"How you lose your democracy": Shocking new research shows Americans lack basic civic knowledge

Chauncey DeVega

SALON
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Republicans are systematically eroding the basic civil rights of the American people. As we are seeing in other countries that are experiencing what experts describe as "democratic backsliding," Republicans are doing this by undermining and corrupting America's democratic institutions from within. If Republicans get their way, free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, the right to vote, and other basic freedoms and rights will be severely restricted.

In an example of Orwellian Newspeak, Republicans present themselves as defenders of freedom, when they actually oppose it. More specifically, Republicans believe that freedom is the ability and power of a select group of White Americans (rich, white, "Christian" men) to take away and otherwise deny the rights and liberties of other Americans and people in this country they deem to be less than, second-class, not "real Americans" and the Other, such as Black and brown people, the LGBTQI community, women, non-Christians, and other targeted groups.

Unfortunately, many Americans are unaware of their basic constitutional and other guaranteed rights and liberties – and how the country's democratic institutions are ideally supposed to function. How can the American people defend and protect their democracy and rights, if they lack such basic knowledge?

Such an outcome is not a coincidence: it is the intentional outcome of how the American right-wing and conservative movements have undermined high-quality public education for decades with the goal of creating a compliant public that lacks the critical thinking skills and knowledge to be engaged citizens. Now new research by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center provides insight into the extent of this crisis. Some of the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey's findings include:

[W]hen U.S. adults are asked to name the specific rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, only one right is recalled by most of the respondents: Freedom of speech, which 77% named.  
 
Although two-thirds of Americans (66%) can name all three branches of government, 10% can name two, 7% can name only one, and 17% cannot name any.

I recently spoke with Matthew Levendusky, who is a Professor of Political Science, and the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, about this new research. His new book is "Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide."

In this conversation, he explains how America's democracy crisis is connected to a lack of basic political knowledge and civic literacy, the role that education can play in equipping Americans to defend their democracy, and why contrary to what many "conservatives" like to believe, America is not a "republic".

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

How you are feeling about the country's democracy crisis, given your new research that shows a lack of basic civics knowledge among a large portion of the American public?

I am worried, with occasional glimmers of hope. But mostly I worry. Why? Our data show that people lack key civics knowledge, continuing a trend from recent years. A new report from Pew confirms what many suspected: Most Americans are fed up with government and don't think it's working. Those two things are deeply related.

To understand why, it's helpful to take a step back and think about why civics matters, broadly speaking. The main reason is that we want people to understand how they can make their voices heard in our democracy. But you can't make your voice heard if you don't understand our system of government. For example, if you don't know the three branches of government and their roles, then you won't know why President Biden and Congress are sparring about spending, immigration, green energy, etc. If you don't know what rights are protected by the First Amendment or what they mean, then you won't understand why the government can't censor the New York Times, but Facebook can make you take down a post that violates its community standards policy. If you don't know which branch has the responsibility of determining whether a law is constitutional, you won't understand why the Supreme Court and its rulings are so important and influential. In short, without some basic civic knowledge, you can't even follow the news of the day to be an informed citizen. If you can't do that, then you cannot know what to expect out of your government. That is not—at all—to say that a lack of knowledge is the root of dysfunction (it is not). But it is to say that they are related.

The concepts of civic literacy and engaged citizenship are not commonly discussed among the news media and general public. Can you explain those two concepts in more detail and why they matter?

What we can measure in a survey is civic literacy, which is your comprehension of basic facts about our system of government. So, for example, we ask if people know the three branches of government, what rights are protected by the 1st Amendment, who is responsible for determining the constitutionality of a law, and so forth. This gets at the pre-requisite knowledge you need to understand government and to participate in our system. But engaged citizenship—having people really how know to function in our governmental system, and make their voices heard—is the deeper goal.

This matters because we do not just want people to vote, we want them to cast an informed vote. This means, at a minimum, that they know where the candidates stand on the issues that matter to them, and they understand the office's role in our democracy. For example, if you don't know that the president is responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices who are then confirmed by the Senate, you won't know to investigate the types of justices that a candidate might nominate. Likewise, if you don't know the candidate's positions (or have been misled about them), then you cannot effectively cast your vote on the issues that matters to you.

But even more importantly, we want people to participate in government more broadly. This can be many things: going to a community meeting (such as a school board meeting), volunteering for an election or civic activity (shout out to poll workers, the unsung heroes of democracy!), or working to solve problems in your community. For most of us, local participation is more important than national participation. Few people can meaningfully participate in national politics beyond voting (this is just as true of political scientists as it is of regular folks). But we can all participate locally, and for most of us, that is where we interface with government the most: local governments help pave our roads, police our streets, teach our children in schools, and so forth. What would this knowledge look like?

Take the case of Philadelphia. Here, the information needed to participate could be identifying your councilperson, knowing what they can resolve, and how to contact them. It could be knowing who controls the schools, and what are the roles of the mayor vs. the school board. You could also investigate what should be reported to 311 to get a response from a city agency, and what a registered community organization can help to address. These would differ from place to place, but the core idea is that it would help citizens see how they could uncover how the government can help them solve problems in their lives.

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I went to a very good public school system.  I remember taking social studies and civics courses. Obviously, given my career path, those courses and teachers had a great influence on me. Are such courses still taught today? What is their content?

Many states—including Pennsylvania—have civics requirements, and that's helpful for teaching this sort of civic literacy. But it is on all of us, as citizens, to help the next generation learn how to participate more meaningfully in our democracy. Happily, there are so many great resources for those who need to do this. For example, the Civics Renewal Network provides thousands of free, non-partisan, high-quality learning materials about civics that anyone can use. For example, Annenberg Classroom provides 65 high-quality videos about various key Supreme Court decisions, as well as extensive materials about our system of government. While much of this is aimed at teachers, who can use it directly in their classrooms, parents and others could also make use of this material. [In full disclosure, both CRN and AC are part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, but I would endorse their content even if I did not work there.]

If I could add something to civics education in our current moment, it would be teaching people skills on how to have conversations across lines of difference. This is something that I discuss in my new book, and I show can reduce animosity and improve understanding between the two sides.

What does this look like? There are many ways of doing this, but they tend to share a few things in common. These are conversations centered on genuinely listening to the other person and their point of view, what some scholars call "perspective getting" so you can understand why they believe what they believe. The goal is to understand those with whom you disagree, not to persuade them. This means asking probing questions and keeping an open mind. These are also conversations grounded in what Keith and Danisch call "strong civility," basically the idea that we treat each other as political equals and respect the other person's right to take part in the political process.

But this takes practice, and can be intimidating, so it's something we all need help to do well. Happily, there are a number of groups working to do this, but it is a vital civic skill as well that we all should try to master.

What measures of political knowledge and civic literacy were used in the new research? What do those measures help to reveal (or not) about a person's relationship to democratic citizenship and its demands and requirements?

Surveys like ours ask about the key ingredients of civic literacy. Do you know what the three branches of government are? Do you understand their roles? Do you know key rights guaranteed by the various key amendments?  Do you know what a 5-4 Supreme Court decision means? And so forth. These are some of the benchmark pieces of information people need to know to be informed citizens.

And our survey—like many others—finds that many Americans do not. For example, one-third do not know the three branches of government. While most people know that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of speech, they don't know the other rights protected by it (freedom of the press, freedom of religion, right to petition the government, and right to peaceably assembly). And even though most people know that free speech is protected by the First Amendment, they don't understand what that means: roughly half think (incorrectly) that it requires Facebook to let you say whatever you'd like on its platform.

This sort of lack of basic information is quite troubling, as it highlights that citizens lack that core civic literacy.

Many Americans do not have a basic understanding of politics and government. Yet, we are also in an era of 24/7 news media and the Internet. The high levels of civic ignorance and lack of knowledge among the American people is an indictment of our country's political culture, political elites and the news media, the educational system, and other key agents of political socialization.

This is why the well-documented decline of local media is so important. If you like politics, there's never been a better time to be alive. You can read Politico, First Branch Forecast, subscribe to Ezra Klein's podcast, etc. You can consume politics all day, every day. But if you don't like politics (and most Americans do not!), it's never been easier to avoid it, so scholars have found that civic knowledge similarly polarizes based on political interest.

In the days of a robust local media, that was less pronounced: if you subscribed to the local paper to get the sports scores, you also flipped past some national stories, and at least glanced at them. Now, you don't even get this sort of by-product coverage. This is especially consequential for coverage of sub-national politics. All of the sources I discussed above focus on national politics, covering the minutiae of the debates between McConnell, Schumer, Biden, and so forth. But there is far less attention to state and local issues, and indeed, there are just far fewer reporters covering that today than a generation ago.

Given that the business model of local journalism has collapsed, I don't have a great solution to this problem, but it is an important one that many scholars are working to solve.

As a function of a deep hostility to real multiracial pluralistic democracy, there is a right-wing talking point that America is actually a "republic" and not a "democracy". Of course, this is not true. What intervention would you make against that disinformation and propaganda?

As someone who has taught core undergraduate American politics classes at Penn for many years, this is a perennial question that comes up every year. When people ask which is right—are we a republic or a democracy—the correct answer is that we're both.

For the Founders, "democracy" meant some sort of direct democracy, where the people themselves rule. Functionally, that doesn't exist anywhere in the modern world, at least not at scale (the closest we get are ballot initiatives and referenda in some states). But we have elements of that spirit animating our government today, most notably when we talk about the "will of the people" and public opinion, which is central to our modern understanding of how our government functions.

But we are also a republic, where it is not just what the people want directly that matters, but how that is filtered through our institutions that shapes outcomes (the Electoral College being perhaps the most striking element of that). I try to emphasize to students that our system has both elements, the key is to harness the best of both without succumbing too much to their weaknesses.

Imagine that you are a doctor of American democracy. What is your diagnosis and prognosis for the patient in this time of crisis? How does your new research (and related work of course) help to inform your conclusion(s)? 

Like many others, I fear for our system, and there are real signs of trouble for American democracy. What, then, is to be done? The first, I think, is to put pressure on elites to a bulwark against backsliding. As many scholars—myself included—have shown, backsliding is more the fault of elites than voters (i.e., it is less about voters demanding elites break norms than it is elites breaking norms that voters then rationalize as unimportant). Our job as citizens is to demand better of them. In 2020, despite real threats—including January 6th—the guardrails of democracy held. They need to be strengthened and reinforced to ensure that they can continue to flourish.

At the outset, I said that I occasionally see glimmers of hope. Those glimmers are the people who are working to make our democracy better. They are working to help us better understand one another, build bridges, and make America live up to its founding promises to all Americans, not just some of them. That is hard, difficult work. But it is the work we need at this moment.

"Trumpism imperils all Jewish Americans": Experts warn of "America's rising tide of antisemitism"

Chauncey DeVega

SALON
Mon, September 25, 2023 

Last Sunday was the Jewish New Year and High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah. As a public figure, in his role as ex-president and now Republican 2024 frontrunner, Donald Trump could have chosen many ways to honor Rosh Hashanah. He could have issued an obligatory statement acknowledging Rosh Hashanah and its significance for the Jewish people. Of course, Trump could have simply decided to be quiet instead of being a gum beater. Instead, Trump celebrated Rosh Hashanah by threatening Jewish Americans who do not support him in a post he shared via his Truth Social disinformation platform last Sunday night:

"Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let's hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!"

Trump's threats and the distinction he makes between "good Jews" and "bad Jews", the supporters of him and his neofascist MAGA movement and those who dare to oppose him and it, are centuries-old antisemitic tropes.

Trump's threats against Jewish people on Rosh Hashanah are but one example of many where throughout his decades of public life – and especially during his time as president and after – where the ex-president has proven himself to be a white supremacist and an antisemite.

MSNBC offers these examples:

During his 2016 campaign, for example, Trump spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, "You're not gonna support me because I don't want your money. You want to control your politicians." He added, "I'm a negotiator — like you folks."

Several months later, in the runup to Election Day, the Republican promoted antisemitic imagery through social media. In the closing days of the 2016 campaign, Trump again faced accusations of antisemitism, claiming Hillary Clinton met "in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers."

While in office, the then-president used some highly provocative rhetoric about Jews and what he expected about their "loyalties." Soon after, Trump spoke at the Israeli American Council's national summit, where he suggested Jewish people are primarily focused on wealth, which is why he expected them to support his re-election campaign.

NBC News adds:

In an interview in 2021, Trump also said, "The Jewish people in the United States either don't like Israel or don't care about Israel."

"I'll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country," said Trump, who won strong support from white evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump also came under fire for his remarks in response to the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, white nationalists and neo-Nazis carried tiki torches and chanted "Jews will not replace us," among other slogans.

CNN offers this additional context:

Trump has a long history of criticizing Jewish American voters who do not support him and of playing into antisemitic tropes.

More recently, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, he criticized American Jews for what he argued was their insufficient praise of his policies toward Israel, including moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In 2021, Trump claimed Jewish Americans "either don't like Israel or don't care about Israel," while also suggesting that evangelical Christians "love Israel more than the Jews in this country." In 2019, he accused Democrats of being part of an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish party." And during his first campaign for president, Trump delivered a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in which he repeatedly referred to the audience of Jewish donors as "negotiators." He is scheduled to address the group's annual leadership summit next month in Las Vegas.

America's democracy crisis and ascendant neofascism are a state of malignant normality where antisocial and other antihuman and antidemocratic behavior becomes increasingly common as elites and the general public grow numb to it.

To that point, Trump's latest example of antisemitic behavior and the evil it represents should have been the focus of much media coverage, condemnation by the country's political leaders, and public outrage. Instead, with few exceptions, Trump's vile behavior was largely ignored, except as the latest controversy of the day in a political environment driven by the 24/7 news cycle, hyper politics, and the culture of distraction. Such is how democracy dies.

Via email, I asked antiracism activist and author Tim Wise for his thoughts about Trump's threats against Jewish people on Rosh Hashanah and how it fits into a larger context of racial authoritarianism:

This is just more of the same: "othering" distinct numerical minorities for the problems of the country. Whether brown-skinned immigrants, Black folks in cities, trans persons in schools, or Jews at the ballot box, Trumpism and MAGA ideology is all about scapegoating those deemed as somehow deviant from the white, Christian, straight norm. And by dividing Jews between the "good" conservative ones and the "bad" liberal ones, Trump is engaging a trope that has always been utilized by anti-Semites. From the "good" Jews who were willing to convert, or at least hide their Jewishness during the Inquisition to the "good" Jews who served as Kapos to the Nazis, anti-Jewish bigots have always found examples of Jews they like. But only as a cudgel to use against the rest. If this kind of signaling isn't confronted, immediately, and forcefully by all Jews, and the Christians who constantly tell us how much they love us, anti-Jewish bigotry will likely grow even stronger. And with it, all the other bigotries that are part of Trumpism.

I also asked philosopher and Holocaust scholar John Roth for his thoughts about Trump's threats against Jewish people who he is targeting because of their "disloyalty." Roth connects Trump's antisemitic threats to the ex-president's recent interview on NBC's "Meet the Press":

His reflection deficient, his repentance nonexistent, Donald Trump demonstrated how little he knows and appreciates about Judaism and Jews when his insulting New Year's jibe to Jewish Americans desecrated Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe by thoughtlessly accusing "liberal Jews" of voting to "destroy America & Israel."

Earlier that same day, September 17, Kristen Welker's inaugural "Meet the Press" program featured her fraught interview with the indicted former president. She questioned Trump about his often-repeated vow to take retribution against his political enemies. "When you launched your campaign in March," she said to him, " you told the crowd, quote, 'I am your retribution.' What does that mean? What does that look like?" With more candor than usual, Trump replied that "I have to protect people," making clear that he meant his staunch, anti-democratic, and often violence-prone allies. "When I talk about retribution," he insisted, "I'm talking about fairness."

That comment was cunning and deceitful at once. Trump divides the world into those who support him and those who don't. In his calculations, fairness for his supporters means—it requires—payback and revenge against his opposition. That's how his protection scheme works. In his words and calculations, in his retribution racket, Trump's transactional antisemitism is writ large.

In an email to Salon, Ethan Katz, who is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at UC-Berkeley, and co-founder of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, historicized Trump's most recent antisemitic screed in the following way:

The idea that many Jews are "unpatriotic" and working against the interests of the nation, unless they pass a certain purity test, goes back to longstanding antisemitic notions about Jewish dual loyalty, Jewish conspiracy, and Jewish power and control behind the scenes. Speaking here of "liberal Jews" sounds to many like it is code for the likes of George Soros, which for the extreme right is very clearly code for Jewish bankers, for Jews who allegedly control the world financial system, have enormous power, and exploit the masses. And the notion is present here also that Jews should be grateful for all that the government is doing for them — as if they are a monolith separate from everyone else, defined solely by their ethnicity or religion in how they vote, and see the world, and identify.

In reality, of course, for most American Jews, Israel is only one of a number of important issues shaping their voting behavior, and views of Israel for a majority of American Jews are far more nuanced than the views President Trump represents here. Moreover, deciding to target Jews on one of their holiest days in this way also comes uncomfortably close to medieval images of Jews as religiously impure due to their alleged opposition to Christianity, and the persistent (if clearly false and discredited claim) that they had murdered Jesus Christ.

Trump's antisemitic and white supremacist threats are both contributing to and reflect a larger societal environment where hate crimes and right-wing terrorism have been escalating during his time in office and now almost 3 years since he was defeated by President Biden.

Law enforcement and other experts are continuing to warn that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists and malign actors represent the greatest threat to the country's domestic safety and security. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and neofascists have engaged in mass shootings and other such lethal violence targeting Jewish people, Muslims, African-Americans, the LGBTQI community, and other marginalized groups and "enemies" throughout the Trumpocene.

Hate crimes against Jewish people in America are at historic levels. This includes bomb threats against synagogues on Rosh Hashanah.

In Florida, neo-Nazis have become increasingly emboldened by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man who they correctly see as their leader. Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and other leading Republican fascists and their forces are enacting an Orwellian Thought Crime regime in Florida and other parts of the country, where "un-American" and "un-patriotic" books and other materials deemed too "woke" or otherwise contaminated with the "Critical Race Theory Mind Virus", i.e. they are not right-wing indoctrination and propaganda mind killers, are being banned. These banned books (and courses) include those that focus on the Holocaust.

"Disloyal" and "dangerous" teachers and other educators are also being threatened with violence, harassed, and even fired from their jobs.19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine's warning that "those who burn books will in the end burn people" most certainly applies to the Age of Trump.

In his email to Salon, Katz also emphasized how America's rising tide of antisemitism, white supremacy, neofascism, and other attacks on multiracial pluralistic democracy and society in the Age of Trump and beyond are part of a much larger revolutionary project by the global right:

In some respects, Trump's relationship to Jews echoes that of a leader like Viktor Orban in Hungary, who is openly autocratic, and has embraced Far Right conspiracy theories about George Soros that seem unmistakably antisemitic, but also has built alliances with more conservative elements in the Hungarian Jewish community. Like the supporters of Orban and a growing number of autocrats in Europe and beyond, many in the MAGA movement appear skeptical of the importance of democratic institutions, and a significant number of these voters are openly hostile to the achievements of the Civil Rights movement and ongoing efforts to make America a more fulsome multiracial democracy. Here I'm speaking of those who really embrace white nationalism, which fixates obsessively on Jews in well-documented and terribly dangerous ways. The American Jewish community, as I mentioned, is diverse in its politics, even as more than 70% of Jewish voters supported Joe Biden, as they have every Democratic nominee for president for decades. But the role that conspiratorial thinking about Jews plays for many of Trump's most right-wing supporters is very worrisome. And Trump's willingness to single out Jews for critique about their voting behavior, on one of their holiest days, will surely be read by many of those voters as a symbol of a shared preoccupation with Jews and alleged Jewish power and influence. Whatever your politics, this should be a cause of grave concern.

Trump's antisemitic threats are not part of a separate and distinct "culture war" by the right-wing as too many among the mainstream news media and political class (especially "centrists" and "liberals" and "progressives") have reflexively and lazily suggested in their attempts to create some false distinction between "real politics" such as voting, elections, and "the economy" vs. "silly" and "dumb" and "distracting" "culture war" issues.

There is no "culture war": in reality, the so-called culture war is a fascist war where the neofascists, white right, and other illiberal and antidemocracy forces know that culture and "real politics" are closely linked as spaces where power (and the future) are contested and won (or lost).

Ultimately, those people who mock and dismiss Trump and the Republican fascist's antisemitism and larger "culture war" behavior are speaking from a lofty perch of imagined security and false safety.

For those who are being targeted, this is all very deadly serious business.

I conclude this essay with a warning from John Roth:

Attacks on some Jews don't stop there. The contagion spreads. Trumpism imperils all Jewish Americans, especially to the extent that they defend the highest traditions of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which resist the corruption and venality that characterize the American fascism of Trump and his MAGA stalwarts. Trump's hatred of Jewish opposition to him is rooted in his disrespect—and perhaps in some fear—of commitments to justice and truth embedded in the Days of Awe and resolved to hold him accountable.

You have been warned again. We, who are the miner's canary, keep telling you to wake up. Unfortunately, too many people in America insist on not listening.

DeSantis' weaponization of education turns deadly

Chauncey DeVega
Mon, September 18, 2023 

Ron DeSantis Saul Martinez for The Washington Post via Getty Images

On Saturday, August 28, a white supremacist armed with an AR-15 rifle murdered three Black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida.

The victims have now been laid to rest, but the atmosphere of racist violence, hatred and general antipathy towards Black and brown people in the Age of Trump continues. There will be more white supremacist hate crimes and terror attacks against Black America; this is the American Way and has been so for centuries.

The Associated Press reports:

Mourners at the funeral service for Angela Michelle Carr applauded the Rev. Al Sharpton as he criticized laws that allowed the gunman to buy an assault-style rifle years after he was involuntarily committed for a mental health examination. He also denounced white supremacists who demonstrated outside Disney World a week after the Aug. 26 killings in Jacksonville.

"How many people have to die before you get up — whether you're a Republican or a Democrat — and say we've got to stop this and we've got to bring some sanity back in this country?" Sharpton said. "Have we gotten so out of bounds that we've normalized this stuff happening?"

Carr, 52, worked as an Uber driver and was sitting in her idling car outside a Dollar General store when she was shot multiple times. The gunman then went inside and killed A.J. Laguerre, a 19-year-old store employee, as he tried to flee. Jerrald Gallion, 29, was fatally shot after walking through the front door with his girlfriend, who escaped.

The Associated Press story continues:

While they insisted the focus should be on Carr's life, ministers speaking at her funeral repeatedly criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who had made a "war on woke" a central issue of his campaign while downplaying the existence of racism.

"Rhetoric and other policies and governors have made it comfortable for people to come out of the closet with their hatred of those of us whose skin has been kissed by nature's sun," Bishop Rudolph McKissick Jr., The Bethel Church's senior pastor, said during Carr's funeral.

Writing at Jacksonville Today, Dan Scanlan highlights the response by Black clergy to the white supremacist killings:

It is time to preach against a culture of violence and death, said the Rev. William Barber II, head of Repairers of the Breach. a group based in North Carolina that says it combats immoral and illegal policies against LGBTQ people, labor and voting rights, criminal justice and other policies that negatively affect the poor and marginalized.

The movement aims to "take back the microphone" from lawmakers who spew hatred in their policies against others, Barber said.

[....]

"They are rising up to take back the mic from those who for far too long used the public mic to fill the airwaves with hateful and divisive lies about Black people, Black history, LBGTQ brothers and sisters, immigrants and women."

Scanlan continues:

The clergy all pointed to DeSantis, a Republican presidential nominee, for his push to relax gun laws, repeal diversity initiatives and stop what he terms "woke indoctrination" in schools.

"A philosophy put forward by the governor of this state, a philosophy that has barred classroom lessons on race, and classroom lessons of sexual orientation and gender identity; a philosophy that blocked Advanced Placement African-American studies," said The Rev. Mark Thompson. "And we learned just yesterday that he is pushing to replace the SAT, which isn't great, with the CLT, the classic learning test which teaches everything Western and nothing modern or progressive."

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Rev. Sharpton, Rev. Barber II, and the other Black clergy quoted above are correct: Ron DeSantis (and other leading Republican politicians) have cultivated an environment that normalizes and encourages the type of white supremacist violence that killed three Black people on that horrible Saturday in Florida several weeks ago.

The evidence is overwhelming and obvious.

DeSantis has declared an Orwellian-thought crime war on "woke" and "critical race theory" in Florida – which he intends to spread across the United States. In practice, this means the literal whitewashing of Black America's history (and the country's history more generally) to serve the supposed needs and interests of "white people" as part of a larger project of fascist patriotic education that is designed to squash resistance and create a compliant ignorant public.

DeSantis' intent is irrelevant; racism and white supremacy are not a matter of intent but of outcomes and results.

DeSantis' and the larger Republican fascist and white right's plans to erase the real history of Black America and the color line include teaching that white on Black chattel slavery was basically a type of jobs program and not a centuries-long institution of human trafficking, torture, rape, murder, war, dislocation, and exploitation on a global scale that killed many millions of Black people. Such a reading of history is inaccurate, based on lies and willful distortions of fact and historiography, intellectually dishonest, and is right-wing dogma and disinformation masquerading as "scholarship".

Social theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux, has correctly described DeSantis' weaponization of education in the service of a white supremacist fascist agenda as being an example of "apartheid pedagogy". In an essay at the LA Progressive, he explains:

Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance—a manufactured ignorance that attempts to whitewash history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism as it might have been framed in in the 1920s and 30s when members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan shaped the policies of some school boards. Apartheid pedagogy uses education as a disimagination machine to convince students and others that racism does not exist, that teaching about racial justice is a form of indoctrination, and that understanding history is more an exercise in blind reverence than critical analysis. Apartheid pedagogy aims to reproduce current systems of racism rather than end them. Apartheid pedagogy most ardent proponent is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who has become America's most prominent white supremacist.

Apartheid pedagogy is a form of white supremacy; white supremacy is inherently violent. Apartheid pedagogy is not new. Its roots can be traced back to slavery, the end of Reconstruction, and the Jim and Jane Crow terror regime and "separate but equal". Today's attempts by the "conservative" movement to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement are but a continuation of that centuries-long white supremacist political project to protect and expand white privilege and white domination over every area of American life. Apartheid pedagogy as seen in DeSantis's Florida is also part of a much larger global project as seen in Orban's Hungary, Putin's Russia, and other parts of the "Western" world, to end multiracial pluralist democracy.

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DeSantis flustered when pressed on guns, kicks out Black man who mentioned Jacksonville shooting

DeSantis' intent is irrelevant; racism and white supremacy are not a matter of intent but of outcomes and results. For example, DeSantis has supported gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter harassment, voter intimidation, arrests for largely non-existent "voter fraud", and other policies targeting the Black community in Florida as a way of keeping him and other Republicans in power. Rolling Stone highlights how DeSantis still refuses to publicly and in direct terms condemn neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and to disavow their support of him. One of DeSantis's senior campaign staff members was recently fired after he posted a campaign video online that featured Nazi imagery. DeSantis and his spokespeople claim that they had no knowledge of the staffer's white supremacist politics. Such a denial has no credibility given the larger pattern of white supremacist and other racist behavior by DeSantis and his administration and supporters. The white supremacist mass murderer in Jacksonville envisioned himself as a soldier in that global struggle. Signaling his devotion to that evil cause, he wore a Rhodesian army patch on his tactical vest.

DeSantis has repeatedly used fascist and other violent language and imagery including a promise to "slit throats" if he takes control of the White House in 2025. He is now promising to order extrajudicial killings of "drug dealers," i.e. brown people from Latin and South America, who are caught trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally while wearing backpacks. DeSantis has made no such threats about shooting white people who fit the same profile at the U.S.- Canada border.

In all, such violent language is an example of what law enforcement and national security experts have termed "stochastic terrorism."

In an excellent article at the Washington Post, historian Brooks Marmon makes this intervention:

The efforts of DeSantis and other Republicans pushing to remake education policy and restrict the teaching of history resemble the information control strategies deployed by the government in Rhodesia (today's Zimbabwe) during the Cold War, as it tried to avert the global tide of decolonization. The leaders of this White settler colony in southern Africa used tactics including sleight of hand, outright bans and restrictions on access to information to maintain power. These efforts resulted in an increasingly violent and polarized society as Black anti-colonial nationalists escalated their resistance.

The determination of this small clique of Whites and their ability to hold out against world opinion until 1979 shows that while reactionary tactics may not be sustainable in the long run, they can garner unexpected success and create lasting divides that are difficult to surmount.

While there is a difference in degree, curbing the discussion of the United States' history of racism, segregation and slavery puts American conservatives in the same camp as Smith's Rhodesia — using a selective version of the past and attempting to strictly regulate access to information to bolster their own political project. The similarities expose the reality: information control is a tool of despots, and it's ultimately rarely effective. Instead of winning anyone over, such strategies just deepen societal fissures.

Few observers in the mainstream news media and political class have publicly connected Ron DeSantis's white supremacist policies to the year he spent as a high school history teacher in Rome, Georgia. Such a failure is not a surprise given the mainstream news media's desperate attempts to elevate DeSantis as a "reasonable" and "respectable" alternative to Donald Trump, and general unwillingness to properly adapt to the country's democracy crisis and the existential danger embodied by neofascism and resurgent white supremacy. At the Independent, Joe Sommerlad explains:

The current Republican governor arrived at the Darlington School aged 23 after graduating from Yale University.

He had been born in Jacksonville in September 1978 to working class Italian-American parents, his father a TV engineer and his mother a nurse, going on to study at Yale and then Harvard Law School, after which he joined the US Navy in 2004, where he served as a legal advisor to SEAL Team One and was stationed at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq before being discharged, thereafter working as a special assistant US attorney in Florida and then seeking election to Congress in 2012.

His year as an educator was chronicled by The New York Times last year in a report that investigated the allegation that he had partied with students.

One former student told the newspaper they remembered seeing him at one such event: "As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, 'What are you doing here, dude?'"

Asked how his presence at such events was received, another was dismissive: "It was his first job out of Yale, he was cute. We didn't really think too much about it."

Another student, Danielle Pompey, claimed Mr DeSantis had treated her unkindly as a student, alleging this was because she was Black.

"Mr Ron, Mr DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me," she told The NYT.

"Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black."

She also claimed that, during a history class on the American Civil War, he had made arguments for the justification of slavery, saying: "He was trying to play devil's advocate that the South had good reason to fight the war, to kill other people, over owning people – Black people.

"He was trying to say 'It's not OK to own people, but they had property, businesses.'"

Another former student, who asked not be named, said Mr DeSantis's views on the Civil War were so well known that they were made the subject of a parody video for the school's video yearbook.

The NYT reports that the video contains a snippet of a student imitating Mr DeSantis and saying, "The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North…," before the clip cuts to a student dozing off at their desk.

Given what his former students have said about their time with him, DeSantis' apartheid pedagogy and apparent embrace of the white supremacist Lost Cause ideology and other lies and distortions about the color line and America's history (and present) should not be any surprise at all.

Decades of research has shown that education level is positively correlated with reducing racism and prejudice in general. However, that dynamic does not override the fact that there are many "highly educated" racists and white supremacists. DeSantis and the other racial authoritarians and white supremacists in the "conservative" movement and larger white right increasingly fit that profile in the Age of Trump.

Of course, they would never use that language to describe their values and beliefs and political project because such transparency would mean that they would not be allowed platforms and positions at leading publications, think tanks and interest groups, educational institutions, in the news media, in the Republican Party and "mainstream" "conservative" movement, and across civil society. Instead, these "educated" white supremacists and racists present themselves as defenders of the "Western tradition", "conservative values", "legacy Americans", "patriotism", "real America", and "(White) Christian heritage."

DeSantis and the other leaders of the Republican fascist party and larger white right know the real power of the Black Freedom Struggle as an example of one of the world's most successful pro-democracy movements.

They are working very hard to prevent the teaching of those lessons. Why? Like the fascists and authoritarians and demagogues in other countries and earlier eras, today's neofascists, both here in America and around the world, know that to win the present and future they must control the past.

The Aftermath of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

 August 6, 2023
By Nimra Javed

Friday prayers in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. © John Isaac

Article 370 of the Indian Constitution grants Jammu and Kashmir a unique status as the only state that can define its own accession term and receive this treatment. In order to legislate and establish other contacts with the Indian Union, the state assembly and government were granted this unique status under the constitution. Article 370 was included in the Indian constitution following discussions between Kashmiri and Indian government officials. This unique status was, however, eroded over time by a number of Draconian measures. To draft its own constitution and approve applicable sections of the Indian Constitution, the IIOJK Constituent Assembly was founded in 1950. Importantly, Article 35A was included to ensure the continuation of the Maharaja’s state subject rule by giving the state government the authority to establish its own definition of permanent residents and place limits on the ability of non-residents to purchase property in the state.

Despite being subjected to Indian aggression, brutality, and tyranny, the people of Jammu and Kashmir were able to maintain their unique culture and identity because of Article 370. It gave the state legislature the power to make laws for Jammu and Kashmir, with the exclusion of the military, the media, and international relations. Article 370’s third clause stated that the J&K constitutional assembly’s approval was needed to alter or repeal the article. Since the legislature was dissolved on January 26, 1957, however, it is impossible to constitutionally revoke the special status. The BJP government unilaterally repealed this law, turning the state into a de facto prison, despite the fact that it had a permanent status. While New Delhi promised that this change would bring prosperity to the state, the reality shows otherwise. Significant shifts and difficulties have resulted from the repeal. Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are now two independent union regions after the removal of Article 370 on August 5, 2019. With this change, the territory was no longer granted any kind of special status and instead fell under the direct control of the Indian federal government.

Concerns were voiced regarding how the elimination of Article 370 would affect the demographic make-up of the area. Mass migration and settlement by a certain group can shift the demographic balance, as was the case with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, which drew criticism from many. The repeal was interpreted as an effort to domesticize the international debate over Kashmir within India. As a result, the unlawful union territory authority in Jammu and Kashmir issued up to 3.5 million bogus residence certificates to foreigners.People who had previously worked for 10 years in various capacities in the territory, such as at colleges, banks, or other jobs, were now able to claim domicile under the new rules for claiming domicile in J&K. Domicile eligibility was extended to include offspring of J&K service personnel and those who had completed high school (grades 11 and 12). Some people aren’t happy with all the domiciles being given out, especially to former soldiers known as Sainiks. This has prompted concerns among locals about a possible effort to manipulate the area’s population composition and threatens their safety.

Some people are worried that the ruling party, the BJP, is trying to control the region’s majority Muslim population by settling extremist Hindus in the valley, which could lead to ethnic cleansing and the emergence of new conflicts. As a precautionary step following the revocation, some Jammu and Kashmir political figures were detained or placed under house arrest. Syed Ali Gillani, Yasin Malik, Omar Abdullah, and Mehbooba Mufti are just some of the prominent regional party leaders that were threatened with detention. The goal of this action was to silence the Kashmiri government. While visiting New York, Indian author Arundhati Roy declared, “The biggest myth of all times is that India is a democracy.” Actually, it’s not the case. Several Indian states are dangerously close to civil conflict. The number of reported rapes has been steadily rising since article 370 was repealed. IIOJK is notorious for its use of torture, sexual assault, kidnapping, nighttime raids, disappearances, and mass graves. Human rights abuses have been systematic and pervasive in J&K for at least 40 years, according to UNHCR findings from 2018 and 2019. Khurram Parvez, three of his accomplices, and Parveena Ahanger were among the prominent human rights activists whose homes and offices were raided by the NIA on various occasions in 2020. Ajay Kumar Mishra, minister of state for the home, said in the Rajya Sabha, “the cost of pursuing journalism in Jammu & Kashmir is huge.”

The executive editor of The Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin, told the wire that they are under constant observation and that government policies have all but muzzled the media. Journalists in Kashmir are often subjected to ‘police verification’ requests, which can take the form of either a verbal’ summons’ and questioning, or a physical raid. She writes about the persecution of Kashmiri journalists in her book, “A Dismantled State” (The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 379), which was written after Article 370 was revoked. This book details the ‘Orwellian policy’ of punishing, jailing, and otherwise intimidating journalists into silence, and the damage done to the fourth pillar of democracy as a result. It’s now difficult for journalists to operate without interference.There has been a surge in the number of extrajudicial executions committed by armed organizations in the region. The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCC) has reported that since August 5th of this year, 165 people have been killed in Indian-led search and cordon operations. The economy and job market in the area have also been significantly impacted by the repeal of Article 370. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) reports that the jobless rate has risen to 16.2 percent, which is more than twice as high as the 6.7 percent unemployment rate in the Indian Union. The withdrawal of special status has had severe economic ramifications for the people of Jammu & Kashmir, with an estimated 500,000 people losing their jobs. Kashmir’s business community, according to the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCCI), lost almost 40,000 crore rupees due to the current adverse environment. The Indian government has claimed that Article 370 is to blame for the state’s lack of economic progress, although the truth appears to be more nuanced and complex. Significant difficulties have arisen as a result of the abrogation, which has had an effect on the economy and other facets of regional life.

The Indian government opted to hold online auctions for mineral extraction bids during the communication shutdown in Kashmir. This, however, prevented Kashmiris from applying, therefore almost all of the permits went to Indians rather than Kashmiris. Sand, boulders, gravel, and other riverbed materials were made available for mining in over 200 mineral blocks along the Jhelum River and its tributaries, spread over all 10 districts of the region. In an interview with Anadolu Agency, local contractor Abdul Ahad voiced his concerns, saying, “It is not injustice but murder with us and our families.” Because of this, a record-breaking 70% of all mining contracts went to Native Americans. There are still many unknowns and unanswered questions concerning the future of the region as a result of these shifts. The situation in Kashmir requires our care and attention. Only sincere diplomatic efforts, with human rights and the aspirations of the people as their top priorities, will bring peace and stability to the region. As global citizens, we have a responsibility to keep an eye on the situation in Kashmir and work toward a peaceful resolution that protects the region’s distinct culture and the future of its people. True peace and reconciliation in Kashmir can only be achieved in a world where ideals of justice and fairness reign supreme and no one’s suffering goes ignored or neglected.


Nimra Javed is Researcher at CISS AJK and working on Nuclear Politics & Disarmament, Emerging Technologies and New Trends in Warfare. Writer can be reached at: @NimrahJaved_

 

Extremists Want to Ban Discussing Their Abortion Bans

 

Sensing just how unpopular their agenda is, anti-choice extremists are attacking reporters for calling their abortion bans “bans.”

July 29, 2023 by Other Words Leave a Comment

By Jim Hightower

Unfortunately, it’s 1984 again in America.

Not the year. The book. George Orwell’s classic novel tells of a far-right totalitarian clique that uses “newspeak” and “doublethink” to impose their rigid, anti-democratic doctrine on society.

Their regime held power through mind control — they had a “Ministry of Truth” for perverting language and manipulating facts, while their “Thought Police” enforced ideological purity and suppressed dissent.

Thirty-nine years later, here comes a clique of theocratic extremists in our country using Orwellian manipulation in its crusade to take control over every woman’s personal reproductive rights.

Having seized the Supreme Court and practically the entire Republican Party, these present-day autocrats are now demanding that state and national lawmakers enforce the group’s ultimate dictate: A total ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.

To their amazement, however, the great majority of Americans — including many Republican voters — think abortion ought to be generally available, with each woman deciding what’s best for her. Moreover, the idea of Big Brother imposing a federal ban is massively unpopular.

No problem, say today’s Orwellian newspeakers, we’ll just ban the word “ban” from our PR campaigns. Thus their harsh abortion ban has magically morphed linguistically into a “pro-life plan.” There — feel better?

Doubling down on their propaganda ploy, the abortion truth twisters are also plotting to ban reporters from using what one called “the big ban word.” Anti-abortion agents are now barraging news outlets with warnings that any use of that verb will be considered proof of political bias.

Sure enough, rather than risk right-wing fury, some scaredy-cat reporters are already caving in, meekly describing bans as “restrictions on procedures.” How nice — a kinder, gentler tyranny!

To keep up with the 2023 version of Orwell’s Thought Police, follow journalist Jessica Valenti’s diligent tracking of anti-abortion trickery at Jessica.substack.com.

 

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Previously Published on otherwords.org with Creative Commons License

 

The Myth Of The Free Market – OpEd

 July 4, 2023 

By Dean Baker

The media are really going overboard in telling us the days of the free market are over with Biden’s new economic policies. President Biden has quite explicitly implemented policies intended to reshape the direction of the economy, pushing clean energy and more domestic production of advanced semiconductors and other products. He also has reinvigorated anti-trust policy, which was largely shelved by his predecessors.

But the idea that the policies of the last four decades were somehow a matter of just leaving things to the market is a grotesque lie that no person remotely familiar with economic policy should be repeating.

The Finance Industry Cesspool

I will reverse the usual course of my diatribe here and start with the financial sector. Suppose back in 2008-09 we let the market work its magic when Citigroup, Bank of America, and other financial giants were effectively bankrupted by their own greed and stupidity. We would have a radically downsized financial sector, with many fewer people earning seven and eight-figure salaries at banks. (No, we would not have had a Second Great Depression. Keynes taught us how to prevent a depression: spend money.)

We would also have a much smaller financial sector if we taxed sales of stocks, bonds, and derivatives like we taxed sales of clothes, cars, and furniture. It is the power of the financial industry, not the free market, that tells us that these financial transactions should be exempted from the sales taxes that apply to just about everything else we buy.

There is also nothing “free market” about the special tax treatment that some of the richest people in the country get when they have “carried interest” income as partners in hedge funds or private equity funds. Nor is it the free market when these funds prey on public pension funds, promising high returns that they rarely deliver.

“Free Trade” is a Story for Children and Elite Pundits

The “free trade” deals of the last forty years had little to do with free trade. We did want to remove trade barriers on manufactured goods, in order to subject our manufacturing workers to direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This had the predicted effect of costing us millions of manufacturing jobs, and substantially reducing the pay of the jobs that remained.

But we could have made the focus of free trade removing barriers that protected doctors, dentists, and other highly paid professionals from competition with their lower paid counterparts in the developing world. This would have had the effect of reducing jobs and pay for U.S. born professionals.

For some reason, this was never a part of our “free trade” agreements. We could speculate this was because the people deciding on trade policy were far more likely to have friends and family members who are highly paid professionals than friends and family members who were autoworkers or textile workers, but that would be rude. In any case, this part of “free trade” deals was about a having a freer trade in a particular sector of the economy, where the predicted and actual effect was to drive down the pay of non-college educated workers.

Patent and Copyright Monopolies

The other really big part of our free trade deals was to make patent and copyright monopolies, and related protections, longer and stronger. It is incredibly Orwellian that these government-granted monopolies are somehow discussed as being the free market.

And, their impact is not some small sideshow. We will spend over $550 billion this year on prescription drugs. If drugs sold in a free market, without patents or related protections, the cost would almost certainly be less than $100 billion. The difference of $450 billion is more than four times the annual food stamp budget. It’s more than half of what we spend on the military each year. It comes to more than $3,000 a family.

If we projected out over ten years, and accounted for growth in spending, it would be close to $6 trillion. That is six times President Biden’s widely touted infrastructure program.

And, it has a huge impact on inequality. The people who benefit from these monopolies are many of the country’s richest people. Bill Gates is the poster child. He would likely still be working for a living if the government didn’t threaten to arrest people who copy Microsoft software without his permission.

Just since the pandemic, we created five Moderna billionaires by paying the company to develop vaccines and then letting them keep control over the vaccines. Don’t try to tell us that is the free market.

By my calculation we transfer over $1 trillion a year to the beneficiaries of patent and copyright monopolies, compared to a situation where items like drugs, medical equipment, computer software and other items sold at their free market price. This is around 40 percent of all after-tax corporate profits.

Why the Free Market Lie?

I could on at great length laying out other areas where the government has structured the market in ways that redistribute income upward. (See Rigged, it’s free.) It should be obvious to anyone at all familiar with economic policy over the last four decades that it was not about the free market, it was about structuring the economy in ways that made the rich richer.

It is understandable that the proponents of these policies would like to claim it was just the free market. After all it sounds much better to tell the public, the vast majority who are losers from these policies, that “the market creates both winners and losers,” as opposed to saying, “we’re implementing polices to transfer money from you to us.”

But why do people who oppose these policies go along with the hoax? There apparently is a big market for this sort of pretending in major media outlets, but it would be nice if we could get more reality-based policy discussions.

This first appeared on CEPR.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.