#Municipal election 2020

[marjorierose]

The Les Mis fandom doesn't much like "Turning," the song sung by the women of Paris on the morning after the barricade. It's easy to understand why. It undersells the seriousness of the revolutionaries--"they were schoolboys, never held a gun"--not likely even if you don't take the previous revolution into account. "Nothing changes, nothing ever will" is not particularly inspiring after all that talk about revolution. It's a pretty hopeless song about history being cyclical, in a musical that otherwise is about glorifying people's efforts to create change.

But I don't think we have to take "Turning" as a truer statement of values than we do "Stars." It's sung by characters in the story, although we don't know their names. And as something diegetic, as a portrayal of people reacting to that failure, it really worked for me on this latest viewing. Think of the last deeply disappointing election result, and then think of the last time there was a major disaster in your city if you've experienced that, and then imagine those things combined such that everyone fighting for positive change had been killed, and the attitude of the women makes a lot more sense. "Nothing changes, nothing ever will": in some circumstances you disavow hope because you just can't stand trying to keep it, because giving up hurts less, because if you see the future as walking in perpetual circles at least you understand where you're going.

Lately I have been remembering the bewildering early days of the uprising in 2020 here in the Twin Cities, the boarded-up windows with messages spray-painted on them ("minority-owned business," "people live upstairs") and the police casually macing groups of people at busy intersections or train stations. Even more than that, I've been remembering the morning after the 2021 municipal election, when police reform failed, the mayor was reelected and granted more power than ever, and the city council that had promised to remake public safety in the city got replaced by the most conservative council in many years. Activists were getting together just to grieve and to vent, and those Zoom vent sessions were not really enough for the immense feelings of loss. It's different from, or additive to, the grief and the survivor's guilt of "Empty Chairs." It's having your hope deflate because the thing you were hoping for just isn't there to look to anymore, and then it's reforming yourself around its absence. The crucial moment goes by unused and you don't know when another one will arise. It's easy to get cynical. The future looks like a treadmill: minutes into hours and the hours into years. Rien n'est changé; rien ne changera. I can't think of a single other song about that feeling.

[randomnoteforfuturereference]

Okay, so a reason some folks abstain from voting is because they think the whole system needs to get thrown in the trash. Some of even accelerationists who deliberately want a Trump presidency because they believe he'd push things to the tipping point.

Setting all the initial issues of that ideology aside, let's say you do have your glorious revolution. The ruling class have been guillotined or chased out.

What now?

Initial overthrows tend to consist of a broad base, followed by a powerful faction being the one to ultimately come on top (Russia, China, Iran, etc). The very few times you have a relatively peaceful revolution followed by relatively peaceful transition (Velvet Revolution, dissolution of Soviet Union, etc), you have a structures intact and a populace largely on the same page.

But what if you have competing ideologies?

It's pertinent to look at the makeup of this country. In 2020, African Americans number at around 47 million or 14% of the population, and combined Native Americans/Alaskans/Hawaiians number at 10.5 million or 3%. A Gallup poll in 2023 determined that roughly 7.2% of adults identified as LGBT, with 7% not responding. In contrast, the number of people who voted for Trump was 74.2 million or 22%.

When you look at other revolutionary governments, the ones that acknowledged previously marginalized communities did so because they were a good chunk or majority of their population (eg Cuba); even in those cases you may still have marginalized groups. Whereas for most post-revolutionary governments, you either get more of the same marginalization/discrimination (eg Vietnam) or, worse, systematic targeting/genocide (eg Cambodia).

So with all that in mind, are you able and willing to fight to secure your "egalitarian paradise" and keep it from becoming Gilead? I'm not asking metaphorically.

Among the various partisan factions in the US there are armed left-wing militia groups, but guess which side is way more armed. So are you dispensing any talk of gun control and instead buying all the military-grade hardware? Are you learning how to use that rifle and basic combat tactics? Are you willing to use that gun on another human being?

If you are not prepared for that or the effect of infrastructural collapse, you could actually participate in this imperfect system by voting for a president that you may not like but can function better as damage control. All while you not only focus on your senators and representatives, but also your state government, to continue pushing the needle and making it easier for progressive causes to get passed and stay in place. All while you make sure to vote in municipal elections to have school boards that reflect your views. All while you actually reach out to communities you may not agree with to at least try and dissuade them from reactionary populism.

But if you want to burn it all down, you best also be prepared for the war that rises out of the ashes.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Study shows higher Covid mortality in pro-Bolsonaro cities

Cities with a high percentage of voters for former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro recorded higher mortality during the peaks of the Covid pandemic, according to a study published on Monday in a Brazilian journal on public health.

The study focused on the peaks of excess mortality during the pandemic, in August 2020 and April 2021. “Excess mortality” measures the increase in the number of deaths during a certain period compared to a previous average and includes deaths from all causes. For a period in late March 2021, Brazil reported over 3,000 Covid deaths per day.

“Considering the 2018 election results, we observed a strong association between excess deaths at the two peaks of the pandemic,” the authors wrote.

“In general terms, each 1 percent increase in municipal votes for Bolsonaro from 2018 to 2022 corresponded to a rise of 0.48 percent to 0.64 percent in municipal excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic peaks,” they added.

Continue reading.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Molly Redden at HuffPost:

Wesley Bell, a St. Louis prosecutor who is mounting a formidable Democratic primary challenge against Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), is campaigning as someone who will produce more tangible results for the district while sharing many of her same left-leaning values. But one line on Bell’s political resume is at odds with his promise to champion a progressive agenda. In 2006, Bell managed the campaign of a conservative Republican running for the same seat Bell is seeking today. The candidate, Mark J. Byrne, ran as a fierce abortion opponent and gun rights crusader. “I intend to protect the rights of the unborn,” his campaign website read. “I believe that there is no greater job for elected representatives.”

He ultimately lost to incumbent Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., who remained in office until Bush successfully challenged him in 2020. “Nearly 20 years ago, Wesley helped a longtime friend by volunteering with his campaign, in spite of their differences in political affiliations and positions on many issues,” said Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for Bell’s campaign. “Wesley has been a progressive prosecutor, working to overturn wrongful convictions and refusing to prosecute women for abortions, and he will be a progressive member of Congress who works with President Biden.” Byrne, who is now a municipal judge in a neighboring county, said Bell ran his campaign as a friendly favor. The two met as young lawyers in St. Louis County, he recalled, and became friends over years of poker nights. “He didn’t run a Republican’s campaign, he ran a friend’s campaign,” Byrne said in an interview this week with HuffPost. “He and I didn’t see eye to eye on political issues, but he did the best that he could to try to help me get elected.”

[...] As of May, Bell has raised more than $65,000 in contributions from donors who normally give to Republicans. They include a former GOP speaker of the Missouri House, the billionaire hedge fund founder Daniel Loeb, and the former finance chair for Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) presidential super PAC. At the end of the last fundraising quarter, Bell reported having about twice as much cash on hand as Bush. Bell has also benefited from more than $300,000 in ads paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC. While AIPAC backs candidates of both parties who support U.S. military assistance for Israel, progressive critics have noted the PAC’s top contributors are GOP megadonors. Bush is one of AIPAC’s top targets in the 2024 elections. “The fact that my ‘Democratic’ opponent’s entrance into politics was managing a Republican congressional campaign for a far-right, anti-abortion extremist is strikingly consistent, and it should tell voters everything they need to know,” Bush said in a statement. “He can’t be trusted to protect our reproductive freedoms and abortion rights, secure our democracy, and stand up to the MAGA Republican extremists in Congress.”

St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell is claiming to run as a progressive to unseat incumbent Rep. Cori Bush (D) in MO-01, but in 2006, he helped manage a GOP campaign for House candidate Mark J. Byrne.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face

No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back. Take network policy, where rural turkeys in Red State America keep on voting for Christmas, then profess outrage when Old Farmer Comcast gets to sharpening his ax.

For two years, the FCC has been hamstrung because MAGA Senators refuse to confirm Gigi Sohn, leaving the Commission with only four commissioners. What do the GOP have against Sohn? Well, to hear them tell of it, she’s some kind of radical Marxist who will undermine free enterprise and replace the internet with tin cans and string.

The reality is that Sohn favors policies that will specifically and substantially benefit the rural Americans whose senators who refuse to confirm her. For example, Sohn favors municipal fiber provision, which low-information conservatives have been trained to reflexively reject: “Get your government out of my internet!”

Boy, are they ever wrong. The private sector sucks at providing network connectivity, especially in rural places. The cable companies and phone companies have divided up the USA like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” setting out exclusive, non-competing territories that get worse service than anyone else in the wealthy world. Americans pay some of the highest prices for the lowest speeds of any OECD nation.

For ISPs, bad service is a feature, not a bug. When Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its books, which is how we discovered that the company booked the one rural customers with no alternative as “assets” because they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

We also learned that Frontier had calculated that it could make an extra billion in profit by bringing fiber to three million households, but chose not to, because it would take a decade to realize those profits, and during that time, executives’ stock options would decline in value as analysts punished them for making long-term bets.

We can bring fiber to rural America, and when we do, amazing things happen. McKee, Kentucky — one of the poorest places in America — used federal grants and its New Deal era rural electrification co-op to bring fiber to every household, using a mule called Ole Bub to run it over difficult mountain passes, and the result was an economic miracle:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The only Americans who consistently say they like their ISPs are people who live in the 700+ small towns that have run their own fiber, mostly in Red States:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

Small wonder that rural Americans prefer muni fiber to commercial ISPs’ offerings. When Trump’s FCC Chair Ajit Pai gave them billions in subsidies to improve rural connectivity, the monopolists spent it pulling new copper lines, not fiber — which would have been thousands of times faster.

Given all that, it takes a lot to convince rural Americans that municipal fiber is bad for them. Specifically, it takes disinformation. More specifically, it takes the lie that municipal fiber would result in “government interference” in users’ communications.

Boy, is this ever wrong. Private companies are free to set their own content moderation policies, and can discriminate against any viewpoint they wish. They can and do remove “lawful but awful” speech like racist diatribes, vaccine denial, election denial, and other conservative fever-dreams.

Contrast that with local governments, who are bound by the First Amendment, and prohibited from practicing “viewpoint discrimination.” This means that if a local government allows one viewpoint on a subject, they are generally required to allow all other viewpoints on that subject. This is how we get the Satanic Temple’s excellent stunts, like demanding that towns that display Christian icons on public lands also display statues of Baphomet right next to them.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/17/639726472/satanic-temple-protests-ten-commandments-monument-with-goat-headed-statue

When your town government runs 100gb fiber into your basement or garage, it will have a much harder time blocking you from, say, running a Mastodon instance devoted to election denial or GhostGun production than your commercial ISP will. Convincing American conservatives to hate municipal broadband was a gigantic self-own:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

Even worse is what rural America has been sold instead of municipal fiber: Starlink, the My Pillow of broadband. Starlink sells itself as blazing-fast satellite broadband, but conspicuously fails to talk up the fact that every Starlink user in your neighborhood competes for the same wireless spectrum as you, so the service can only get slower and more expensive over time:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

There’s been a concerted smear campaign against Sohn, and one of the major talking points is that Sohn is anti-cop because she sits on EFF’s board, and EFF wants to place limits on police access to commercial surveillance data. Which is wild, because one of EFF’s demands is limits on geofenced reverse warrants, where cops ask Google to reveal the identity of everyone who was in a specific place at a specific time. If you’ve heard about geofenced warrants lately, it was probably in the context of conservative outrage at their use in rounding up the January 6 insurrectionists.

Now, the primary use of these is to target Black Lives Matter demonstrators and other protestors, and EFF advocates for the normal Fourth Amendment rights that everyone is guaranteed in the Constitution. Conservative pundits didn’t give a damn about geofenced warrants until the J6 affair, and now they do — but they still insist that Sohn should be disqualified from sitting on the FCC because she shares their outrage at the abuse of private surveillance data by law enforcement.

All this raises the question: why have all these Red State senators made it their mission in life to block the appointment of an FCC commissioner who would deliver so many benefits to their constituents? It’s hard to say, of course, but Luke Goldstein has a suggestion in today’s American Prospect:

https://prospect.org/politics/democratic-majority-at-the-fcc-still-blocked/

“A torrent of lobbying money from the telecom industry has flooded Washington to block Sohn’s arrival at the FCC. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile doled out over $23 million lobbying Washington this year.”

And why would these companies spend millions to block Sohn from sitting on the Commission? Because she would help the Democratic majority pass policies that make broadband cheaper and faster for America, especially rural America where costs are highest and service is worst, and this will limit the telco monopolists’ profits.

There’s a new Democratic senate majority that’ll sit in 2023, so perhaps Sohn will finally be seated and start delivering relief to all Americans, even the turkeys who can’t stop voting for Christmas.

[Image ID: A hunter in camo firing a rifle whose barrel has been bent back to point at his own face. A muzzle flash emerges from the barrel. The hunter wears a MAGA hat. Behind the hunter is a telephone pole with many radiating lines. In the bottom left corner of the image is a 1950s-style illustration of a broadly smiling salesman, pointing at a box that is emblazoned with the logo for ALEC.]

[crossdreamers]

Brazil has elected no fewer than three transgender members of parliament

Brazil’  president Jair Bolsonaro is a homophobic and transphobic extremist. He might lose this year’s presidential election. In the meantime Brazilians have elected no fewer than three openly trans MPs!

Pink News reports that Erika Hilton, a Black, trans woman, who became the first-ever trans councillor elected the the Municipal Chamber of São Paulo in 2020, have become a member of parliament.

Duda Salabert, a former teacher, founder of the anti-transphobia organisation Transvest and Democratic Labour Party member, joins her. As does Robeyoncé Lima, a lawyer, activist and Black trans woman.

More here!

Erika Hilton’s victory tweet, saying “You can already say: ELECTED BLACK TRANSGENDER!”

[racefortheironthrone]

In a hypothetical situation where Moris Hilquit wins the 1917 mayoral election by a plurality, how do you think the ideal socialist for successful dentists would have performed as mayor of new york?

That is a tricky scenario to pull off, as alternate histories go.

In "original timeline" New York City, Morris Hillquit (SPA-NYC) got 145,000 votes for mayor, which is impressive....for third place, with the Democratic nominee (John Francis Hylan, a man who had impressively worked his way up from railroad laborer to engineer and then to lawyer, and who managed to win the support of both Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst) winning 314,000 votes, and incumbent reform mayor John P. Mitchel (having largely alienated his Fusion alliance) winning 155,000.

So the first thing that would have had to happen was Mitchel not running and splitting the anti-Tammany vote. However, Hillquit and Mitchel together would still be 14,000 votes short - and you know what happens when there's a close mayoral election and Tammany Hall is on the ballot.

So the second, and arguably more important thing that would have to happen is for Hearst to run against Tammany, like he did in 1905 (as a "Municipal Ownership League" candidate, no less!) and 1909, splitting the Democratic vote. (Words cannot describe what a weird guy William Randolph Hearst was politically. Depending on what part of his life you're talking about, he was an imperialist or an isolationist, a supporter of the New Deal or an outright Nazi.)

As for how Morris Hillquit would have done as mayor of New York City, I think he would have faced a pretty unrelentingly uphill battle on a lot of fronts. Hillquit was running as an anti-war candidate at a time when the country as a whole was starting to shift in a pro-war and anti-socialist direction - which would ultimately see five Socialists ejected from the New York state legislature in 1920. (Note that it would take until 2020 for New York socialist electoral politics to reach its former high-water mark.) Mayor Hillquit might well have joined them as a casualty of the First Red Scare.

While I think that Hillquit's support for municipal ownership of the subway and other utilities, women's suffrage, and the Socialist Party's proposal for government food-purchasing to help deal with the crippling cost-of-living crisis would have been quite popular, I think he would have had a very hard time getting socialization of the subway through the Board of Alderman.

Whatever its temporary woes in mayoral or gubernatorial races, Tammany was always strongest in the legislative branch (in no small part because that's where the money was) - and Tammany's empire of corruption rested upon a foundation of bribes and kickbacks paid by private companies looking to get "franchises" (i.e, private monopolies) for water, gas, electricity, commuter rail, and subways. They would have fought tooth and nail to stop Hillquit from taking these utilities under public ownership and stopping their gravy train, so Hillquit would have had to win a majority on the Board of Aldermen as well.

So I think that Tammany would have tried to do to Hillquit the same thing they did with reform mayors like Seth Low and John P. Mitchel: wait him out. (Incidentally, this is what made Fiorello LaGuardia a terrifying enemy to Tammany Hall: he was the first reform mayor to ever get re-elected, which gave him the time he needed to push through a new charter that abolished the Board of Aldermen, essentially permanently crippling Tammany.)

[darkmaga-retard]

Two months out from Election Day and less than two weeks before early voting begins, states and municipalities are fighting over whether to implement ballot drop boxes, amid election integrity and practical concerns.

Ballot drop boxes, a method of voting that became more widespread during the 2020 presidential election as COVID-19 lockdowns continued, are facing a pushback in several municipalities and states ahead of the November election.

Ohio

On Saturday, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) issued a directive to local election officials, stating that only voters can return their own ballots in drop boxes. The directive followed a July federal court decision that partially struck down a state law restricting who can return absentee ballots for disabled voters. The League of Women Voters of Ohio brought the lawsuit against LaRose in December.

“[T]his directive provides that an assistant delivering a ballot for another must sign an attestation that they comply with applicable state and federal law,” the directive states, later adding, “voter-assisted ballots must be returned inside the board office, where the voter assistant will be asked to complete the attestation form.”

Two days before issuing the directive, LaRose sent a letter to GOP legislative leaders, urging them to review the state’s ban on ballot harvesting and consider eliminating ballot drop boxes.

The court ruling “effectively creates an unintended loophole in Ohio’s ballot harvesting law that we must address,” LaRose wrote. “I suspect this is exactly the outcome the [League of Women Voters] intended. Under the guise of assisting the disabled, their legal strategy seeks to make Ohio’s elections less secure and more vulnerable to cheating, especially as it relates to the use of drop boxes.”

[mariacallous]

Far-right Golden Dawn supporters have sent letters to at least two MPs from the ruling New Democracy party, vowing to continue targeting them until they are ousted from parliament because they voted for legislation last month that legalised civil marriage for same-sex couples.

New Democracy MP Anna Eythymiou said that after receiving the Golden Dawn letter by email, she then saw it taped to the wall outside her office in Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

“On Tuesday 5/3/2024 I received the attached letter in my email. This morning, upon arriving at my law office, I found that the letter was stuck on the wall at the entrance of the apartment building next to my professional sign with my name and my legal role,” Eythymiou said in a statement.

She called for condemnation of the incidents, which she described as “acts of intimidation and thuggery”.

The letter was signed by the ‘Youth Front of the People’s Association – Golden Dawn’. It said that similar actions will continue against MPs who voted for the same-sex civil marriage bill until they are removed from their parliamentary seats.

The letter describes the vote in favour of the bill as “a direct insult to the values of Hellenism and the principles of the Orthodox Faith”, which “exposes an uncontrolled number of vulnerable, underage members of Greek society to immediate danger and brutally affects their fundamental rights”.

“Finally, we pledge that we will do our utmost to remind the Greek people of your aforementioned value choice until you are removed from any public elected office,” the letter concluded.

Stratos Simopoulos, another New Democracy MP in Thessaloniki, who also voted in favour of the bill, received the same threatening letter.

“‘Ghosts’ of the past are trying to come back,” said Simopoulos – a reference to the banning of Golden Dawn in 2020 under a court verdict that branded the far-right party a criminal organisation.

He said that the letter “also includes threats [targeted at] my appearance at events of a religious and political character”, and called on the Greek Orthodox Church to condemn the incident and stand behind MPs who voted in favour of the bill.

Despite strong opposition, parliament voted last month to legalise civil marriage and childbearing for same-sex couples. The Greek Orthodox Church criticised the legal change, saying it was a step towards the abolition of traditional parenting and the “disappearance” of gender roles.

In April last year, mask-wearing members of Golden Dawn’s youth wing forced their way into an exhibition by artist Sergej Andreevski from neighbouring North Macedonia at a gallery in Thessaloniki’s Kalamaria municipality, accusing him of celebrating past massacres of Greeks.

The far-right activists verbally attacked the artist and later bragged on the internet that they had shut down the exhibition.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, a landmark statute designed to dramatically increase Black people’s participation in electoral politics after centuries of slavery, segregation, and second-class citizenship. Newbern, Alabama, a small town in which two-thirds of 133 residents are Black, has not held a municipal election for some 60 years. What a coincidence!

In place of a democratically elected government, the town, which is located about an hour south of Tuscaloosa, has been ruled by a small group of white people who handpick their mayoral and town council in a form of hand-me-down governance. In recent years, some of Newbern’s residents have sought to change that. In a recent filing in federal court, the residents argue that the town’s failure to hold elections violates residents’ rights under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, and ask the court to order the town to hold an election by November 2024.

The case is striking for multiple reasons, including, most obviously, the absurdity of the purported government’s departure from fundamental democratic principles. It is also a stark reminder of the real-world impact of federal courts in a political and legal system dominated by reactionary conservatives. Liberals are asking judges for small victories, launching last-ditch efforts to access basic rights under the Constitution. Conservatives, in contrast, are aiming much higher: For them, courts are a testing ground for novel ways to curtail rights nationwide. In federal trial courts, conservatives are having their cake and eating it too, while liberals are begging for crumbs.

The plaintiff in this case is Patrick Braxton, a Black Newbern resident who, in 2020, filed the actual, long-ignored paperwork to run for mayor. As the only legally qualified candidate, he won by default, and tried to appoint a town council accordingly. The existing town council responded by convening a secret meeting during which it decided to conduct the town’s first-ever special election. Telling no one about the new “election,” the previous mayor, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, and his council effectively reappointed themselves to their jobs. Stokes and his cronies have since repeatedly changed the locks at town hall as part of a refusal to transfer power to the legitimate officials. They have also denied Braxton access to the town’s bank account, forcing him to run food distribution drives and otherwise carry out his mayoral duties using his own funds.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are asking the court to install Braxton as the town’s rightful mayor. “Allowing the Defendants to continue their hand-me-down governance violates the basic tenets of democracy and state law,” they write. In the meantime, they say, Stokes is ignoring basic requests from his Black constituents: Although their homes occasionally flood with raw sewage, he’s refused to support the installation of a proper sewage system.

The simple request in this case—can we have a local election, please?—is a far cry from the triumphant asks being made by conservative legal movement lawyers in federal courtrooms across the country. Over the past several years, a single Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas has signed off on requests to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of drugs used in medication abortion; to force President Joe Biden to reinstate Trump-era immigration policies; and to gut a federal program that provides free contraceptive access to anyone who wants it.

Many of these exercises in judicial policymaking have come in the form of nationwide injunctions, which spiked during the Biden administration as Trump judges began wielding their power to implement the former president’s agenda by judicial fiat. During a Supreme Court oral argument last month, Justice Neil Gorsuch observed that judges issued “exactly zero universal injunctions” during President Franklin Roosevelt’s 12 years in office. “Over the last four years or so, the number is something like 60,” he said. Given that conservative judges in Texas recently declined to adopt rules that would have limited conservative activists’ ability to hand-pick judges, it seems unlikely that this trend reverses anytime soon.

The Newbern case lays bare the impact of the Republican Party’s generations-long effort to capture the judiciary. When the federal bench is this stacked with friendly faces, the conservative legal movement is free to run up the score. Everyone else is just hoping to get on the playing field.

[the-foolish-scholar]

Two of Pentacles

In the Two of Pentacles, a youthful individual dances while juggling two coins in their hands. The infinity symbol links the coins, suggesting that this person can handle unlimited problems so long as they manage their time, energy and resources well. In the background, two ships sail the high seas, bobbing up and down on the huge waves – another sign that the ups and downs of life are manageable with focus and attention.

-

Hellur. I’m finally forcing myself to sit down and write. It’s been quite a month… But I finally feel like I’m firmly standing on two feet.

The municipal election’s delegation was… an experience. I helped out as the ‘call center’ on the day of elections, logging every big observation that happened during the day. I also helped to make a slideshow for the CIS’ press conference. I was a brave girl!

A journalist asked to speak to a few of observers outside in the parking lot where we were having the press conference. They wanted to meet in the parking lot because they were concerned about their security. They told observers that few members of the press came to the conference and that those that came didn’t really ask questions because they had been intimidated and didn’t want to write anything that could be perceived critical of the government. So, take from that what you will.

After we finished speaking, everyone came up to me and said that they thought that the slideshow was really powerful and that it was good we showed it; but Leslie cautioned that they could come and arrest us for showing it, which made me spiral out of control.

Buying produce at the market and having conversation in the car on the way to the beach grounded me into reality and helped me to calm down as best as I could.

Tom, in his old age and with his wisdom, very dryly told me that one day, my grandchildren would ask me about what I was doing when democracy was dying in the 2020s and that I’d gleefully tell them about my various stints in jail. Roberto distracted me by asking me about my theological studies; which actually really helped me to develop the paper I was working on for my socio-theological analysis of the Latin American reality. 

Being at the beach was like taking one big benzo. I swung myself in the hammocks. I drank a lot of coconut water. I worked on one of my Paint By Diamonds projects. I watched the sunset. I had delicious seafood. I swam in the pool. I drank rum. I laid out in the sun. I walked on the beach. I ate junk food. I looked up at the stars. I made a very strange vegetarian meal for Tom and I. I released baby sea turtles into the ocean. I listened to music. I learned a lot about Mormonism and gossiped about my love life with Roberto’s sister. I got a massage. I enjoyed air conditioning.

When we got back home from the beach though, it was like life slapped me in the face. I struggled to balance my school work along with my volunteer work. My sleep schedule was all over the place. And then, I was away again, in Suchitoto.

Brooke, Tom, and I went out there because Tom was teaching a women’s self defense class to women a part of the feminist collective. He taught me some moves too so it’s safe to say I could beat some asses.

A lot of time away was dedicated toward work; both in the academic sense and the volunteer sense. Analyzing observer data on the elections gave me a headache and Brooke and I went back and forth for hours.

When we weren’t working though, we were soaking up all of life’s special moments. On the first night we went to one Mexican restaurant which had subpar food but entertaining characters. I stopped at the tienda afterward and got myself some peach yogurt, which was delicious. The next night, we went out to a fancy restaurant, Casa Flamenco. We sat in this little cabana which had a table for three.

Brooke got us a bottle of wine and boy did we drink ourselves into a delight! We split cauliflower wings with a buffalo and a tamarindo sauce, had the silliest portion size of this creamy tomato pasta, and enjoyed coffees with brownies a la mode for dessert. The restaurant also had a little store and I got Paulo Freire’s The Politics of Education. On our walk home, we got a little lost but I made a friend in the park and he drove us home for 50 cents each. The next night we went to another nice restaurant overlooking the town square, but I don’t remember what it was called. I had a delicious smoothie and veggie sandwich. After we finished eating, Brooke and I checked out the church.

They were just wrapping up mass when we walked in and a very young, dare I say Fleabag-esq, priest came up to us. He was blown away that Brooke was Jewish, Tom was Buddhist, and I was an agnostic theology student at the UCA. It was fun to chit chat with him. We then hung out just the three of us in the park, people watching, sharing stories, recommending movies and shows. Thankfully, we did not get lost on our way back to the hotel. The next morning, we had breakfast (I especially enjoyed the partly frozen orange juice) and packed up. We were extremely lucky to get the last three seats on the bus back home. I arguably had the best seat, I was in the back corner, with leg room.

A man preached on the bus and we made eye contact with each other practically the whole time he spoke. I always end up doing that, which is unwise, but it’s in my nature! I gave him my contact information so that he could reach out to me for an interview if he wanted one for my book. The Faith Across Identities project is alive and well! I’m also going to be interviewing a woman from the island whose son was wrongfully imprisoned… She has a very interesting faith.

When we got to the bus terminal we bid our farewells and I got in an Uber to take me home. I was tired and wanted silence on the ride home, but my Uber driver wanted dialog… We had a whole discussion about the flaws of the church and organized religion. I think he expected me to be against him because it felt like he wanted to fight me the entire time… By the time I got home, I was glad to be in bed. I lazed around, took a nice shower, and ordered takeout, spending the rest of the day watching my shows.

The next week I finally completed my first big paper as a graduate student! I sound like a church elder throughout the entire thing, but there’s just this sense of security I get writing about the Salvadoran reality from a spiritual stance instead of a purely sociological stance… Which makes no sense, considering how the government has an extremely violent past with the religious… But still, I feel sheltered and protected by the church… It’s the strangest thing.

Speaking of the spiritual, I’ve started one of my more spiritual oriented classes. It’s titled, The Mystery of God. It’s pretty chill to be honest. We’ve just been analyzing different pieces of art debating how it depicts God. I choose to focus on Nezahualcoyōtl’s poetry, specifically his poem Inside Heaven. He was an Aztec ruler right before the conquest; he is known for making the first Aztec temple that prohibited blood sacrifices, among many other things! I’ve also been reading a lot of church documents that have originated from Latin American clergymen. I am continually amazed by how the church as an institution operates as such a fierce advocate for justice down here. It is such a privilege to study this subject and I can’t wait to one day share all that I’ve learned with students back home.

But, I’ll admit, it has been hard to reach this point. While those closest to me support me unequivocally, some have given their unsolicited advice and really soiled my spirit, making me feel like the way I’m choosing to do things is the wrong way to do things. I know that what I do doesn’t make that much sense. But does it really have to make sense to people if it’s not their life?

Someone I got dinner with told me to drop out of my program, unprompted. I was pretty perplexed by their perspective, especially given that I had earlier stated how exciting the challenge of studying in Spanish was and how I felt like I was finally finding answers to questions I had begun to ask myself in 2021. I brushed their commentary off and reminded them the reasons why I was doing what I was doing and then they seemingly got angry with me, invalidating my choices once again.

On my walk home from the dinner, I started to spiral out of control and second guess myself. Afterall, I’m some white woman in my 20s all alone in some other country studying in a program that’s mostly made up of retirees who are devoutly religious. I’ve had to deal with so much red tape, from both the Salvadoran and the US government. It is not easy.

But, I’m doing what I want to do! And on the bright side, that spiral that they sent me down brought me lots of revelations. I can confidently say that I’ve got a damn good solid plan for my future. One that seeks to serve others and not just myself, too!

Anyway! I met up with Joel, one of my contacts from the national university, and we went to the market together. I bought some pretty colored candles and crazy glue. After we left the market we went back on campus and chatted. He told me to think of fear like it was an invasive instinct; something that didn’t belong in our lives and that if we didn’t take steps to eradicate it, it would take over, destroying everything. He also invited me to attend a conference with him! It’ll be my first ever academic conference. Three days where I just get to be a huge fucking nerd. I can’t wait!

Mmmmm I’m trying to think of what else to tell y’all.

In a great big contrast from last year, I spent most of Semana Santa shut in my room studying, instead of being out in the field doing research. I was kind of bummed that I didn’t participate in any of the festivities but I really needed to spend time catching up on work. Though I did observe things here and there! Which was refreshing! It’s crazy how seriously Easter is celebrated here…

My one roommate, who has since moved out, and I had a lot of fun while we lived together. We ate lots of Chinese, got close with our vigilantes, found some good vintage pieces for them to sell on their Depop, talked a lot of shit about our landlord, sang a lot of karaoke, contemplated contemporary politics, and experienced life as two idiots abroad. I’m gonna miss them but I’m sure our paths will cross again.

Speaking of roommates, my other roommate and I are going to start going on walks together which is so refreshing because I’ve missed going on walks!

Though, today I did have a really nice walk by myself at dusk. It had finally cooled down a little so I plugged in my headphones and listed to Court and Spark and just walked and walked. I felt like Forrest Gump.

I’ve made some pieces of art that I’m pretty proud of. I’m so glad that I’ve had bursts of creativity after what feels like such a long stint without any. I just really hope I can get more on top of things and start throwing on the wheel again. I love my collages and I find peace through my poetry, but there’s nothing like making stuff out of mud!

I’m also starting to offer my spiritual services to people to have more spending money for myself and to support projects my peers and I are pursuing. If you want a reading or need some type of spiritual work done don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

Oh!!! I also have finally gotten all the paperwork that I needed to get in to prove that Miami University is a real and legally operating institution of higher education in the US!!! Now I just must wait for approval from the Salvadoran government. Fingers crossed!!!

I think that’s it??? Lots to juggle, lots to look forward to! Miss and love you all lots. I hope that I’ll get to see those of you that actually read this when I come home. Take care of yourselves and know that I’m always just a call away if you need anything. XOXO!

Z

[deadpresidents]

I found out recently that William Harrison was a Presidential Elector and was wondering if any other Presidents or Vice-Presidents ever served as Electors?

Yes, it's actually much more common than you might imagine. The people chosen to serve as Presidential electors by the political parties in each state are often leading figures in that party -- from local party chairs and municipal office holders to incumbent and retired major elected officials. Just for example, Bill Clinton was an elector in New York in 2016 and 2020 (Hillary was a 2020 elector, too).

[beardedmrbean]

Sofia city council voted on March 9 to instruct mayor Yordanka Fandukova to ask the state to move the Soviet Army Monument from the centre of the Bulgarian capital city.

The monument was erected in 1954, while Bulgaria was under communist rule. It commemorates the Soviet invasion of Bulgaria at the close of the Second World War. The communist line was that the 1944 invasion, which led to the end of the monarchy and to decades of communist rule, was a “liberation”. To date, left-wing parties continue to revere the monument.

The vote to ask for the removal of the monument was 41 in favour, 13 against, with one abstention.

Those who voted in favour were the GERB-UDF group, Democratic Bulgaria, Patriots for Sofia and independent city councillors.

The request, to be made to the Sofia district governor, is to move the monument to the Museum of Socialist Art or to some other state-owned land away from the city centre.

Democratic Bulgaria tabled the proposal in 2020, but the matter did not proceed because GERB-UDF kept it off the agenda. This changed recently when GERB-UDF leader Boiko Borissov made a public call for the removal of the monument.

Some weeks ago, an inspection by municipal officials found that the condition of the monument was a hazard to the public, and it considerably exceeded the size originally approved.

The morning of the city council meeting saw protests at the monument and outside Sofia city council headquarters against the removal of the monument. Participants in the protest, in which red flags rivalled Bulgarian flags in number, pelted the city council building with eggs and red paint.

Caretaker Prime Minister Gulub Donev said on March 9 that a decision on the fate of the monument should taken only after Bulgaria’s April 2 early parliamentary elections.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil 2024 elections: young voters rise by 78% compared to 2020

The number of 16- and 17-year-olds registered to vote in this October's municipal elections has surged by 78 percent compared to the 2020 municipal elections. According to data from the Superior Electoral Court, there are now 1,836,081 eligible voters in this age group.

In the 2020 municipal elections, 1,030,563 teenagers, who are not required to vote, registered. According to the Brazilian Constitution, voting is compulsory only for those aged 18 to 70. The increase in registered voters in this age group far exceeded the overall electorate's growth, which rose by 5.4 percent between the two municipal elections.

As a result, this group now represents 1.17 percent of the entire Brazilian electorate, which totals over 155.9 million voters. The largest age group within the electorate is 45 to 59 years old, comprising 38,883,736 voters.

In the 2022 general elections, teenage voter registration surged, reaching 2.1 million—an increase of 51.13 percent compared to 2018. The Electoral Court, however, cautions against comparing these figures with municipal elections, as certain areas, like Brasília, Fernando de Noronha, and polling stations abroad, do not participate in municipal elections.

Continue reading.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Philip Lewis at HuffPost:

Residents in a small Alabama town will be able to vote in their own municipal elections for the first time in decades after a four-year legal battle. A proposed settlement has been reached in the town’s voting rights case, allowing Newbern, a predominantly Black town with 133 residents, to hold its first legitimate elections in more than 60 years. The town’s next elections will be held in 2025. The settlement was filed June 21 and must be approved by U.S. District Judge Kristi K. DuBose. For decades, white officials appointed Newbern’s mayor and council members in lieu of holding elections. Most residents weren’t even aware that there were supposed to be elections for these positions.

[...] The settlement will reinstate Patrick Braxton as the mayor of Newbern, the first Black person to hold the position in the town’s 170-year history. Capital B News had first reported about Braxton’s fight. Braxton was the only candidate who filed qualifying paperwork with the county clerk in 2020, so he won the mayoral race by default. The incumbent, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, hadn’t even bothered to fill out the paperwork to run again. Haywood Stokes Jr., his father, had previously been mayor of the rural Black Belt town. After Braxton assumed office, he faced several obstacles. He discovered the locks to the town hall had been changed, and that the town council had held a secret special election in which they simply reelected themselves. They then reappointed Stokes III as mayor of Newbern in 2021. He has been acting as mayor ever since.

Newbern, Alabama will be set to hold elections for its municipal officers next year for the first time in over 60 years as a result of a proposed settlement over the majority-Black town's residents being deprived of their voting rights. This settlement also reinstates Patrick Braxton to the Mayor post.

[theculturedmarxist]

In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.

First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.

The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.

The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7

After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.

A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.

By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.

Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.

Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.

It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.

That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.

That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.

An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.

Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.

The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19

It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20

What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.

Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.

But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.

Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.

The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.