View from America                                              

By M.R. Josse GAITHERSBURG, MD: The results of the Tuesday, 2 November 2021, gubernatorial election in Virginia awoke America the next day to many sobering realities, including how much the political winds have shifted since the start of what many political activists had hoped was “a new national awakening to the stubborn legacy of America’s racist history,” as Matt Viser and Cleve R.Wootson Jr., of the Washington Post phrase it. In that election, Democrats came face-to-face with the implications of a stinging defeat of Democrat Terry McAuliffe by Republican Glenn Youngkin.  As Post columnist Dan Balz writes, “A year after celebrating victory in the 2020 elections, their slender congressional majorities are even more at risk than they feared, and it is not clear that President Biden or his party has a workable plan to rebalance a political landscape tilting significantly against them.” STINGING DEFEAT As per Balz, the result was not a total surprise. “Nervous Democrats could sense it coming for weeks. But the full impact of the loss in a state that Biden won by 10 points just 12 months ago, along with a far closer gubernatorial race than anyone expected in New Jersey, which Biden won by 16 points, triggered alarms across the party.” Next year, the political pundit reminds, the entire Democratic Party will face the voters, with Republicans more confident than ever that they have the issues, whether education, inflation or the border, as well as the strategy and a strong tail wind to drive Democrats from power in the House and Senate, and thereby short-circuit the final two years of Biden’s first term in office.” The morning after the results of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial contests were announced, the hopes for systemic change, on the racism and policing fronts, have thus been dashed. And while it remains to be seen what the future holds on this score, Post columnist, E.J. Dionne Jr., argues robustly – and credibly - that the Democrats have only themselves to blame. He says the defeat, in Virginia, was “so comprehensive and disastrous that it does not leave room for excuse-making, blame-shifting or evasion.” He goes on to say that “President Biden and his party can respond with urgency, or they will surrender the country to the Republican Party still infected by Trumpism. “All of Tuesday’s portents were negative. In both, Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans were energized and Democrats were indifferent. In Virginia’s GOP rural precincts, in the places where Donald Trump is still a hero, voters surged to polling places in a tidal wave. Republican Glenn Youngkin ran ahead of Trump’s 2020 showing in counties where there did not seem to be much room for improving his party’s vote. Democrats, particularly young and Black voters, stayed away, making up a far smaller share of the electorate than they did a year ago.” Gary Abernathy, another Post columnist, has also proffered some delectable food for thought. In a write-up entitled “Thanks to Biden, Trump still stays in the game”, he refers to the 2020 presidential polls and reminds, inter alia, that “for most voters, the 2020 election was not about policy promises” but that “it was a referendum on Trump.” He also believes American voters “didn’t elect Biden to do big, historic things. They elected him to restore a sense of calm.” He goes on to observe: “Shortly after taking office, momentum may have been with Biden to go bigger than expected…Instead, gas prices are skyrocketing, inflation is climbing, the supply chain is in shambles, the southern border is a mess, and covid-19 remains a threat. The Afghanistan pullout was disastrous, the fatal drone strike on an innocent Afghan family was appallingly incompetent, and France took the unprecedented step of temporarily recalling its U.S. ambassador over a mishandled submarine deal…” Next year, Abernathy predicts, “voters will offer a mid-term report card on Biden and his failing agenda, and there are several indicators justifying Republican optimism. When the 2024 election rolls around, Biden will be a couple of weeks shy of 82. Does anyone predict a miraculous rejuvenation? At 78, Trump – likely the GOP nominee barring a drastic change in health or legal complications – might seem like a spring chicken by comparison.” BIDEN’S ENDURING WIN Despite those gloomy prognoses, another shift in the political wind seemed to herald a far more roseate prospect for the Biden administration, trundling forward toward the mid-terms, a year away. What, then, was the trigger for the sudden, positive change in Biden’s political prospects? It was, as Washington Post reported, that late Friday, 5 November, he “helped clinch passage of a $ 1.2 trillion bipartisan bill – stepping up his pressure on House Democrats after months of standing back from the debate. “Spurred in part by the humbling electoral losses, Biden made personal edits of a written statement aimed at forging compromise and publicity and privately urged members to vote for the measure – all amid a flurry of phone calls with (Nancy) Pelosi (D-Calif.)”, House Speaker. “The long-sought legislative win came hours after a positive jobs report and encouraging news about an experimental drug to treat covid-19, capping the most topsy-turvy week of Biden’s presidency.” Biden, by general consensus, appeared to secure an achievement that had eluded leaders of both parties for years, bringing a bipartisan infrastructure package to the cusp of achievement. As Jeff Stein predicts in a major front-page Post story, “it will make major investments in all 50 states for years to come. The desire by large numbers of Democrats and Republicans to back the agreement and commit to major upgrades in the country’s roads, bridges and ports marked a sharp departure from partisanship that had seized Washington. “The pact resembled the type of Washington deal Biden had promised voters would still be possible during his 2020 campaign, upgrading rural Internet capabilities while also addressing climate change, cleaning up pollution and replacing lead pipes to deliver clean water.” Yet, impressive as the passage of the $ 1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation’s infrastructure undoubtedly is, it represents roughly only one-half of Biden’s overall economic agenda; as such Democrats must now be prepared for the next, and perhaps tougher, task: shepherding the rest of Biden’s economic agenda through Congress. As the Post’s Tony Room explains: “Still another roughly $ 2 trillion in new tax and spending investments are awaiting action in the House and Senate, where party lawmakers harbor grand ambitions to overhaul the nation’s health care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws.” NOT EXEMPLARY An altogether different and darker perspective on America emerges from a recent Post story by Annabelle Timsit on a Pew Research Center survey on how people in the United States or other industrialized nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and South Korea – view American democracy. The Pew report said “very few people in any public survey think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow.”Outside the United States, “a median of 17 percent said U.S. democracy set a good example for other countries to follow”, while 57 percent said it “used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years.” On the other hand, twenty-three percent said that the United States has never been a good example of a democracy, while respondents in the United States were just about as negative – with only 19 percent saying American democracy provided a good example. People in Taiwan, Italy and Greece were the most positive about the state of American democracy while Singapore, Australia and New Zealand the least. The survey which was conducted over the phone and online from 1 February to 26 May this year came after former president Trump spread the false claim that he, not President Biden, had won the election in November 2020, and after a pro-Trump mob rampaged inside the U.S. Capitol.

A mob of supporters of then-U.S. President Donald Trump climb through a window they broke as they storm the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

Yet, despite criticism of U.S. democracy overall, a median of 60 percent across 16 countries said the U.S. government respects freedoms of its people, far higher than 8 percent who said China respects its people’s freedoms in the same survey. Globally, the United States’ international reputation had improved since the election of Biden, the report said, with a median of 75 percent saying that it had confidence Biden would be right in international affairs, compared with the 17 percent who said the same for Trump in 2020. The survey was conducted before the United States’ chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which the Taliban took control of the country. BOLTON’S AFGHANISTAN Reference to Afghanistan brings me to an opinion-piece in the Post, 3 November, penned by none other than John R. Bolton, who served as National Security Adviser to former president Trump, and the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” which this observer reviewed in this space several months ago. The thrust of his newspaper write-up is this: “The United States may not face another 9/11-scale attack immediately, but the terrorist threat has not moderated, and certainly not disappeared.” To prove his thesis that the Afghan “blunder” already endangers U.S. security, Bolton presents the following arguments: “The Islamic State emerged from al-Qaeda, and the taxonomy of Islamist terrorists is not so rigid that alliances of conveniences or even firm partnership won’t emerge against the common enemy, namely the United States. Accordingly, a notion now circulating among some in the national security community supporting the Taliban against ISIS-K should be sharply rejected. “The terrorists understand their own capacity for shifting alliances, and so should we. They are all our enemies.” Bolton concluded bluntly: “Today, post-withdrawal, Americans are understandably more vulnerable to terrorism’s threat. Adversaries and allies alike regard the abandonment of Afghanistan as a surrender, auguring how muted a U.S. response might be to crises far from Kabul. We can reverse this slide, but doing so requires recognizing that leaving Afghanistan was a major strategic blunder.” As Afghanistan moves perceptibly away from major headlines, starvation and a host of other urgent issues there scream for attention. This includes the cardinal one of defusing the ticking Afghan time bomb by according the Kabul regime a de facto, if not yet de jure, recognition that facilitates its engagement with the outside world. In the meantime, one may take a quantum of solace in what might possibly turn out to be a positive shift in Afghanistan’s political winds: the Taliban’s overture to the Shiite Hazara minority, dramatized by the elevation of Maulavi Mahdi, as a Taliban intelligence chief. The operative word is “might”. The above premise is based on a major story in the Post, 8 November, where the Shiite Maulvi has been quoted as claiming: “I am a bridge between the Taliban and the Hazara community” though readers are also informed that “skeptics say he’s a foil to prevent a Hazara uprising, rather than a serious agent of reconciliation.” THE ATTACK: RECAP Note has already been taken of the generally poor standing of American democracy globally, a state of affairs that has come about for a myriad reasons, including the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. In a massive 28-page photographs-crammed supplement, THE ATTACK, Sunday, 7 November, the Post has graphically documented in fine reportage the 6 January siege of the U.S. Capitol, abundantly establishing that it was “neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event”. Divided into the three following segments – Before, During and After – the document is not only an exemplar of American journalism at its best but, in my opinion, should find a prominent niche in the historiography of American democracy, notably in the age of Trump. Predictably, it has been rejected by Trump and his cronies who argue, inter alia: “The media’s obsession with the January 6th protest is a blatant attempt to overshadow a simple fact: there is no greater threat to America than leftist journalists and the Fake News.” What nonsense!