They Hate Us

Shortly after the election, Paul Ewell at Virginia Wesleyan University, dean of the school’s global campus, director of the MBA program, and tenured professor of business, went on Facebook to express his hatred of most Americans. He posted this: “If you were ignorant, anti-American, and anti-Christian enough to vote for Biden, I really don’t want to be your friend on social media.... You have corrupted the election. You have corrupted our youth. You have corrupted our country. I have standards and you don’t meet them.”

That was not smart. The resulting uproar at Virginia Wesleyan forced him into an abject apology: “I spoke out of anger which I should not have done. Second, I don’t believe what I said. I have friends and family who are Democrats and I love them dearly.” He had to resign his tenured faculty position, but he got the ultimate sign of approval when Trump tweeted “Progress!” about Ewell’s statement.

I don’t know what Ewell actually believes, but I doubt he dearly loves those anti-American, anti-Christian friends who are Democrats. I don’t know what Trump believes, nor does anyone else. But I know that Trump and Ewell and countless other Republicans, past and present, have convinced millions of Americans to hate Democrats, liberals, Biden voters, us.

Who are we, objects of so much hatred? As this election, and national elections for the past 30 years, have demonstrated, Democrats represent at least half of the country.

Chances are your child’s doctor and teacher are Democrats. So is your local librarian, the professors at the state university, the taxi drivers in big cities, the actors and athletes you see on TV, the guy (nearly always a guy) who fixes your computer. Most lawyers and government workers and professional poker players and park rangers vote for Democrats. Are they all anti-American?

A lot of Democrats are not Christian: great majorities of Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddists vote Democratic. Maybe the conservatives who hate us think all non-Christians are anti-Christian. If you don’t pray like we do, you must hate Christianity. But more Catholics identify as Democrats than as Republicans, and mainline Protestants are divided nearly evenly. At least one-quarter of evangelicals are Democrats: are they anti-Christian, too?

Black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, as are nearly three-quarters of Asian voters and two-thirds of Hispanic voters. Are white Americans the only real Americans? Should we go back to the days of Jim Crow, when nearly all voters were white? The challenges to black voters in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta by many Republicans, which nearly all Washington Republicans tacitly supported, only serves to underline both the whiteness of contemporary Republicanism and their disdain for all other colors.

Former Professor Ewell may have been angry because he was surrounded by Democrats. Norfolk, Virginia, home of Virginia Wesleyan, voted 71-26 for Joe Biden. That was true for cities and suburbs across the country, while rural Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Trump supporters often imagine that he would have won the election if California were excluded. In fact, Biden would still have beaten Trump in both popular vote and the Electoral College without California. Both California and New York would have to be excluded. Is that how Republicans think about America? Are those 60 million people anti-American? Is it morally better to live in the country?

I know lots of Democrats. None of them are anti-American and most of them are Christian. None of them are ignorant. There are some things they hate: lying, trying to subvert our democratic processes, separating kids from their families at the border, systemic racism, con men. People like former Professor Ewell and Donald Trump and many in between say that makes them anti-American, which is like what Ku Klux Klan leaders said 100 years ago.

The uses of hatred are apparent in Georgia’s unresolved Senate elections. Both Republican candidates accuse their Democratic opponents of being anti-American, without using that term. David Perdue said Jon Ossoff is a “trust fund socialist who lives off his family’s money-making documentary movies that no one’s ever watched.” Kelly Loeffler said victories by Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock would “literally shred the fabric of what makes our country the greatest in the world.”

Americans are dividing themselves into warring sides. One side, a white, poorly informed, nasty minority, says the other side is anti-American, pumped up by Trump’s assertions that Democrats are traitors and communists, that Biden would “hurt God”, that Kamala Harris is “a monster”, and that Democrats successfully plotted to steal the election. This rump of America can listen all day to shouting voices on TV and radio who tell them their hatred is virtuous. The liberals around them, whom they see every day, somehow don’t count. The person they like the most violates every principle they say they believe in. No amount of logic, reason, facts or willingness to talk makes any impression.

I have no idea what to do about it, and neither apparently does anyone else. Their hatred does not diminish us. It diminishes them.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 24, 2020

I Dare Call It Treason

We are now witnesses to the most dangerous act of selfishness from the King of the Self. Trump knows the evidence for any form of election fraud is silly fantasy. His electoral deficits are beyond challenge, 74 Electoral College votes and more than 5 million popular votes. Yet he repeats his denunciations of American elections, the bedrock of any democracy, that began when he was only a candidate. In October 2016, he called the election “one big, ugly lie”.

His disastrous character flaws are obvious to everyone. We, and here I mean all those who care about the real world around us, must now go beyond psychological analysis to political clarity. Trump is a traitor.

That most despised word is not necessarily synonymous with committing treason as defined in law. In the midst of a war against a foreign oppressor, our founders explicitly limited treason in Article III: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” For centuries, our judicial system has hewed to that original language, standing on “only”.

The label traitor was used in a wider sense by Joseph McCarthy and the legions of supporters for his conspiracy theories. He asserted in 1954 that Democrats were the “party of treason” and the entire administrations of FDR and Harry Truman were guilty of “twenty years of treason”. The foreign enemy was obvious then, even without a declaration of war. Although many Democrats supported the anti-communist witch hunts associated with McCarthy’s name, Republicans have been using accusations of communism, and thus collaboration with the enemy, in elections ever since. John Stormer’s 1964 book “None Dare Call It Treason”, asserting that America had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communists, played an important role in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and in influencing Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy.

Some of Trump’s foreign acts have skirted the line to treason, and I expect we will eventually learn more about details of his relationship with Russia that do involve giving aid to an enemy of America. But Trump has been the only President to routinely accuse the other major political party, which represents the majority of voting Americans, of being traitors, even for such petty offenses as not applauding his State of the Union address in 2018.

To properly judge Trump’s current behavior, we must think about treason inclusively. A useful conception of treason should include attempts to overthrow our constitutional system from within. Pinochet, the junta in Argentina, Mussolini, and Hitler all conspired to overthrow their own democratic governments. They were traitors to their fundamental laws.

Trump embarked months ago on an attempt to bring down the American republic during this election. Claiming that the 2016 vote that put him in the White House was rigged was typical of his unscrupulous boorishness and political egotism, but in a different category than asserting that the Democrats were from the beginning plotting to steal this election and are now doing that in front of our eyes. If there was any truth to this accusation, Democrats would be committing treason. But there isn’t, and that is abundantly clear to all but those Americans who believe every word of the President.

I might consider taking up arms against any group who was trying to take over my country, and I don’t even own arms. It is not surprising that Trump believers have brought weapons to intimidate elected officials, have plotted to kill Democratic Party leaders, and are now threatening revolt. Trump is purposely destroying the faith of millions of Americans in the legitimacy of their system of government. Afterwards he plans to return to his golden existence. But those supporters are making themselves outcasts in America, armed, angry, and woefully misinformed.

Commentators have searched for the proper words to label Trump’s current actions. Thomas B. Edsall asked many election experts about Trump’s behavior, and their responses include the words narcissism, sociopathy, dangerous, irrationalism, delusion, and norm-busting. The political scientist Bryan Garsten wrote in a New York Times opinion piece (November 9) that we should label Trump a “demagogue” as a way to protect our country from the next one. Sean Wilentz, professor of history at Princeton, was more politically pointed: if Trump rejected these election results, “It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.

Margaret Sullivan wondered in a Washington Post column on Nov. 12 how journalists should “navigate this tricky path”: “How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?”

It matters what words we use to label Trump. If the combination of Republican voter suppression and Republican rejection of election results is not called out for what it is, Trump will not just be busting norms, but destroying our still imperfect union. The proper label for that crime is treason.

Bank robbers who sign their hold-up notes may be incompetent, but they are still committing robbery. Just because Trump’s actions are clumsy, petulant, and unlikely to succeed, is no reason not to label their criminality properly.

And Trump is succeeding, at least in public relations. Seven in 10 Republicans now say the 2020 election was not free and fair: 48 percent of Republicans say it “definitely” was not free and fair, and another 22 percent say it “probably” was not. That’s twice the share of Republicans just before the election who said the race would not be free and fair. Before November, 68 percent of GOP voters said they had some trust in our elections. Now that has dropped to 34 percent.

The greatest security risk we face is not an external enemy. Only one-third of Republicans believe in American democracy. More than one-third think it is likely that the results we have heard will be overturned.

Trump’s tweet two days after the election, “STOP THE COUNT!”, has been widely misunderstood. Election officials do not heed his tweeted instructions. He was urging his supporters to stop those officials from counting ballots. That was incitement to insurrection.

Bringing a prosecution against Trump for treason would be futile and counter-productive. The flag-hugger’s treason is less a legal matter than a rhetorical issue. The recent willingness of news networks to label Trump’s lies as lies may not have swayed many of his supporters, but it has brought clarity to our thinking. Calling his efforts to overturn this election “treason” clarifies the significance of Trump’s anti-American actions.

Having a traitor in the White House was the fantasy of the TV thriller “Designated Survivor”. Now life imitates bad art.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 17, 2020

Selfish, Selfish, Selfish

Freedom is a wonderful thing. People who live with less freedom, or sometimes virtually none, long for the quality of freedom we enjoy. Many migrants to our borders are thinking about money, but the yearning for freedom has brought millions of people from all over the world to America. My father was one, eagerly sailing to America with nothing in his wallet to escape his loss of freedom in Austria in 1938.

Freedom for some was written into our laws, then extended to most, and now, theoretically at least, to all. When freedom is threatened by a part of the government that is supposed to protect it, we can use other parts to resist that loss. One marker of 2020 is the sudden increased public awareness of how freedom is doled out in America, more to some than to others, and how that needs changing now. We have the freedom to protest the deficiencies in American freedom and to demonstrate for their correction.

That freedom makes some Americans uncomfortable. Lawless destruction makes nearly everyone uncomfortable, but despite the conservative focus on “looting” and “burning”, that’s not what upsets them. The exercise of our lawful freedom to organize protests against existing discrimination in favor of white heterosexual Christian Americans bothers conservatives. They defend the freedoms they want for themselves, but are skeptical of the demands for freedom by those who have less.

Some of the freedoms that we theoretically enjoy are likely to upset people around us. I don’t think there are any legal penalties for talking loudly on a phone in a crowded space, bumping people out of the way, or cutting in line. So we are constitutionally free to behave that way. We see people do those things all the time. Selfish people, who assert their freedom to be anti-social. People who put their petty desires ahead of their neighbors’ well-being. A free society necessarily offers the freedom to be selfish.

In normal times, it’s the annoying behavior of selfish people that reveals their lack of concern for others. Today selfish people wear it on their faces. You can see it from afar. They don’t wear masks.

Not everyone who rejects masks is selfish. Some poor souls work for people so selfish they don’t let people who answer to them wear masks. They create their own maskless environment. Maybe they can then pretend that other bare-faced people prove that it’s not about their own selfishness.

But it is. Putting other people at risk for a deadly disease, or even just making other people who worry about the disease uncomfortable, in the name of personal freedom is pure and extreme selfishness. I think it is notable that fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews both appear to reject mask-wearing. The distance between what self-proclaimed devout Christians and Jews say their religion is about and their collective behavior toward fellow humans is becoming unbridgeable. When “Do unto others” becomes a slogan for revenge against political opponents rather than an expression of love and virtue, selfishness reigns.

Let’s blame the Egotist-in-Chief, whose public performance of utter self-regard is profoundly disheartening. But he didn’t create selfish people, he only encourages their worst impulses.

We are now witnesses to Trump’s most dangerous act of selfishness. He knows the evidence for any form of election fraud or error is nonsense. His electoral deficits are far beyond challenging: nearly 5 million popular votes and counting, and probably 74 Electoral College votes.

Yet he attacks the legitimacy of American elections, the bedrock of any democracy. His personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tweeted yesterday that Real Clear Politics had called Pennsylvania for Biden and then rescinded the call. Online interest in “Biden loses Pennsylvania” surged. The lie could easily be checked: RCP never called Pennsylvania.

Trump’s power of persuasion over his supporters is immense: now that the election has been called, 7 in 10 Republicans say it was not free and fair.

Selfishness is an injury to others. Trump’s selfishness, the selfishness of mask rejecters, and the selfishness built into Republican politics are injuring millions of Americans. They are all free to continue their behavior. Long after the masks are put away, they will be marked by their selfish abuses of freedom.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 10, 2020

The Green Party

Hooray for the Green Party! Before there was a Green Party in the US, we rooted for the Green Party in Germany. They were a tiny group of committed environmentalists, with wonderfully advanced social and economic ideas. Unlike the US, but like most other democratic systems across the globe, third parties in Germany, and fourth and fifth parties, can shove the whole political system in the direction they advocate, as long as they can convince enough voters. Over the decades since their founding in 1980, Die Grünen have persuaded large minorities and in some places majorities of voters that they should govern. They are now coalition partners in the governments of 11 of Germany’s 16 states, and Winfried Kretschmann is the Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, the equivalent of governor.

The American political system at nearly every level is hostile to third parties. The American Greens show no signs of being able to overcome these disadvantages. It is a symptom of our system that the Greens are widely viewed as a spoiler party, unfairly stealing votes from one of the Big 2. The best performance of a Green presidential ticket was in 2000, when Ralph Nader won 2.9 million votes, 2.7% of the total. If more than half of those Greens in Florida had voted for Al Gore, who lost the state by 537 votes, he would have won.

Since then, they have not reached 1%, except for 1.1% in 2016, when both major party candidates were so unpopular. Their membership reached over 300,000 in 2004, but has declined to about 250,000 now. This year they are not even on the ballot in 19 states. Their major candidates are Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, both also nominees of the Socialist Party USA, who I don’t believe have ever held elective office.

The structural obstacles to Green success are not their only problem. Perhaps in overreaction to the label of spoiler, the Green Party is barely more polite than the Republican Party about those who don’t vote for them. Here’s what Virginia Rodino, co-chair of the Maryland Green Party, and Kevin Zeese, recently deceased former Attorney General in the “Green Shadow Cabinet”, say about the American voting public. The two major party candidates are “a certifiable, lying, murdering war criminal and a racist mass incarcerator”, who are representatives of the “two parties of the millionaires governing the United States since its founding”. Republican and Democratic voters “do not have faith in ordinary people” because they “remain shackled election after election to the corporate parties”.

“Voting for Biden is immoral in the current electoral reality. Trump is the worst president in our lifetimes and has to be removed from office. . . . Only voting for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker makes sense in 2020 with two terrible candidates — the worst president of our lives and one of the worst corporate Democrats of our lives.”

Joe Biden has committed himself to the most liberal or progressive or even leftist program of any Democratic nominee in my lifetime. I don’t expect the Greens to even admit that, much less give him any credit. But I’d appreciate it if they gave me some credit, along with the millions of voters who have voted or will vote for Biden. They can’t even get their rhetoric straight: Trump “has to be removed”, but voters for Biden are themselves “immoral” because we “do not have faith in ordinary people”. I don’t find these Green leaders persuasive when they claim to be the only party with faith in ordinary people, but think that about half of American voters are committing a politically immoral act. I always thought most of us are ordinary people.

At another point in their diatribe, Rodino and Zeese narrow their focus: “people who live in states like New York, California, Maryland, and the other 30 solidly Democratic states would be wasting their vote if they vote for Biden.” According to the National Public Radio polling analysis, these 33 states in which a vote for Biden is immoral include 4 which lean Republican, 7 toss-ups, and the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If many potential Democratic voters took the Greens’ advice and decided not to “waste” their votes, they would hand a second term to Trump. The Green argument depends on lies about Biden as a candidate, insults to all Democrats, and electoral calculations which would hand another term to Trump.

The Green Party’s website takes a more positive approach, and is not so insulting to those who are not convinced that voting Green is the best way to get rid of Trump. Nowhere do they explain, however, why being Green necessarily means voting for Socialists. Their inability to come up with their own candidates this year shows their weakness and makes them even less likely to become a vital force for change.

I’m glad the Greens exist as another choice for voters. But this year, they are not a good choice.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 3, 2020