All past and future posts to this blog will be found on Substack at https://historyfortomorrow.substack.com
Autocracy: A Family Affair
Today Lara Trump, wife of the former president’s son Eric, was selected as Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee. The traditional function of a national party committee is to raise money to support candidates on the party’s ticket and fund general party-building activities. Last month Ms. Trump stated her intention to “make sure that every penny of every dollar donated to the RNC is going to Donald Trump’s campaign.”
Modern authoritarian leaders often place family members in positions of power along with trusted cronies. This allows the corrupt practices on which all strongman regimes rely while minimizing the chances of exposure.
Mussolini made his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano foreign minister. The son of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) ran the unofficial family business of money-laundering as have the offspring of many other dictators. Charges against Istvan Tiborcz, who made huge sums of money from contracts awarded without competition by the Hungarian government, were dropped by his father-in-law, Viktor Orban. Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of Turkey’s Recep Tayyp Erdogan, was accused of illegal activities by multiple foreign governments while serving as energy minister. He is now finance minister. Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, served as senior advisors to the president despite a lack of expertise in public policy or governance and having been initially rejected for a security clearance.
Persons
Now we have the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos in fertility clinics are “extrauterine children” and that parents can sue for their wrongful death. In a concurring opinion, one judge cites the Bible (Jeremiah) and declares that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
This ruling flows from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned the right of women to choose abortion. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in that case repeatedly references “potential life” and “unborn human beings.” Alito and the other self-proclaimed originalists on the court are certainly aware that, to the framers of the Constitution, the idea of “unborn human beings” would have been literally unheard of.
Today a considerable minority of Americans believe that an unborn fetus has a soul and abortion is wrong. For many this conviction springs from sincere and deeply held religious beliefs. As Americans it is their right to hold these beliefs and to behave accordingly. And it is their duty to refrain from denying the same right to any of their fellow Americans who believe differently.
Those who seek court rulings and laws that recognize a fetus as a person may argue in terms of protecting rights but the effect is quite different. A person is one who is able to think and reason, to act consciously and purposefully. Women and girls are persons. The effect of these rulings and laws is to subordinate the actual personhood of women and girls to the potential represented by a fetus or embryo.
In his majority opinion in Dobbs, Justice Alito wrote, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Yes, Mr. Justice, it is time to heed the Constitution. But it is an issue not for elected representatives but of individual conscience and personal freedom.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ” (Amendment I).
Lafayette, we are here!
With German submarines sending the ships of neutral nations to the ocean’s floor and the loss of American lives mounting, Congress declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917. The war-weary French welcomed the first American troops two months later and on July 4th the U.S. 16th Infantry made a symbolic march through Paris. The parade ended in Picpus Cemetery at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette had served with distinction in George Washington’s Continental Army, leaving for a time to return to France and negotiate an increase in support for the American cause. Speaking at Lafayette’s tomb, Colonel Charles Stanton concluded his remarks by proclaiming, “Lafayette, we are here!”
America’s entry into World War I marked a turning point for the longstanding American tradition of isolationism, the reluctance to become involved in European alliances and wars. Protected by two oceans for a hundred years, Americans had been able to engage the Old World through commerce and diplomacy rather than warfare. With the end of the war in 1918, many hoped to once more retreat into isolation. Those hopes were dashed at Pearl Harbor.
The United States emerged from World War II with security concerns that encompassed safeguarding democratic government and protecting free trade around the world in order to provide the American economy with markets and raw materials. A parade of technologies from submarines to ICBMs had made isolation an ineffective tool for the pursuit of these goals.
Isolationism seemed a dead letter in serious discussions of American foreign policy until Donald Trump brought his fascination with Russia and dislike of NATO to the White House. Formed after World War II as an alliance of the U.S., Canada and European democracies to keep the peace in Europe and act as a bulwark against Russian aggression, NATO has evolved into an instrument through which the American government works with allies on military matters around the world.
NATO’s core principal is the collective-defense provision, known as Article V, that states that an armed attack on any member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” Mr. Trump never believed in such mutual defense obligations, writing in 2000 that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” John Bolton, the former President’s national security adviser, wrote in his memoir that Trump had to be repeatedly talked out of withdrawing from NATO.
This past weekend the former President took his animus to a new level, declaring at a rally in South Carolina that not only would he not defend NATO countries that he views as not spending enough on defense, but that he would go so far as to “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” against them. Never before has a President suggested that he would incite an enemy to attack American allies.
America’s alliances are vitally important. Our standard of living directly depends on a world economy governed by a set of rules concerning the movement and exchange of goods, the right to travel, and relations between nations. Those rules were largely worked out between the U.S. and Europeans. In a world operating under Russian or Chinese rules, American activities would be at the sufferance of countries that do not mean us well.
Long averse to alliances of any kind and no longer surrounded by the kind of advisers who dissuaded him from extreme actions in the past, Mr. Trump in a second term could effectively end the security umbrella that has guarded friends in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the eight decades since the end of World War II. Just the suggestion that the United States could not be depended on might prompt longtime friends to back away and embolden the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Our allies are a great strength. Russia and China have nothing to compare with them. But these allies depend on our continuing commitment. If we are no longer here for Lafayette, Lafayette may not be here for us.
Temples
Earlier today, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, presided over the consecration of a gigantic new temple in the city of Ayodhya. Dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram, the temple is situated on land that was once occupied by the 16th century Babri Mosque. In 1992 the mosque was destroyed by a Hindu mob as police stood by.
India’s founding fathers saw the separation of religion and government as crucial to the country’s cohesion and founded the state as a secular republic in 1947. Modi has led India in the opposite direction promoting hatred and fear of the country’s Muslim minority. Online hate speech and misinformation has encouraged violence against Muslims. Today acts such as the lynching of Muslim men accused of slaughtering cows and the beatings of interfaith couples can take place without consequence.
Modi has stirred religious animosity for authoritarian ends. Polarization helped him maintain support as he centralized the apparatus of government around himself while bulling and harassing critics of the regime – academics, students, journalists, human rights groups and environmental activists.
Using religion to build support and scapegoat opponents is a common tactic of authoritarian leaders. The very first modern authoritarians, Mussolini and Hitler, promoted antisemitism, persecuting, deporting, and murdering Jews. Today Vladimir Putin has built churches and secured the support of the Russian Orthodox Church. Victor Orban has used “Christian democracy” to undermine Hungary’s democratic institutions and institute one-party rule. He has been hailed as a model leader by some right wing politicians in other countries including the United States.
Religion appeals to us to strive for what is good and noble in our nature. We do not have to accept its perversion by those who seek to use it for selfish ends. Today, in one of the most troubled parts of the world, we have an extraordinary example of how people can pursue their own beliefs and values without troubling others. It is in a place that adherents of three religions call the “Holy Land.”
The Temple Mount or Haram ash-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) in Jerusalem is the focal point of the 75 year-long Arab-Israeli conflict. To Jews it is the site of the First and Second Temples. For Muslims it is where two of the most important mosques in Islam stand: Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. The area of the Noble Sanctuary is administered by a “waaf” or Muslim religious trust. Israel made no change in this arrangement after taking control of all of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Jews have traditionally prayed at the Western Wall on the outside of the compound but are forbidden to enter the Temple Mount by a rabbinical injunction. These understandings remain unchanged in the midst of the present conflict.
Stopping Trump
The Iowa caucuses on January 11 mark the start of the presidential election of 2024. This election will be unlike any other in American history because the presumptive Republican nominee was a president unlike any other.
Throughout his time in office Donald Trump violated the norms of our democracy attacking the press, blatantly profiting from public office and repeatedly lying to the public for his own selfish purposes. Most dangerous of all were his illegal efforts to overturn a presidential election by pressuring officials and legislators to change the results in their states and then attempting to disrupt the certification of the vote count with a violent mob that he summoned and sent to the Capitol.
At least two dozen cabinet and administration officials who served under Trump have said that he is not fit to be president. These include two defense secretaries (Gen. Jim Mattis and Mark Esper), his Attorney General (William Barr) and Vice President Mike Pence.
Since announcing his candidacy last November, Trump has been telling us about his intentions for a second administration. He has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out.” He has told us that “we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and echoed the language of Adolf Hitler saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country. He has suggestedthat he would use the Justice Department to indict political opponents and told us that the nation’s former top military general deserves to be executed for treason. And he has said that the “termination” of the Constitution would have been allowable to overturn the 2020 election.
In Trump’s first term, some cabinet officials and lawyers sought to restrain his more extreme actions while a number of his plans were thwarted by incompetence among his initial team. By the end of his first term those who sought to restrain him were gone and those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. There is reason to believe that extreme policies pursued by Trump and his advisors would have a greater chance of becoming reality in a second administration.
Under the name Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing organizations run by people aligned with Trump has been compiling a database of thousands of potential staffers for use should he be reelected. There are also plans to reduce the civil service protections of federal workers making it easier to fire and replace those who are not sufficiently loyal to the Trump agenda. One of the Project 2025 groups has drafted plans to deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act.
CAN TRUMP BE STOPPED?
The election of Donald Trump is not inevitable. The United States is still a democracy and ordinary Americans have agency. It is our choices that will determine the fate of our democracy and freedoms.
What can you do?
(1) VOTE. We must take the threat seriously, even if we have grown too numb to maintain the appropriate level of alarm. A free election with high levels of voter turnout is every authoritarian’s worst nightmare. Register and vote.
(2) DONATE if you are able. Like it or not, money is the lifeblood of political campaigns. One place to start is with donations to grass-roots organizations working on voter turnout. The Movement Voter Project web site has a clickable map with links to such groups all over the country.
Go to: https://movement.vote/states/
(3) CONTRIBUTE YOUR TIME. You can contribute your time by providing voter information and encouragement to potential swing voters. You may not live in one of the critical battleground states, but you can contact like minded and undecided voters in these states. Local organizations like Indivisible chapters provide ways to make such contacts by phone and through postcards and other means. (These organizations do not ask volunteers to try to persuade or argue with committed Tump supporters.) The Indivisible web site has a clickable map with links to it’s chapters around the country.
Go to: https://www.indivisible.org/groups/
(4) AFTER ELECTION DAY REMAIN STEADFAST. The fight to preserve democracy may last well beyond the day votes are cast. Three years after the election of 2020 Trump continues to lie about his loss keeping it an issue of debate and discord.
In an interview with Donald Trump on December 5, 2023, Fox News host Sean Hannity tried to get him to commit to staying within the constitutional bounds of the presidency should he be elected in 2024. Trump sidestepped the question, and Hannity tried again. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” he asked.
“Except for day one,” Trump responded.
Should he secure a second term, we can expect Donald Trump to be a dictator for much longer than one day.
Making History
There has been no presidential election in American history more consequential than that of 1860. Over the previous decade the nation had become deeply polarized over the issue of the extension of slavery. The economy and society of fifteen southern states was rooted in the slave system but a growing number of Americans saw the institution as immoral while others perceived it’s expansion as a threat to their personal livelihood.
Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, won the election with 180 electoral votes although he gained less that 40 percent of the popular vote. Since the central issue for the Republicans was unwavering opposition to the expansion of slavery, Lincoln’s election provoked a crises. Before inauguration day, seven southern states seceded from the union.
Hoping to avert civil war, Sen. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky came forward with a compromise embedded is six proposed constitutional amendments. The heart of the Crittenden compromise was to allow slavery in present and future territories south of the latitude line at 36 degrees 30 minutes.
President-elect Lincoln would have none of it. For him the issues of union, slavery and the future of democracy were intertwined. He urged the leaders of his party to reject Crittenden’s proposal. “Let there be no compromise on extending slavery,” he wrote Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” There was no compromise. The war came. And slavery was destroyed.
History is the result of choices. Sometimes those choices are made by those who are remembered by later generations, as is the case of Lincoln’s steadfastness in opposing compromise over slavery. But very often they are the choices of ordinary people, like the voters who put Lincoln in power.
We may be able to learn from history but we cannot change it. By contrast there is nothing inevitable or foreordained about the future. People and leaders have agency and it is our choices that will make the history of 2024.
At the opening of a presidential election year that might be as consequential as that of 1860 we should resolve to take care in the choices we make. For we are the ones who will write the history of the success or failure of our democracy and it’s promise of liberty for all.
The Transformation of Christmas
The letter arrived at the office of the New York Sun in July of 1897. It was from Virginia, the eight year-old daughter of Dr. Philip O’Hanlon. She had asked her father if Santa Claus was real but found his reply unconvincing. So she decided to pose her question to the Sun. In her letter she noted that “Papa says ‘if you see it in the Sun it’s so.’”
Virginia was growing up in an America undergoing revolutionary change as it moved from an agricultural economy and society to one that was industrial and commercial. Goods were increasingly produced by powered machines while transportation advancements created a nationwide market.
One of the cultural results of these changes was the transformation of Christmas.
Heretofore Christmas had been used by revelers as an excuse for feasting, drinking, gambling and licentious behavior. So offensive was such carrying on to the Puritans of New England that in 1659 the Massachusetts legislature made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate the holiday.
With the growth of cities that accompanied industrialization, these Christmas revels became even more threatening sometimes turning to gang violence and even riots. “Bands of mostly young people and apprentices would go house to house and demand that the doors of prosperous people be open to them,” historian Stephen Nissenbaum has written. “They felt they had a right to enter the houses of the wealthy and demand their high-quality food and drink … Those who failed to comply could be greeted with vandalism or violence.”
Industrialization had spurred the rise of an affluent middle class that felt imperiled by this trend. A group of New Yorkers undertook efforts to transform Christmas into a new kind of celebration centered on family gatherings and especially focused on the happiness of children.
One aspect of this reshaping of Christmas was the invention of Santa Claus. For a new middle class uncomfortable with purchased luxury, Santa seemed to offer a reassuring return to a simpler time in which children’s toys came not from an assembly line but were hand-crafted and delivered by sleigh. Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“The Night Before Christmas”) did much to refashion the American Christmas in this way.
Overlooked or misplaced for a time, Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter was eventually handed to Francis Church, a Columbia College graduate and veteran Sun writer. Church wrote a response in a single afternoon. Prefaced by Virginia’s original letter in which she remarked that some of her fiends told her that there is no Santa, his editorial appeared in the Sun on September 21.
Church’s reply began by saying “Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”
He continued: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”
“You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside,” Church wrote, “but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man … could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.”
Church’s piece was soon published by other New York newspapers and has ever since been reprinted by various publications during the holiday season. It is the most frequently republished editorial in the English language.
Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas earned a masters degree and doctorate in education and for 43 years served as a teacher and then principal in New York City. Not long before her death in 1971, Virginia announced that she still believed in Santa Claus.
The Boston Tea Party
Saturday marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in which three ships laden with East India Company tea were boarded by a group of colonists thinly disguised as Native Americans. The boarders dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. They were protesting the British tax on tea.
For eight years American colonists had objected to taxes levied by Parliament but, from the British perspective, they had this time gone too far by destroying private property. The reaction was harsh. As punishment Parliament passed a series of bills, known as the Coercive Acts, that among other things closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for and gave the royal governor power to appoint most civil officials. These measures alarmed leaders in the other colonies and, at the First Continental Congress in September of 1774, they met to respond with a boycott of British goods and other measures. The chasm widened and within a year the two sides were in a shooting war that would end with American independence.
There is a widely held misconception that the colonists were protesting taxes because they were too high –– the Tea Act had actually lowered the cost of tea. The objection was rather that Parliament had no right to tax the Americans since they were not represented in that body. Claiming the rights of Englishmen, they insisted that there could be “no taxation without representation.” Living under laws that are made by what the Declaration calls “the consent of the governed” became the cornerstone of American government. It took a long time: Black men could not vote for members of Congress for 89 years. For women it took 144. And today consent of the governed is under threat.
In 2010 the Republican Party launched Operation REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project), a plan to gain control of state legislatures so that the party could manipulate the boundaries of Congressional districts in their favor. This process, called “gerrymandering,” involves drawing district lines to place opposition party voters into a small number of districts and spreading out the rest into other districts so there are too few to have a chance of winning. Political parties have always engaged in gerrymandering but today’s sophisticated technology makes it possible to draw district lines with highly accurate precision.
Funded by wealthy Republican donors, REDMAP worked. In the election of 2012, Democrats won a majority of 1.4 million votes cast for members of the House of Representatives. Still, Republicans obtained a 33 seat majority.
A few months later the Supreme Court voided key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the case of Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Many of the same state legislatures began enacting voter suppression measures such as strict voter ID restrictions, reducing polling place hours in certain locations, curtailing early voting, and aggressively purging voter rolls. These laws were targeted at Blacks and others assumed to be Democratic voters.
Consent of the governed presumes majority rule through free and fair elections. As voter suppression makes elections less free and gerrymandering makes them less fair, majority rule is increasingly eclipsed. Thismatters because minority rule has an insidious effect on policies that affect people’s lives.
A CNN poll last May found 64% of Americans saying they favor stricter gun control laws. But such legislation consistently fails. For decades Americans have overwhelmingly favored raising he minimum wage, but since it was last raised in 2009 it has been blocked in Congress. Today the House of Representatives has left on holiday break with pressing matters such as aid for Ukraine and Israel, southern border policy, and the annual budget deadlocked as extreme lawmakers from gerrymandered districts remain unwilling to to compromise.
In 1765 Patrick Henry of Virginia wrote a series of resolutions against the Stamp Act, the first of Parliament’s attempts to tax the American colonists. He argued that only the people of the colony themselves, or their elected representatives, could know what was best for them in matters such as taxation. Anything else, he said, “has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”
Cease Fire
On October 7 the Palestinian faction Hamas staged a brutal terrorist attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip killing more than 1,200 people and kidnaping some 240. Vowing to eliminate Hamas, Israel responded to the atrocity with a full air, sea and ground attack on Gaza as well as imposing a total siege on the Palestinian enclave
Two months on, the more than 2 million residents of Gaza are trapped lacking food, clean water, fuel, medical supplies and other necessities with nowhere to escape the Israeli assault. The health system has collapsed and infectious diseases are ravaging the population. Over 18,000 people have died –– more than 7,500 of them children. Under present conditions the humanitarian catastrophe can only get worse.
Last week United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution for a “humanitarian cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants.” On Friday the United States vetoed the resolution on the grounds that it did not contain a condemnation of the Hamas attack or an acknowledgement that Israel has the right to defend itself. Four days later, the non-binding resolution was passed by the U.N. General Assembly (where the U.S. has no veto) with 153 countries in favor and 23 abstaining.
Today leaders of six of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations co-signed an article in the New York Times calling on the Biden administration to stop blocking calls for a cease-fire.
“We are no strangers to human suffering — to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes,” they began, but “we have seen nothing like the siege of Gaza.” Pointing out that the constant aerial bombardment has “rendered our jobs impossible,” these leaders emphasized that “we can do nothing remotely adequate to address the level of suffering there without an immediate and complete cease-fire and an end to the siege.”
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is an extremely complex one in which both sides can genuinely claim just rights and legitimate grievances. Expectations that a cease-fire of itself would lead to mutual accommodation or a lasting peace are nothing if not naive. Perhaps the only thing more irrational would be to believe that continuing this level of destruction of communities, hopes and innocent lives could in any way advance the future security and peace of those on either side.
It is time to cease fire.
History for Tomorrow 