It is conventional wisdom that, beginning 50 years ago,  the (capital “D”) Democratic Party, began shedding a big chunk of its traditional base—rural middle class and both urban and rural working class voters in favor of the urban meritocracy. Consequently, it created a breach into which the ever-opportunistic Republicans marched, thus flipping what had been the normal order of political things. And then along came Donald Trump who, for all his towering ignorance, quickly grasped that a combination of growing poverty, hopelessness and disinformation could be a winning combination in a presidential election.
 
The remarkable thing is that his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, despite having lived in Arkansas, one of the most rural, impoverished and hope-deprived states for almost 20 years, came away from that experience utterly clueless about this ominous combination and its implications. Moreover, she very publicly insulted the voters who fell into this category. Her obliviousness proved the axiom that intelligence encompasses much more than being “book-bright.” The truly bright combine academic intelligence with situational, creative and social emotional awareness.
 
While the odds 10 months before the 2022 mid-term elections appear daunting for Democrats, it is far too early to write their chances off. There is still time to right the Democratic ship while simultaneously saving our precious (small “d”) democracy.
 
It will not be nearly enough to run against Donald Trump. He will not be on the ballot, although many of his fear-motivated acolytes will be. Having been largely banned from social media, he is becoming an afterthought.
 
Instead, Democrats need to acknowledge that, to win elections, they must be able to appeal to the core concerns of the rural, post-manufacturing voters and peel off enough of them to add to their meritocratic base. Here is a four-pronged plan that Democrats should implement:

1. Accelerate the expenditure of funds under the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that will have the most impact on rural America--$65 billion for broadband so that every American will have high-speed access to the Internet; $55 billion to expand access to clean, safe drinking water; $110 billion to repair roads and bridges; $65 billion for upgrades to the electric power grid; $50 billion to protect against droughts, extreme heat, floods and wildfires, and for weatherization projects; $21 billion to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells.
2. Re-institute the Obama Manufacturing Initiative that then-Vice President Biden oversaw, the centerpiece of which was 12 regional re-training hubs designed to prepare laid-off manufacturing workers for jobs in the “new” economy. President Obama did this via executive order, budgetary transfers and re-programming, all well within a president’s authority without having to go to Congress for funding. The constraints that hampered this program then—jobs far away from the hubs—would be considerably eased by universal broadband.
3. Focus laser-like on “kitchen table issues” instead of becoming embroiled in partisan squabbling over cultural divides and obsessing about Trump. In addition, Democrats should stay away from appeals to voters to save democracy. Families who must worry day-to-day about putting food on the table and a roof over their heads have no energy to focus on other issues. Warning voters about democracy’s demise are wasted words.
4. Pare down the Build Back Better bill now stalled in the U.S. Senate to those few provisions that Senators Manchin and Sinema could support, namely those aimed at family expenditures: extension of the Child Care Tax Credit; free universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year olds; and reducing child care expenses.

 
If Democrats institute an electoral strategy such as this, they would have a shot at retaining the Senate and House and winning state and local races that currently appear to be long shots, while also preserving our (small “d”) democracy.
 
Dick Hermann
January 15, 2022

The United States has in front of it the opportunity of a lifetime to do a world of good and regain its global leadership along with the world’s esteem.
 
Unless virtually every human being is vaccinated, Covid-19 will never go away or even become endemic like the cold or flu. The Delta and Omicron variants are examples of what can happen when vaccines become the province of only rich nations. Vaccination rates of at least 60 percent could not keep the West safe from these variants that began in other countries where vaccination rates are miniscule. Unless we are all protected, none of us will be protected. Variants will keep on coming and we may never put Covid-19 behind us.
 
The U.S. could and should manufacture and deliver enough Covid-19 vaccines so that the entire global population can address the pandemic. Thus far, the COVAX initiative, the worldwide effort to get vaccinations into the arms of the global population, has only been able to deliver a small percentage of vaccines to the world’s developing nations. It has fallen far short of what is necessary.
 
Only the U.S. has the wherewithal to get this done. We have the manufacturing facilities that have produced the strongest Covid-19 vaccines. We have the means of dramatically stepping up production via the Defense Production Act. And we have the best delivery systems in the world.
 
U.S. global positioning and influence has taken a big hit in the 21st century. Our leading foreign policy “exports” have been George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War and Great Recession, Barack Obama’s Syrian “line in the sand,” Donald Trump’s capricious pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran nuclear weapons treaty and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, along with his self-defeating “America First” policy among other inanities, and Joe Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
 
Perhaps the only positive among all this negativity was Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), through which the U.S. provided $90 billion in funding for African HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research, making it up to then the largest global health program focused on a single disease in history. PEPFAR was a huge success, saved millions of lives and garnered the U.S. both gratitude and positive carryover from beneficiary countries. It was the poster child for winning global health diplomacy.
 
Now we have an opportunity to do it again.
 
Although the two most effective vaccines—mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna—have some challenges—Pfizer requires extreme cooling during shipping and storage; and the government is embroiled in a patent dispute with Moderna—there is an alternative: Corbevax, a more traditional vaccine developed by two Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine physician-researchers. Corbevax has been shown to be 90 percent effective and is being used in India. It is incredibly inexpensive to produce and easy to ship and store. The costs of such a program are small compared to the costs of a continuing pandemic.
 
By vaccinating the world, we would save millions of lives and relieve the enormous stress on under-resourced national healthcare systems. We would also benefit ourselves by taming Covid-19 here at home and eliminating potential new and lethal variants that could continue to jeopardize our own citizens and our economy.
 
Moreover, this should not be a one-time initiative. We should also commit to providing boosters as long as they might be needed. For this component of the program, we could urge other developed nations to join in.
 
It is only the U.S. that has proven vaccines and delivery capability to bring this off. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and the two Chinese vaccines that their countries have distributed widely have been a disappointment. They are of questionable efficacy and have disappointed most of the world’s developing nations.
 
The benefits of such an ambitious U.S. program extend far beyond health. America’s geostrategic influence will carry over into other areas of global competition: rebuilding trust in U.S. competence; the democratic battle against the totalitarian onslaught now afflicting the West; and empowering our burgeoning rivalry with China.
 
Everyone would profit from a generous U.S. global vaccination initiative.
 
Dick Hermann
January 8, 2022

​Francis Fukuyama gained a lot of acclaim in the 1990s with his best-selling book, The End of History. He argued that history was over because democracy had triumphed virtually worldwide, heavily influenced by the fall of the Soviet Union. His thesis was premature. Today, that book title is far more appropriate to the times in which we are living, but for very different reasons.
 
The global rise of populism, right-wing reaction, the drive toward fascism and the locking in of the will of the minority via questionable methods smacking of the same totalitarian impulses that democracy fought to suppress in the twentieth century make mincemeat of Fukuyama’s thesis. However, now we may be witnessing the actual end of history, but in a very different and far more dangerous sense.
 
If this is the end of history, it is because (1) it is declining as an academic subject in both K-12 and college classrooms, deemed not particularly relevant to the kind of education needed; (2) there are fewer historians, (3) Americans (as well as citizens of other countries) are increasingly ignorant of what went before, and (4) increasingly our political leaders, the people who should be most aware of and sensitive to history, are both clueless and uninterested in learning its critically important lessons.
 
I was blessed throughout my educational journey with a number of magnificent history teachers. What I learned from them has both greatly influenced my life as well as my reading, research and writing, as well as my public policy predilections. I have experienced at a granular level how history affects everything we do and every direction our nation and world takes. Today, as history has receded as an academic subject, my kind of experience might no longer be possible.
 
No historical parallel is perfect. But some are so aligned that immensely important lessons can be drawn from them, or ignored at their peril. One of the best examples of this was Hitler’s June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, likely the disaster that more than any of his other mistakes, led to his and Germany’s ruination. The century prior, Napoleon’s 600,000-man Grand Armée invaded Russia at around the same time of year, only to run smack into Russia’s typically early winter, which decimated Napoleon’s army. He left Russia with 9,000 troops. Hitler had all of the information about Napoleon’s folly, but ignored it. He chose poorly.
 
There are also plenty of examples where learning from history’s mistakes led to remarkable triumphs. The World War II allies were acutely aware of the terrible mistake made a quarter of a century before by the World War I victors—namely, treating defeated Germany harshly, a calculus that led to Hitler’s coming to power and setting the planet on fire. This time around, the conquerors were magnanimous towards the losers and both they and the world have profited hugely for 75 years as a result. The Allies chose wisely.
 
Neither an individual nor a nation can learn from history if they are ignorant of it. Surveys uniformly indicate that today’s Americans are woefully uninformed.
 
In fall 2020, the American Historical Association conducted a national survey of 1,816 people. Two-thirds of respondents considered history to be little more than an assemblage of names, dates, and events. More than three-fourths of high schoolers responded similarly. The idea that the past has lessons for us or that it should stimulate questions and critical analysis was virtually non-existent. All of this says nothing about attempts by outside groups to thwart the study of history by banning certain subjects, e.g., the impact of race. What has been happening recently at school board meetings serves to make teachers afraid to teach history. Instead of addressing possibly controversial subjects, they avoid them.
 
The shift away from history likely began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union’s launch of its Sputnik space satellite prompted the U.S. government and public to panic that we had fallen behind the Russians in science and technology. Educational priorities shifted dramatically toward science and mathematics. History, which had been deemed one of four core subjects along with science, math and language, was suddenly viewed as having no immediately applicable, practical use and was de-emphasized.
 
There are, however, a handful of holdouts where history education is still highly valued and is nurtured by academic administrators and eagerly embraced by students. It remains a top major at Yale, Brown, Princeton and Columbia. Meanwhile, it is being downgraded at the vast majority of universities. We cannot afford to so limit the pool of historians to graduates of a few Ivy League institutions.
 
It is very troubling that one of our major political parties depends on voters’ inability to apply their sense of history to assessing its policies. Immigration is a classic example. Trump turned immigration into the reason for most of the country’s problems even though history shows that it has been one of our biggest pluses, responsible for tremendous innovation and economic progress. Republicans and other despotically-inclined groups are really good at this. The Nazis rode the bogus “stab-in-the-back” falsehood (re: who lost World War I) to power. The Communists’ 65-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia, every entry virtually a lie, contributed to brainwashing an entire population. Donald Trump’s MAGA illusion and Big Lie are having a similar effect on the willingly conned. Whitewashing history for nefarious ends is, sadly, a highly successful political strategy.
 
The end of history is a bad portent for the future of this nation. A healthy democratic society and polity requires a constant, questioning examination and understanding of yesterday. The absence of “critical historical thinking skills” can only lead to tragic policy follies like the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Re-injecting these skills into the curriculum would go a long way toward making America great and vastly improving the quality of our decision-making.
 
Dick Hermann
January 1, 2022

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) may be the one Janus-faced member of congress who is both a villain and (considerably less of) a potential hero at the same time. His political career has been noteworthy for straddling the line between coming across convincingly as a good guy with a heart while deep down being an opportunistic, self-aggrandizing wretch. While governor, he did next to nothing for his desperately impoverished state aside from milking it for all it was worth to advantage his coal waste business and maneuvering millions of dollars into his family’s pockets. He could be the poster child for income and wealth inequality. At the same time, when out on the campaign stump, he brings to mind Conrad Birdie’s anthem, You Gotta Be Sincere. He oozes an empathy his colleagues can only dream about.
​
As a senator, his greatest achievements have been to consign his Mountain State even deeper at the bottom of the litany of state rankings. West Virginia ranks:

• 50th in public health,
• 50th in disconnected youth - non-high school grads not in school and not working,
• 50th in higher education attainment,
• 50th in foster care,
• 50th in hunger and food insecurity,
• 50th in the lowest percentage of adults with a college degree,
• 50th in infrastructure,
• 49th in life expectancy,
• 49th in poverty,
• 48th in median household income,
• 48th in overall economy,
• 47th in health care,
• 47th in unemployment,
• 45th in education,
• 44th in child poverty, and
• Near the top in dirty air and water.

There are a lot of programs in the president’s Build Back Better Act that would dramatically improve the lives of Manchin’s long-suffering constituents. But, as he told Fox News, he cannot support the bill–it is dangerously inflationary. 

That’s risible in the extreme, given that he just voted for a bloated defense budget that will cost at least five times the cost of the BBB proposal while contributing next to nothing to West Virginia’s or the nation’s security. One man’s reckless inflation is another man’s fiscal responsibility.

Then again, perhaps Manchin’s blowing up the most economically transformative piece of legislation in more than half-a-century will force Democrats to take a more studied second look at the $1.75 trillion BBB bill. The best parts of this omnibus bill are the child care tax credit, which will move and keep millions of children out of poverty, universal pre-K, and the healthcare provisions that will bring us closer to healthcare for all at lower insurance premiums. If the bill were pared down to these three provisions and they were made permanent, perhaps even the Manchin family scion might support them. Moreover, it would make sense to cut off the child care credit at something less than $400,000 annual income for a two-parent family.

West Virginia’s economy has depended so heavily on coal that declining production is killing the state. Today, mine safety and ecological concerns are major challenges to West Virginia. Even the much put-upon United Mine Workers Union sees the logic of the bill and is begging Manchin to support it.
 
“Coal Slurry” Joe’s vote is desperately needed to bring BBB over the finish line. It is a given that not a single Republican senator will vote for anything supported by the Democrats even if it would actually improve American lives.

“The perfect,” to quote that trite, hackneyed, cliche-ish and overused saying, “must never be allowed to become the enemy of the good.” 

Dick Hermann
December 24, 2021

​How does one explain that Donald Trump and his band of treasonous insurrectionists are allowed to run around free? Apparently the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government does not rise to the level of a criminal offense.
 
The Constitution’s language concerning treason is as follows: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
 
This narrow definition does make prosecution for treason extremely difficult. In the one case that comes closest to what Trump and his collaborators attempted on January 6, 2021—that of Aaron Burr 200 years ago—the defendant was acquitted. However, the current case involving Trump is distinguishable from the Burr case.
 
In secret correspondence with a U.S. general who subsequently turned against him and revealed the plot, Burr outlined his design for carving a new nation with him at its helm out of what was then Western U.S. territory. To render that a prosecutable conspiracy required an affirmative act. While a rag-tag army was being raised on an island in the Ohio River, Burr was not present and there was no evidence that he actually called for the marshaling of a military force to execute his plan. Consequently, the court acquitted him, finding that he did not levy war against the U.S.
 
Trump’s conspiracy, on the other hand, went much farther and was far more overt than Burr’s. In addition to plotting with Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Mark Meadows, Bernard Kerik, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Rudy Giuliani and others, Trump on January 6 appeared in front of his “army” and directed them to march on the Capitol. In his harangue to his “troops,” he employed incendiary language that they reasonably interpreted as a call to arms and action against the sitting U.S. government. Unlike the Burr conspiracy, which never got off the ground, Trump’s did levy war against the U.S.
 
There is even more ammunition at the Justice Department’s disposal than the distinguishing characteristics of the Trump conspiracy. In Ex parte Bollman and Swartwout, a habeus corpus case involving two Burr associates, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall interpreted the Constitution’s Treason Clause: To be a traitor, Marshall said, an individual did not have to appear “in arms against his country. On the contrary, if war be actually levied, that is, if a body of men be actually assembled for the purpose of effecting by force, a treasonable purpose, all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors.”
 
This interpretation fits Trump and his insurrectionist army to a T. This raises the question posited at the beginning of this essay: why haven’t Trump and his co-conspirators been indicted for this most monstrous of crimes?
 
There is a reason we have a Department of Justice and an Attorney General. DOJ’s own mission statement reads: “To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”
 
That’s pretty unambiguous. To date, DOJ and Attorney General Garland have fallen down on the job. It is a sad commentary that the Attorney General of the United States hesitates to go after the worst criminal act in our long history, possibly because he fears being branded “political.”
 
If Garland and DOJ are vacillating because they fear that they could lose this case, the next question to them should be: “Why haven’t you gone after Trump for the more than ten instances cited by the Mueller Report in which he obstructed justice, but could not be indicted because of DOJ’s guidelines against indicting a sitting president?” Trump is now a private citizen.
 
There comes a time when all good men must come to the aid of their country. That time, Mr. Garland, is now.
 
Dick Hermann
December 12, 2021

​The oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was one of the most revelatory airings of how Supreme Court justices think about arriving at consequential decisions. The questions they asked and the opinions they advanced raised a barrage of issues worth pondering:
 
The legal principle of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”), a hifalutin’ way of saying that courts should hesitate before overturning precedents, came up a lot. The conservative justices pointed out that plenty of precedents have been overturned by past Supreme Courts, their prime example being Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 school desegregation decision that reversed Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 declared that “separate but equal” schools for blacks were just fine. The attorneys arguing against the Mississippi law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy missed an opportunity to point out that Brown and the other precedent-shattering cases the justices mentioned differ from Dobbs in a very important respect: their reversals righted obvious, consensus wrongs. The original decisions later overturned were by all accounts immoral and unethical. In Dobbs, morality and ethics are a much murkier matter.
 
The “stench” that Justice Sotomayor said would adhere to the Court if it overturned Roe ignores that this partisan reek already exists. One has to be living in a cave without access to outside world media to believe that the Court has not already been irreparably harmed by the awful, often political decisions it has handed down in this century, e.g., Bush v. Gore (deciding the 2000 presidential election…by one vote) Citizens United (legalizing bribery in politics…and announcing that corporations are people, too) Shelby County v. Holder (gutting the Voting Rights Act), Rucho v. Common Cause (declaring that courts have no role in gerrymandering cases because these are political questions [whereas Bush v. Gore and Citizens United were not?]), and District of Columbia v. Heller (a tortured misreading of the Second Amendment). In all these decisions, the Court ignored logic, ethics, data and last but not least, the law.
 
Chief Justice Roberts mistakenly claimed that the fetal viability standard was mere “dicta” (i.e., just an aside) and not essential to the decision in Roe. It’s scary when the top U.S. judge doesn’t accurately frame something critical to what he is about to decide.
 
If Roe goes down, then body autonomy, a central rationale for the constitutionality of abortion, will no longer apply to pregnant women. Compare that to conservative justices in lower federal courts who have recently proclaimed that body autonomy justifies bans on vaccine and mask mandates, an opinion I suspect the Supreme Court’s conservatives also hold.
 
If the Court overturns or substantially limits Roe, which I believe is inevitable, it will be confirming the Republican inference that the sanctity of human life ends at birth. After that it is every man and woman for him/herself.
 
Republican legislators rail against abortion while simultaneously opposing any assistance to poor families who strain financially to support their children. They consistently vote against any proposal that would help those families. If conservatives believe that material circumstances prompt women to terminate a pregnancy, they need to do something to ease them. Yet they roadblock universal health insurance coverage, paid family leave, a livable wage and child care tax credits. Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP.
 
Justice Barrett’s solution, offered from the bench: Women could either leave unwanted newborns at the nearest police precinct or fire station, or give them up for adoption!
 
Overturning Roe v. Wade will not result in significantly fewer abortions. Restricting access to the procedure will mean fewer legal, safe abortions. Women of means will simply travel to places where they can safely terminate their pregnancies. Poor women will be forced to return to the back alley and coat hanger era.
 
Dick Hermann
December 3, 2021

​The COP-26 summit brought parties together to boost action towards the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Anticipation of the Glasgow meeting raised expectations that the 197 nations present would actually achieve something concrete that would keep global warming from exceeding 1.50C (2.70F).
 
It was not to be. The UN report on COP26 paints a far rosier picture of what was actually achieved than a realistic assessment supports. It borders on irresponsibility because it claims that “the Glasgow Climate Pact keeps 1.5 alive.” After that opening statement, everything that follows must be taken with an ocean of salt. COP-26’s failure means that the world must turn to another strategy. More on that below.
 
Glasgow attendees heard a great deal of soaring rhetoric from world leaders about the gravity of the problem. However, nothing resulted beyond the usual pledges of billions of dollars of transfer payments to developing nations staring the devastating effects of climate change square in the face. Nice words. But if the past is any indicator, words will speak volumes louder than any follow-up actions. The lofty rhetoric of world leaders was just that. Real action was nowhere to be found.
 
Glasgow glossed over some of the core climate change issues. For example, nothing was said about carbon capture. Similarly, the world’s nations were silent about nuclear power, an essential transitional energy source if we are to phase out fossil fuels and move to renewables.
 
The leaders of two of the world’s foremost greenhouse gas polluters—China and Russia—did not even bother to attend COP-26. Absent Presidents XI and Putin, the conference outcomes border on the meaningless.
 
Without itemizing the pledge particulars, suffice it to say that the planet can no longer limit temperature rises to 1.50C since the Industrial Revolution by the target date of 2030. The political will to do that simply does not exist. Temperatures are certain to smash through that barrier, which climate scientists have earmarked as the point of no return. Once crossed, what that means is that the climate will be out of control.
 
COP 26 was full of “urgings,” but not much that was tangible or enforceable. Telling was a statement in the official Glasgow report: “Countries have raised their ambition….” This may be the finest example of diplomatic clap-trap in history.
 
As in the previous 25 climate conferences, Glasgow kicked the can down the road once again. Going into Glasgow, half of the world’s major economies had not even met their previous 2015 Paris Agreement goals. And there are no sanctions for these failures, not even a gentle tap on the wrist.
 
With this non-approach, the 1.5 goal is now permanently out of reach. Natural disasters—more and greater storms, floods, forest fires, mudslides, droughts, heat waves et al.—will reach unheard-of intensity. Entire communities will be swallowed up by rising seas. Crop yields will decline. Water shortages will become more widespread. Population displacement will affect millions of people. The world will be forced to deal with this destruction accompanied by enormous increases in the costs of cleanup and in lives and livelihoods lost.
 
Add to the climate chaos that many nations have been over-reporting their carbon savings, a fact that came to light in Glasgow, but did not make it into the UN report. There are no sanctions for climate reporting fraud.
 
What this all means is that it is time to turn attention from halting and reversing global warming to mitigation. In other words, learning to live and cope with climate change and the escalating havoc it will inflict. Translated, that means constructing barriers against rising sea levels in places like lower Manhattan; vastly increasing federal and state budgets for agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard; enacting laws restricting residential construction in places highly prone to forest fires and beach erosion; and encouraging “climate migration” from areas at high risk to safer locales.
 
Dick Hermann
November 28, 2021

​President Biden has inexplicably fallen into the Trump Saudi Dumpster. This is disappointing in the extreme. 
 
Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to Saudi Arabia. It was the first, but by no means the last time he toadied to the kingdom’s dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
 
His one-way love affair with the Saudis and MBS was a constant of Trump’s presidency. He did not waver even when MBS directed the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s justification for condoning this butchery was that the Saudis were going to pay American firms billions of dollars in return for armaments. That those weapons were used to rain death on thousands of innocent Yemenis was no deterrent to Trump’s shameful veneration of the kingdom.
 
It was thought that, once the U.S. achieved energy independence in the 2010s, 65 years of being the Saudis’ doormat would end. Despite no longer needing to rely on Saudi oil for the U.S. economy to function, Donald Trump enthusiastically prostrated himself and allowed MBS to walk all over him.
 
Thus, it was with great relief that, with Trump gone, it appeared that our relationship with this repressive regime that murders its citizens and enslaves its female population would finally be rebalanced. On assuming office, the Biden administration announced that it would only sell defensive weapons to Saudi Arabia. While even this modest policy retrenchment was insufficient, at least it was a modest step toward terminating America’s Saudi servility.
 
Not so fast.
 
President Biden has just approved a $650 million sale of arguably offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia. There is absolutely no justification for the U.S. to continue Trump’s misbegotten policy of fawning over this corrupt, homicidal regime that continues to wreak havoc on both its own population and Yemen, and makes a mockery of human rights.
 
The counter-argument from the State Department’s Arabists who have apparently captured Biden is that Saudi Arabia is the offset to Iran’s regional aspirations. The implication of this is that, absent U.S. military support, the Saudis would be unable to counter Iran. That is ludicrous. The Saudi military is brimming with both offensive and defensive weaponry that is more than adequate to give Iran pause.
 
It is now up to Congress to stop this misguided missile sale. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has filed a “joint resolution of disapproval.” I don’t find myself typically agreeing with this radical anti-Semite on any issue. This time, however, she is absolutely right.
 
Unfortunately, prospects for stopping the sale are poor. Even if the measure receives congressional approval, Biden is likely to veto it.
 
So here we go again, continuing to knuckle under to Saudi demands for more arms, weapons they could easily deploy in Yemen despite their assurances to the contrary. Someone please inform Biden that the balance of oil intimidation that governed U.S.-Saudi relations ever since President Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz Ibn-Saud met in Egypt in 1945 and signed the pact that kept the oil spigot open to the West, has changed in our favor.
 
Dick Hermann
November 19, 2021

​The 2021 election results in Virginia, New Jersey and around the country might have appeared to signal that Donald Trump’s direct efforts at subverting democracy and replacing it with extreme right-wing authoritarianism are no longer working. With Trump out of power and banned from major social media, he himself has become, for the moment anyway, a has-been.
 
But that does not mean that the Trumpist threat is behind us. In fact, what was the top-down nature of the danger has morphed into a bottom-up menace that may be more dangerous. As has become the norm, defenders of American democracy are slow to realize the peril and take the necessary steps to counteract it.
 
This is not unprecedented. Once again, history tells a similar story.
 
Following Adolf Hitler’s release from prison, to which he had been confined after his failed “Beer Hall Putsch,” his National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party changed tactics. Instead of beating its head against the wall in futile, top-down efforts to seize power, it switched to a bottom-up strategy. It intimidated thousands of local government officials to resign or take the equivalent of early retirement due to a barrage of death threats and violent assaults. Death threats were often aimed not only at these officials, but also at their families, children included. These officials quite properly concluded that their personal and family safety was paramount. In many cases, the vacancies created by their departures were filled by Nazis.
 
This “bottom-up” strategy proved hugely successful. By the time Adolf Hitler got himself appointed German Chancellor, the ability to control both the electoral environment and local populations made it easy for him and the Nazis to rapidly and seamlessly take control of all of the levers and levels of power. We all know what happened next.
 
Disturbingly, something similar is now happening in America. Trump true-believers, enraged and enflamed by vaccine mandates, mask requirements, and the non-issue of Critical Race Theory, even though it isn’t being taught in K-12 schools anywhere, are (1) threatening school board members, school administrators and educators, and (2) moving into the vacancies created when school board members resign their positions or opt not to run for re-election due to fear.
 
A growing number of the 90,000+ school board members in the U.S. are leaving their positions, opening the door to MAGA zealots as replacements. No job or volunteer position (a number of school boards are comprised of volunteers) is worth a life.
 
The new MAGAverse strategy designed to subvert the country and transform it into an authoritarian state bereft of the rule of law does not stop at the schoolhouse door. It also extends to state and local election administration. A similar attrition is going on among county and city election officials. Fourteen states, all controlled by Republicans, have recently enacted laws empowering state legislatures to overturn election results, i.e., the will of the voters, if they don’t like the results. Moreover, just like school board member attrition, local election administrators are quitting in droves due to death threats aimed at them and their families. They too are being replaced by Trump partisans.
 
Little is being done to counter this bottom-up subversion. The Justice Department has directed the FBI to work with local school boards to try to figure out ways to protect board members. Although no action has yet been taken to implement any protective measures, Republicans are screaming “foul,” turning this too into a culture war battleground. Unfortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland is emulating the kumbaya, “play nice” inclinations of his boss, President Biden, instead of coming down hard on those who threaten local officials.
 
Dick Hermann
November 12, 2021