Politics

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” says Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of Tennessee Williams’ classic American play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Like other resonant phrases, people often forget the context. Blanche says this to two psychiatric nurses as she is about to be forcibly removed to what those days was called a ‘lunatic asylum’.

Words can take on a life of their own.

It is entirely plausible that Donald Trump, when he constantly compares US asylum seekers to serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, is confusing these two uses of the word ‘asylum’.

It could also be plausible that Keir Starmer’s advisors did not think through the various ramifications of what they meant when they coined the catchphrase “island of strangers” to warn of the dangers of unchecked immigration.

This is not the first time that a prime ministerial speechwriter has culled more brickbats than bouquets. Neither Margaret Thatcher, when she said “there is no such thing as society”, nor Theresa May, when she spoke of “citizens of nowhere”, probably realised how much these ideas would define their premierships.

But there may be reasons other than migration why people feel estranged in the UK today.

This was too depressing to come up with something pithy.

Not really sure I can add more absurdity to this.

OK, so that is in the running for clickbait hed of the year, but it's actually apt for the column.

It may seem paradoxical to write this in an opinion piece. But it needs saying: arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people’s beliefs. And the implicit societal acceptance that they do is getting in the way of other, more effective forms of political thinking and doing.

I’m a researcher who studies the intersection of psychology and politics, and my work has increasingly led me to believe that our culture’s understanding of how political persuasion works is wrong. In the age of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rise of the far right, commentators have endlessly opined on the problems of fake news, polarisation and more. But they’ve mostly been looking in the wrong places – and have focused too much on words.

Take “debates”. They’re a central part of most election campaigns around the world, seen as so influential that they’re often governed by strict rules around media coverage and balance. Yet evidence suggests that watching debates has no impact on opinions whatsoever. In 2019 researchers analysed 56 TV debates in 22 elections in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Europe from 1952 to 2016. The study tracked nearly 100,000 respondents to see whether debates helped undecided or decided voters to make up or change their minds. They found no evidence that they did. In 2012, a reporter ran another analysis about whether debates influenced election outcomes. As he put it: “The effects of debates on eventual votes are likely mild, and, in most cases, effectively nil.”

How much more dystopian can it get? Hang onto your hat!

The US Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering an “out-of-the-box” pitch to participate in a television gameshow that would have immigrants compete to obtain US citizenship.

Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described the pitch to the New York Times as a “celebration of being an American” and said the show would include challenges based on American traditions.

In a statement, McLaughlin said: “We need to revive patriotism and civic duty in this country, and we’re happy to review out-of-the-box pitches. This pitch has not received approval or rejection by staff.”

“What I’m really worried about is my generation losing faith in democracy,” he said.

The Democrat describes a generation that played by the rules, only to learn the game was rigged. They pursued higher education, avoided drugs and underage drinking, lowered teen pregnancy rates, voted, often in record numbers, and yet they are saddled with student loan debt, struggling to afford rent, and deeply disillusioned with a political system that has failed to deliver economic fairness or financial security.

“We still find ourselves fucked, frankly,” he said.

Now, Hogg argues, is the moment for the party to act with urgency – and accountability, after leading Democrats brushed aside voter concerns about Joe Biden’s age and ability to run for a second term.

“People felt like we were not honest with them,” he said. “When they told us the president was too old. We said: ‘No, he’s not.’ And then at the last second: ‘Yes, he is.’ And then when they told us prices were too high, we said: ‘No, they aren’t. Look at this graph.’

“It doesn’t matter what the data says if that is not what people feel,” he added. “What you have to respond to is what people feel and explain what you’re doing today.”

This frankly sounds like the sort of guy who should be in a DNC leadership position.

Not even a year ago, though it feels like a decade, the US Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal laws when they act in their official capacity. In other words, presidents don’t have to worry about breaking the law, as they will never be held to account. On Thursday, the Trump administration was back at the court with a related request: Will the justices please allow us to enforce illegal orders against anyone who fails to sue to stop us?

As Trump portrays himself as a king, his lawyer presses for a king’s powers.

The request comes out of litigation over Trump’s illegal executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders. This is so obviously a violation of the citizenship clause of the Constitution, which guarantees birthright citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States, that the Trump administration does not want the court to tackle that question. Instead, they are asking the court to strip the judiciary of the power to issue nationwide or universal injunctions—orders that halt the implementation of a rule, law, or policy while the courts contemplate a final ruling.

If courts cannot halt the government’s illegal actions until the Supreme Court has decided they are illegal—a process that can take years, if the case ever reaches the nine justices—then the government would be free to do essentially whatever it wanted to anyone unable to sue or possibly join a class action lawsuit. It transforms the justice system from one which stops illegal government activity into one that can only provide whack-a-mole relief to those who can stand up and ask for it.

It’s a nightmarish vision of the justice system. Imagine the police identify a serial thief. He’s targeting neighborhoods at night all across the country. Rather than lock him up, the thief simply promises to skip the homes that have called the police to complain and obtained a restraining order. Until a jury convicts him, everyone else keeps getting robbed. That’s what Trump is asking for: the ability to run roughshod over the Constitution and the law—and not just on this question of citizenship, but on any illegal or rights-depriving scheme he can think of—until the case somehow reaches the Supreme Court.

“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Solicitor General John Sauer. “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

“You go back to English common law and the Chancery Court,” Jackson continued, “but they had a different system. The fact that courts back in English Chancery couldn’t enjoin the King, I think, is not analogous or indicative of what courts can do in our system, where the king, quote, unquote, the executive, is supposed to be bound by the law, and the court has the power to say what the law is.”

This is the crux of the issue. The Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority keeps moving the goal posts so that the president increasingly resembles the monarch the colonies declared independence from. As Trump portrays himself as a king on social media, his administration presses for him to possess a king’s powers as well.

In their battle against universal injunctions, the Trump administration has contended that final, nationwide relief from an illegal order would only come if and when the Supreme Court issued a ruling finding it unlawful. And Sauer did pledge the government would follow any such order. But as Justice Elena Kagan drew out in her questioning, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court would quickly hear a challenge to an illegal executive order, if ever.

“I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

“Let’s just assume you’re dead wrong,” Kagan began,asking Sauer to concede the citizenship order is illegal to lay out how the administration would argue court review should play out to “get to the result that there is a single rule of citizenship, that is the rule that we’ve historically applied, rather than the rule that the EO would have us do.”

Sauer suggested litigants could get temporary relief througha class action. (Yes, a class action for infants being born constantly joined by parents who might fear deportation as a result of coming forward in court.) But Sauer soon acknowledged that the administration would likely fight class certification.

Next Kagan asked if an individual challenging the executive order won an appeal in a circuit court, which has jurisdiction over several states, would the government agree not to enforce the order in those states? Sauer would not commit to that.

Sauer and some of the GOP-appointed justices seemed content with the idea that through one of those routes—an individual plaintiff or a class action—a challenge to an executive order could quickly reach the Supreme Court, where would be resolved expeditiously. But Kagan quickly pointed out that the government was actually arguing for an extraordinary loophole: The more egregious the violation, the harder it will be for the issue to ever reach the Supreme Court.

The birthright citizenship question is a perfect example, because it is considered to be lawless and baseless by most lawyers. “Let’s assume that you lose in the lower courts pretty uniformly, as you have been losing on this issue,” Kagan pressed. “I noticed that you didn’t take the substantive question to us. You only took the nationwide injunction question to us. I mean, why would you take the substantive question to us? You’re losing a bunch of cases. This guy here, this woman over here, they’ll have to be treated as citizens, but nobody else will. Why would you ever take this case to us?”

In other words, the Trump administration can win by losing. If the losing party, the government, accepts individual losses and never appeals, then it wins by applying the order to everyone without a lawyer—which is most people, especially among immigrant populations fearful of deportation.

After two and a half hours of arguments, it is unclear whether there are five votes among the justices to end universal injunctions outright. Doing so would be a radical departurefrom the law, one that would subject the nation to every illegal fantasy Trump and his braintrust can think up for an indeterminate amount of time. This case clearly showed the contours of thechoice: The justices clearly do not like the pervasive use of universal injunctions, and the GOP appointees certainly don’t like the cascade of injunctions against Trump. But at the same time, the birthright citizenship order is clearly baloney.

Perhaps Justice Clarence Thomas’ questions best illustrate the conundrum. An originalist, Thomas’s questions focused on the history of universal injunctions and its common law ancestors, seemingly to disprove the notion that there is a bygone analogue that would justify its existence.

But does Thomas believe, as Sauer stated on Thursday, that the citizenship clause was merely intended to cover the children of formerly enslaved people? Two years ago, Thomas wrote that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which includes the citizenship clause and the equal protection clause, were bound up together in one universal rule of equality for all. “The addition of a citizenship guarantee thus evidenced an intent to broaden the provision, extending beyond recently freed blacks and incorporating a more general view of equality for all Americans,” Thomas wrote in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, using the amendment to justify ending affirmative action by stressing its application to white people as well. As forthe amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, Thomas called it “a new birth of freedom.”

But that’s not worth the paper its written on if the courts can’t protect it.

archive.is link

I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In the Opinion video above, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.