In spring 2021, The New York Times ran an editorial by Samuel Goldman in which he defended the disproportionate influence exerted by the “elite” – effectively an American aristocracy – on the nation’s governance. The gist of it seemed to be that the betters of society should not hide their privilege and excellence under a bushel and we poor hoi polloi clods should submit to their deserved rule. Yuck. This could not be allowed to pass without comment. The New York Times took a pass.
Samuel Goldman, “America Has a Ruling Class,” The New York Times, 4 April 2021, SR5 (www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/opinion/america-politics-elites.html).
Samuel Goldman’s call for the acknowledgement of a quasi-aristocratic ruling class is larded with disquieting a priori assumptions. He believes there is a properly functioning “meritocracy” despite all contrary evidence. Is he unaware of the concept’s origin, Michael Young’s satire lampooning a dystopia forged meritocratically? Thumbing through Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites would profit him.
For him, this ruling class is a reality to tolerate, not something inherently problematic in a pluralistic democracy. Do the “best” – the original Greek meaning of aristoi – inevitably rise to the top in a society riven by bigotry, sexism, and income inequality? He assumes a smoke-filled room crammed with the “best” is where governance is transacted, a rejection of transparency. Is he oblivious to the scorched-earth politics practiced since Mr. Obama’s election in 2008?
His quasi-Nietzschean emphasis on the “great man” spurs his cajoling of the “ruling class” to proclaim its pedigree yet be judged solely by its actions. Radical honesty from the “best” instead might often look like this: “I’m the scion of an aristocratic family whose influence removed every sharp edge, stunted me in empathy, and elevated me to a sinecure for which I’m unfit by temperament, experience, and ability.”
No American president has ever been convicted in an impeachment trial. President Mulligan slipped the constitutional noose a second time – what a talented boy! – on 13 February 2021, technically an “acquittal.” He of course trumpeted this as proof of his innocence and as complete exoneration. It was neither. Even to call it an acquittal is misleading, especially in this instance in which a handful of Republicans defected and most senators voted to convict and remove. The result more closely resembled a hung jury. The “acquittal” likely will become part and parcel of a GOP effort to cast the 6 January insurrection into the Sea of Oblivion. The vote was enraging and absolutely foreordained. A screed referring not to an article in the paper but to the news generally was sent to The Richmond Times-Dispatch, which passed. That one surprised me.
The Former President’s “Acquittal.”
And so ended the impeachment proceedings. The House Managers’ case was factually unimpeachable, constitutionally pristine, and rhetorically powerful, compelling to heart and mind. It eviscerated a defense fueled by mendacity, false equivalence, and faux outrage, a reflection of the defendant.
Yet there was no clarifying moment, no dramatic passage that would jar the deluded from their civic torpor. No Margaret Chase Smith arose from the GOP to uncover her party’s folly. No Joseph Welch crystallized the damage to public life from unabashed political indecency.
The Senate Minority Leader instead offered post-trial sophistry contorted enough to make a medieval scholastic theologian blush, political triangulation so transparent that he need hardly have bothered. He and forty-two Republican senators consigned their integrity to a blind trust. They seem unlikely soon to reclaim it.
Seven of their GOP brethren have been lauded for voting guilty. This sets the bar for civic virtue low. Conviction required only a sliver of conscience and a glancing regard for truth and still they find themselves vilified by their colleagues and the Republican base. Would Abraham Lincoln recognize his party were he to see it pound shut the coffin of accountability?
The salient question is how the GOP now will elevate the Big Lie. The party has inured its faithful to untruth: Tax cuts to the wealthy always create jobs and enhance revenues despite never having done so,[1] Saddam Hussein had WMD and “palled around” with Al Qaeda, torture comports with American values and invariably foils malign plots, Wall Street and financial deregulation had no hand in the Great Recession, the forty-fourth president was a Kenyan Marxist Muslim authoritarian, mainstream media purveys only “fake news,” coronavirus is a hoax, the 2020 election was stolen. Can Orwellian Doublethink be far away? Perhaps war is peace, falsehood is truth, guilt is innocence.
[1] Igor Derysh, “50-Year Study of Tax Cuts on Wealthy Show They Always Fail to ‘Trickle Down,’” Salon, 27 December 2020 (www.salon.com/2020/12/27/50-year-study-of-tax-cuts-on-wealthy-shows-they-always-fail-to-trickle-down/, accessed 27 December 2020); David Hope and Julian Limberg, “The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich,” International Inequalities Institute Working Paper 55, December 2020, London School of Economics and Politics (https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences_of_major_tax_cuts_published.pdf, accessed 27 December 2020).
The second impeachment of King Joffrey the Superannuated following the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol led me to ponder the Athenians’ use of ostracism to take the starch out of potential tyrants and how closely impeachment was analogous to it. The product of this reverie was this unpublished editorial.
I wasn’t certain what to do with it. My Beloved, with my consent, passed it to a friend whose opinion I value. She was enthusiastic and asked to use it in her classes as an example of how pre-modernity holds relevance for the present. I blushed. I flogged it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. No dice. Events then pushed it past its sell-by date.
An American Ostracism.
The nation finds itself at a disconcerting juncture in its democratic story, yet the crisis is one far from unique for democratic governments. The forty-fifth president made an attempt, unprecedented in the American experience, to subvert the democratic process and to extend his rule through unconstitutional seizure of power. The effort failed but left in its wake the thorny problem of how best to restrain a politician and a faction that remain a threat to democratic governance.
The risk posed by the unscrupulous actor willing to employ any means to arrogate power for personal benefit has plagued democracy from its inception. Millennia ago, the classical Athenians contended with it. Peisistratus (600-527 BCE) seized power on three occasions and ruled Athens continuously from 546 to 527 BCE as a tyrant. Tyranny, however, for the Greeks did not bear the dark connotations attached to it in the American idiom. It was understood neutrally and simply as rule by unconstitutional means. It was possible for an Athenian tyrant to be broadly popular and Peisistratus mostly was. A tyrant often aspires to cement the position as a family business and therein is the problematic nature of tyranny exposed. Hippias (d. 490 BCE) followed his father Peisistratus as tyrant. His rule became so oppressive that the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes helped to engineer his ouster and exile in 510 BCE and then two years later introduced the reforms that earned him the sobriquet “father of democracy.”
This democracy was narrow in its franchise (only free men; no women, no slaves) but ultimately more radically participatory than the American representative model. It introduced a measure to forestall the ascent of a future wannabe tyrant, ostracism. Athenian citizens convened annually and voted whether there should be an ostracism. If yes, a second, secret balloting was held two months later. Every citizen incised a name on a potsherd (ostracon) and, if a quorum voted, the top vote-getter had ten days to settle his affairs and leave Athens for ten years; however, his property and citizenship were protected and a return to politics was permitted once the exile ended. The goal was to break a threatening, dangerous politician’s power and to hobble his faction. Perhaps a dozen Athenians suffered ostracism during Athens’ classical era.
Historical analogies are, of course, inherently limited. Classical Athens is not twenty-first century America; nonetheless, the past should not be wholly discounted and can at least whisper in the present’s ear. The universality of human experience should never be dismissed. The question becomes, then, what democratic methods are available here and now to thwart a potential tyrant. The situation in 2021 is complicated by a further disturbing reality: A swathe of politicians in one of the nation’s two political parties has been marinating in varying measures of cynical ambition, authoritarian fantasy, delusion, and fecklessness, a toxic mixture with the potential to initiate a downward spiral into autocratic, illiberal governance.
It is difficult to think that the Constitution’s framers, classically educated as they were, were ignorant of the Athenian example. It, moreover, seems unlikely that they, having rebelled against what was in their perception tyrannical rule in its pejorative sense, would not have devised a provision to safeguard their fledging democratic republic from a tyrant. They in fact did. This mechanism was set into motion last month with the House’s bipartisan vote to impeach the forty-fifth president for fomenting the assault on the Capitol on 6 January.
Unlike Athenian ostracism, this procedure requires three rather than two steps, and here the third step is crucial. The former president must not just be convicted in his upcoming Senate trial but then he must also be disqualified from further federal officeholding. This American ostracism is the only constitutional remedy for a dangerous demagogy driven by an amoral, conscienceless political opportunist suffering from more than a soupçon of sociopathy.
Would that we now had a political counterpart of another classical Greek, Diogenes the Cynic (414/404-323 BCE), that prince of gadflies who made a career of exposing the hypocrisy and cant of the political elite. What would Diogenes conclude should he stroll through the impeachment trial and, as was his wont, hold aloft a lamp lit in daytime in a search for an honest person? Whatever he might make of the American brand of ostracism, the behavior on 6 January of the onetime president, now decamped to Florida, has proven true an aphorism credited to Diogenes: “The mob is the mother of tyrants.”
Sometimes a free issue of a magazine passes through the mail slot and it’s actually worth reading. That was the case when I was comped an issue of In These Times. I’m now a subscriber. One of its writers – Moe Tkacik – contributed an article on the necessity of dropping the antitrust hammer. It was music to my ears. An unpublished compliment was sent to her.
Moe Tkacik, “Restoring Antitrust in Each Other,” In These Times, January 2021, 12-3 (https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-gig-workers-labor-rights-antitrust-laws-break-up-uber).
Moe Tkacik hits the nail on the head. An accelerationism that tolerates further corporate consolidation as the path to nationalization both underestimates corporate power and undervalues the misery inflicted on workers in the meantime. Aggressive pursuit of antitrust can help blaze the trail for more unionizing, creation of worker cooperatives, and eventual restoration of the means of production to the commons.
Following the presidential election, the vaccines to ward off the coronavirus became a reality and hopefulness flowered for a close to what, through executive inaction, ineptitude, and disingenuousness, had become a needlessly grave pandemic. Despite this sign of better times to come, winter loomed and it promised to be brutal.
A sequel to the coronavirus-black death editorial for The Richmond Times-Dispatch from the preceding April made sense. There was also more grist for the mill. During the warmer months of 2020, a habit had developed: an hour or two each day on the front porch for reading by turns polemics and novels. The summer reading list included Albert Camus’ The Plague (a rereading) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The opinion I wrote exceeded the canonical length but the editor at the newspaper found the space to run it whole. I’m thinking maybe a trilogy is in the offing as the vaccines take hold and the pandemic subsides, something focused more on social, economic, and cultural implications of pandemics, less about the diseases themselves. We’ll see.
“A Coronavirus Winter: Historical and Literary Lessons,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18 January 2021, A13 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-a-coronavirus-winter-historical-and-literary-lessons/article_f4f237e8-ad4a-5ef1-bf28-88bc669507c3.html).
In The Nation’s final issue before the results desks across electronic media univocally confirmed the reality of The Once and Not Future King’s electoral ouster, Eric Alterman assessed the danger represented by the man’s epic dishonesty and the press’s broad inability to call it what it was. Mr. Alterman was on the money and an unpublished letter said so. A perusal of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent would do the press corps a world of good.
Eric Alterman, “The Plot Against America,” The Nation, 16-23 November 2020 (www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-plot-against-america/).
Eric Alterman’s critique of the press’s coverage of the Trump administration was fully on point. Authoritarian wannabes will vie for Mr. Trump’s mantle and base; they likely will be more strategically and less pathologically mendacious than the departing president and consequently will pose a continuing threat to democratic governance. Hiding behind the evasion of “only reporting” will neither inform the citizenry nor hold officeholders to account nor ensure the fourth estate’s long-term health. “Truth will out” only when public exposure of dishonesty and malfeasance is swift and assured.
Victor Davis Hanson was doubtless displeased with the election’s outcome. Though still not quite conceding the loss, Mr. Hanson applied himself to a new task: a frantic airbrushing of the Trump regime. Who knew that President Quarter Pounder with Cheese was so misunderstood and that the animus toward him sprang not from his actions but was merely a quibble over style? Mr. Hanson surpassed himself on this one. My response was printed by The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Will Trump Ride Off into the Sunset?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 November 2020, A15; “Will Donald Trump Ride Off into the Sunset, Another Tragic Hero?” The Chicago Tribune, 11 November 2020 (www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-trump-legacy-victor-davis-hanson-20201111-t6aqm2ofb5cy5archlpuw5zo3a-story.html). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above leads to the version in The Chicago Tribune.
“Hanson’s Defense of Trump Rides Off on Wrong Trail,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 17 November 2020, A14 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters/letter-to-the-editor-nov-17-2020-hansons-defense-of-trump-rides-off-on-wrong/article_a9607437-092c-5b20-af96-0b94582b4d39.html).
To observe the length policy, the letter’s final paragraph was dropped before submission. Here it is:
Hanson likes cinematic references. Here is one for him: Harry Potter’s Professor Dumbledore and his Pensieve, a receptacle for storing memories for later reference and sharing with others. Hanson’s Pensieve, however, consigns his memories to oblivion. De rigueur for Hanson’s right-wing coterie is magical thinking followed by a deep drink from the River Lethe. The classical allusion should not be lost on Hanson. Then again, perhaps he has forgotten it.
As the 2020 presidential election neared, Style Weekly kindly offered me another and, I hoped at the time, final swipe at The Mad King. I seized it. Beyond that, this opinion concedes that Jonathan Freedland’s diagnosis of the rot in American political life was uncomfortably accurate.
“A New American Syllabus,” Style Weekly, 14 October 2020, 15 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/opinion-a-new-american-syllabus/Content?oid=16616782).
Televised political conventions are inherently propagandistic; however, the backdrop of the coronavirus, The Benighted One’s exploitation of the Executive Mansion as a prop, and the hyperbolic expressions of fealty to His Sublimity, along with shaky production values, placed the 2020 Republican National Convention in its own subgenre. The unpublished letter below was written in response to The Washington Post’s account of the event.
Toluse Olorunnipa, “In Prime Time An Alternate Reality That Bolsters a Flagging Campaign,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2020, A1, A17 (www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-convention-falsehoods/2020/08/27/41a07f5a-e888-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html).
And so the Republican National Convention has mercifully concluded. Toluse Olorunnipa ably exposes the convention’s dishonesty and the political desperation driving it. Beyond this, perhaps the convention’s most disturbing quality is how unsurprising it was.
Is anyone shocked that the clownish enablers who have flocked to Mr. Trump’s campaign would subject the nation to a bloated, low-rent analogue to Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will? Ms. Riefenstahl, whatever her defects, was a talented filmmaker able to impart a cinematic sheen to appalling totalitarian dreck. Even this dubious achievement evaded the Republican National Committee. It should be remembered that Ms. Riefenstahl, despite her considerable moviemaking skill, could not disguise the profound smallness of her subject and she indeed, regardless of her intentions, made apparent the banality of evil. The ham-fisted, reality-television-addled doyens of Trumplandia could not help but do the same. It is to be hoped that voters will not be deceived by Mr. Trump’s deluded medicine show.
I love the post office. The Duke of Mar-a-Lago does not. While his undisguised contempt for it is inextricable from his animosity toward Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and The Washington Post, it seems probable that he, on his own, saw it as a potential cash cow, the quasi-governmental entity most ripe for privatization. The timing of this stab at an editorial is noteworthy. It was written within a week or so of the installation of the vile Louis DeJoy as postmaster general by a board subverted by His Eminence’s appointees. As challenging as circumstances have been for the postal service, Mr. DeJoy demonstrated how things can always be made worse. I sent the thing first to The Richmond Times-Dispatch and learned that it could not be accepted because of a six-month moratorium on further submissions after an opinion had been printed. I then tried The Washington Post and The Virginian-Pilot without success.
Save The USPS
The USPS is at a crossroads. It could run out of funds in September.[1] Congressional action, or perhaps inaction, in coming weeks will likely settle its fate. The post office’s unique historical, cultural, and economic contribution to American life has made it a singular institution whose future role in the country’s story deserves sober consideration.
First, a confession: My affection for the post office is immoderate. For an inveterate postcard writer, dispatching a bit of epistolary art to any address in the nation for a mere quarter and a dime is a small repeating miracle.
The postal service’s story is fundamentally America’s story. It was there from the beginning. The Constitution enjoined Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”[2] The post office grew with the nation while driving its development. Winifred Gallagher’s history of the post office details its role in virtually every revolution in communication and transportation – canals, stagecoaches, Pony Express, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, civil aviation. Its expansion of services, especially Free City and Rural Free Delivery, helped define lived experience. It still fulfills its creators’ injunction to “bind the nation together” and inform its citizens. Yet, paradoxically, it is a historical treasure whose history is too little known.[3]
The postal service, moreover, suffers from the widespread misconception that it burdens the taxpayer. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 transformed the US Post Office Department into the USPS and mandated that the agency become financially self-sustaining, a goal achieved in 1982. Congress provides funds only to cover congressionally required free services to the blind and overseas voters, a budgetary pittance. It otherwise finances itself solely through sale of services and products.[4]
The USPS perennially faces financial challenges. The internet has eroded its revenues, a circumstance worsened by the Post Office Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This lame-duck enactment compelled the USPS to prepay its full liability for retirees’ medical benefits fifty years in advance across a ten-year period. The impact of this abnormal obligation, unprecedented in either private or public sector, was compounded by the 2008-09 financial crisis.[5] The Independent Policy Institute concludes that, had the USPS not been subject to prepayment, it would have been profitable from 2013 to 2018.[6]
Misapprehensions have created space for specious charges regarding the postal service. Some assert that the USPS loses money by billing private carriers such as Amazon below the cost to move their packages and is hemorrhaging revenue. This claim has been debunked. The USPS is legally obliged never to transport parcels below cost; its arrangement with Amazon makes money. Amazon likely enjoys a favorable rate, but critics should remember that discounting of bulk deliveries is a common business practice and that the USPS handles “last mile” delivery, in other words, not from sender to recipient but only from the recipient’s nearest postal distribution center, where Amazon leaves parcels.[7]
These falsehoods likely arise from desire to privatize the USPS. Cogent arguments can be marshaled for that path; however, privatization would undermine a fundamental pillar of the USPS: its universal mandate, the requirement to deliver to every address at a flat rate. If profitability becomes the postal service’s guiding principle, delivery to rural, remote addresses would not pay. Requiring private carriers to honor this mandate could well push them toward bankruptcy.[8]
The coronavirus has worsened the USPS’s position. It could lose $54 billion in revenues,[9] a major factor in its potential insolvency. A $10 billion loan in the CARES Act has mitigated this shortfall but the need to stabilize the agency’s finances is urgent, especially with the anticipated reliance on mail-in ballots in November.[10] It would also be penny wise, pound foolish during historically high joblessness to hobble an employer of 630,000 workers,[11] the vanguard in offering decent jobs to women, minorities, and veterans. Sustaining the USPS would enable it then to address its long-term financial health. Ending the prepayment obligation would free the agency to focus on capital improvements, research and development, and innovation.[12] Introduction of creative services, such as postal banking or the installation in post offices of media hubs with broadband internet and secure email, could secure the bottom line while addressing socioeconomic inequalities.[13]
The postal service, perhaps because its couriers do indeed make their appointed rounds, is taken for granted. It is easy to forget, as Gallagher emphasizes, that it began as the most democratic of institutions in service of a revolutionary notion: free flow of mail and information as the right of every citizen, not a privileged few. There is reason for hope because of the nearly universal fondness for one’s own carrier and post office.
[1] Lauren Fox and Jeremy Herb, “US Postal Service Warns Congress It Could Become Insolvent Amid Coronavirus,” CNN, 10 April 2020 (www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/politics/postal-service-congress-help/index.html [accessed 14 June 2020]).
[2] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7.
[3] Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: a History (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
[4] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 255-61, 273; Eugene Kiely and D’Angelo Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack,” FactCheck.Org, 5 April 2018 (www.factcheck.org/2018/04/trumps-amazon-attack/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Kirsten B. Blom and Katelin P. Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits and Pension Funding Issues, Congressional Research Service Report R43349 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 7 January 2015), p. 1.
[5] Jeff Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office,” The Week, 16 April 2018 (https://theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-post-office [accessed 3 May 2020]); Matthew Yglesias, “The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout Explained,” Vox, 12 April 2020 (www.vox.com/2020/4/12/21218151/usps-bailout-privatization-amazon-trump [accessed 3 May 2020]); Bill McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post Blames 2006 Law for US Postal Service’s Financial Woes,” PolitiFact, 15 April 2020 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/widespread-facebook-post-blames-2006-law-us-postal/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Blom and Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits; Al Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion for the US Postal Service,” Barron’s, 30 March 2020 (www.barrons.com/articles/the-u-s-postal-service-gets-10-billion-in-the-cares-act-it-needs-the-support-51585489596 [accessed 16 June 2020]).
[6] McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post”; Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis–And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, 15 July 2019 (https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ [accessed 15 June 2020]); Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis – And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, February 2020 (updated) (www.inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Manufactured-Postal-Crisis-February-2020.pdf [accessed 15 June 2020]).
[7] Nick Wingfield, “Is Amazon Bad for the Postal Service? Or Its Savior?” New York Times, 4 April 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/amazon-postal-service-trump.html [accessed 3 May 2020]); Manuela Tobias, “No, the Postal Service Isn’t Losing a Fortune on Amazon,” PolitiFact, 2 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/02/donald-trump/trump-usps-postal-service-amazon-losing-fortune/ [accessed 3 May 2018]); Kiely and Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack”; Manuela Tobias, “No, USPS Doesn’t Lose $1.46 on Every Amazon Package,” PolitiFact, 6 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/06/eric-bolling/usps-amazon-lose-146-every-package-delivers/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office.”
[8] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 281.
[9] “Postmaster General Statement on US Postal Service Stimulus Needs,” USPS (https://about.usps.com/newsroom/statements/041020-pmg-statement-on-usps-stimulus-needs.htm [accessed 3 May 2020]).
[10] Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion.”
[11] “The United States Postal Service Delivers the Facts,” USPS, February 2020.
[12] Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office”; Anderson, Klinger, and Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis.”
[13] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 266-7, 282-4.