Jonathan P. Baird

In my lifetime, I have experienced three peace movements. There was the enormous anti-Vietnam War peace movement, the international nuclear freeze movement in the 1980’s and the smaller movement that opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

What is worrisome about our own time is that there is not a comparable peace movement even though a hot war danger remains high. Both Ukraine and the situation with China raise the spectre of possible nuclear war.

At least in the 1980’s masses of people were afraid of nuclear war. Now it seems like people simply assume it won’t happen. Our time lacks forceful voices emphasizing diplomacy, negotiation and peace-making. Neither political party appears to see or address the increased militarism and war risk.

This is probably not surprising considering the history of empires. Like the British Empire and other colonial empires before it, the American empire wants a unipolar world where it calls the shots. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, the United States sought to establish global political and military dominance.

Instead of a peace dividend after the Cold War, power to control world affairs has been the agenda of our political elite, whether Republican or Democratic. Like 19th century imperialists, our leaders remain stuck in old ways of thinking. It is like lessons are never learned from past wars. Vietnam and Iraq don’t register or even cause pause. We have a need for an enemy and it is on to the next war.

Not enough leaders of major powers take seriously the reality of looming climate catastrophe and how it requires change. The science could not be clearer. Carbon dioxide emissions are the leading source of greenhouse gases which are responsible for global warming. Combustion of fossil fuels is primarily behind the emissions.

If we do not trigger an immediate decline in such combustion, the results will be nightmarish. They are already quite evident. Take your pick: the devastating floods in Pakistan, the heatwaves in China, Europe and California. And the raging forest fires in the western U.S.. Superstorms and flooding are in our future.

Even though the Inflation Reduction Act passed Congress and it has laudable climate provisions, action on climate ranks behind military needs among almost all American leaders. In 2020 the United States spent an estimated $778 billion on its military. That represents almost 40% of the world’s military expenditures even though the U.S. composes 4.25% of the world’s population.

In a bi-partisan way, we throw many billions of dollars into the war in Ukraine. Our military leaders want to weaken Russia. They still see it as an enemy, even not being communist. There is precious little talk of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine although there must be such a settlement.

I oppose the Russian invasion and I think there should be an immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine. But the narrative that western powers are blameless is simple-minded. As Jeffrey Sachs has persuasively argued “the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East”. That was followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement.

The war needs to end. No one wants to think about it but the threat of nuclear war remains too high. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukaine, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, has come under fire. Shelling by either side could lead to a Chernobyl. If the war continues to go badly for Russia, would a desperate Putin play the nuclear card? Probably not, but speculation is not that reassuring.

Similarly, the U.S. should not be escalating tensions with China. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was ill-advised and unnecessarily provocative. Tensions with China must be de-escalated.

China and the U.S. are the world’s largest carbon emitters. Last year, U.S. Climate Evoy John Kerry and China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua issued a joint statement to strengthen the Paris Agreement by adopting long-term strategies aimed at net-zero greenhouse gas emissions to keep the world’s temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

After Pelosi’s visit, China broke off climate talks and launched large scale military drills. The foolishness of scuttling U.S.-China climate talks should be obvious but hawkishness appears to be in vogue. And unfortunately that is not an accident.

Powerful economic forces, our military-industrial complex and particularly weapons manufacturers, want war expenditures to always remain high. They always want to modernize weapons systems regardless of whether it is nukes, fighter planes or battleships. It is fundamentally about profit. As Randolph Bourne said over 100 years ago: “War is the health of the state’.

A new peace movement is needed to challenge our misguided priorities of military dominance and empire-building. America still maintains 750 foreign military bases spread across 80 nations. Our military is the world’s largest oil consumer and causes more greenhouse gas emissions than 140 nations combined. What good will an American empire be if the world is not habitable for our children and grandchildren? War should not be taking precedence over climate.

In the 21st century, there is a need for a new definition of national security which would make the climate emergency and prevention of nuclear war our highest priorities.

Hamilton Nolan has written:

“We are like the drivers of a car accelerating toward a brick wall, unwilling to take our foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes, because we don’t want to disturb the passengers in the back seat.”

As the old saying goes, there is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Part of the Donald Trump playbook is the creation of enemies to rail against. Trump created the bogeyman of Antifa. When you step back and think about it, Antifa was a bizarre choice. Some people who identify with Antifa live in Portland, Oregon but they are not even an organization. They are mostly an exaggerated fantasy but for Trump they have played the role of foil.

I am not saying Antifa doesn’t exist. Obviously there are millions who identify with anti-fascism. But Antifa is more an image inhabiting fevered minds than much of a reality.

The word “Antifa” is an abbreviation for anti-fascist. What is strange is that before Trump tagged Antifa, anti-fascists were the incarnation of a noble tradition. Trump dragged anti-fascists down through his looking glass and distorted any sense of history.

The obvious needs to be stated: anti-fascists fought and defeated the German and Italian fascists in World War 2 and saved democracy in America and elsewhere. These anti-fascists were the British, American and Russian militaries. Whatever the internal differences among the allies, they all contributed to the defeat of European fascism.

So how did it come to be that anti-fascists became the bad guys? Trump has consistently associated anti-fascists with riots against the police. In Trump World, anti-fascists were enemies of his peculiar version of law and order. Also, I would offer that Trump has embraced fascists. Think Bolsanaro, Orban, Duterte and Erdogan. Trump has cozied up to the Proud Boys and Q’Anon and has now promised to pardon the criminal seditionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6.

History illustrates the illogic of Trump’s anti-fascist antipathy. American anti-fascists recognized the danger Nazi Germany represented to the world. To understand, I would go back to the little-remembered Spanish Civil War in the years before World War 2. In the 1930’s, America was isolationist and trying to remain neutral, a posture which served Nazi interests.

While they were sometimes called “premature anti-fascists”, the American opponents of fascism in the mid-1930’s had the most clear-eyed vision and understanding of Nazi barbarism. In 1936-1939, 2,800 young Americans volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic against fascist General Francisco Franco who was financially supported by Hitler and Mussolini.

The Spanish Civil War stirred the conscience of anti-fascists from all over the world. Over 40,000 anti-fascists from over fifty countries volunteered to fight in Spain. They became the International Brigades. The war came about when monarchists, large landowners and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church rebelled against the democratically elected Spanish Republican government.

The Americans who went to Spain organized themselves into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They reflected a wide swath of views on the Left but they were all united by an anti-fascist commitment. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army.

The Lincoln Brigade was tremendously idealistic and self-sacrificing. They were poorly supplied in food, water and weapons. Of the 2,800 Americans who fought in Spain, an estimated 750 died there.

When faced with his mother’s disapproval of his decision to fight in Spain, an American Jewish volunteer, Hy Katz, said this:

“This is a case where sons must go against their mother’s wishes for the sake of their mothers themselves. So I took up arms against the persecutors of my people – the Jews – and my class – the Oppressed. Are these traits which you admire so much in a Prophet Jeremiah or a Judas Maccabeus bad when your son exhibits them?”

Probably the best book about the Spanish Civil War is George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Inside the story of the battle against fascism was the effort for social revolution in Spain. Orwell wrote as a soldier for the Republic and a partisan. In spite of the horrors of the war he experienced (he himself got shot), Orwell wrote:

“Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.”

Before Franco’s victory, Spain provided a glimpse of what a more egalitarian society could look like.

I would suggest that the Spanish Civil War history connects directly to our time. The same battle between democracy and fascism is going on now. Like the Spanish fascists, MAGA Republicans reject a fair, democratic election they lost.

Beyond all particulars, the central question voters face this fall is whether America will remain a constitutional republic or whether it will degenerate into authoritarianism. And that is not hyperbole.

MAGA Republicans threaten both voting rights and election oversight. It is not an accident they have targeted Secretary of State races in battleground states. The Washington Post has reported that 54 of 87 Republican candidates running for positions with power over the way elections are certified in battleground states have falsely claimed the 2020 election was fraudulent. If such people are elected, they would have power to monkey with procedures and results. Winners could become losers.

Trump and his MAGA Republican supporters do not believe in the continued existence of American democracy and the rule of law. The January 6 coup attempt was consistent with the fascist resort to violence when unable to win electorally. Unable to accept losing, Trump will always say elections are corrupt and illegitimate.

In the fall election and beyond, we need a united front of all Democrats, progressives, independents, conservatives and anti-Trump Republicans to protect our constitutional republic. Saving democracy and preventing a slide into fascism is the most important issue out there. We must do better than the Spanish Republic did.

For years, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has been a lone voice in the wilderness warning about the role of conservative dark money on the judiciary. He has described a multi-pronged effort. First, the conservative legal movement selects carefully vetted judges who embrace a pro-corporate world view. Then the movement unleashes millions in dark money from their donor network to support their nominees. Finally they tee up strategic cases and use amicus briefs to get the desired pro-corporate result.

In an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, Senator Whitehouse detailed a 50 year effort going back to the famous secret memo written by Lewis Powell, then a prominent corporate lawyer, which decried progressive gains. Powell argued for an unprecedented influence campaign on behalf of corporate America.

I thought of Senator Whitehouse and Justice Powell when I saw the story about the massive $1.6 billion donation Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society Vice-President, received from Barre Seid, a 90 year old Chicago electronics company mogul.

This unbelievably sketchy transaction, structured so that neither Leo’s group nor Seid pay taxes, is likely the biggest political donation ever. It left Leo sitting atop a mountain of cash. No one knows how this money will be spent but it is such a stupendous windfall that it is safe to assume it will be transformational over the next generation for the whole right wing ecosphere.

Seid transferred an ownership stake in his company, Tripp Lite, to Leo’s new group, Marble Freedom Trust. The trust then sold Seid’s company and netted $1.6 billion. It is estimated the transaction saved Seid $400 million in taxes. The Marble Freedom Trust is not required to publicly disclose its donations and it has wide latitude in spending on elections or other ideological projects.

The Seid to Leo money transfer perfectly encapsulates the dark money conundrum we face. Although an absolutely enormous donation, the deal went down in the shadows two years ago. We were lucky to find out about it at all. The New York Times reported it, but as noted, it was two years after the fact.

In the Citizens United era, there is no transparency. Money rules in politics. People have the mistaken notion that the judiciary is insulated from special interest influence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Certainly, the Founders did not anticipate the corrupting power of corporations but here we are. It is not just a dark money flood – it is a tsunami.

Leonard Leo has been described as the most influential person you have never heard of. He is not just another conservative movement lawyer ideologue. He has been the mastermind of the conservative effort to reshape the American judicial system, especially the Supreme Court. He delivered to former President Trump the list of Federalist Society-vetted Supreme Court candidates and he counseled him on picks.

He has been remarkably successful in packing the Supreme Court and the federal courts with right wing extremists. Leo’s fingerprints are all over the successful nominations of five sitting conservative Supreme Court justices as well as the effort to stop Merrick Garland’s ascendancy to the High Court.

During an event in 2018, his buddy, Justice Clarence Thomas jokingly referred to Leo as “the third most powerful person in the world”. Leo has been effectively raising huge sums from anonymous corporate donors since 2005. The Seid transaction is a glimpse into a world we never get to see. Dark money is typically funding that cannot be traced to actual donors.

The conservative plan has been to groom and select judges who will unambiguously support the Republican effort to roll back laws and regulations they consider unwelcome. As Trump’s lawyer Donald McGahn has said,

“There is a coherent plan here where actually the judicial selection and the deregulatory effort are really the flip side of the same coin.”

In response to the Seid donation, Leo has said they are just trying to keep up with the Left but that is laughable. Over the last 20 years, the Left failed to prioritize judicial nominations and it has nothing in place that in any way compares to what Leo has accomplished. Results speak for themselves.

Senator Whitehouse points out how much the Supreme Court has become a reliable ally for corporate and Republican partisan interests. He writes that from 2004 to 2017, the Roberts Court issued 73 five to four partisan decisions which benefited big corporate and Republican donor interests. To quote Whitehouse:

“They included allowing corporate interests to spend unlimited money in elections, hobbling pollution regulations, enabling attacks on minority voting rights, curtailing labor’s right to organize and restricting workers’ ability to challenge employers in court.”

And this was before the devastating decisions we saw this last term.

Leo and the Federalist Society are on a mission to turn back the legal clock to a pre-New Deal era. Incredibly, they appear to believe the law was better 85 years ago. This is a deeply reactionary project designed to benefit rich Christian conservative white men. It is a legal agenda for the 1%.

I think the overturning of Roe v Wade shows that precedent will not stand in the way of the conservative wrecking ball.

Much could be done to address the dark money plague. Congress could require much more transparency. The courts have escaped the type of tight scrutiny other branches of government require. Senator Whitehouse suggests far more disclosure of donors behind political campaigns for judge, disclosure of travel and hospitality perks and reporting of ex parte contact during pending litigation.

The hidden behind-the-scenes nature of the whole conservative influence machine should shock Americans. I expect there is much we still do not know.

When you think about whom to thank when the Supreme Court makes climate change worse, destroys women’s reproductive rights, and makes it much harder for black people to vote, don’t forget Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society and the Republican Party.

A few years back, while on vacation, I was browsing in Tim’s Used Books in Provincetown. In the biography/autobiography section, I came across The Rebel Girl, An Autobiography by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. To my surprise, Flynn wrote that she was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1890. I had no idea Flynn was from Concord. As far as I knew, no one ever claimed her. She also lived some of her early years in Manchester. Her father had moved the family around New England as he tried to find work.

The name Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is now obscure but in the early twentieth century she was one of the most famous labor leaders in America. The title, The Rebel Girl, comes from a song written by the legendary minstrel, Joe Hill, that he dedicated to Flynn. In part, the lyrics go:

“There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as everyone knows
Some are living in beautiful mansionsAnd are wearing the finest of clothes
There are blue blood queens and princesses
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl
But the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl

That’s the Rebel Girl, the Rebel Girl!
To the working class, she’s a precious pearl”…

Gore Vidal once called the USA “the United States of Amnesia”. When it comes to labor history, Vidal could not be more accurate. The vital and colorful history of American labor has not been transmitted. It is forgotten history, an untold story.

Flynn was from a poor but intellectual Irish working class family. She wrote that all four kids slept in a single bed with their coats on because of the cold. Her parents were too poor even to afford a babysitter so they dragged her and her siblings to political meetings. Her parents were radicals and her father ran for assemblyman in New York as a Socialist Party candidate.

As a young teen, she was asked to give a speech at the Harlem Socialist Club in New York City and she spoke on the topic of “What socialism will do for women”. She was inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” and August Bebel’s book Women and Socialism.

Quickly Flynn proved she was a gifted orator. Right from the start she grabbed media attention. She started speaking on the street in New York City and got arrested. One newspaper headlined “Mere child talks bitterly of life”. The New York Times called her “ a ferocious Socialist haranguer”.

In 1907, her high school expelled her and she joined the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. She began a period in her life when she travelled widely around America working as a labor agitator. She said she had wanderlust in her heart. She described the IWW this way:

“The IWW identified itself with all the pressing immediate needs of the poorest, the most exploited, the most oppressed workers. It “fanned the flames” of their discontent…The memorable accusation against Jesus, “He stirreth up the people!” fitted the IWW. It set out to organize the unorganized, unskilled foreign-born workers in the mass production industries of the East and the unorganized migratory workers of the West, who were largely American born and employed in maritime, lumbar, agriculture, mining and construction work.”

Flynn was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs. She knew them all. Theodore Dreiser called Flynn “an East Side Joan of Arc”. She led the famous Lawrence Massachusetts Bread and Roses textile strike in 1912. Workers were being forced to work 56 hours a week for starvation pay. Conditions in the shop were deplorable. Mill owners were forced to settle, giving workers a 20% pay raise.

In the years before World War 1, Flynn worked to organize garment workers in Pennsylvania, restaurant workers in New York City and miners in Minnesota. She also played a central role in the silk workers strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913.

She was an opponent of World War 1 and like other anti-war activists, she was accused of violating the Espionage Act. The government ultimately dropped those charges. She fought against the deportation of other immigrants who had also opposed the war.

In 1920, Flynn helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, and she was elected to the National Board. In 1921, She took up the struggle against the conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was
the cause celebre of the 1920’s. She was a key fundraiser.

In spite of seven years of unrelenting effort by the Defense Committee, the state of Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. On August 23, 1977, the 50th anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned them and declared any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from their names.

After a long period of ill health, Flynn joined the Communist Party in 1936. She wrote a series of feminist articles for its paper, the Daily Worker. Flynn wrote about birth control, women’s suffrage, labor legislation for women, divorce, prostitution and desire for love. She never publicly dissented from the party line. She remained a loyalist even in the face of the exposure of Stalin’s crimes.

During the McCarthy witch hunt, Flynn and sixteen others were prosecuted for violating the Smith Act. She and the others were accused of conspiring to “teach and advocate violent overthrow” of the government. After a nine month trial Flynn was found guilty. She served two years in Federal Prison in Anderson West Virginia. Her statement delivered at her trial in 1952 is remarkably eloquent, defiant, and revealing.

In her history of American labor, Fight Like Hell, Kim Kelly writes:

“Collective working-class power was behind every stride forward this country has made, grudgingly or otherwise, and will continue to be the animating force behind any true progress.”

I am sure that is a statement with which Elizabeth Gurley Flynn would have agreed.

I think it is fair to say that fear of immigrants in the United States is out-of-conrol. And it is not just in the United States.

Fascist and far right politicians have persuaded citizens in many countries that the greatest threat they face is not climate change or economic inequality. It is faceless masses at some distant border.The demagogic message from Donald Trump, Victor Orban and Marine Le Pen is the same: they will replace you, they will eventually outnumber you.

A May Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 3 in 10 worry more immigration is causing native-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence. Irrational fear of outsiders has skewed public understanding.

The lack of empathy for immigrants was recently driven home by the horrific June deaths of 53 people inside a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas. The truck did not have a functioning cooling system as temperatures spiked over 100 degrees. People wedged in like sardines died from heat exhaustion and dehydration. The dead included victims from age 13 to 55 who were from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. All were believed to be brought illegally through the border with Mexico.

I didn’t see much sympathy for these dead. It was just a blip in the news cycle. But the story is very reminiscent of Jewish experience. Just like Mexican and Central Americans now, Jews were once smuggled into America.

The story has been forgotten. One hundred years ago, Jews were a suspect class. Anti-semitism was widespread and much of the American public held stereotypical views, not too different from how “illegal aliens” are viewed now.

In 1921 and later in 1924 strict immigration quotas were put into place that greatly limited the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, especially Jews, who could come into the U.S..

The quotas were so limiting that the new laws prompted illegal smuggling operations. The fact of the quotas did not stop European Jews from wanting to come to the U.S.. No one knows exactly how many Jews illegally emigrated to the U.S.. Over the period from 1921 to 1965, best estimates are in the tens of thousands, possibly higher.

The story is told in Libby Garland’s book After They Closed the Gates. Smugglers brought Jews over on ships with forged travel documents. People crossed the border in Mexico, Canada and also by boat from Cuba. Havana was a center for smuggling from Cuba into the U.S. It afforded easy access to the Gulf and Atlantic ports, especially to points on the Florida coast.

Garland shows how complicated and multi-faceted the process of immigration was. Garland writes:

“Emigration was only one of many arenas in which Eastern European Jews relied on illegal methods. Buying and selling on the black market, smuggling, assuming false identities and obtaining forged documents were, particularly in the chaos that followed World War 1, facts of life.”

There was a dark side to the alien smuggling. Liquor bootlegging and sex trafficking were often part of the rampant illegality. The smugglers were often brutal. Garland says immigrants who did not pay up or who were naive enough to pay up front would get dumped overboard. Smugglers often robbed Jewish passengers of their valuables.

Immigrants often relied on friends and families in the United States for detailed instructions about the story they should offer which would provide the best chance for entry. Jewish name-changing was a rite of passage.

Given the experience Jews had with anti-semitism in Russia and eastern Europe, many people perceived illegal immigration as a perfectly legitimate choice. Desperate situations demanded creative responses. Garland says that being Jewish in Eastern Europe often meant having to engage in a process of creating improvisational and shifting identities.

Just as with immigrants now, Jewish illegal immigrants left Eastern Europe and Russia because of extreme poverty, lack of economic opportunities and the threat of violence. Immigration restriction and the lack of a legal path to citizenship contributed to people turning to the smugglers.

From the perspective of 2022, knowing what we know now about the Holocaust, that Jewish illegal immigration now looks benign and it is never mentioned. Closing the gates left European Jews at the hands of the Nazis. In retrospect, the extreme quotas that kept Jews out of the United States were both a tragedy and a giant mistake. How many were murdered who could have been saved?

Maybe Jewish history should make Americans reconsider the hysteria directed against Mexican and Latin American illegal immigrants.

No one supercharged the fear and hysteria more than Trump Administration hatemonger, Stephen Miller. Miller’s uncle, David Glosser posted this on Facebook:

“My nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on an awful truth. If in the early 20th century, the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”

The last major immigration reform was enacted in 1986. We remain long overdue for new legislation which could provide a roadmap to permanent protections and citizenship for undocumented people.

I have been trying to think of the right metaphor to describe the U.S. Supreme Court’s last term. I would settle on “train wreck”. The major problem with the characterization of train wreck is the fact that most train wrecks can get cleared away relatively quickly and trains can get back on the tracks and running. The damage is not necessarily long-lasting. That cannot be said about the Supreme Court’s last term.

The damage done will be long-lasting. Whether it is guns, climate change, criminal defendants’ rights, Native American tribal sovereignty or religious liberty, the defeats were epic. But they pale next to the harm done to abortion rights in the Dobbs case.

Taking away a constitutionally protected right that has been guaranteed for 50 years has never happened before. Up until the Dobbs case, the Constitution safeguarded women’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Now the Court has given that right to the state.

The idea that a court would take away a given right is counter-intuitive. While American courts have a checkered history, we generally expect that courts will bestow rights – not short-circuit them.

What is disturbing about Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs is not just the holding that there is no right to abortion, it is also his reasoning. It reeked of misogyny as well as a one-sided grasp of history.

Women simply do not figure in the decision. That is true even though as an issue abortion could not be more exclusively about women.

Justice Alito argues that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions. He says the right to abortion is not mentioned in the 1787 Constitution. Nor is it an unenumerated right. Of course, the words “woman” or “sex” are not mentioned in the Constitution. That did not change until 1920 when the nineteenth amendment was added to the Constitution and gave women the right to vote.

In reading Justice Alito’s opinion, you get no sense of the profound sexism that has shaped American history. Fifty-five white men crafted the Constitution. As Jill Lepore has written, women were not “part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People” “.

In every respect women were second class citizens. There were no women judges or legislators. Neither could women run for or hold office. A patriarchal system relegated women to the domestic sphere to be wives and mothers. Men virtually owned their wives. When women married, they lost their legal identity. They couldn’t own property, control their own money or sign legal documents.

Domestic violence was practically a norm. There was no such thing as marital rape. Married women had no right to say “no” to sex. Both English and American jurisprudence did not see husbands as ever guilty of rape of a wife.

Based on the Dobbs opinion one might conclude that Justice Alito had never heard of women’s liberation. Alito conveys no sense of appreciation of any women’s history.

It is telling what legal authorities he cites in Dobbs. Alito has a fixation on medieval men. Most prominently he cites a 17th century English jurist, Sir Matthew Hale, who he calls a “great” and “eminent” legal authority. He mentions Hale more than 10 times. Hale lived from 1609-1676.

In 1662, Hale presided over the trial and execution of two women, Rose Cullendar and Amy Duny, for witchcraft. The trial became a model for the Salem witch trials which were held 30 years later.

Hale found independent women to be a threat to society. If not owned by a husband or a father, Hale believed women could become satanic.

Hale believed women’s bodies belonged to men. He was steeped in the Christian religious view that women were made from Adam’s rib. Beating your wife was encouraged as a corrective tool.

Probably Hale’s most significant “contribution” to legal scholarship was his defense of marital rape. It remained the legal standard in the U.S. until the 1970’s. Law Professor Jill Hasday writes that she has read hundreds of American judicial opinions, citing Hale. For centuries, male legal authorities like Hale did not believe women had any bodily autonomy.

Professor Hasday goes on to say that the reason Alito cites Hale is because he wants to establish that the early American legal system was opposed to abortion. But Alito botches the history. Although little remarked on, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians issued a joint statement criticizing the Court decision. They wrote:

“… the court denies the strong presence in U.S. history and traditions at least from the Revolution to the Civil War of women’s ability to terminate pregnancy before the third to fourth month without intervention by the state.”

The Court majority chose to disregard the historians. Before the Dobbs decision, both American historian organizations had written an amicus brief outlining the historical and legal precedents of abortion in the U.S..The amicus cut directly against Alito’s argument that abortion was not deeply rooted in American history.

How anachronistic and messed-up is it that Alito would rely on a man from the Dark Ages who believed women could be witches as his authority on reproductive rights. Even by the seventeenth century, Hale was considered a misogynist. Back then, many were already doubting allegations of witchcraft.

By sending abortion back to the states. Alito knowingly is transferring power back to the white right wing men who control so many state legislatures. He knows his decision will result in abortion care being severely restricted or outlawed in roughly half the states. Now we can return to the era of coat-hanger abortions.

The Republican Party owns this debacle. This was their male supremacist project for the last 40 years. As happened in Kansas, the voters must make them pay.

Many aspects of former President Trump’s January 6 coup attempt have become clearer because of the work of the January 6 Committee. We know there was nothing spontaneous about the coup effort. As with Trump’s other attacks on democracy like his fake elector scheme, this was a highly planned operation.

From right after the time that Trump tweeted on December 19 for his shock troops to come to Washington D.C. for something “wild” until January 6, a plan evolved. Much money, strategizing and organizing were behind the insurrection.

However, there are many unanswered questions that deserve further exploration. The January 6 Committee hasn’t explained everything and I have more questions.

How much coordination existed between Trump operatives and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers? What went on at the Willard Hotel war room command center leading to January 6? Key members of Trump world like Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and John Eastman were part of the war room planning. From Cassidy Hutchinson we know that Mark Meadows called in to the war room on the evening of January 5.

Was there a developed plan in place for the violent attack on the Capitol that included Trump and his operatives? Was the violence planned by the Trump team?

Were the Proud Boys put in place early by Trump operatives to initiate the violent attack? We know from Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker, that hundreds of Proud Boys cased the Capitol around 10:30am on January 6, long before Trump’s speech. I guess I don’t believe in “accidents”. We know that leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers met in a Washington DC parking garage on January 5. Why did Enrique Tarrio, Proud Boys chairman, post on Parler on December 29:

“We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will be spread across downtown DC in smaller teams.”

Why were so many of the insurrectionists armed with lethal weapons like pistols and assault weapons? Why did they have flex ties and bear spray? Why did they stash an arsenal of firearms and ammunition at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va, a 15 minute drive from the Capitol? Why did Trump urge the removal of magnetometers on January 6 when he knew his supporters were armed?

Why were the Oath Keepers decked out in full tactical gear, wearing hard-knuckled gloves, tactical vests, camo helmets, ballistic goggles and radios with earpieces? Why did they march in stack formation? Were they expecting some order from Trump to justify military action?

Who planted the pipe bombs that did not explode? How did the bombs fit into the plot?

Did any of the far right groups plan to execute leaders they considered enemies like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Did they actually plan to hang Mike Pence? Would that have happened if Pence was captured? Were there murder cells? When Trump tweeted at 2:24pm that he was disappointed in Pence for lacking courage was that seen by Trump supporters as an implicit order to carry out Pence’s execution?

How close were we to martial law being declared by Trump? We know that Mike Flynn advocated that. Even as late as January 17, 2021, a few days before Biden’s inauguration, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene was texting Mark Meadows, presidential chief of staff, that members of Congress wanted Trump to declare martial law so Trump could stay in power.

Was the Willard Hotel war room plan that Trump was going to march on the Capitol with his supporters and declare himself President/dictator? Why didn’t Trump end up marching to the Capitol as he said he was going to do?

What was the Secret Service actually up to on January 6? Were some Secret Service agents in cahoots with Trump’s coup? Why was Mike Pence unwilling to get in the vice presidential limo with the Secret Service and leave the capitol? Were agents going to fly him to Alaska or remove him so that Trump’s scheme could move ahead?

Did Trump really grab the steering wheel of his limo and forcefully argue to get the Secret Service to allow him to march on the Capitol? Did the Secret Service say “no” simply because they could not guarantee his safety in the crowd?

Why did the Secret Service delete text messages around January 5 and 6? As federal government employees they know the importance of maintaining and safeguarding records. It is legally required. How could they disappear evidence on days they knew in advance would be historically important even with a system migration?

The Secret Service received a letter on January 16, 2021 from the chairs of four congressional committees instructing preservation of all January 6-related documents. The erasure took place after the oversight officials’ request. The January 6 Committee received only one text message from the Secret Service after issuing a subpoena on July 15. Did the Secret Service calculate the risk of exposure was worse than intentionally covering up?

Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli also deleted text messages around January 6. Coincidences like this stop looking like coincidences. Looking back on Watergate, the Rosemary Woods tape gap was 18 minutes. Here there is a more widespread pattern of cover-up. Remember Trump also disappeared records for hours on January 6. This adds greatly to the impression of a systemic cover-up. Was cover-up part of the war room plan?

We know that for hours Trump gleefully watched TV coverage of the assault on the Capitol and he didn’t order police or military intervention. Was the reason he did not order such intervention part of.a plan to stop election certification? The more chaos created, the more impossible it became for Congress to conduct any business. Delay prevented the feared goal: certification.

Why did the police or military not anticipate what was going to happen on January 6 when there was so much advance notice of the insurrectionists’ intentions? There were so few defenders at the Capitol to face the mob. On the night of January 5 on his podcast Steve Bannon said “to strap in”. He said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”. He called it “game day”. Why was that not taken seriously as the attack on the Capitol was entirely foreseeable?

How much did the Trump team have to do with disabling military or police response before and on January 6? Did the Trump team keep the National Guard away from the insurrection deliberately? Again, was delay part of the Trump plan to allow more time for his coup scheme to unfold?

Did the Trump operatives coordinate their violent insurrection plan with Congressional allies including people like Reps. Boebert, Greene, Jordan, Gaetz, Gosar and Sens. Hawley and Cruz? In the two month period prior to January 6, how many Congressional tours were actually reconnaissance missions so that future insurrectionists knew where to find legislators they targeted? Why was Boebert tweeting “1776”?

If they did nothing wrong, why, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, did Reps Biggs, Gohmert, Perry, Greene and Gaetz seek pardons from Trump? Doesn’t that show consciousness of criminality and guilt?

Hopefully, the January 6 Committee will look at questions like these and seek answers. Even without knowing all the answers, it is clear that MAGA fascism came close to succeeding on January 6. If Pence had gotten in the limo, if demonstrators had killed congressman or senators or if Trump had declared martial law, who knows? All supporters of democracy of whatever party should be very alarmed. The threat remains.

As a sixties survivor, I am conscious of being part of a shrinking community. So many comrades are already gone. Because the sixties are invoked so much, I also admit to being hyper-critical about depictions that attempt to convey that time. There are not many that pass muster but Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied, is unique. The title comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem:

“If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied”

Craig McNamara is the son of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam war under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His book exposes a lifelong struggle to come to terms with being the son of a war criminal but a war criminal he loved. It also honestly recounts a 60’s story in the best hippie radical tradition.

It is difficult to transmit now how much the Vietnam war was hated by my generation then. The pointlessness, the body counts, the abject racism toward the Vietnamese and the sheer imperialist waste of it all were not lost on us. Some of us became perpetually alienated skeptics or radicals. The journalist I.F. Stone used to say all governments lie and Vietnam taught us that truth. Vietnam was our education in empire.

What is unique about Craig McNamara’s story is how he manages to balance love of a father with angry reckoning about his father’s deeds. Craig never was able to confront his father, though. His father always evaded that confrontation.

His father was the exemplar of the Camelot mythology, the best and the brightest. Robert McNamara was the data-driven whiz kid who had been plucked from running Ford Motor Company to become JFK’s Secretary of Defense. The fact that he knew little about Vietnamese history or culture did not stop him from designing disastrous policies which killed massive numbers of human beings. This is what C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, would have dubbed “crackpot realism”.

Craig ended up striking out away from any well beaten paths. After starting at Sidwell Friends, he transferred to St Paul’s School where he bombed out academically. He was dyslexic but that wasn’t recognized at the time. Still, he managed to get accepted at Stanford. But college was not for him. Like so many, he connected to the anti-war movement and activism. He experienced “a burning sadness” and deep trauma related to his father’s role. He suffered stomach ulcers. He wrote:

“This template of protest was the only thing available to make sense of the ugliness in my inner world.”

Craig describes what he calls the “chipper gene”. Typically his father would say things like “It’s a glorious day” no matter what kind of day it was. He never allowed Craig into any honest discussion of Vietnam although he vaguely acknowledged “mistakes”.

Needing a change and being determined 4-F for the draft, Craig dropped out of college and with two friends decided to ride motorcycles through Central and South America all the way to Chile. Craig spent two and a half years traveling. He and the others spoke no Spanish. They contended with motorcycle accidents, nightmarish bugs, potholes, impassable roads and unfriendly police. They had little understanding of the political landscape through which they were passing.

Arriving in Santiago, Chile in September 1971, Craig’s stay coincided with the new presidency of Salvador Allende. Allende’s election was an epic event in Latin America. He was a democratically elected Socialist, a precedent that tremendously worried then-President Nixon. Allende’s election released enormous enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor among the Chilean masses. This was Craig’s education in revolution.

Craig also was drawn to farming which really became his passion. He moved to an island where he lived in an underground cave and started a dairy cooperative. During this period, he was almost entirely cut off from his past life.

He left Chile around the time of the military coup that toppled Allende. His father had failed upward to presidency of the World Bank. The World Bank had cut off lending to Chile during the Allende years but resumed lending under the fascist Pinochet regime. Craig was horrified. After the coup in Chile, in his personal journal, Craig wrote:

“My soul is weeping and my heart is anguished. My passion for Chile and my companeros consumes me…Companero Allende, you will never be forgotten”

Upon his return to the U.S. Craig decided that farming would be his way forward. He wrote that he could not utter the word Vietnam without wanting to cry. He re-entered college at 25 to study agriculture at University of California Davis where he got a degree. His dream was to buy and run a farm.

Craig found a walnut farm in Winters, California which is in the northern part of the state. With financial help from his father, he purchased it in 1980. Craig describes worrying that others would think he rode on his father’s coattails although getting help from parents is hardly unusual.

For 42 years now, Craig has diligently worked the walnut farm. The work is very hard and not that lucrative but Craig has lived a life of integrity.

His story touches the universal theme of the difficulty of father and son relationships but it also raises questions about how to live a moral life in 2022. In watching the January 6 hearings, I have been struck by the overweening ambition and careerism of people who worked in the Trump White House, even people like Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews who did the right thing and resigned.

The lure of professional success seems to have a powerful hold even when navigating a moral swamp. Whether it is love of power, prestige, desire for fame or money, professionals in the Trump orbit have seemed able to push moral considerations into the background. January 6 was hardly the start of venality and corruption in that administration

Craig McNamara’s example stands in total contrast to the get-ahead-at-any-cost mentality. Career advancement was never his yardstick.

I think the peace movement of the 1960’s played the role of necessary corrective to the sick vision of Robert McNamara and other war planners. A peace movement is something we are sorely lacking now. There are inadequate checks on the forces now pushing war and militarism. Craig McNamara stands in an honorable tradition of those who did not go along and who swam against the tide.

Anyone concerned about the future of the Democratic Party has to be concerned about how poorly the party has performed in rural America over the last few election cycles. On TV, I remember looking at the red and blue counties of America after 2016 and 2020. There are blue coastlines and blue pockets in a largely red sea.

How did it come to be that Democrats are getting politically wiped out in so many rural places? I have seen different statistical explanations. One in Politico said two-thirds of rural voters chose Trump. Another said the Democrats lost 90% of rural counties. Trump actually did better with rural voters in 2020 than 2016. Whatever the numbers actually are, there is a basis for Democrats to be very worried.

It hasn’t always been like this. The red trend in rural America has accelerated over the last decade.

Two young Democrats, Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, who co-authored the new book, Dirt Road Revival, take up the Democrat/rural voter question. And they do not speak as academics. In 2018, Maxmin and her campaign manager Woodward, flipped a state representative seat in a heavily red district in Maine. Then in 2020, they flipped a state senate seat running against the Maine Republican Senate Minority Leader.

Maxmin and Woodward argue that the Democrats have largely ignored rural America. The Democratic message to rural America: you don’t matter. They say Democrats stopped trying to persuade people who disagreed with them, focusing on running up big margins in urban and suburban areas.

The two young activists point to a long-standing pattern of neglect. In their 2020 campaign they describe how the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee told them it didn’t believe in talking to Republicans. Maxmin and Woodward recognized this as bad politics.They committed to reaching out much more to independent and Republican voters. Their strategy paid off.

Our octogenarian Democratic Party leadership is seriously out of touch. The party keeps losing in rural America but there is incomprehension in the face of the repeated losses. You might think the extent of the losses would lead to some soul-searching. Just the margin of the losses matter.

Many people in rural America see the Democratic Party leadership as elitist and not speaking to their needs. That is also true of the Republican Party leadership but Democrats have held themselves out as fighting for working people.

Democrats need to be self-critical. In the not so distant past, our leaders have called rank and file voters “deplorables” or “clinging to guns and religion”. It was our party leadership under Bill Clinton that presided over Wall Street deregulation, disastrous trade policies, continued de-industrialization of America, and mass incarceration. Neither party has clean hands.

Maxmin and Woodward show a different way forward. They lay out a how-to roadmap for organizing rural America. Maxmin emphasized door-to-door canvassing and the personal touch. She and Woodward dispensed with expensive party campaign consultants and conventional election literature, creating their own original signs and literature.

She focused more on listening than offering solutions. She engaged people in hearing what was on their minds. She was always respectful of people and their views even when she disagreed. She focused on values, not party. Maxmin also ran a 100% positive campaign. She refused to slime her rivals.

During the Covid lockdown in 2020, Maxmin and Woodward organized socially distanced phone banks oriented to relief for seniors who needed help. The campaign connected a network of volunteer drivers to pick up prescriptions for neighbors, deliver groceries, drop off toilet paper or find large-print books for people with eyesight problems who could not access public libraries which were closed. Their campaign was more of a social movement than traditional politics.

Campaigns of all political stripes strive for authenticity. That is why you see candidates shooting guns, wearing cowboy or baseball hats or riding a horse. Even Trump who looks like he sleeps in a suit wears a baseball hat. Maxmin was straight forward as a progressive Democrat. She never hid her views.

In her book, she describes a conversation with a guy who opposed Medicaid expansion in Maine. At first he had told her to get off his property but she persisted in asking him for his perspective. He explained that he had grown up without electricity or running water. He had worked hard to build a life, including buying his own health care. Maxmin thanked him for explaining. She said her support of Medicaid was not to take anything away from his hard work. It was about supporting others who remained in need. At the end of the conversation, the guy said he would vote for her.

Maxmin and Woodward point out the harm of negative stereotypes. There are many Democrats who will, out of frustration, dismiss people as “Trumpers”, “backwards” or “racist”. While there are no doubt many Republicans who will never be won over, that is not true for many others. Finding areas of agreement is possible but the Democrats have to try.

Working people across America have been screwed. Many do not bother to vote, feeling it makes no difference. When Biden ran against Trump he talked about returning things back to some type of normalcy, the way they were before Trump. That view is wrong.

Things are in a far worse and more precarious place than the ancient Democratic leaders seem to realize. Whether it is the climate emergency or the fascist threat to democracy, Democrats must be the Big Change party, recognizing the gravity of our present moment.

As Maxmin and Woodward explain, Democrats have failed to act on an understanding of the class structure of rural America. Too often they have not fought for rural low income or working people who all have the same needs everywhere. Rural families want to close the wealth gap with better incomes. They want their kids to have opportunities. They need broadband, affordable housing, affordable education, student loan debt relief, and universal health care.

But the Democrats have been shrinking violets. They will come up with $40 billion for Ukraine but American restoration remains off the table.

The future of the Democratic Party lies with outstanding young people like Maxmin and Woodward, not with corporate lobbyists tied to Wall Street. The young activists are right that the Party needs to reinvent itself so that we could actually hope to re-take some state legislatures.

The Democrats have an abysmal record at the state level. In 1978, Democrats controlled both chambers in 31 state legislatures. By 2017, that number was down to 13. During Obama’s presidency Democrats lost almost 1000 seats in legislatures. We need to look at that and not accept it.

In rural America, a dirt road revival is the best hope for fighting the Republican authoritarians. The Republicans have utterly debased themselves but the Democrats have only weakly shown themselves worthy. The stakes could not be much higher.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, there was Walter F. White. From 1931 to 1955, he was a leader of the NAACP. He made an enormous contribution to the cause of civil rights in America but he remains a virtual unknown. White deserves to be far better known.

A big part of the story of American history is filling in the gaps of the conventional story we have been bequeathed. A new biography, White Lies, by A. J. Baime, tries to correct the disappeared record. Walter White’s life was contemporaneous with the Jim Crow era.. White was born in 1893 and he lived until 1955. In his obituary, the New York Times wrote:

“Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country.”

But White always identified as black. His parents were born into slavery. As a teenager, he lived through the Atlanta race riot of 1906. White’s family home was almost torched by a racist mob. That experience left an indelible impression.

As a very young person, White took the initiative to start an NAACP chapter in Atlanta. He invited the legendary James Weldon Johnson, who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and who was the national leader of the NAACP to come and speak in Atlanta. In that era, the NAACP was considered the most militant organization fighting for civil rights. Johnson was so impressed with White that he recruited him to move to New York City and work for the organization. White arrived in the city in February 1918.

At the same time White arrived in the city, the national NAACP was contending with an epidemic of lynchings, mostly in the South. In Estill Springs, Tennessee, a mob of 1500 people burned a black man, Jim McIlherron, at the stake. McIlherron was believed to have shot and killed two white men. The New York Times reported “hot irons were applied to his body for about ten minutes in an effort to get him to make a confession”. Before he was set on fire, members of the mob unsexed him.

The NAACP telegrammed President Woodrow Wilson and Tennessee’s governor, appealing for them to break the silence and denounce the terrible mob acts. A U.S. assistant attorney general responded that under the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government had no jurisdiction over matters of this kind. The Tennessee governor said he would only take action if requested by local officers, something that would never happen.

This was the heyday of lynchings and Ku Klux Klan resurgence. Racist crimes were not investigated and perpetrators were never punished. Those who lynched had no apprehension about adverse consequences.

White came up with an idea. Beginning with the McIlherron case, he decided to go South to investigate lynchings as an undercover investigator. Once back home, he would publish his findings. Because of his skin color, he could go to the scene of lynchings and do first hand investigations. He did not find it difficult to penetrate to the heart of these crimes as perpetrators were often willing to talk freely.

Following in the anti-lynching tradition of Ida B. Wells, White published expose after expose in a range of newspapers and magazines. Between 1918 and 1930, White made 41 undercover investigations, repeatedly placing himself in great danger.

On one occasion, he almost got himself lynched. After a racist massacre in Arkansas, word leaked that there was a black man posing as a white reporter. White hightailed it to a train to get out of the South. A mob was looking for him. Not realizing who he was, the train conductor told him he was “about to miss some fun”.

White asked the conductor “What’ll they do with him? The conductor replied “ When they get through with him, he won’t pass for white no more”.

White wrote a book about lynching disputing the false narrative that lynchings were a result of black men sexually assaulting white women. He found that blacks were getting lynched for being successful at business. It was part of a disenfranchisement effort rooted in white supremacy. Lynching was meant to keep black people down through intimidation. White wrote:

“..mobbism has inevitably degenerated to the point where an uncomfortably large percentage of American citizens can read in the newspaper of the slow roasting alive of a human being in Mississippi and turn, promptly with little thought, to the comic strip or sporting page. Thus has lynching become an almost integral part of our national folkways.”

His courage and advocacy were so remarkable that at the age of 36 White was catapulted into national leadership of the NAACP. He pushed hard on both President Roosevelt and Truman to support anti-lynching law. Initially in 1934, FDR would not support the law out of fear it would block the rest of his agenda. He was trying to hold together a coalition that included Southern Democrats. Finally in 1938, FDR supported the anti-lynching bill. Eleanor Roosevelt helped behind the scenes.

Although he was not ultimately successful in passing anti-lynching legislation (that just passed in 2020), White pushed FDR to issue an Executive Order in 1941 that outlawed discrimination in employment. It was the first time the federal government ever issued such an order.

In 1946, this was followed by an Executive Order issued by President Truman creating a President’s Commission on Civil Rights. White had access to the White House and he educated Truman about lynchings and other horrible acts like the blinding of Isaac Woodard. Truman was genuinely shocked and said, “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that!! We’ve got to do something”. White succeeded in raising the profile of civil rights as a national issue.

With help from Charles Houston, White also recruited a young Thurgood Marshall to join the NAACP legal staff. To say this move worked out is a giant understatement. In a series of blockbuster cases, Marshall deconstructed laws upholding segregation in education and voting rights. Marshall’s biographer Juan Williams has written that White “opened Marshall’s eyes to the idea of civil rights as theater and the power of using dramatic situations to the NAACP’s advantage”.

About himself, White wrote that he embodied the “enigma of a black man occupying a white body”. Although he was married, he had a long-standing secret affair with a white woman, Poppy Cannon. He divorced his wife and married her. Angry mail poured into the NAACP headquarters. At that time, interracial relationships were far from accepted. White’s reputation took a hit.

In considering why Walter White has been disappeared historically it would appear his affair contributed as did his skin color but any fair assessment must acknowledge his over three decades of outstanding advocacy. White wrote:

“I am one of the two in the color of my skin; I am the other in my spirit and my heart. It is only a love of both which binds the two together in me…I am white and I am black, and know that there is no difference. Each casts a shadow, and all the shadows are dark.”