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Political radicalization primarily evolves as the result of either of two completely opposite experiences. One is engineered and nothing but lies; the other is lived through and exclusively truth. While the end result of each is essentially the same – full estrangement from established governance, as well as most traditions and institutions that inform it – how each bloc gets to where its going has everything to do with whether their attack on the status quo possesses any merit. Right now in America both of these processes are at work. One has succeeded in creating the result it constantly reinforces. The other is slowly but surely getting to the same place, and when it does civil strife will move ever closer to past our ability to control, the luxury of pursuing daily routines we have enjoyed for generations critically damaged.

Since it started Fox News has beamed like a laser the same mission statement message 24/7: White America has nothing to atone for in its past, and in fact is now the victim of a false narrative that uses unfortunate events from generations ago to bestow undo privilege on the ancestors of those who suffered injustices resolved for decades. For more than thirty years this has been the Rosetta’s Stone of Fox/AM messaging, the common DNA that runs through every talk track every day. From Limbaugh to Levin, Hannity to Carlson, every paragraph is bonded by this trope. Whether the story is Obama ramming through health care or Trump being ceaselessly attacked for keeping to his campaign pledges, the subtext is always there – hardworking whites are getting screwed by a system drenched in “identity politics”.

Steadily, day after day, one of the tightest, most comprehensive propaganda delivery systems in human history has plugged away at the critical thinking abilities of its ever growing core of devout consumers. The grievance and resentment narrative they listen to at home, in the car, on the internet, and now interact within on social media has fully eroded their confidence in government, actually redefining it as a “deep state” committed to subjugating white patriots to the whims of entitled minorities and liberal elites who believe they are better than those without ivory tower educations. It has killed any ambition to seek other information sources, and destroyed any patience or trust in the viewpoints of friends and family who don’t parrot the world according to Rush. In short, but without a doubt, it has radicalized millions of Americans and consumed the GOP, mandating a new political class forbidden to pursue what has always been solely responsible for securing the peaceful interplay of US political power – compromise.

Trump’s Presidency has added to Fox/AM’s delivery network the world’s most powerful pulpit and exponentially magnified both the intensity and credibility of the white grievance narrative, enhancing it into an all-encompassing life proposition that combines Trump’s well being with the nation’s fundamental survival. That the GOP didn’t even bother to put forward a position platform this week clarifies a cult of personality no different than any of history’s most pronounced totalitarian movements. His acceptance diatribe last night confirms one of America’s major political parties is now fully beholden to the lies and bigotry Fox/AM has relentlessly cultivated since its inception. The Republican Party is now completely defined by the rabid whims of one of Fox/AM’s fanatical consumers, who also happens to be a sociopath, his message both informed and impelled by the only information source he trusts. The full radicalization of 35-38 percent of America is now complete. They won’t be modifying their nihilist extremism any time soon, and they equate electoral defeat in November with the end of days.

Meanwhile, the American Black experience has continued apace, its reality fully at odds with Sean Hannity’s fiction. Technology has validated what black communities and their leadership have always claimed, that encounters with law enforcement throughout the US have never become less dangerous for black suspects, who way too often are targeted for scrutiny only because of skin tone. This narrative hasn’t been spun for them by former house painters on the radio or television, it’s been lived one encounter at a time, one beating and jailing, one wrongful conviction, one hail of bullets, one ruined life after another. The notion of white privilege is not a figment of talking points; it’s the sad conclusion of systemic injustice. The advent of real time video capability has provided a verdict our own eyes can’t dispute. Over and over again viral documentation has confirmed outrageous abuse nobody can credibly contest, hard as many may try.

The steady stream of camera-verified police killings of unarmed or detained black men has eroded whatever faith in US jurisprudence may have been bolstered by Barak Obama’s election. Indeed, throughout his two terms, case after case of police brutality and outrageous shootings of unarmed black men resulted in the same thing…. nothing. Trump, he of the “I wish you wouldn’t treat them so nicely” sensibilities about basic civil rights, has viewed law enforcement as a vital constituency; he’s been wholly adversarial to anything less than grotesque coddling and slavish support regardless of how incriminating the circumstances are. It’s now a fair question to ask whether radicalization of black America isn’t actually MAGA’s objective, so overt is its indifference to police abuse and so hostile its attitude toward protesters. Trump has no platform for the coming election other than to equate Black Lives Matter with Antifa and promise war on anyone who marches when yet another police outrage occurs. “Law and order” is his constant bellow; he’s Richard Daley on roids.

So there it is, two blocs at odds with the US democratic experiment, shaped by wholly different circumstances. One radicalized like a Frankenstein in Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes’ ghoulish laboratory, taught to fear their shadows and blame whatever failings they endure on those their ancestors have tormented for centuries. And the other camp, the tormented, who non-fascist America now fully depends on to help deliver electoral salvation in November, that has run out of patience with a system which makes going for a late night 7-11 run a life-threatening proposition, or calling the cops for help an existential predicament. A group who literally watches its own get executed for being black, and then has to stomach a peanut gallery of reactionaries swear it’s more than what the camera vividly displays because… did you see he had a record?!

NBA head coach Doc Rivers, as insightful as any political analyst, was asked the other night his thoughts on the decision by teams to sit out a round of playoff games to protest the police shooting of unarmed Jacob Blake in Wisconsin. Rivers became emotional. “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back,” he observed before perfectly crystallizing the current state of affairs:

“All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear…. We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. We’re the ones that we’re denied to live in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear.”

Not 48 hours later, like the windup menace he is, Trump validated Rivers’ assessment on the White House lawn to a cheering throng of hateful radicals, oblivious to the fact they are hastening what they’ve always feared most – streets filled with chaos and disorder. That they can’t make the connection and recognize chickens coming home to roost is hardly surprising. After all, where would they ever hear such a thing, and if they did, why would they ever listen to it? The new rules for radicals. BC

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

Thomas Mann

“ I am the one who knocks!”

Walter White

We have been raised to believe in the incompatibility between evil and inanity. Hollywood to history books reinforce the notion that the pursuit of evil is a structured quest, with forethought and dark strategy at work to impose the worst in sweeping and systematic fashion, nothing piecemeal or slipshod about it. When we think of notorious authoritarians we too often make them smarter and more deliberate than they were, as if launching a two-front world war against an ally fully prepared to cede you most of a continent includes some whiff of logic and intelligence.

Throughout Trump’s idiotic reign the principle solace many have grasped for is this assumption anybody so disorganized and ad hominem isn’t capable of destroying 250 years worth of democratic institutions and traditions, ushering in a dark age. Listen to him, they’ve regularly declared, he couldn’t plot a trip to the basement, let alone a coup to usurp the Constitution. When things get bad enough adults will abandon ship and he’ll turn to pudding. How has that worked out?

Fact is, nothing supports such confidence; history posts a long list of atrocity by incompetents. When it comes to the projection of evil, aptitude is never a requirement. Only two things are, both of which Trump boasts in spades: a sociopathic lack of empathy and self-awareness, and control of the resources required to impose it. When it comes to crimes against humanity, simply being devoid of conscience is more than half the battle.

We’ve learned on a near daily basis that our POTUS can always go lower, impulsively plunging to new depths. Yet and still, every now and again he will clarify straight up he is in fact evil and, with the immense power at his disposal, a grave danger to us all. Speaking the other day at a so-called coronavirus briefing, really just a platform for more unhinged gibberish, the Bunker Duffer wandered about his ever-growing enemies list, pretending it was still February and he hadn’t ruined the nation’s health and economy already.

Suddenly his eyes lit up at one of the bullet points Stephen Miller had provided for his teleprompter. New Zealand, who all but the worst took heart in for completely flattening their Covid curve, recently reported new cases of the virus. Trump was positively giddy about the news! “New Zealand, by the way, just had a big outbreak, and other countries, who were put up to make us look not as good as we should…” The next day, at a rally in Minnesota, Trump did a wink wink, nudge nudge for the wretched core chorus after revisiting the subject. “Of course, we don’t want that,” he said with the scurrilous smirk reserved for when he wants something with all of his ghoulish soullessness.

Since the turn of the 20th Century, America has been led by a number of Presidents with weighty baggage on their scales. Wilson had a stroke and was near fully incapacitated by the end of his second term. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt was heroic into four terms bound to a wheel chair. Nixon was corrupt and paranoid, but had enough shame and civic duty to leave when the gig was up. Clinton couldn’t help himself and felt victimized so many couldn’t get past his entitlement to seedy and improper personal indulgence – a kinder, gentler narcissism. Reagan was clearly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s toward 1988. The list is long. Yet and still, we’ve never before done evil born of sociopathic character disorder. Now we may get four more years of it. Oh, yes, he’s an imbecile to boot, Hitler and Klink all rolled into one.

The Democrats went after Trump as they had to do last week; anything less would have been complicity, a wanton surrender to consultants desperate enough for an income stream they don’t mind destroying its wellspring for. Nobody really doubted it would happen; but meted out over four nights among the companion theme of the genuine diversity Trumpism detests, its impact was a very pleasant surprise, more powerful than most expected. In particular, both Obamas provided long overdue bearings for defining how unfit Trump is for office with the style and substance anyone but despicables couldn’t help but celebrate as dawn to MAGA’s long night.

However, we’re still tip toeing through the tulips when it comes to what we confront, still trying to stick his square peg in our round avoidance of the indictment MAGA’s durability merits of our society at large. Our democracy is not meant to survive some certain tipping point when a collective lack of altruism makes the breeding grounds for despotism and atrocity sufficiently lush with too much apathy and self-absorption. At that juncture it’s just a question of when somebody is willing to consume whatever good is left; and they don’t have to be ingenious or even cunning, merely prepared to do what’s necessary without concern for precedent. Sound like anyone we know?

The next four days promise to be a true shit show. The temptation to permit the parade of America First clowns’ ineptitude on the stump to obscure the toxic platitudes all will slur, or amateurish production values to diminish the divisive cruelty they sloppily portray, will be strong and certain to allay some degree of alarm at the message this GOP enthusiastically embraces. But evil is evil, and MAGA is just that with increasingly diminished effort to disguise its ugliness. Worse, it’s doubtful this snake won’t keep slithering even if you do cut off its head in November; is their any doubt in the capability of any number of current GOP toadies to go full dark side as needed to replace Trump as the wretched core’s Jim Jones du jour? Cruz, Cotton, Jordan, Hawley, even ever more disgusting Marco Rubio, etc. No shortage of applicants.

We are necessarily wedded to the goal of trouncing Trumpism come November. There is nothing else we are allowed or should allow ourselves to consider right now. Blow them out. Landslide. Nonetheless, Trump provides hourly evidence he recognizes no such boundaries to his rabid inclinations, while now near constantly reinforcing how truly awful a human being he is, which both his niece and sister have provided their own depositions to support. Joe Biden was excellent last Thursday declaring “character and decency are on the ballot.” Indeed. However, we know, and should not forget, that he didn’t go near far enough. When it comes to Decision/2020 and beyond, it’s the evil, stupid! BC

“A president’s words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job.“

Michelle Obama

The strength of oratory can be immense. To hear words on our national stage that perfectly meet a moment in time, generally crisis, is as rare as it is momentous. It requires the speaker to economize without sacrificing critical substance, provide flourish without fluff that dilutes meaning, and convey a unifying theme that doesn’t debilitate details it is meant to unite. No easy task.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln synopsized national calamity and its human cost, while extrapolating why such sacrifice could not be in vain – all in less than five minutes. Precisely 100 years later, near the foot of a memorial built to honor Lincoln’s legacy, MLK stunned thousands and became a voice for the ages, with effortless clarity and confident cadence. “I Have a Dream” immediately became a crucial signpost for America’s national mission, both aspiration and non-negotiable demand of racial justice. Lincoln and MLK each simultaneously clarified their greatness while rising to occasions where nothing less would suffice.

Last night, within the sterile virtual confines a pandemic curve we’ve abjectly failed to flatten now necessitates, Michelle Obama answered history’s challenge as well as anyone possibly could. Taking a place along the perch of our all-time greats, the former First Lady delivered a majestic 18 minute gut check Americans can’t ignore. It was a 10.5, ideal in every way. Exactly what we needed at the precise moment we needed it!

The terrible tragedy of our time is reflected in the inverse proportion a person’s goodness can now be assessed by a third of our nation’s disdain for them. That is, forget all other metrics, the intensity of the wretched core’s loathing, always encapsulated on our President’s Twitter feed and Fox’s prime time lineup, for a particular public figure now clarifies how invaluable they are to the nation’s prospects. Think Adam Schiff or Dr. Fauci. Rest assured, after last night, if only by that measure, Michelle Obama is pivotal to our survival.

PBS’s Judy Woodruff and crew sounded an ominous pre-convention theme as they took a “game day” approach to the proceedings, downplaying Trump’s daily outrages with repeated inanity about “what Biden needs to do.” The thesis Biden-Harris have to convince America they offer ideas that make them more than just “not Trump” presupposes “stale” good faith and honor isn’t enough these days, an insidious falsehood. PBS producers evidently believe “fair and balanced” requires inviting Trumpie journalist Chris Buskirk to muse about the “largely positive” road forward on Covid policy, as well as Ohio MAGAite Gary Abernathy to sternly observe Biden must make certain “not to talk down” to pro-lifers or gun owners. Thankfully, Michelle Obama was having none of it.

Her address was void of specific policies past Obama-era basics Trump inherited and ceaselessly claimed credit for, and the myriad of agreements he has deserted while destroying the continuity of “alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower.“ This was more a manifesto on essential character traits and habits required by the Presidency and a vibrant society. That it was by far the most comprehensive condemnation of MAGA’s long list of outrages put forth by any of the country’s former White House occupants only reinforced its sense of urgency. She was succinct yet sufficient, graceful yet fully damning. The total package. What we must stand for and its existential incompatibility with a Trump Presidency. It doesn’t matter whether she was preaching to the choir; truth doesn’t care about its audience.

Anyone who wants to take issue with Michelle Obama’s characterization of the American experience as a quest to provide more for our children, a story with “a lot of beauty” as well as “a lot of struggle and injustice and work left to do…,” should be put on the spot to describe it better. They will fail. Just as they will to compete with the bona fides she brings to the table as “one of a handful of people living today who have seen firsthand the immense weight and awesome power of the presidency.” It “is a hard job,” and demands “clear-headed judgment, a mastery of complex and competing issues, a devotion to facts and history, a moral compass….”

It’s doubtful many would argue her list of requirements is off base. After nearly one full term, it is impossible to contend Trump has ever made the slightest effort to meet any of them. Last night, the better half of Bunker Duffer’s greatest nemesis put his lazy ineptitude exactly where it belongs, before the country he has gravely injured and means to hurt some more. Her calmly ferocious delivery will resonate as shorthand for a gargantuan civic mistake Biden and Harris will be the first to try and remedy; a thankless task the vanquished Trump and his seditious minions will do every idiotic thing they can conjure to obstruct.

We can’t determine what a national moment is going to look like and entail. Sometimes it’s as obvious as after an epic battle of a defining Civil War. Other times it might sneak up as a radio address that pinpoints fear as our worst enemy. Who is to say? Sometimes we recognize it immediately, other times not, leaving it for history to identify. Last night we did. A disastrous fraudster finally laid bare for all to see, naked and utterly barren, by one of our finest, who has held her tongue for far too long, but made the wait more worthwhile. A $1500 claimer taken to task by a Secretariat of our political racing oval, imperiled by the nag’s non-existent work ethic and refusal to prepare.

Several weeks ago, the POTUS tacitly acknowledged his refusal to lead has caused Covid-19 fatalities into the hundreds of thousands. “It is what it is” he shrugged vacantly in yet another grotesque example of his pathological self-unawareness. Last night, Michelle Obama summed up her assessment of Trump’s performance thusly:

“He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.“

One worn and overused throwaway line has never underscored so much distance in our national condition. At one side of the chasm is the pathetic indifference of an existential disaster our cynical apathy helped create and abide, nails-on-a-chalkboard. On the other, a pitch perfect summation of how unacceptable our current national leadership situation is and a call to action for resolving it. The immense power of oratory that rises to the moment! BC

In 1974, with court-ordered school desegregation, south Boston took on a war-zone look. Mandated busing created ideal conditions for Beantown bigots to request the south’s worst hold their beers while they lived down to everybody’s lowest expectations. It didn’t matter that, as one black mother in Roxbury put it, all her community wanted “was to get their children to schools where there were the best resources for educational growth—smaller class sizes, up-to-date-books,” “southie” whites had no interest in busing their kids to help solve the problem, and instead viewed the edict as an existential government intrusion. Racists were glad to ride that wave of visceral resentment all the way in to the beach.

Several hours drive down I-95 in Delaware a Democratic political prodigy was on the rise, having won a US Senate seat two years earlier at the preposterous age of 29. Handsome and toothy, with charisma to match, Joe Biden was making all the right moves his gifted skill set afforded him, but Wilmington, Delaware, like Boston, was also convulsed by school busing. While the level of tumult was not as pronounced as the chaos up north, swimming upstream on the opposite side of white grievance required a level of conviction that superseded political ambition and accepted electoral defeat for the sake of principle. Joe Biden didn’t have that in 1974. In fact, after facing white backlash for early, very tentative support of court-ordered busing, Biden did more than a 180 and led the charge against it. If “shameful pandering” is too strong a modifier, it’s still uncomfortably close to the mark.

Near five decades later, on a Democratic Presidential primary debate stage, what goes around came around and Biden was taken to task for his expedience. It was a powerful moment as one of his opponents used a personal narrative to illustrate real-life consequences that flow from the countless political footballs tossed to and fro inside the beltway. Kamala Harris made him pay a price, mostly to enhance her own profile within that same power structure, scoring relevance at Biden’s expense, reminding him the hard way there exists no statute of limitations on past mistakes in Presidential politics. He appeared genuinely hurt as Harris skewered him, perhaps figuring her past close relationship with his late son, Beau would have earned him a pass; sorry Joe, nothing personal, this is business. Indeed.

Now the two are a team, with the survival of America as a going democratic concern squarely on their shoulders. That Biden selected Harris speaks to the thick skin temperament we once expected from a POTUS. In fact, at its essence the union reflects everything near four years of MAGA governance has assaulted, and anything past next January will surely destroy. Wherever they’ve been, however they’ve gotten here doesn’t much matter to most as long as they get us out of what we’re stuck in.

Yet and still, the Biden-Harris ticket is more than simply a vehicle for ridding us of pestilence; it is redemption, a vital sign that Trump was nothing more than backlash run amok, which we are capable of banding together to sweep back into the footnotes of America’s story, the three steps back we endured and then left behind. But make no mistake, what that course correction will look like is dangerously unclear, with the worst still ahead.

The career evolutions of Biden and Harris encapsulate both the imperfections and promises of Western liberal democracy. In pursuit of personal ambition, pluralist politicians confront, massage, spin and ultimately grow from issues of the day. Sometimes, maybe too often, it’s uglier than we’d like it to be, but Winston Churchill’s observation is always prescient… it’s the worst system there is except for all the others. Before January of 2017 we had not experienced any of the others, now we have. Biden and Harris represent resetting to the messy good faith democracy we were before our civic catastrophe. Whatever the peccadilloes each suffers, combined together they don’t add up to one Trump news cycle.

Trump surprised nobody and immediately did what he does best: embarrass himself and further stain our once vibrant electoral tradition by hissing insults at both candidates. “Nasty” is his go-to for together women, who have always unnerved him; Harris fits that bill to a tee. Anyone familiar and attentive to Fox/AM standard operating procedure knows what the ceaseless talk track coming our way is going to sound like. Progress is a dirty word in Hannityland; the beginning, middle and ending premise will be apocalyptic change a Biden victory will unleash. That’s the broad strokes. The details will be hourly lies and distortions, peppered with constant dog whistles toward Harris, as the parade of Trump’s servile “personalities,” from Levin to Limbaugh, Ingraham to Carlson, compete to sink lowest.

Fear and loathing will be served in equal measure for no other purpose than to reinforce the notion anything but a glorious Trump triumph equals the end of days. The supposition that our current nadir is a sweet spot to be zealously maintained can only be embraced by those who fear losing the entitlement rush MAGA exclusion provides. The Trump GOP now fully disdains governance geared to anything but slavish guardianship of the upper brackets’ bottom line and stomping on ethnic groups supposedly prospering at “hard working America’s” expense. It is a zero-sum formula they will trumpet at all hours.

More than two centuries ago de Tocqueville observed that men “will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends.” We now suffer a friendless wretch of a President, fully supported by one of our two major political parties and a multi-billion dollar propaganda delivery system, who lies as he breathes and only lives to create enemies for his core of supporters to distrust. If that’s not a definition of despotism, it ought to be. MAGA’s enemies list is near everybody and truth is the last thing their “friends” are interested in providing. The fate of our democracy has become barely an even-money proposition.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are a couple of very able and decent politicians, who have never provided anyone enough reason to question their honor and good faith. As to greatness? Our times will determine that. The depths of the current crisis we now depend on them to lead us out of will provide more than enough tribulation for each to earn such acclaim. Pray every night they do! Stand by their side! BC

Central to understanding the US Presidency is it means different things to different people. Indeed, we judge our Presidents on just such a basis. Reagan was atrocious on policy, frequently embarrassing himself by badly winging responses to questions it was clear to all he was inadequately briefed on,. His critics, then and now, will be glad to remember the pollution trees cause, or his first debate with Walter Mondale when delivering their assessment of his job performance. Yet and still, he could deliver critical remarks, meticulously prepared by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, as well as any…, er, good actor could. When it came to conveying the importance of a moment, whether it was beguiling national grief after the Challenger blew up, or crystallizing history’s growing momentum to obliterate Soviet tyranny, Reagan delivered at his pay grade.

Lyndon Johnson was terrible in front of a camera and on a podium. Stiff, stilted and dispassionate, LBJ did his cause few favors when he brought it into American living rooms. However, nobody could put the elbow on a Congressman or Senator better than the rangy Texan with an encyclopedic grasp of legislative details and whipping together the numbers necessary to get bills passed. It is no stretch to maintain only a President Johnson could have succeeded in delivering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which a number of incumbents were convinced to risk their previously secure livelihoods for.

Johnson would ultimately be driven from office by his Vietnam debacle, but the legitimacy of his tenure had already been secured. It is easy to condemn him for the Indochina quagmire which cost the US plenty, however a “but” always has to follow because of how he employed his particular skill set to right perhaps our most grievous wrong. The Great Society has stood the test of time and is a great Presidential achievement.

The point is, regardless of the strengths and weaknesses Presidents have exhibited, we digest them based on our preferences for what best serves the job, which we assume promotes the national interest. In other words, we accept the notion they devote their best and worst to fulfilling the requirements of office, not their personal aspirations. In fact, the job of President is regarded as such a pinnacle of our society’s professional food chain, occupants are expected to willingly forsake past associations and fortunes as a prerequisite to avoiding any conflicts of interest that could distract from serving the nation effectively.

To do otherwise would tarnish the legitimacy of their White House enterprise, a previously unthinkable prospect. After all, however good or bad you are doing your job, could there be anything worse than a majority at odds with the premise you even mean to carry out its core responsibilities? Of course, the Trump Presidency has laid waste to all of these suppositions, metastasizing into a condition without precedent.

Anyone not appreciative of the chasm between reality and Trump/MAGA gaslighting need only watch this weekend’s PGA Championship, the first relevant pro sports competition since the Coronavirus outbreak. No fans make for an initial jolt the CBS sports team recognizes is strong enough to have Jim Nance actually introducing final round coverage by musing about “why we watch sports.” If Tiger makes a birdie and nobody cheers, did he actually hole it?

It’s elbow knocks instead of handshakes, and post round interviews conducted from the mandatory six foot distance, probably measured to the inch. PSA messaging from the PGA rotates between its commitment to furthering racial progress and the tour’s gratitude to fans for weathering the Covid crisis and bearing with current circumstances. All of this as the President picks fights with reporters at his golf club’s 19th hole for the temerity of mentioning 160 K deaths to the jeers of members he has recruited for post-round media bashing. It’s likely Bunker Duffer will feel betrayed by the one organization he thought he could still count on, check the Twitter feed for those details. Regardless, the contrast is striking.

Many will tell you Trump refused from the start to embrace the duties we elected him to carry out. However, there is a huge slippery slope from rejecting duty to the job and warping it toward the sinister aim of securing one’s rabid perception of their continued viability. That descent is now complete. Our national survival depends on how unacceptable most of us believe that is.

Trump ran for President despite knowing it would unearth a lifetime of corrupt deceit. Why will be exhaustively explored until such endeavors earn a cold cell or worse, probable if Trumpism is not soundly rejected this November. Either way, we now suffer government that, by any reasonable assessment, is overtly corrupt; that is, it exists only to protect the boss from a reckoning for his malfeasant failures. The GOP platform is now Trump’s survival, nothing else. Whatever he tweets are its details.

Whether it’s grilling Sally Yates to admit Carter Page’s “persecution” vindicates Trump of every specific the Mueller Report details, or maintaining the issue of children returning to school is the fractional percentage that will suffer Covid’s worst symptoms, rather than spread it to their parents or grandparents who very well may, the GOP now conflates Trump’s interests with the public interest…. no exceptions. Whatever gibberish he produces will either be ignored or allowed to modify previous positions. National interest now equals Lindsey Graham’s servility to Trump’s impulses – another inexplicable post-2016 development that warrants extensive investigation.

Very few now hold that anything about this Administration is normal. Polling is clear only a pronounced minority supports anything Trump touches, but they are all in, with relentless Fox/AM propaganda making sure their eye stays on the ball, which is Trump or destruction… exactly as he sees things. The temptation for Biden and Democrats is to simply stay out of the way. Doing that is all wrong because it implies there is anything less than ever increasing peril to be had from allowing his worst. There isn’t.

Every week Covid death estimates increase as Trump shrugs “it is what it is,” his wretched core ever more militant about their right to spread misery. MAGA Governors of Covid petri dish states are forcing school openings while keeping masks optional. We are about to learn how a dismantled postal service will sabotage our electoral process, not to mention basic commerce. Meanwhile, Homeland Security is being deployed, in the words of its first head, Tom Ridge, as Trump’s “private militia.”

It’s not a ticking bomb, it’s a different detonation every day, each more damaging than the last, and all with zero pretense about what completely informs the agenda. It’s a presidency devoted only to the President, whose continued viability is the sole priority his servile party apparatus pursues, top to bottom. It’s now more like a stroke than a cancer. Trump/MAGA has become a dire trauma situation; we are running out of both time and options. BC

“Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.”

Albert Camus

History is most often unforgiving of stupidity and ineptitude it fosters, affording such qualities little more than the role of enhancing the deeds of others who came forward to repair the damage they caused. Much of the credit FDR gets for confronting the Great Depression with a wide array of programs and policies flows from the dichotomy between his proactive assault on the crisis and predecessor, Herbert Hoover’s stuporous inertia. Hoover came into office four year’s earlier perhaps the most admired man in America, decades later his term was synonymous with disastrous folly, and admiration was the last thing any retelling of his Presidency conveyed.

Abraham Lincoln’s stature was enhanced through the generations by documentation of the calamitous failures before and after him. James Buchanan is generally considered one of our worst Presidents for his paralysis in the face of secession. Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson is near equally reviled by posterity for his momentous post-war pandering to the same elements Lincoln defeated. Either way, Honest Abe’s legacy never suffers when compared to such wanting contemporaries.

That’s noteworthy now because, next to the current White House occupant, Hoover, Buchanan and Johnson could be etched on Badlands granite as paragons of political courage and discerning wisdom. What we currently observe has no precedent, and it only gets worse. No longer a Presidency, this is a know-nothing siege by a certified sociopath and the party who accepts only his continued survival as its mandate. It’s not executive government, but a conglomerate of metastatic tumors, relentlessly eating away at a couple of centuries worth of performance standards. Anyone next at bat will have to do better because it’s impossible to do worse.

However, any progress they make is going to come in spite of a MAGA class of destructive show horses even a landslide for the ages won’t near wash away. Any talk of “reaching across the aisle” deserves scorn as empty rhetoric because Matt Goetz is currently relevant, which is to say cooperation means nothing less than assuaging the lowest common denominator. It’s not an aisle; there is a chasm between MAGA nihilists, now fully empowered by the House GOP leadership to do nothing other than gum up the works at all times, and everybody else subject to a measurable sense of shame they will abide. MAGA equals always acting like an obnoxious jerk; it’s a political bloc of Karens. Constructive governance occupies no part of the equation. We suffer the invasion of decency snatchers and there is nothing hysterical about observing they are only capable of hurting the public interest.

Pre-Trump would have seen Jim Jordan on the cusp of political ruin as one witness after another swore that, as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, he abided and even concealed repeated sexual assault by the team’s doctor. But these days gaslighting truth is a daily exercise for Hannity darlings, and there are simply too many scandals to go around, allowing even egregious wrongdoing to fade into the background as fresh outrages eclipse old news cycles.

Spared ignominy, Jordan has become a designated hitter on the Hill, carrying the President’s water no matter how filthy it becomes. It seems there isn’t a hearing to be had Trumpie sycophants, less willing or able to attack common sense in an effort to revise facts, won’t cede their five minutes to the “gentleman from Ohio.” Calling Jordan a gentleman is like calling Mad Dog 20/20 wine; it dilutes the term toward meaninglessness. He is the essence of what addles us and what will continue to do so regardless of November’s outcome. And while history will be merciless to Jordan, McCarthy, Nunes, et al., that won’t get us a cup of coffee from 7-11 right now.

We grew up taught that only despotism can imprison you, denying responsible government at the whim of an entitled few. Of course, minorities knew this wasn’t true; now many more of us get the picture. Democracy, or whatever it was we experienced in November of 2016, is capable of similar abasements, more than able to take three steps backward faster than you can say “America first!”

Don’t believe me? Go to You Tube and pull-up Jordan’s most recent questioning of Dr. Fauci. Virtually every serious scientist on Earth (a group of the others were gathered by Breitbart last week for a looney toons video even Mark Zuckerburg wouldn’t keep up) now avows the US has “lost control” of its Coronavirus response. More than 150K are dead and the future estimate increases weekly. Yet and still, there was Jordan determined to use his time, along with precious minutes others yielded him, to browbeat Fauci into agreeing Black Lives Matters protesters taking to the streets was the equivalent health threat and civic disgrace as a sardines can Coconuts Bar and Grill crowd, or up to 250,000 motorcyclists heading to Sturgis, South Dakota this weekend for a superspreader celebration of their right to be ultra-covidiots. Only those primed by hours of Fox/AM’s finest expounding on the same inanity could take Mr. Half Nelson seriously; Fauci was not one of them.

We are a nation at the mercy of one-third of us, whose civic sensibilities are shaped by a billionaire’s nefarious news network to serve his one percent sliver. Meanwhile, last quarter’s GDP dove 32.9 percent. That’s twice the worst number of the Great Depression. One can be no more idiotic than to look at that figure and believe it will improve if we simply better ignore the pandemic it was produced by, but here we are. After awarding its donors a $2 trillion windfall at full employment, the GOP now withholds unemployment benefits to millions as the jobless rate soars toward the heavens. In the same breath it ladles tort protections to businesses prepared to force their employees to choose between health and a roof over their heads. Nobody said stupidity couldn’t also be cruel.

The slim hope near four years ago was the faker, who never wanted to win election, and who was hopelessly over his head, would accept whatever expertise was willing to sign on to his shabby enterprise. Perhaps the awesome responsibilities of the office he stumbled into would exceed his megalomania and persuade him to surrender to competence. The fail-safe was the GOP leadership, who would step in if things headed off the rails. Those delusions seem forever removed. Now we pray in 99 days an overwhelming majority can right the ship, or at least put the steering wheel in the hands of a functional adult, supported by those who know what the hell they are doing.

Regardless of the certainty Trump and his MAGA minions will foist chaos by refusing to accept anything they don’t like come November, it’s all we have. Any reckoning Decision/2020 brings about can’t be worse than the mindless meandering we now suffer. Something’s gotta give. Three months never felt so far away. BC

The DR takes no pleasure in being ahead of awful news that threatens the basic well being of US and world citizens. I’d rather be wrong, for example, that Covid fatalities in Florida and Texas are going to become shockingly prevalent and horrify us as medical capacity is overwhelmed. I pray that prediction is alarmist and the numbers lag behind my worst fears. It isn’t and they won’t.

On the subject of November’s election, it’s been startling how far the professional political and media class has lagged behind the basic reckoning Trump will not accept results that give him the boot. After all, in the final month of his 2016 campaign he talked of little else other than the “rigged” electoral process he was certain guaranteed his defeat. Honestly, was there any doubt he would refuse to concede then? If so, what did the candidate do or say (ever!) to support such optimism? And since day one of this Presidency, when Trump got his Administration rolling with fantastical claims that massive, multi-million voter fraud was why he decisively lost the popular vote, can one sentence, one tweet, one policy be identified conveying anything other than concession will never be an option Bunker Boy will consider?!

If the peaceful transference of political power in America rests too much on good faith observance of honorable traditions, the continued normalization of torrential Trump shamelessness clarifies delusion too often subverts clear-eyed recognition of existential dangers we’d just rather ignore until that’s no longer possible. Why make your back hurt any sooner than you have to? Yet and still, the days of spasm are now upon us. Better late than never.

Last month a bipartisan group of prominent government, academic, military and media figures met on-line to actually “game out” different scenarios revolving around the central notion Trump will not accept November’s verdict, come what may. What may isn’t pretty, according to all four simulations the participants saw through to their logical conclusions. Blood on the streets and a bleakly unsettled future were prominent characteristics each sample led to, with little in the way of optimism to be found. Hardly a surprise to those willing to ponder cold hard reality before others had the stomach for it, but depressing and instructive nonetheless.

The group, which goes by The Transition Integrity Project, approached its task primarily from the assumption the Constitution and laws it predicates (constants) are obviously going to be tested severely by a sitting President with little regard for either and his supporters (variables). Somewhere on a spectrum between the rule of law as determinative or just so much scribble on paper is where the nation will find itself after November 3. Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor, former Defense Department official and co-founder of the project summed up our impending predicament nicely: “The law is essentially … it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.” The critical question is who will support Trump’s criminal recklessness?

The historical context provided by the Decision/2000 deadlock is also not particularly hopeful. Fact is, had Al Gore been determined to push on and press his case, encouraging militancy from his base by framing the issue as a grievous crime against the people’s will, who knows where things could have gone. That he appreciated both how important faith in the electoral system is to our governance, and how fragile the 2000 outcome demonstrated it was, spared the nation turmoil nobody could guarantee would be resolved. Of course, Fox/AM made certain Gore vs. W Bush was just the beginning of a cold civil war it would actively incite 24/7, producing this point in time.

All of the scenarios the exercise employed took for granted the Trump campaign will use any and all levers at its disposal to challenge any outcome it doesn’t like. Wether the full GOP backs him tooth and nail, of course, had a big impact on the tumult suffered by the country during the pretend crises. The exercises punctuated how critical cooperation during Presidential transitions are to US governance; we will see this Christmas season. Sadly, the group’s consensus on this score was gloomy as well. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Foundation noted the US has “norms in our transition, rather than laws,.” Trump’s disdain for such traditions, Kleinfeld warned, means this election “is something a democracy expert would worry about.”

In each of the group’s scenarios mail-in ballots were the go-to pretext discreditIng the process. It is worth noting all of the outcomes were close calls, with one a mixed result, Trump winning the electoral vote, but Biden dominating the popular count by more than five percent. No instance supposed Trump would stop at any point and accept his fate. The main takeaway? Trump doesn’t have to win. “He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose,” says Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, and a co-organizer of the exercise. Is there really anything more up Trump’s alley than reframing defeat as victory? It’s what he does.

And what of the most unpredictable and dangerous variable the group considered? How will the extreme corners of the wretched core respond when Trump and Fox/AM’s ceaseless warnings of a lib apocalypse appear to be nigh? Are radicalized, well-armed, organized militias prepared to step over the line and start burning down the house, perhaps with help from elements of governmental agencies like ICE or even various police departments now wedded to the notion only Trump secures their future viability? How does that genie get put back into the bottle?

When Proud Boys, Washington Three Percenters, Patriot Prayer and the like inject themselves into national protests sure to explode when Trump refuses to give way, the chaos will create fluidity beyond anyone’s ability to control. The group’s scenarios had Trump both pouring gas on the fires while trying to control things for his benefit, seizing on any opportunities calls for order afforded him to consolidate the power he already possesses, which one participant observed “is 9/10ths of the law.” In other words, it’s mine and you’re going to have to take it from me. The group came up with no good answers as to how that will happen without dire harm to the country.

It’s useful these days to remember that picnickers lined the first battlefields of the Civil War eager to witness the spectacle of armed conflict while noshing a chicken leg or some pie. Nobody imagined the carnage that lay ahead. We know our President will give not a second thought to the disaster his narcissistic recklessness could portend, but those who matter most now at least finally seem cognizant of the specter. But if the recent online get together of some of our best and brightest is any indicator, we’ll need a bigger umbrella for the storm heading our way. Batten down the hatches. BC

The no-knock warrant is perhaps the most odious of all law enforcement tools. Initially conceived and justified as an extraordinary measure designed to protect police from well-armed suspects holed up within vibrant drug operations, as well as a means to seize evidence and deny major dealers opportunities to flush product into city sewage systems, it has proliferated exponentially through the decades, as local SWAT teams looked for more to do than confronting too infrequent hostage situations. The numbers tell the story.

A plethora of reliable studies confirm no-knock warrants have increased near twentyfold since the Reagan “war on drugs” days, from about 3000 in 1981 to more than 50K per year currently. Indeed, in Baltimore as one example, two-thirds of the city’s SWAT deployments are to support no-knock drug raids. Predictably, a disproportionate rate of the chaotic collateral damage such tactics produce is suffered by minorities. From 2010 through 2016, no-knocks led to the deaths of at least 31 civilians, half of that total were minorities. Black suspects were the targets of 42 percent of SWAT-supported raids, Hispanics another 12 percent.

Make no mistake, as one department after another has militarized operations, and hired battle-hardened armed-service veterans, ramming down doors has become more rule than exception. The fact SWAT members are almost always unfamiliar with the suspects involved, and quite literally are on the scene to overpower anyone they encounter assures a wide berth for tragedy. To view such an operation is to pray it never comes rolling up your driveway. Shoot first, worry later is a non-hyperbolic description of the sensibilities on display; there is no room for error. Up to here and now that calculus appears to be one law enforcement throughout the country has been able to live with, even as too many within their sights were not so lucky.

The operation that killed Breonna Taylor was apparently not supported by SWAT members. Nevertheless, the plain clothes detectives, in possession of a no-knock warrant that may or may not have been obtained legally, were as clueless as they were dangerous. She was killed for nothing, an innocent victim of shoddy and reckless police work. Asleep when they came a-ramming with no justification whatsoever, she was shot eight times and lay unattended until she passed. The posse and its superiors circled the wagons almost immediately, blaming their firing squad on the response of Taylor’s boyfriend, who pulled his fully licensed hand gun to confront unidentified mayhem coming through the front door. He stood his ground! A coroner intent on playing ball made clear later that Taylor “died almost immediately,” as if that justified not doing a thing to help an innocent woman you just sprayed with bullets.

One of Fox/AM’s most loathsome activities is the dependable tendency to sully the reputation of any black victim of police brutality. Sure as the sunrise Rush will tell his dittoheads Eric Garner deserved what he got because he was “breaking the law” – selling odd cigarettes. Bill O’Reilly did his best to make George Zimmerman the martyr instead of Trayvon Martin because “somebody punched him in the face.” To Sean Hannity it was more outrageous Philando Castile’s girlfriend documented his murder by cop than the crime itself:

“….he’s shot by the policeman, and she’s live facetiming this thing to the world, commenting on it — I’m just like, how about helping the person that’s been shot? We’ll figure out the particulars later, but it was more important I guess to get the video.”

Her “comments” were screams of anguish. That Trump’s appendage wouldn’t hesitate to say such an outrageously cruel thing, even as the video itself portrays shock and grief near too much to watch, is no surprise and only further illuminates his Goebbelsesque skill set. Yet and still, it seems even Hannity doesn’t want to mess with Breonna Taylor.

While protesters across the nation entreat us to “say her name,” Hannity is keeping quiet on the subject, a near unheard of occurrence. In fact, across the nihilist media universe there is similar silence on the topic. Which is odd considering no camera footage is available, opening up an endless landscape for false insinuations which Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin usually love to bury their snouts in. Moreover, Taylor’s boyfriend did actually shoot at officers, winging one, convinced they were home invaders. Plenty of ammunition for the usual smears and blame-the-victim revisionism. Regardless, the fact prosecutors dropped charges against him reeks of a desire for sweeping things under the rug.

That nobody on the MAGA television or radio dial sees any upside to defending Louisville’s finest says much about how indefensibly egregious Taylor’s killing was, and only adds to the anger that, after more than four months, little in the way of justice has been meted out. Slow rolling things won’t work on this one; nobody is forgetting about her anytime soon.

The investigation into Breonna Taylor’s killing is headed by Kentucky’s first Black Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, a Republican enthusiastically endorsed by Trump and Mitch McConnell, a former employer. Where that leaves justice for Breonna Taylor is not a promising place. Thus far only one detective has been fired, and any chance of criminal charges gets more remote with the time Cameron appears glad to let pass without results.

As unconvincing as Taylor’s killers are, their word is not disputed by camera footage they don’t have any good explanation for not providing. Whether Cameron feels his political viability rests with pleasing “all lives matter” sensibilities his primary benefactors demand isn’t anything he wants to boast about. Of course, sadly that doesn’t mean it won’t be more determinative to Breonna getting or not getting her day in court.

Before Breonna Taylor there was Bounkham Phonesavanh, all 19 months of him. On May 28, 2014 at 2:25 am, a Cornelia, Georgia SWAT team executed a no-knock warrant on a family residence. Not a trace of drugs or contraband found, but a flash-bang stun grenade was lobbed into a play pen little “Baby Bou Bou” slumbered soundly in. It exploded and severely burned the baby’s face and chest, while also causing “a complex laceration of the nose, upper lip and face; 20% of the right upper lip missing; the external nose being separated from the underlying bone; and a large avulsion burn injury to the chest with a resulting left pulmonary contusion and sepsis.” The injuries were so extensive and painful, the infant was placed in a medically induced coma and required numerous surgeries costing in excess of a million dollars to perform.

Although the family eventually settled for $3.6 million in civil damages, nobody involved in the raid was convicted of wrongdoing. Local grand juries refused to indict, and when federal prosecutors brought charges against one of the deputies, a jury refused to convict on all counts, including that she lied to obtain the, you guessed it, no-knock warrant!

If the murder of George Floyd lit the match, the extinguishing of Breonna Taylor’s promising life now primes the pump for national protests against a status quo that’s not working, unmistakably illuminating the crossroads we have arrived at. Her case checks all the boxes of change we can no longer ignore. In Kentucky, Cameron and McConnell may believe the flood waters will ebb without action… they won’t.

Justice for Breonna means criminal proceedings for her killers, whether their union, or Trump, likes it or not. Recognizing the value of good policing is not a zero-sum equation with punishing its worst actors; we are not less safe because bad cops are prosecuted for outrageous conduct. Equally important is recognizing that vehicles for abuse like no-knock warrants and chokeholds are bad ideas that need to end yesterday. Louisville’s city council passed “Breonna’s Law,” which does away with no-knock warrants. Last time I checked they were still a going concern. Should enough councils across America stand up to law-and-order opportunists and follow Louisville’s lead, that will be a tangible sign of progress. Personally, I can live with SWAT teams getting bored with less to do. More importantly, so will young EMTs and slumbering infants. BC

One would be very hard pressed to find a more ambitious politician who likes people less than Ken Cuccinelli. Arrogant, distant, self-righteous, devoid of empathy, Cuccinelli is the total package when it comes to a candidate you love to hate. Yet and still, the Virginia GOP is a Petri dish for nastiness, with its most recent senate nominee, Corey Stewart, proving outright bigotry was not too low a bar for its state convention attendees to limbo on down to. Cuccinelli was certainly a more polished presence on the stump when he was handled fairly easily by Terry McAuliffe as the Republican gubernatorial standard bearer in 2013, but the arrows in his quiver were just as toxic.

In a shameful testament to off-year voter apathy Virginia voters gave Cuccinelli the nod in the 2010 State Attorney General race. His subsequent shamelessness was as bad as Tea Party governance got. A culture war and pro-life zealot, Cuccinelli enthusiastically recognized anti-sodomy laws still on the books, and equated same-sex marriage with bestiality. Obsessed with sabotaging Obamacare, he became a public face of Red state obstinance toward the law, a regular preening presence on Fox prime time.

Moreover, Virginia taxpayers could sleep tight knowing the state’s top law enforcement official was actually investigating climate change scientists for fraud! Yet and still, while Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin hailed Cuccinelli as “fearless,” and the type of “courageous conservative we need…” to stand against the Obama menace, his futile run for the governorship clarified that ever more blue Virginia had little use for reactionaries like Cuccinelli in any national capacity. So it was off to the wilderness. Until Trump/MAGA.

If there was ever any remaining doubt that Trump is not only willing but determined to foment civil unrest in service to his rabid impulses toward political viability, one need only listen to his Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security – none other than Herr Cuccinelli – not just defend, but actually boast of White House plans to unload federal jackboots on the ground in volatile cities like Portland, Oregon. Were the action anything other than a naked proclamation to the extremism White fear creates, there would be at the very least an effort to communicate with city officials. Instead, Trump vilifies them by Tweet as accomplices to anarchy and lawlessness, daring them to get in his way.

Cuccinelli is the ideal weasel worder to convey such a message, meant solely to excite the wretched core with bold declarations their nastiest inclinations will be reflected toward the scum relentless Fox/AM consumption dehumanized long ago. The rationale is two pronged. First, there is no longer any civil rights component to the protests, and peaceful demonstrators no longer count, it’s Antifa… case closed. Second, we’ll decide as to the need for protecting federal property and whether mayors are up to the task. In Portland, Cuccinelli hissed, the situation amounted to a siege “not made any easier when you have somebody like Mayor (Ted) Wheeler, who holds back, to a certain extent, his own law enforcement. For instance, they don’t allow them to utilize certain nonlethal tactics and so forth. So it makes everybody’s job harder.“

Wheeler’s response? Trump’s actions “will only escalate the situation” and “are a direct threat to democracy.” Portland has seen protests near daily since George Floyd’s murder, and Wheeler, like many other big city mayors, has had to strike a balance between confronting violence and vandalism while respecting why the discontent endures.

Trump only wants to pick a fight and look tough, just the way MAGA likes to see him. That’s now so crudely transparent as to make pointing it out inane. “They are not wanted here,” Wheeler made clear last week of the federal presence, many unidentified. “What’s happening here is, we have dozens, if not hundreds of federal troops descending upon our city. And what they’re doing is, they are sharply escalating the situation.”

Wheeler astutely pointed out that his residents don’t necessarily see any difference between local and federal enforcement. Last Friday federal muscle gassed 300 protesters; they were not in the mood for making distinctions. The good will local police had amassed for patience and restraint quickly dissipated. Now, a weeks-long situation Wheeler believed was finally winding down is rapidly heating up again; of course, that suits Trump just fine. In fact, Portland seems to be reaping so much love from the Hannity and Carlson faithful, Trump wants a national rollout. Chicago. New York, Philly, you name it, wherever disgraceful libs are falling down on the job, the MAGA gestapo will be taking names.

Is there any more stereotypical portrait of ugly authoritarian rule than several thugs jumping out of an unmarked vehicle to snatch up an unfortunate dissident for “questioning”? Like our President it is a caricature that doesn’t deserve explanation because it offers nothing but the obvious, which can only be as bad as it looks, probably worse. That Ken Cuccinelli is now the unapologetic Administration front man for an outrage only our worst would give him the opportunity to crow about, makes perfect sense to anybody familiar with his resume. It also makes it just that much more loathsome. With Cuccinelli you don’t expect much more than additional reasons to detest what he stands for. A new chapter of ruin. Looking past this is not an option we can entertain. BC

By: Tom Fredrickson

When former National Football League great Donté Stallworth quoted my dad in a New York Times op-ed piece, it was cool in a buzzy, Facebook sort of way. It also got me to turn off Netflix and start to think.

I was also glad to see my father cited because this is a pivotal moment and he spent his career studying the roots and consequences of racism. He is deeply relevant, Stallworth recognized.

“The N.F.L. has had plenty of opportunities to be on the right side of history,” Stallworth wrote. “It could have supported Colin Kaepernick and other players who took a knee four years ago to protest police brutality and racial inequities in the U.S. justice system. But the league failed to protect them when the players needed them most.”

The Black Lives Matter movement is boldly calling out racism in the justice system. The N.F.L., though distorted by celebrity and wealth, is part of society and reflects it. American history, in turn, illuminates football and other elements of modern society.

“It was only last month that the league issued an apology of sorts, admitting that ‘it was wrong for not listening to N.F.L. players earlier’” Stallworth wrote.

“How could the N.F.L. be so blind? The author and historian George M. Fredrickson wrote that ‘societal racism did not require an ideology to sustain it as long as it was taken for granted.’”

An overwhelming majority of owners in the N.F.L.’s history have been white men. “Today, more than two-thirds of the players are Black. But across 32 teams, there are only three Black head coaches and two Black general managers. Over the past three years, there have been 20 head coaching vacancies, but Black coaches filled only two of them.”

Racism was always present, but no one needed to express it because there was no concerted challenge to the status quo. The league made the implicit assumption that blacks lack the leadership qualities, intelligence, and discipline to run teams.  Following the murder of George Floyd, the outrage (personal and societal protests) became too great to ignore.

The Arrogance of Race (Fredrickson, 2008) continues where Stallworth left off:

Until the revolutionary era no one had seriously challenged slavery and black subordination in the southern colonies. During and after the Revolution there was a challenge of sorts, but the most recent historical studies suggest that it was half-hearted and ineffectual. … In the absence of a serious political and intellectual challenge to the implicit assumptions of southern biracialism, slaveholders found that they could protect their interests merely by encouraging the belief that emancipation was impractical or, if pushed, by standing firm on their ‘rights’ as owners of slave property.

In citing my father’s quote, Stallworth appears to suggest an analogy between team owners and slaveholders. I am sure many people would find it laughable to think of men earning millions of dollars a year slaves, but as in slavery, players (usually) lack agency, are subject to physical battering, and get traded like chattel.

More directly, football fits right in the corporate mold. In the entirety of the Fortune 500 companies, there are only four black CEOs. Just as there is a paucity of black offensive and defensive coordinators being groomed for coaching jobs, there is a small pool of black executives to tap as corporate leaders. Blacks are sharply underrepresented in top business schools, largely because the tuition is unaffordable. In a sense the N.F.L. is worse than other businesses: It has many talented black players who could easily be groomed for leadership roles. 

Young black players are “stacked” (players are pooled to compete for certain spots) for positions that require speed and quick reflexes as opposed to the down-the-middle “thinking” positions such as quarterback, center, and linebacker. Black children gravitate to positions held by role models, reinforcing the pattern. Even players who have developed the requisite skills have been pulled in different directions because of the league’s prejudice.

“Walt Frazier, an esteemed high school quarterback who received scholarship offers to play college football, chose to play basketball in college instead, believing he had no future as a black quarterback when his time came to play professionally (the move paid off, as Frazier would have a Hall of Fame basketball career).” (msgnetworks.com, Wikipedia)

American history and the history of football show that black progress mainly occurs only when white people are forced to give way. George Preston Marshall integrated the WashingtonRedskins in 1962 only after Mo Udall, U.S. secretary of the interior under John F. Kennedy, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy conveyed that the team would have to because D.C. Stadium was federally owned.

The racial path of professional sports has a parallel in the Civil War. It took the threat of losing the war of secession for the nation’s military and political leaders to accept blacks as soldiers. The conventional thinking was that blacks would be cowardly and undisciplined – that they would drop their weapons at the first challenge. When the exact opposite proved to be the case, and black regiments fought with valor and distinction, public, military, and political opinion started to change.

In my father’s book, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent (2008), which was released shortly after he died, he examined in parthow the exemplary performance of black soldiers influenced the evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s thinking about their capacity to be free citizens. This idea was taken up by historian Eric Foner, who supplied a blurb for my father’s book, yet failed toacknowledge or credit the work in Foner’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Fiery Trial, 2010.

Fredrickson: “Clearly … Lincoln’s personal view of African American capabilities had become more favorable as a result of (black) military achievements.”

Foner: “Partly because of the value he placed on the contribution of black soldiers, Lincoln’s racial view seemed to change.”

Because of segregation, playing football and sports on white professional teams remained out of reach for black athletes. Courageous pioneers such as baseball legend Jackie Robinson helped to change that. The small, difficult openings finally cracked ajar and black athletes eventually took a huge role. But in football, they have bumped up against the glass ceiling described by Stallworth.

One of the greatest obstacles faced by both slaves who wanted to become soldiers and black players who wanted to play in the N.F.L. was the appeasement of Southern racism. Some Union generals took the initiative to free slaves in areas they controlled. This was upsetting to Lincoln, partly because he felt he needed to appease border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, which were insecurely in the Union hold. Both my father and Foner used the same quote in a letter that Lincoln wrote to his friend Orville Browning: “I think to lose Kentucky is to lose the whole game.”

The integration of the N.F.L. also faced the obstacle of Southern appeasement. Marshall claimed that integrating the Washington team would cause it to lose fans in the South and the team was at the time the southernmost team in the league. 

Marshall said: “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”

Racism, as my father saw it, is the belief that certain races are innately inferior. According to racist ideologies, no amount of education or culture can bring an inferior race to true equality because of inborn biological differences. 

Racism developed as a response to Northern abolitionism, which grew in force and volume in the 1830s.

Prior to the 1830s, black subordination was the practice of white Americans, and the inferiority of the Negro was undoubtedly a common assumption, but open assumptions of permanent inferiority were exceedingly rare. It took the assault of the abolitionists to unmask the cant about a theoretical human equality that coexisted with Negro slavery and racial discrimination and to force the practitioners of racial oppression to develop a theory that accorded with their behavior. (Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 1971)

Blacks were lazy and bestial by nature, the thinking went. The structure and discipline of slavery was not only a positive good but necessary. The development of “scientific” views of racial inferiority made long-standing, vulgar prejudice against blacks more respectable and actionable.

A competing ethos was “romantic racialism,” which posited blacks as sweet and simple but in need of paternalistic help or control. Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin exemplifies this. At least this form of prejudice sought to offer protection from abuse and, in Stowe’s view, outright emancipation.

The tension between democratic ideals and the immense profitability and looming expansion of slavery led to the Civil War. 

“Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence,” abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison said in a speech in Boston in 1854.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 in large part to weaken the confederacy; the proclamation declared slaves free in secessionist states, though their freedom had to wait for their escape or the victory of Union forces.

The end of the Civil War, the passage of the 15^th Amendment, and the start of Reconstruction led to the slaughter of thousands of blacks to prevent them from voting and holding office by the Ku Klux Klan and the White League. “Klan violence was unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history,” wrote Ron Chernow. (Grant, 2018)

In the decades that followed, blacks were “excluded from industry for a long period except in parts of the deep South and confined largely to agriculture.” (C. Vann Woodward, The New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1971)

Blacks were not competing directly with whites for jobs, thus not an economic threat, but they were held in contempt by many people in the South as well as the North thanks to tradition, “science,” politics, and legal segregation.

In the view of W.E.B. Du Bois, the great black intellectual and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, poor whites accepted their place in the post-Civil War capitalist system partly because they received non-financial recompense.

Reviewing a biographical volume about Du Bois, my father wrote: “… in explaining poor white support for the Jim Crow system, he called attention to the way in which white workers, although poorly paid, were ‘compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they are white.’” (The New York Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2001)

The famous idea, which was outlined in Dubois’ 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 rings true to me. In his Marx-influenced construct, white laborers withstood their economic exploitation with help from the mental lifeline of white supremacy.

(White laborers) were given public deference and were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. 

Du Bois had become a socialist but split from the Marxist left because of its under-emphasis of racism. Mainline communists and socialists believed that racism was a byproduct of the class struggle and that racial animus would disappear when capitalism was destroyed.

As blacks, faced with the resurgence of the Klan and lynching, moved North in search of safety and job opportunities, they became an economic threat to whites, who discriminated against them in all facets of life, from trade unions and employment to housing and schools. Economic discrimination reinforced a longstanding cultural prejudice.

My father cited Du Bois’ 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, in which Du Bois wrote the split between white and black workers: “depended not simply on economic exploitation but on a racial folklore grounded on centuries of instinct, habit and thought and implemented by the conditioned reflex of visible color.”

The question of whether racism is fueled more by cultural or economic factors is very much alive. Is racism thriving because, as it did under slavery, it serves the economic interests of the ruling class? Or are cultural prejudices more important? Or is it some combination of both?

Clearly, racism played a pronounced role in Donald Trump’svictory in 2016 and in his ongoing though falling political appeal.  Did he build his campaign on the bedrock of historical, cultural racism? Or do minorities and immigrants make convenient scapegoats in a time of inequality and economic hardship, as they did for Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany? 

When it comes to the glass ceiling in professional sports, racism in the justice system, and social inequality, is the answer moral suasion, debate, and legislative action? Or does real change require taking to the streets? Can we get to where we want to go through incremental change or does it require a ”revolution,” however you define the word?

Maybe – like Lincoln – we are big enough to change.