“History being made, the right way,” says Umair Haque
The Net is awash in devastating commentary about how bad Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling was granting TFG a special master to review documents seized by the F.B.I. in its August search of Mar-a-Lago. Digby touched on it on Monday (and may again later today). Neal Katyal’s thread is worth reading also. Charlie Savage of the New York Times calls the decision “extraordinary,” and not in a good way. Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas, brands the decision “an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation.”
Cannon demonstrates once again how Donald J. Trump has made a career of turning “justice delayed is justice denied” on its head to avoid ever seeing the inside of a prison cell.
But I want to turn to Umair Haque’s stunning commentary on President Joe Biden’s Philadelphia speech from Thursday. I’d missed this until browsing on Monday.
The London-based British economist is not normally upbeat. Haque has over the last decade condemned the “the logic of opulence,” the looting of the social contract by the wealth-addicted. Haque noted the reduction of the American middle class to “something very much like Neo-serfs” by the same logic. “Americans aren’t poor because they don’t work, they don’t work hard enough, or they don’t work long enough,” he wrote in 2019. “They’re poor even if they do.”
That same Haque saw Biden’s condemnation of MAGA Republicanism as a speech for the ages. Anti-democratic, xenophobic reactionaries and bona fide fascists gained ground across the planet over the last decade with no pushback. Biden’s speech answered the democratic world’s Mrs. Robinson-esque, “Where have you gone, Beacon of Liberty?” plea. The world was watching, even if Americans were not.
Before Thursday, it was as if the world learned nothing from the 1930s. “Our leaders on the center left failed to challenge them, to stop them, to even call them out,” Haque laments. Until Biden “let it rip” in Philadelphia:
What did he have to say? He made basically four points. Number one, the rise of this form of politics — violence, intimidation, hate, scapegoating, Big Lies, rage, a vitriolic rage at the values of democracy itself — was not normal. Not in a democracy. Because, two, it was inimical to democracy — this was how modern societies plunged backwards into chaos and ruin. That meant, three, that fighting this form of politics, rejecting it, wasn’t a partisan issue of left and right at all — but about coming together to defend democracy itself. And four, that was every sane and thoughtful person’s not just choice, but responsibility. Their duty. To whom? To history. To futurity. And to each other.
Beautiful. Elegant. Powerful. True.
Some speeches are just speeches. The tedium of democratic bureaucracy — new policies, updates, agendas, like Zoom meetings, but for a society. The boring stuff of management. History safely ignores them. And then there are speeches. Ones which change history, because they remind people of it, where they stand in it, and how it’s made — or unmade.
This was one of those speeches.
It was a Gorbachev announcing the end of the Soviet Union-level speech in Haque’s estimation. Yet it garnered almost no coverage from major media. They knew what Biden meant to say.
That should tell you something — something very, very important.
The American Establishment is deeply uncomfortable with what Biden’s doing. They are trying to stop him. The networks didn’t fail to cover his speech and the Times and Post barely mention it and CNN disgracefully attacks its backdrop, as if that was the thing which really mattered — in some kind of coincidence. It’s how power works. Some of it’s explicit — like CNN reporters obviously being instructed by their new libertarian boss to attack the President. Some of it’s implicit, like networks all deciding, hey, a President warning your democracy’s under existential threat isn’t worth you hearing about, all you need is more more dumb Superhero TV Shows. There are many ways to stop a political movement, after all. Acts of commission — CNN style, or acts of omission, New York Times and Washington Post and networks style.
Meanwhile, “the internet lit up like a thunderbolt from the hand of Jove was coursing through it.” Why? Because over the last decade leaders of what we once called the free world sat silent or, worse, pandered to the demagogues, lunatics and fanatics, hoping they might just go away without direct confrontation. “And the truth is that while they’ve been doing that? All of us have lost respect for them.”
Biden broke the spell, Haque argues:
He didn’t just invite people, regular sane people — who’ve not had a voice, a leader, representation, but been crying out, for God’s sake, for our leaders to get in the fight, say something, do something, anything — to “get involved” in “hope and change” or what not, the usual anodyne ways political speeches end. He said, right out loud, that it was every sane person’s responsibility and duty to defend democracy from those who are attacking it existentially — regardless of their minor-league partisan politics. He made it a matter of responsibility and duty to history, the future, and each other.
In other words, Biden issued not just a political call — but something much, much more vital: he issued a moral directive. He reminded us that each of us has a moral stake in this life, in the project of civilization, and those millions upon millions of moral stakes are what the house of democracy is. On those stakes, we can grow the fruits of equality, justice, truth, freedom — or we can try to distill the poisons of hate, lies, and violence. But duty and responsibility — history says, futurity will say, each of us must say to one another — impel us to make the right choice.
The same overconfidence by which the left believes the truth — expressed in raw facts — will set people’s minds free led them to stop making moral claims decades ago. We stopped leading with our values and foolishly assumed people would infer them from policies we promote. Into that values vacuum flowed white Christian nationalism, free market fundamentalism, and the manifold moral horrors to which the 21st century is heir to, including the acid-washing of the social contract upon which the American polity was erected.
Fascists gained ground by making moral claims, Haque reminds readers.
Their demagogues make moral claims — Nietzschean ones, you’re the superhumans, all you have to do is annihilate, hate, extinguish, get, cleanse away, the subhumans. And it works. To bond their base into a movement, because movements arise from moral claims, which create deep sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose. Our side has been missing all that entirely, and it’s felt like it, because there was no moral meat on the bone. But all that’s different now.
One hopes, anyway.
One anecdote to support Haque’s optimism.
Major Garrett hosted a panel of Trump supporters on Sunday’s Face the Nation. A Trump supporter named Mary from Virginia said, “It’s getting — somebody like me who’s not a Republican or Democrat but I do support Trump — it’s getting really old hearing ‘democracy, democracy, democracy.'” Biden and Democrats use the term as a weapon, she complained.
Good. That means she’s threatened by the pushback, by Democrats reclaiming democracy the way Republicans appropriated freedom and “law and order” to advance the opposite for non-MAGA Americans. It suggests Biden’s speech sent a shudder through the MAGA movement’s white Christian nationalists.
After Biden’s speech, the word “Finally” cropped up over and over in emails a friend received. Let’s pray Biden wasn’t too late.
(h/t DJ)
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