Search Results for: Republican

The Bitter History of Law and Order in America

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Andrea Pitzer | Longreads | April 2017 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

 

During his heady first days in office, Donald Trump developed his now-familiar ritual for signing executive orders. He began by swapping a large sheet of paper for a hinged portfolio, then he started revealing the signed documents to onlookers a little awkwardly, crossing his forearms to hold the folio up, or bending it backward to show the press his signature. Finally, he perfected the motion by turning the open folder completely around to face the audience, displaying it from three angles, as if delivering tablets of law from Mount Sinai. By the end of the week, he seemed pleased with this bit of theater in which he could star as the president. The ritual, of course, became a meme.

Shortly after he perfected this performance, Trump signed three executive orders promoted by the White House under the heading “Law and Order.” The first required the Attorney General to look at crimes against law enforcement; the second directed the AG to create a task force on crime reduction and public safety, with specific mention of illegal immigration; the third delegated cabinet members to review strategies for finding and prosecuting international drug cartels. All three called for studying crime rather than implementing new programs—they also heightened anxiety over purported crime by blacks and immigrants while making it seem like only Trump was willing do something about it.

Read more…

The High-Water Mark: The Battle of Gettysburg, the Jersey Shore, and the Death of My Father

Dane A. Wisher | Longreads | April 2017 | 36 minutes (10,142 words)

 

2013

* * *

“What kind of commie bullshit is that?”

“I’m telling you, listen to the album again.” I jam my finger into the bar top for emphasis.

“I don’t need to. It’s called Born in the USA. It’s about good, honest American people. You’re defiling a New Jersey hero.”

“It is about America. But the flag and blue jeans on the cover, the upbeat sound on the title track—it’s all ironic.”

“Here we go. It’s ironic.

“It’s the definition of irony. Apparent surface meaning conveying the opposite of the actual underlying intent of the message. The album is about how people can’t catch a break, how hollow all the patriotic fanfare is.” My speech sounds less pompous in my head.

“This is just like your thing with Forrest Gump.”

I roll my eyes. Forrest Gump has become his latest culture war litmus test. Still, it’s good to see my brother. I’ve been teaching in Qatar for two years and he works odd hours as a cop at the Monmouth County Prison and so the nights when we can shoot the shit are rare. When we do, we eat a lot and drink a lot and tell a lot of stupid jokes and get a sick enjoyment out of fighting with each other. Read more…

The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Images via Wikimedia Commons

A. Roger Ekirch | American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution | Pantheon | February 2017 | 33 minutes (8,149 words) 

Below is an excerpt from American Sanctuary, by A. Roger Ekirch.

For background, it is important to know that a seaman named Jonathan Robbins participated in a mutiny on the HMS Hermione in 1797, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. Afterward, he joined the American navy, but he was eventually recognized and jailed. To justify his actions, Robbins claimed he was an American citizen who had been impressed—that is, captured and forced into servitude—by the British navy. However, his American citizenship was disputed. The British sought his extradition, which the president, the Federalist John Adams, granted—an action which had disastrous political consequences for his party. Robbins was found guilty by a British naval court and hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Acasta in 1799.

This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

The Greatest Trick the Government Ever Pulled Was Convincing Us We Aren’t Already on Welfare

Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan. Photo: AP Images

With the prospect of 24 million Americans losing health care if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, the question of the year is shaping up to be: “Why did so many Trump supporters vote against their own self-interest?”

At Forbes,  self-described former Republican Chris Ladd comes up with a credible answer — and at the center of it lies race, class, and a flawed perception of who gets or deserves “government assistance.” For generations, white middle-class Americans were taught to believe they “earned” everything given to them — and that by having a job, they were entitled to it. Meanwhile behind the scenes, the government used tax credits at the individual and employer level to hand over billions in subsidies for their health care, their housing, their public education, and their infrastructure:

My family’s generous health insurance costs about $20,000 a year, of which we pay only $4,000 in premiums. The rest is subsidized by taxpayers. You read that right. Like virtually everyone else on my block who isn’t old enough for Medicare or employed by the government, my family is covered by private health insurance subsidized by taxpayers at a stupendous public cost. Well over 90% of white households earning over the white median income (about $75,000) carried health insurance even before the Affordable Care Act. White socialism is nice if you can get it.

Companies can deduct the cost of their employees’ health insurance while employees are not required to report that benefit as income. That results in roughly a $400 billion annual transfer of funds from state and federal treasuries to insurers to provide coverage for the Americans least in need of assistance. This is one of the defining features of white socialism, the most generous benefits go to those who are best suited to provide for themselves. Those benefits are not limited to health care.

Read the story

Empathy, Schmempathy.

Broken sign reading "Nothing"
Nothing to See Here via Wikimedia

My blue state bubble is trying so hard to reach out. Just one example: a local organization (The Evergrey) planned a field trip to a red zone in hopes of creating some kind of… understanding?  It seems every other person on the bus is reading Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir about Appalachian culture. And my media diet offers an all-you-can-eat buffet of calls to empathize with Trump voters.

But in New York Magazine, Frank Rich asks if soft hearted lefties are wasting their — our? —  time:

But for those of us who want to bring down the curtain on the Trump era as quickly as possible, this pandering to his voters raises a more immediate and practical concern: Is it a worthwhile political tactic that will actually help reverse Republican rule? Or is it another counterproductive detour into liberal guilt, self-flagellation, and political correctness of the sort that helped blind Democrats to the gravity of the Trump threat in the first place? While the right is expert at channeling darker emotions like anger into ruthless political action, the Democrats’ default inclination is still to feel everyone’s pain, hang their hats on hope, and enter the fray in a softened state of unilateral disarmament. “Stronger Together,” the Clinton-campaign slogan, sounded more like an invitation to join a food co-op than a call to arms. After the debacle of 2016, might the time have at last come for Democrats to weaponize their anger instead of swallowing it? Instead of studying how to talk to “real people,” might they start talking like real people? No more reading from wimpy scripts concocted by consultants and focus groups. (Clinton couldn’t even bring herself to name a favorite ice-cream flavor at one campaign stop.) Say in public what you say in private, even at the risk of pissing people off, including those in your own party. Better late than never to learn the lessons of Trump’s triumphant primary campaign that the Clinton campaign foolishly ignored.

Read the story

The Fuzzy Chinese Face That Transcends Political Divisions

a sleepy panda bear that seems to be smiling
Photo by popofaticus via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In New York City, Representative Carolyn Maloney and 450 rich people gathered at the Waldorf Astoria to raise money toward the one thing that brings everyone together: adorable, roly-poly panda bears. Politics be damned: everyone loves a panda. Carl Swanson wrangled an invitation to the Panda Ball to give you the inside scoop in New York magazine.

The event was to raise money — $50 million is the estimated goal — to bring a couple of pandas to live in Central Park. The dream had proved unbelievably flexible: Democrats for pandas, Republicans for pandas, and, above all, New York (and Chinese) money for pandas; pandas as cuddly “Can’t we all just get along?” political metaphors and icons of world trade; pandas for peace and mutual respect, and the branding opportunities that could bind rival empires together, but in any event pandas who could never be pressed into military service over the islands in the South China Sea. Pandas as crowd-pleasing trophies of city pride (the D.C., Atlanta, San Diego, and Memphis zoos have them, but the Bronx Zoo last had them, and only briefly, in the late 1980s); pandas as paragons of a kind of toddlerlike, clumsy innocence — we must protect them! — and of conservationism (there’s a reason the World Wildlife Fund has a panda as its logo; without human support, it’d be hard for them to even survive the Anthropocene). This is all besides their being such adorable plushie fluff (for those fluffy people who were hoping to make their world a little fluffier again). Who knows why we are supposed to care about these sleepy-eyed creatures, really — though we instinctively tend to — much less how practical this grand panda dream is. The important thing seemed to be that, emerging bleary-eyed and anxious from the election season, New York’s powerful people had to care about something uncontroversial, had to gather together at charity galas and sit in those faux-bamboo chairs at the benefit for some reason. And suddenly the list of inoffensive causes had shrunk so radically that it seemed maybe a couple of fat black-and-white bears — who eat almost exclusively what is the world’s least nutritious vegetation and who take a rather lackadaisical approach to procreation — were the only thing these people could agree on anymore.

Read the story

Voices from the Last Days of Obamacare: A Reading List

Photo: AP Images

Repeal and replace: Republican candidates used these three words throughout the election cycle almost as an incantation. There was no other option for dealing with Public Enemy #1: Obamacare. When President Trump took office they became a battle cry for Republicans intent on undoing his predecessor’s signature legislation.

But what would repeal and replace look like? Last week, the House Republicans unveiled draft legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act, seven years in the making. The American Health Care Act shares part of the old plan’s name, but not many of its current features. Everything from the insurance mandate to Medicaid expansion is missing from the new plan, and leaders from both sides are unhappy with the half-baked results. Read more…

R.E.M.’s Political Songs Still Resonate Today

Credit: Flickr/Rodrigo Siderakis

Never before has a rock and roll band been as lyrically political as R.E.M. From Murmur to Fables of the Reconstruction, Green’s “World Leader Pretend” and “Orange Crush” to Automatic for the People’s “IgnoreLand,” R.E.M. is the only band of the 20th century that legitimately crossed over from rock to pop and could appeal to hardcore college radio denizens as well as teens who first heard of the Athens-based quartet while surfing the mainstream radio dial.

What other band could draw tens of thousands and sell out arenas with lyrics like, “These bastards stole their power from the victims of the Us v. Them years/Wrecking all things virtuous and true/The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal/Lost lamb off the precipice into the trickle down runoff pool.”?

Read more…

‘I Am Not a Role Model’ and the Resurgence of Athlete Activism

Extending gloved hands skyward in racial protest, U.S. athletes Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos stare downward during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner after Smith received the gold and Carlos the bronze for the 200 meter run at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City on Oct. 16, 1968. (AP Photo)

“Republicans buy sneakers too.”

That’s what Michael Jordan reportedly said when, in 1990, he was asked to endorse Harvey Gantt, a black politician who was running against Jesse Helms, a racist and divisive senator, in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina. Arthur Ashe was one of those who had reached out to Jordan, hoping to convince the then-ascendant GOAT to take a political stand, to use his position for something that mattered off the court. Jordan’s reputed answer wasn’t unusual—it was just three years later that Charles Barkley, a future NBA Hall of Famer, infamously proclaimed that he was “not a role model.” Read more…

The Ban, the Wall: Bearing Witness

Rose Marie Ascencio-Escobar's husband was detained when he went to check in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb 22. Her husband has been in the United States since 2001 when he came from San Salvador without documents. (Marie D. De Jesus /Houston Chronicle via AP)

Reports say there is going to be another travel ban soon, perhaps even today. And so, standing on the precipice of our next great catastrophe, I have decided to take stock, as far as I can, of this thing we have wrought, which I can only describe as the new American carnage. Moreover (sorry about this) I would like to put forth my own obnoxious “all else is a distraction” theory:

In my opinion, this is the greatest story of the moment, and all else is a distraction. Think-piece-ologists have recently argued that the “real story” is the dismantling of our administrative state, or the lock-out of the free press from the halls of power, or the Russian oligarchy’s new influence on the Republican party, or so on. But, when the people of the future look back at us now, it seems to me that they will “little note, nor long remember” the exact form of our bureaucracy, or whether we took seriously our own promises to ourselves about freedom of the press, or whether Michael Flynn was actually colluding with the Russian ambassador rather than just wishing him a very very merry Christmas. These things will all be seen as incidental: goings-on as curious and inconsequential as Rudolf Hess in a biplane or Marat in a bathtub. I submit that, for the people of the future, all these stories will be incidental to the story of why we allowed our neighbors to be terrorized and rounded up.

So, I am making a small attempt to bear witness.

I am asking six questions.

Who has been detained?
Who has been denied entry?
Who has been rounded up?
Who has been deported?
Who has fled as a refugee from my country?
Who has been killed here? Read more…