Daniel McCarthy

Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won the last presidential election with a record 81 million votes. But the exiguous margins of their hold on the House and Senate, with fewer than 51 per cent of the seats in either chamber, tell another story, as does the desperation of their struggle to abolish the filibuster and federalise election law. Those policy aims are of a piece with dreams of ‘packing’ the Supreme Court with left-liberal justices — and packing the Senate too, by turning tiny Democratic bastions into new states. The left wing of the party even assails the constitutional principle behind the Senate itself, the idea of equal representation of the states.

Forty minutes into Donald Trump’s remarks at CPAC, I’d formed a conclusion. Donald Trump hasn’t just taken over the Republican party, I thought, the Republican party has taken over Donald Trump. The speech got off to a slow start, with Trump’s familiar critiques of illegal immigration failing to elicit much excitement from the audience. Was this tried and true, as far as they were concerned, or just tired and true? Soon enough Trump was uttering phrases that any Republican leader of the last 30 years might have recited: socialism, radical Democrats, exceptional nation, Judeo-Christian values. Farmers this and farmers that. Mostly fine — all routine. The urgency was gone. But the speech kept going. And while little was new, Trump started to sound like Trump again.

‘The cutting edge of societal evolution.’ That was one of Rush Limbaugh’s catchphrases in the 1990s, and it was an apt description of a man who revolutionized radio and politics alike. Limbaugh has now died at age 70, but the societal evolution that he accelerated continues. This is why Limbaugh will still be loved by the right and hated by the left for years to come. Rush was a media powerhouse in his own right as a radio host, but he was also the grandfather of Fox News. Ever since the Nixon years conservatives had thought that there could be a mass audience for their message, one large enough to support a television network. Efforts to create one, or buy one of the existing networks, all fell flat, however.

As Donald Trump goes on trial in the Senate, the Republican party faces the possibility of a crack-up. Trump will almost certainly be acquitted, but the vote will be the third time in two weeks that GOP disunity is in the spotlight. Last week the attempt to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership role in the House saw the pro-Trump wing of the party come up short. Then 11 Republicans voted with the Democrats to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga / Q-Anon) of her committee assignments. Now it’s the Senate GOP’s turn to showcase its divisions. ​Cheney’s survival showed that the Trump faction isn’t strong enough — in Congress anyway — to purge the anti-Trump faction. Trump’s acquittal will mean his enemies inside the party can’t get rid of him, either.

The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The Soviet regime didn’t survive, of course, and late 2021 will mark 30 years since the USSR dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to save the Soviet system through reform. The Communist hardliners who briefly deposed him in the summer of 1991 tried to save it by rolling back reform. Neither sufficed — the regime, and the party and ideology at its heart, had lost their legitimacy irrevocably. The first US presidential election after the collapse of the USSR almost rendered the same verdict on the regime in Washington. The 1992 election saw a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush from within his own party.

The world has many island nations, and sometimes the United States counts itself among them. We have water on either side of us, and though we share our big island with Canada and Mexico, neither poses any threat. America is immune to invasion, a castle surrounded by the safest of moats. This wasn’t always so, and it isn’t really true today, unless we forget about Hawaii and our Pacific and Caribbean territories, most of which would be easy prey for other states if they weren’t under our sovereignty. In the earliest days of the republic, we shared the North American continent with outposts of Europe’s leading powers: France, Russia, Spain and Britain.

Not long ago I attended a gathering of young White House and congressional Republican staffers. Conversation turned, as you might expect, to the prospects for the GOP in Georgia’s two Senate runoff races in January — races that will swing control of the chamber if Democrats win them both. Only one young man dared to say the unsayable: not only would the GOP lose those races, but it should lose those races for the party’s own good. His points were sharp, even if no one was entirely persuaded. There would indeed be a silver lining to losing the Senate majority, and while few Republicans will wish for that, Trump voters will have some consolation if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler go down next month.

America’s longest war has just entered its 20th year. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. Now, nearly a decade after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Afghan war continues. And everyone expects that if the Americans ever leave, the Taliban will return to power. Yet the Taliban who take charge will not be the same as those who harbored bin Laden. The median age in Afghanistan is around 19 years old: half the country’s population was born after the war began. The US is not fighting a limited reservoir of Taliban militants; it is fighting a cultural force that has renewed itself over a generation.

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Biden voted for the biggest and most foolish intervention of that era, the Iraq War of 2003. He has not so much repudiated this act as tried to exculpate himself for it, claiming that in voting to authorize military force he didn’t think military force would be used. This is not credible on its face, and not the way anyone understood the vote at the time. It was as clear a vote for war as any vote has been since World War Two.

Americans hate the Supreme Court. You wouldn’t think so from a look at the polls, which usually show that the court is far more popular than the elected branches of government. But history tells a very different story. The conservative movement as it exists today was formed in large part as a reaction against the liberalism of the Supreme Court under chief justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger — both of whom were Republicans, as it happens. The progressive movement of the early 20th century and the populist movement of the late 19th century were also spurred to varying degrees by the character of the Supreme Court at the time, which was seen as conservative and elitist. Franklin D.

What would happen if Americans voted on different days? Suppose Republicans voted on Tuesday and Democrats voted on Wednesday. Would this be better than everyone voting on the same day? Would it be more fair and less confusing? Like hell it would! One reasonable complaint Republicans had about the 2000 presidential elections — famously decided, in the end, at the Supreme Court — was that some television networks called the State of Florida for Al Gore before polls had closed in the westernmost Florida Panhandle, which lay in the Central Time Zone, an hour behind the rest of the state in the Eastern Time Zone. Declaring a winner prematurely amounted to telling Panhandle voters not to bother casting their ballots.

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around?

Joe Biden’s range of emotional expression has narrowed with age – when he wants to convey feeling now, he shouts. Anger is the only thing that gets through, even when he’s trying to be hopeful or inspiring. And his acceptance remarks at the Democratic convention were well short of inspirational: the nominee didn’t seem tired, but his words did. From the first day of the convention, viewers had to wonder, ‘Why is Joe Biden the nominee of this party?’, a party that neither looks nor sounds like the almost octogenarian ex-VP. Biden has testified to his friendships with segregationists in the Senate. He was the sponsor of a historic anti-crime bill.

News of Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate was greeted by everything but the popping of champagne corks by my right-wing friends at lunch. The consensus of the policy wonks, policy makers, businessmen and journalists at my table was that Harris is good news for Donald Trump. ‘She’s unlikable’ and ‘she’s a cop’ were the instant reactions — though if Harris really were a cop, and not a former prosecutor, she might find some support among Americans horrified by the riots in Chicago, Portland and everywhere else that’s succumbed to left-wing Democratic control. I expected Harris all along, ever since Biden imposed a sex test on his list of potential running mates.