Never Trump Is Not Enough

 

Dear Friends and Family,

I just got the news that Atlantic Publishing will release my book for $21.95 on October 19. I don’t know exactly what that means. It’s not quite like releasing balloons. But I assume that I will have a bunch of copies soon after.

I would like to offer to you all that I will send you a signed copy in exchange for $20, if you send me a check and your address:

Steve Hochstadt

1252 West College Ave.

Jacksonville IL 62650

From being a writer, I’ve become a salesman.

Atlantic now has it up on their website:

https://www.atlantic-pub.com/product-page/freedom-of-the-press-in-small-town-america-my-opinions

The book will also be available on Amazon, and I hope in bookstores across the country, especially if you ask them to stock it. I don’t have the marketing power of Donald Trump Jr.’s ability to have the Republican National Committee distribute “Liberal Privilege” as a fund-raising tool, raising lots of funds for Trump himself. Imagine him talking about others having privilege.

I will greatly appreciate whatever you can do to let people know about the book.

Thanks,  Steve

 

Never Trump Is Not Enough

I am grateful to Never Trumpers, Republicans organized against Trump’s reelection, openly advocating for Joe Biden, representing the Democratic Party that Republicans have scorned for decades. They are not just talking, but making good political ads about why Trump must be defeated. They might be the margin of victory over their own Party.

But “Never Trump” or “Never Again Trump” is just the beginning of deciding where they will go. For Republicans who want to face up to their collective failure, it is not enough.

Trump represents character that nobody could wish for: greed, delusions that he is better at everything than everyone, disdain for all other humans, dishonesty, corruption. Is that all that these Republicans want to get rid of in their Party? To achieve “Never Again Trump”, Never Trumpers must admit to themselves why their Party fell on its knees before Trump.

What about Republican unwillingness to give up a scientifically ignorant, but politically useful reaction to the “global warming” threat of the 1980s? Thirty years later, as climate change actually threatens lives now, are they going to rethink that? Will that prompt more thought about their treatment of American science as a purely ideological construct of their enemies? Deliberate ignorance about unpleasant truths has made the Republican Party incapable of contributing to a better modern life. It won’t be easy to admit that Trump’s stupidities about low-flush toilets and wind turbines and modern light bulbs mushroomed out of standard Republican ideological fantasies.

Let’s go further, beyond science to social science and history. As soon as women and Blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans and immigrants and gay people began to enter the academic professions, Republicans decided that academia was a leftist plot to overthrow America. Will Never Trumpers reexamine the conservative tendency to equate “professor” with “traitor”?

How about racism? The leadership of the Republican Party called out the whole structure in 2012, demanding that the Party “demonstrate we care about” “Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans”. Yet today’s Republicans have turned such broad thinking about who is an American voter into heresy on their journey to ever more explicit forms of public racism. Sending the “least racist person you will ever meet” back to his immensely privileged den won’t make the Republican Party “color blind”, any more than their ability to find a few exceptional black people to hide a white supremacist face.

White male privilege has served as Republican dogma nearly my whole life, propped up by the evangelical right wing, for whom white male supremacy is the foundation of their belief system. Rethinking Republican racism might annoy some fervent supporters, exactly those who claimed Trump was their savior.

There would be other costs to any questioning about how the worst President in history could take over the party of Lincoln. Of the 19% of the American public who are Republicans and watch FOX News, about half of self-identified Republicans, 78% believe that Trump has accomplished more than almost any other president in history. They won’t line up to vote for people who tell them the truth about Trump’s “accomplishments”.

Are Never Trumpers going to argue with their firm beliefs: the mainstream media promotes “fake news” to hurt Trump (89%); the FBI and US intelligence agencies are trying to sabotage Trump (79%); Trump was right to declare a national emergency in order to start building a border wall (84%). This half of Republicans always votes for Republican Congressional candidates. If Never Trumpers alienate both FOX News and these viewers, they will become “Never Winners”.

Never Trumpers sorely lack introspection. Their media spokesmen, such as David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and George Will, can’t bring themselves to admit their role in bringing Trump to the White House and Trumpism into the Republican Party.

It won’t be easy to admit that the hypocrisy of political expediency is the soul of modern Republicanism. Those Republican Senators of 2016 pledged their allegiance to the principle that picking a Supreme Court justice eight months before a presidential election was wrong. Now they wish they could just delete those earnest speeches.

I wish the Never Trumpers success. Even if they don’t change the policy preferences that make it impossible for me to vote for them, perhaps they will be able to bring a whiff of truth to their politics. If they can’t stop suppressing votes, maybe they’ll admit why they do it. If they can’t bring themselves to do anything about climate change, at least they could explain that they just don’t want to spend money on saving the planet for future generations. If they aren’t willing to upset their evangelical base, they could be more forthright about why white Christian men should run the country.

Good luck with that.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

September 29, 2020

I Am Freaking Out

 

A plane loaded with thugs in black uniforms flew to our capital to attack the Republican National Convention! A crazed mob attacked Sen. Rand Paul when he left the White House following the Convention, and would have killed him if the police had not intervened! People you haven’t heard of are controlling the streets! Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left!

The Trump supporter killed last month in Portland was the victim of a drill by left-wing hit squads, who are being trained all over this country! Biden’s supporters among scientists in the government are meeting in sweat pants in coffee shops, plotting how to take Trump down! They do not want America to get well, until after Joe Biden is president! But Biden won’t be elected President. The only way he can win is if the election is a fraud!

Even though the election is rigged by the left and the fake news media will lie about the results, these hit squads are preparing for armed insurrection after the election! At Trump’s inauguration, the shooting will begin! Better get your ammo now!

I know better than to believe some anonymous Q about the deep state of pedophiles and child molesters. These revelations come from the top. Our President says so!

My country, my American way of life is in danger! I’M FREAKING OUT!

Well, at least that last sentence is true. But the rest doesn’t come from InfoWars or Breitbart News. The President and his appointees at the top of the executive branch are telling stories about the planning of a violent coup. Trump said in August in Wisconsin and last week in Nevada that the only way he could lose the election is if it’s rigged. The Republican National Convention made an armed couple who threatened peaceful demonstrators in St. Louis into heroes. Trump praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage murderer of unarmed protesters in Kenosha. Tucker Carlson said that Rittenhouse “had to keep order”, when “no one else would”.

Neither Joe McCarthy nor the John Birch Society predicted a leftist overthrow of the government within months. Richard Nixon, Trump’s law-and-order predecessor, never encouraged armed vigilantes to take to the streets. The man who would be King, backed by the Republican Party and Republican elected officials, is predicting and encouraging civil war.

That’s what freaks me out.

Republican scare tactics are nothing new. The Willie Horton election ad in 1988 was designed to frighten white voters. Trump announced his candidacy by denouncing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He encouraged supporters at his rallies to beat up protesters. But we have never heard wilder threats than what came from the mouths of Republican Convention speakers last month. Patricia and Mark McCloskey got four minutes on opening night to say, “No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.” The planeloads of thugs and hit squads have taken Republican fear-mongering to an unprecedented level.

I’ve been voting since 1970. I have been studying and teaching European history and the Holocaust for nearly 50 years. I know how democratic governments have been captured by autocrats exploiting popular sentiment. I have read the American historians who persuasively explain how much more partisan hatred animated our politics during our history. I wrote about national politics every week for my local central Illinois newspaper for 9 years. I know that Trump is not Hitler or Mussolini, neither Vladimir Putin nor Viktor Orbán. I don’t worry about conspiratorial lies made up to win an election.

But I do worry about people who believe every bit of nonsense out of Trump’s mouth. Even people as unhitched to reality as the QAnon crazies should be able to see by November 2 that Trump will lose the next day. They and the militias and the white supremacists will know that their dreams for an America of their fantasies are about to be dashed by the radical socialist anti-God police-hating anarchists they have been warned about on FOX News for years.

I’m going to be an election judge again in my hometown, a long day from 5 AM to 7 PM, helping my neighbors cast the votes they have decided on. Someone asked me if I’m worried that I might catch the COVID virus from seeing hundreds of people that day. I said, no, I’m worried about what those people listening to the Republican demagogues about the end of their lives will do on November 3.

The Republicans have given up entirely on protecting public safety. They encourage their craziest, most heavily armed admirers to come out shooting.

Trump’s dishonest idiocies might merely be a source of amusement for late-night television, if millions of people did not hang on his every word. If billions of dollars from the richest Americans and the biggest corporations did not flow into his campaign, his ludicrous threats would not be broadcast across the country. If entire networks on television and radio were not devoted to promulgating an alternate reality in which he is doing something useful, fewer Americans might believe his lies. If virtually the entire mob of elected Republicans in Washington did not prop him up with their enthusiasm or silence, I would have nothing to worry about.

But the self-interested cowards, liars, and crackpots who represent conservative America are driving our country toward political catastrophe. Shouldn’t you be freaking out, too?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville, IL

September 22, 2020

Local Politics

I have been back from our summer home in Wisconsin for 10 days. I’ve been driving around Jacksonville and walking closer to home. Here is what I see.

 

There are some, not many, political signs, and most of them are for Biden and Harris. I see big Trump signs along the highway, but few in this Republican town. What does that mean? The Democrats got their signs ready first? Is Trump in trouble among local Republicans? I don’t know.

 

Lots of houses are for sale and others have been sold. The crushing of the leisure economy doesn’t seem to have affected the real estate market in any significant way. Some aspects of the economy are doing well.

 

The college across the street, Illinois College, my former employer, is in the midst of a busy fall. There are some unusual scenes on campus: everybody with masks; outdoor classes under big tents; signs marking doors as only entrances or only exits in efforts to guide foot traffic towards less interaction.

 

A major project to lay fiber optic cable will give Jacksonville broadband services, a significant upgrade in the town’s technological capacity. That project is mostly due to one Democratic member of the City Council, the youngest, serving in his first term. Brandon Adams has pushed for for some city investment in better communication since he was elected last year, and finally won a majority on the Council.

 

Few of the local Republicans would ever have gone beyond paving the roads, fixing the sidewalks, and maintaining basic infrastructure. Adams could not persuade them to support the model he urged Jacksonville to adopt, a municipally owned network run by the city, providing high-speed Internet connections to every residence and business in Jacksonville. Nor could he persuade his fellow Council members to bring in an outside expert to offer advice. Instead the city is paying twice as much to rent a small portion of the fiber optic cables. Republican ideology avoids expert knowledge, costs more money, and provides less.

 

But nobody here says our lives are threatened by Democratic candidates or left-wing hit squads. That’s something to be thankful for.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

September 15, 2020

The Religion of Patriotism

 

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

 

I have not said that pledge for many years, but I remembered every word from all the times I had said it as a youth, in school and at other places. The history of that wording reflects the history of American patriotism.

 

The pledge was written by Francis Julius Bellamy (1855-1931) in 1892. He had studied at the Rochester Theological Seminary to become a Baptist minister, following his father, a Baptist minister in Rome, NY. He led congregations in Little Falls, NY, and then in Boston. Bellamy believed that the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources were inherent in the teachings of Jesus. In the labels of the late 19^th century, he was a Christian socialist.

 

His cousin Edward Bellamy, whose father was also a Baptist minister, shared Francis Bellamy’s late 19^th-century version of liberation theology. He wrote the novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (published in 1888), a futurist fantasy in which a Boston man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000, when the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia: all industry is nationalized, working hours reduced with retirement at age 45, and equal distribution of all goods. Looking Backward, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was among the great best-sellers of the late 19^th century. His sequel, entitled simply Equality (1897), promoted equality for women, and imagined the television, air travel, and universal vegetarianism.

 

The Bellamy cousins wanted radical change, but so did millions at that time. During the last decades of the 19^th century, often labeled the Gilded Age, rapid industrialization and capitalism unfettered by regulation led to widespread poverty and unprecedented concentrations of wealth. The top 1% owned half of the nation’s property, and the bottom 44% owned 1%. American industry had the world’s highest accident rate. Socialist and labor movements grew in response.

 

Francis Bellamy preached against the evils of capitalism, offered a public education class entitled “Jesus the socialist”, and was founding vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists. He was forced out of his Boston congregation in 1891. Daniel Sharp Ford, a member of Bellamy’s congregation who published Youth’s Companion, a children’s magazine, hired him to promote Ford’s campaign to put an American flag in every school. To coincide with the 400^th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1892, in coordination with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Bellamy wrote a flag pledge published in Youth’s Companion in September 1892.

 

Bellamy’s pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” He later wrote about his thinking when composing the pledge. The Civil War led to his reference to “indivisible”. Although he was deeply religious, he strongly believed in the separation of church and state, thus including no reference to God. He had been inspired by the French Revolutionary slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity”, but wrote, “No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all.” He knew that most state superintendents of education were opposed to equality for women and African Americans.

 

Bellamy’s political thinking was among the most progressive of his era, but did not escape the racism inherent in American culture. He argued that the assimilation of non-white “races” into American society would lower “our racial standard”. His and Ford’s and official America’s veneration of Columbus was itself a political statement based on white supremacy and targeted at Italian voters.

 

As a national ritual of patriotism, the pledge has been yanked to the right in the 20^th century. In 1924, the conservative leaders of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution persuaded the National Flag Conference to change “my flag” to “the flag of the United States of America”, despite Bellamy’s opposition. A much more serious distortion was added in 1954 with the words “one nation under God”. Although that change is often attributed to the recommendation of President Dwight Eisenhower, its longer history, as described by historian Kevin Kruse in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America in 2015, is much more revealing.

 

In response to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which introduced significant regulation of business and empowered labor unions, giant corporations created a public relations campaign for big capitalism using organizations like The American Liberty League. This secular political campaign was a flop. Jim Farley, chair of the Democratic National Committee under Roosevelt, said, “They ought to call it The American Cellophane League, because No. 1: It’s a DuPont product, and No. 2: You can see right through it.”

 

Corporate America then turned to conservative Christian ministers, literally employing them to link capitalism with Christianity by arguing that the New Deal is evil and capitalism is “freedom under God”. In 1951, Cecil B. DeMille organized a Fourth of July ceremony, backed by the leaders of corporate America and hosted by Jimmy Stewart, carried live over national radio. Their message was that “the American way of life” was Christian individualism expressed in unchecked capitalism.

 

This is the background for the insertion of religious messages into American patriotic rituals. The pledge now asserted that the separation of church and state was un-American. “In God We Trust” appeared on a postage stamp that same year, 1954, and on paper money in 1955. In 1956, it became our first national motto. Since Ronald Reagan began using “God bless America” to end his speeches in the 1980s, that phrase has become a staple in both parties, like the flag pin as patriotic adornment.

 

The claim in the modern Pledge of Allegiance about “liberty and justice for all” is not true today. In the Jim Crow era, when I first learned to recite it, it was an outright lie. The stirring words of the national anthem about America, “the land of the free”, were similarly false. Like the Lost Cause mythology about the Civil War and its aftermath, which was enshrined in the school textbooks I read and taught as American history, these assertions were propaganda for an American society based on white supremacy. Patriotic rituals were designed to indoctrinate young and old with the belief that the racist, sexist, antisemitic America of the 20^th century was already perfect, that criticisms of racial injustice or gender discrimination were illegitimate, that America was God’s country and corporate capitalism was God’s handiwork.

 

On Flag Day in 1943, the Supreme Court declared, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, that a law requiring schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge was unconstitutional. That ruling still stands as settled American constitutional law. Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote then, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” Yet the patriotic rituals we take for granted do exactly that, prescribing that belief in a specific kind of God is patriotic and that freedom and justice for all already exist.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

September 8, 2020