was to want something more from their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she'd made with nothing but her ravaged voice."

 

All of Markley's true, live heroes have weaknesses. In some cases, staggering weaknesses that few could expect to survive through the decades of political, economic and climate storm und drang. But on page 634-635, there's this soliloquy from Keeper:

 

"'I've done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I've--I've hurt people. People I don't even know or couldn't even find again to tell 'em I'm sorry. Tell' em I'm sorry. Tell 'em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That'd just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.' Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. 'We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I'm crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there's slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But finally the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn't collapse, and she's shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then ...' Your voice cracks again and you let a small sob escape. 'As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she's staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up...'

 

“Now you can't help yourself. You start crying and it's embarrassing, how you're powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you're still cradling her.

 

“'I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.'

 

“Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you're surprised to see the reverend is also crying.

 

“'I carried her out and handed her off. I'll never know what happened to her.'"

 

Nearing the end of the book, one particularly cranky research scientist, who has been warning for decades about the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, finds himself afflicted with a metastasizing cancer that has escaped treatment because his own role in forcing climate legislation through Congress in one of the most dysfunctional moments in American government history means that he has no time to set aside for the medical procedures that will prolong his life. But he does have a final opportunity to share with a friend his feelings about his wife's death from cancer some twenty years earlier.

 

"'When I lost my wife,' said Tony, 'I decided that grief is actually always there. It's like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it's always been there (page 830).'"

 

That moment comes just over 50 pages from the end. But it suddenly felt to me that I was hearing the author, Stephen Markley, expressing his own feelings through Tony. Feeling grief. Endless grief encountered in the course of writing this book and knowing how much suffering of all kinds lay ahead. 

 

But here's the thing, in Markley's book the activists never give up. And they are, by and large generous and stalwart and, most importantly, strategically and tactically agile. In The Deluge the struggle between the people and the power may take an unfamiliar form, but don't be deceived. The struggle for climate justice and more is the same old struggle. And the future always hangs in the balance.