Accountability in 2020

Alongside the wars against the coronavirus and the Trump virus in 2020, another war has been raging in American political culture: accountability vs. impunity. It is too early to declare a victor, but accountability has made some progress this past year.

There is nothing new about the effort to hold people accountable for crimes against others, nor about the impunity that some criminals have felt to commit their crimes over and over. The lives of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were defined by their feelings of impunity as they made assaults against women into a lifestyle. Like countless other men who have been exposed over the past few years as sexual criminals, their celebrity and power made holding them accountable nearly impossible. Crucial to their sense of impunity was the acquiescence of others, mostly also powerful men, to their crimes, maintaining silence, buying silence, enforcing silence. Since the MeToo movement broke that silence, accountability began to replace impunity for them. But those cases reveal also the limits of accountability: those countless co-conspirators who surrounded them with silence have escaped any consequences, preserving their impunity to protect themselves and others.

That pattern fits the mostly failed effort to hold the biggest criminal accountable, the impeachment of President Trump. His whole life defines impunity, from illegally avoiding the Vietnam War draft and getting someone smart to take his SAT’s in his youth, to a career founded on fraud and cheating stretching over decades. The Mueller report and the impeachment trial in Congress displayed to the world the treasonous purpose of Trump’s “perfect call”. But he survived because of the continuing impunity of those powerful men in Congress who supported him by denying facts, by attacking those who told the truth, and by putting partisanship over duty.

Men like Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Lindsey Graham believed they could say the most outrageous things in front of the whole nation and not suffer any consequences. They were both reelected in November, so it appears they were correct. While defenders of rape are few, defenders of treason still hold sufficient power to hold back political accountability.

Black Lives Matter came about to demand an end to unjustified police violence against African Americans and more accountability for such incidents, in the belief that the latter would promote the former. Only a firm belief in his impunity from consequence could explain Derek Chauvin’s murder of a defenseless George Floyd while being filmed, or the countless other cases of cops assaulting blacks on camera, going back to Rodney King in 1991.

Accountability is not always a simple matter. A high school senior recently had to withdraw from a college acceptance when a brief video from 2016 in which she used a racial slur became public. Sometimes demands for accountability conflict with forgiveness.

Accountability depends on the revelation of truth, just as impunity depends on hiding it. But 2020 proved again that revelation is not enough. Impunity can also triumph by controlling belief. The impeachment process from beginning to end had no impact on Trump’s popular approval. From the release of the Mueller report in the spring of 2019 through the House hearings leading to impeachment to the Senate trial ending in February 2020, Trump’s popular approval rating actually rose slightly. Since Trump began his all-out attack on the American constitutional system after his defeat at the polls, his approval rating has inched down only a couple of points.

The differing power of sexual and political accusations is demonstrated in the contrasting fates of the FOX News stars Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. O’Reilly was fired by FOX in 2017 after the New York Times reported that he and FOX had paid $13 million to five women who had reported his sexual harassment, and then two others came forward with similar charges. The year before, FOX News’s founding CEO Roger Ailes had resigned in disgrace, as dozens of women reported sexual harassment. Sean Hannity tells political lies on a daily basis, but retains his prime FOX slot.

Although it appears that Trump violated Georgia election laws, and possibly federal laws, in his amazing telephone request that the vote in Georgia be “recalculated” so he could win, his claims to be a genius might be the only thing that suffers. At this moment at the very end of Trump’s tenure in office, there appears to be no accountability in sight for his attempt to overthrow the newly elected administration and the whole electoral process behind Biden’s victory. The majority of House Republicans and the growing number of Republican Senators who have jumped on that circus bandwagon believe they will suffer no accountability for violating their constitutional oaths.

Perhaps today’s vote in Georgia will tell us more about the contest between accountability and impunity.

I wish for an end to the impunity of racists, liars, and politicians. I would like to see Sen. James Inhofe take some responsibility for decades of denying global warming by admitting he was wrong. I would like my own Congressman, Darin LaHood, and all the other Republicans who have pretended that the November 3 election was rigged, to say publicly that they were wrong all along. I would like the liars at FOX News to admit once or twice that what they said yesterday was not true. I would like the American voting public to hold politicians and media personalities accountable for what they do and say.

I would also like Kris Kringle to be definitively proven to be Santa Claus. That will probably happen first.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook, WI

January 5, 2021

Christmas 2020

We had a very small Christmas this year: my wife Liz and I and her mother Janet. I have written often about how wonderful our large family Christmas celebrations are. Did that make this a diminished Christmas?

Many things were the same. We had a beautiful spruce tree, which we cut at a Christmas tree farm here in northern Wisconsin, wrapped in plastic mesh, and paid for, even though the farm’s owners were not there. They had set everything up for do-it-yourself customers like us. We put up as many lights as we had, then covered every possible branch with ornaments, most decades old. Presents went under the tree, although this year there was plenty of room.

Our stockings were hung by the chimney with care, and were magically filled up by Christmas morning. After eating some homemade coffee cake, we opened the presents, one at a time, passing them around our small circle. This year there was lots of chocolate, along with the many books that always appear, and photos of the youngest members of the family.

It’s easy to focus on what was missing – the excited delight of children playing with new toys, passing silly gifts around the room, ritual readings of The Night Before Christmas and The Polar Express.

Across the country, Christmas gatherings were smaller than ever this year. Only about one-third as many people as usual took airplanes around Christmas. We did get to see our children on Christmas using the electronic video messaging technology that has allowed us throughout the pandemic to interact with them, and develop and maintain relationships with our little grandchildren.

Was this a diminished Christmas? I still woke up on Christmas morning with anticipation. Opening presents and watching loved ones open their presents was still fun. The chocolates tasted just as good as usual, the fire was warm, and the new books entertaining.

I would have preferred to spend the day with all of our family. But in our separate homes, we are all healthy, while the number of COVID cases has skyrocketed across the country. The moratorium on evictions and renewed unemployment payments do not affect any of us, and we don’t really need the stimulus checks we will soon receive. We survived the deadliest year of our lives and can look forward to a return to normal family life in a few months.

We will have many more Christmases. This one was not the best, but it was one we shall all remember.

In comparison to 2020, the New Year promises to be very happy.

Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
December 29, 2020

Many of my columns are collected in Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions, available from the publisher:
https://www.atlantic-pub.com/product-page/freedom-of-the-press-in-small-town-america-my-opinions
and from Amazon:
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Happy Kwanzaa!

As we were driving north to Wisconsin for the holidays, we heard a radio story about Kwanzaa. We realized that we knew nearly nothing about it. I use this opportunity to learn more and, perhaps, to inform you of things you did not know.

Unlike its seasonal colleagues, Christmas and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa is purely secular and recently invented. Ron Karenga, a black liberation activist from California, thought up an alternative in 1966 to what he felt were overly white year-end celebrations. He appears to have borrowed the candle-lighting ritual from Hanukkah, adapted to pan-African traditions and emphasizing seven virtues he believed that African Americans should celebrate. For seven nights from Dec. 26 through New Year’s Day, a red, green or black candle is lit to celebrate the “Seven Guiding Principles” of African heritage that he identified: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 with the goal of giving “Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Karenga was a radical exponent of black nationalism, which generally tried to create black alternatives to white institutions, emphasizing African culture and black economic independence, at a time when anything black was uncommon in white supremacist America. After the Watts riots in 1965, he created the organization US, which became a rival with the Black Panthers for leadership of the black community. The FBI sought to turn that rivalry into violence in its COINTELPRO program, in order to weaken both groups.

Over 50 years later, Kwanzaa has taken hold in countries across the world. That is surprising. This ideological invention of a competitor to the most widely celebrated holiday in the world has not replaced Christmas. But many people know about Kwanzaa. Hallmark issued a greeting card in 1992. The Postal Service issued a Kwanzaa stamp in 1997, and President Bill Clinton made the first presidential declaration recognizing the holiday. It is celebrated on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

It is difficult to say how many people light the Kwanzaa candles. There was a flurry of mainstream interest in Kwanzaa for a few decades. A black reporter from ABC News wrote in 2004 that few people she knew celebrated Kwanzaa, outside of big events in San Francisco and Denver. According to the National Retail Federation, in 2012 only 2% of Americans observed Kwanzaa. But if nearly all of those people are black, that number represents about one-fifth of African American families.

Perhaps the avoidance of commercialization has hampered its popularization, but allowed Kwanzaa to maintain some of its original political intent. Black separatism itself has declined as American society has reduced the barriers to black cultural success. Karenga himself now is chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach, under the name Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga. As opportunities to celebrate black and African culture have expanded with the creation of African American studies departments in universities and increasing attention to black history in schools, the number who celebrate Kwanzaa probably has declined since the 1970s and 1980s.

Black nationalism or separatism is no longer as popular as it was 50 years ago. The current response to systemic racism, a diagnosis that itself is now much more common, focuses on reforming mainstream society, the police for example, rather than separating from it.

Neither separatism nor mainstream reform need be exclusive solutions to the continuing dilemma of racism in America. Karenga’s invention has influenced millions of people, spreading information about African and African American culture well beyond the black community. The seven virtues are potentially relevant to everyone. Whether you light candles or not, Kwanzaa has enriched all of our lives.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

December 22, 2020

The Power of Men

A nasty editorial on the conservative opinion page of the Wall Street Journal has set off a cultural controversy just as the Biden family is about to take over the White House. Joseph Epstein called on Jill Biden to stop calling herself Dr. Biden. Epstein begins by addressing her as “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo”, then offers her this “advice”: “‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” His complaint is that her degree is in education, not medicine. He makes fun of her dissertation title as “unpromising”, then calls her “Dr. Jill”. He praises himself for refusing the title when he taught, although he hadn’t earned it.

Epstein was editor of “The American Scholar”, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa, but has no advanced degrees, and apparently feels defensive about that. He asserts the conservative critique of American higher education as if it were fact: “The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences.” “In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.” I never knew that.

Most of his argument is irrelevant to his point, instead focusing on how honorary doctorates no longer carry any honor, although he did not refuse the honorary degree Adelphi University gave him in 1988.

I have never been a fan of using the address “Dr.” for PhD holders. My grandfather hoped I would follow in his footsteps and become a physician. When I decided on history instead of medicine, I gave up on being called Dr. Hochstadt. I prefer “Professor”, although conservatives tend to use that title as a pejorative. In Germany, my proper title would be “Prof. Dr.”, which I find amusing.

Epstein blithely ignores the tendency of men to denigrate women’s achievements while doing it himself. A relevant study of the way that men and women introduced each other at a medical conference found that women nearly always used the formal “Dr.” to introduce men, but men only used it half the time to introduce women.

Epstein’s offer of “advice” is hardly serious. If it were, he would not address Jill Biden as “Mrs.” or “Jill” and certainly not “kiddo”. In the guise of making a point about the use of “Dr.” for holders of a doctorate, he is actually just insulting an accomplished woman. One woman’s remarkable memory of being in one of his literature classes at Northwestern University demonstrates the depths of Epstein’s sexism.

Behind his sexism lies the typical right-wing condescension towards higher education. In a 2019 WSJ piece, he called college teaching a “sweet racket”, “essentially a six-month job, and without ever having to put in an eight-hour day.” He hates the recent, long overdue recognition of systemic racism and sexism. “I would also suggest dispensing with courses that specialize exclusively in victimology, the history of victim groups told from the point of view of the victims.” Epstein’s view of higher ed is encapsulated in the title of an essay he wrote for the WSJ 4 months ago: “Today’s College Classroom Is a Therapy Session”. Another thing I didn’t know.

At the moment when Joe Biden is finally declared officially President-elect, six weeks after the election, this clash of cultures may be a minor issue. Its value lies in demonstrating the core of right-wing culture: disdain for higher education; demeaning attitudes toward women, especially powerful women, and defense of sexist and racist language.

Epstein has long been extraordinarily insulting to people whose politics he didn’t like, calling feminist scholars “pit bulls” and “dykes on bikes”. He wrote in 1970, “I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” He used his position at The American Scholar to give cultural conservatives a platform, which he refused to liberals. In 2015, Epstein wrote an essay about Barack Obama as an “affirmative-action president”. He began by claiming that Obama was elected “partly for reasons extraneous to [his] political philosophy or to [his] merits”, but soon moved to asking why “we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities”, “not for themselves”, but “for their status as members of a victim group”.

Despite his pretensions to literary greatness, Epstein’s conservative politics lie behind all of his judgments. In September, he equated Trump’s and Biden’s levels of corruption, sexual harassment, and personal character. For a literary man, he apparently has no objection to the abysmal level of Trump’s use of the English language. Ten days after the election, Epstein called Donald Trump “one of the most effective ... one-term presidents in American politics”. Not a mention of his frauds, his dishonesty, or the pretense he was right then engaged in of claiming that he had won. Epstein liked his conservative policies, exaggerated them, and made it seem that any criticism of him was “bias”.

In response to the storm of criticism that has appeared, Paul Gigot, the opinion editor of the WSJ, took shelter in the usual conservative defense of people who are nasty. The day after Epstein’s editorial, by which time the internet was on fire with criticism, Gigot employed the latest versions of the conservative complaint about “political correctness” to defend his own decision to print it. Gigot lumped all the critics together as “the Biden team” employing “the big gun of identity politics” and “cancel culture”. He defended Epstein’s calling Jill Biden “kiddo” because Joe has called her that. One usage heartfelt, one demeaning.

And that’s the choice we all have. Use words to demean others or embrace them.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 15, 2020

The Slippery Slope

Trump always presented a danger to his supporters. Once they signed up for his tales of greatness, perfection, and winning, winning, winning, they were liable to be sucked further and further down his rabbit hole of fabrication. Because Trump never admits that he was wrong and continually embellishes the lies he invents, supporters are unable to draw a line without repudiating their earlier endorsement of his dishonesty. Trump employs his inability to admit anything less than genius to attack everyone who doesn’t buy his whole program. The silence of Republicans in Congress since the election, which has been interpreted as tacit approval of his ever crazier claims about fraud, represents their dilemma: they can’t get off the Trump train as it speeds into uncharted waters.

Sorry for the mixed metaphors. But I’m not sorry for Trump’s sycophants, who deserve the very predictable problem they brought on themselves. The Washington Post surveyed all 249 Congressional Republicans last week, and only 27 acknowledged Biden’s election.

Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia, is a prominent example of what happens to those who can’t take any more. His support for Trump over many years has been vociferous, and Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary for Governor in 2018, perhaps after seeing Kemp’s ad on FOX News, where he brandished a rifle and threatened to round up illegal immigrants himself. Kemp then narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams, helped by his earlier removal of hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls as Secretary of State, overseeing his own election. But Kemp and other Georgia Republicans could not prevent Georgia’s voters from handing the state to Joe Biden, thanks to Abrams’ massive get-out-the-vote drive since 2018.

When Trump insisted that he had won Georgia but for massive electoral fraud there, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, and then Governor Kemp, defended their state. It’s all or nothing for Trump. On social media, he called Raffensberger “a so-called Republican (RINO)”. He said on FOX News about Kemp, “I’m ashamed that I endorsed him”, and placed Raffensberger in a special category of “electoral officials making deals, like this character in Georgia who’s a disaster.” On December 1, Trump said Kemp should “do something”, because he had allowed his state to be “scammed”. An even better idea: “Then call off the election. It won’t be needed.”

Trump’s demand to follow him or be thrown out of Trump World hit FOX News after the network called Arizona for Biden. Since then, the libelous claims by Sidney Powell, a lawyer so outrageous that even Trump’s campaign had to disavow her, that voting machines systematically changed Trump votes to Biden across the country, have caught FOX’s foxes in a trap. Lou Dobbs let her offer this Trumpism on November 30: “It’s really the most massive and historical, egregious fraud the world has ever seen.” Sean Hannity encouraged her to repeat those claims, also without contradiction. Tucker Carlson, however, demanded that she show some evidence. When she refused and displayed public outrage at this demand, conservatives began to criticize him.

Georgia attorney Lin Wood included Carlson as the new enemy, writing on Nov. 22, “Fox News is now part of the propaganda arm of the leftists/Communists who think they are going to overthrow our Constitution.” At a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia last week, Wood shouted at the crowd that they should not vote for either Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue until the electoral fraud is fixed, which means never. “Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?” I wonder how those 222 non-committal Congressional Republicans would answer that.

At the state level, Republican leaders have mostly followed the law, bringing us to “safe harbor” day tomorrow, when states make final decisions in any controversies over the appointment of their electors. But handfuls of local representatives have openly offered to commit whatever political crime it takes to reverse the election. A group of 64 Republican Pennsylvania state representatives signed a letter to the whole Pennsylvania Congressional delegation asking them to “to object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” when Congress meets on January 6 to confirm the Electoral College results. That’s half of all Republicans in the lower House, including the Speaker and the Majority Leader, and 7 of 28 in the Senate.

It is not easy to predict how those who have so closely clung to Trump will react to his escalating attacks on our constitutional system. Attorney General Bill Barr already transformed his supposedly non-political Justice Department into Trump’s taxpayer-funded legal defense team. Then Trump said on November 29 that the Justice Department and the FBI might be co-conspirators: “This is total fraud ... maybe they’re involved.” Two days later, Barr told the Associated Press, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Too bad he didn’t tell the whole truth, that there was no systemic fraud at all. Still Trump is pissed at the latest traitor. NBC News reported that Trump wouldn’t say any more that he had confidence in his Attorney General: “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now.”

The “army” representing Trump, people he picked and encourages, is led by a small collection of wacko publicity hounds, who will scream their fabricated claims over and over again, no matter how unlikely and easily disprovable they are, or what kind of people they offend by their accusations. The claim by Giuliani & Co. is simple: the Dems stole the election. But now they are attacking Republicans who won’t abuse their offices in the cause.

The pattern is in plain sight. Since he won the Republican primary in 2016, the divide between pro- and anti-Trump Republican politicians has been their view of the future. Those who saw themselves searching for Republican votes in the future went along. The Republican members of Congress who have criticized Trump’s lies about the election come from the same cohort as those who campaigned against him before the election: out of office or on their way, “formers”, “ex-’s”, soon-to-be-formers.

Maybe it’s still true that the number of Republican Congresspeople who have contracted COVID is larger than the number who have endorsed the election results as fair and free. The vast majority are sliding along with Trump on his slippery slope, with no brakes, no place to get off before crashing. What will that crash look like?

Will anyone pay a price for this attempt to overthrow our constitutional system? The answer lies not with those politicians, who will adopt every possible slippery justification for their actions. We, those who have opposed Trump from the beginning, can’t make Republicans pay an electoral price, because we don’t vote for them. Only Republican voters can decide to stop supporting individuals and a Party leadership that cares much more about winning, than about democracy. Will they hold any of their “leaders” responsible for their choices? How many will make any effort to discover truth and to compare it to the lies with which they have been bombarded? We, however, can urge state prosecutors, state bar associations, and Democratic legislators to seek penalties within the law for all those who are subverting our electoral system by telling lies.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 8, 2020