My time away

Viewed from Europe, the fire hose of news over the past three weeks reveals an America on the brink of a dramatic break with its traditional allies.

On June 24, my wife Karen and I landed in Dublin for a week-long sightseeing trip followed by a two-week stay in London for our annual binge on the best of British theater. To belabor the obvious, a lot happened while we were away.

Cut off entirely from non-print media, a blessing in our over-televised age, I also had limited time to spend each day reading/deleting emails and browsing online mainstream and independent media. Even as I sit down to write this 48 hours after returning home, I’ve yet to watch President Biden’s debate performance or view his follow-up interviews.

It’s been easier to follow this past weekend’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which took place while we were in the air returning home. The “iconic” raised-fist photograph has gone viral and become the symbol of the Trump campaign. We’ve learned enough about the young perpetrator to know he was motivated by some internal dynamic, not politics, an Arthur Bremer for our times. Left unexplained is how a 20-year-old brought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle within a hundred yards of the ex-president while Karen and I were “caught” mistakenly bringing an eight-ounce jar of English marmalade through security.

I didn’t watch last night’s opening of the Republican National Convention. I never watch television coverage of either political party’s conventions. I find the speeches not only boring but utterly useless for understanding what a candidate will do once in office.

That’s especially true this year. Trump’s claim after the assassination attempt that he will revise his convention speech because he wants “to unite our country” is about as believable as the 30,573 false or misleading claims he made during his four years in the Oval office, an average of about 21 lies per day, according to the Washington Post fact checkers. The Republican National Committee’s pronouncement that it will now tone down the rhetoric was a stunningly duplicitous statement. Cue up vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the Yale-trained “hillbilly” lawyer turned attack dog for Trump’s orchestrated attempt at circumspection.

Should he win, Trump’s election to a second term in the White House, this time without anyone around him to put the brakes on his worst instincts, will be ranked among the most politically divisive events in American history. The Supreme Court’s recent decisions (more on that below) have abolished the guardrails. The level of despair and alienation that will be felt by more than half the population (including a hefty majority of the college educated) will reach unprecedented levels. It bodes ill for the future of our society, the economy and our standing in the world.

While sipping a Guinness in a Dublin pub a few days after the first debate, a 30-something man with tattoos running down both arms engaged me in conversation. Talking to whomever is next to you in a pub is the national pastime in a small country that not only seemed more prosperous than the U.S., but happier and with better roads and public transit.

After learning I was from Chicago, he asked what I thought about Trump. I assured him I was for the other guy. He laughed. “We’re embarrassed for you,” he said.

A young Irish couple poses for a wedding photo on the Dingle Peninsula, the westernmost point in Europe.

Biden’s verbal fiasco

While away, I kept a mental diary of my reactions to what seemed like a torrent of bad news for liberal-minded folks like myself. Allow me to share those thoughts (before returning to our usual subjects in subsequent postings).

Upon reading that President Biden had stumbled through the first half hour of the first presidential debate, which set off a media firestorm about his fitness for high office, I thought to myself, so what else is new? The stutterer-in-chief has been prone to verbal gaffes throughout his nearly half century in public life. One would expect the number of verbal slip-ups to grow after he hit 80. I’m seven years behind him and I write more slowly and find myself all too frequently reaching for words. You can decide if it has affected the quality of my thinking.

It is perfectly legitimate to raise the question of whether we should have octogenarians running the country. Both candidates are guilty on that score. Trump will be over 80 if he wins again. The time to raise those questions, however, was during the primaries, when not a single prominent Democrat stepped forward to challenge Biden.

But as I read pundit after pundit that I respect jump on the bandwagon of dumping Biden in favor of … who precisely? … I thought to myself: What exactly does verbal acuity have to do with performing well as president? Sure, it is an important skill to have when running for office, especially in our media saturated age. But not so much while in office.

A president who is not a dictator is surrounded by well-informed experts for every possible decision that he or she has to make. A president who is not a dictator surrounds him or herself with people with differing points of view – a team of rivals to use historian Doris Kearns’ formulation. A president who is not a dictator listens and then decides.

President Biden during his first term has listened to the right people and pursued policies that are markedly different and more progressive than the militantly centrist positions he took during most of his years in public life. During his first term, which began amid a steep recession caused by a raging pandemic that had been mishandled by his predecessor, Biden proposed and helped pass legislation that made him the most economically progressive president since Lyndon Johnson. His second round of stimulus and infrastructure legislation made him the most environmentally significant president since Richard Nixon, who signed every environmental bill a Democratic Congress put on his desk.

With the globe at a turning point in fight against global warming, count me among those who fear a second Trump presidency will doom our children and grandchildren to lives filled with a never-ending stream of environmental, social and economic catastrophes. Only a Democratic victory in this year’s election stands in the way of that outcome. If Biden stays the course, I will vote for him. If he dies on the day before the election, I will vote for him. If he drops out or gets replaced, I will support whomever the delegates to the convention choose.    

Who cares if Biden zones out occasionally during boring cabinet meetings? In a moment of despair while sitting in London, I used my phone to look up Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s health during his final run for office. Through an election year when U.S. troops and the allies battled across Europe, his doctors limited his work hours to four per day due to uncontrolled high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and other maladies. All of this was hidden from public view by his handlers and a compliant press that never took a picture of him in a wheelchair. When FDR died in April 1945, the New York Times reported the sad event as “sudden and unexpected.”

However sick Joe Biden is, and to my eyes, he’s not that sick, he is certainly less sick than Donald Trump, whose sickness is the kind that millions of Americans either cannot or refuse to see because it is in his head and in his heart.

Supreme Court uber alles

As if the political news wasn’t bad enough, the Supreme Court unveiled two decisions that, when coupled with the repeal of Roe v. Wade two years ago, completes John Roberts’ transformation into the most divisive chief justice since Roger Taney issued the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared that any black man, whether free or slave, had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” On June 28, the high court dismissed 40 years of precedent by declaring that the courts, not experts at federal agencies, will have the final say in interpreting federal statutes that are ambiguous (like what constitutes “clean air”).

As someone who spent many years of my life both reporting on and participating in the notice and public comment periods required of any federal agency seeking to impose regulations, this usurpation by the judicial branch strikes a blow against public participation in federal rulemaking. It ignores the right of Congress to pass laws that are not specific in cases where no one can possibly know what will be required in the future to assure the public has clean air, clean water, safe workplaces, safe and effective drugs, fair bank rules, consumer protections, and on and on.

When the clean air act passed in 1971, no one in Congress understood the impact that uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions would have on the environment. Now we know and we need federal regulators who can act in accordance with existing law without being second-guessed by unelected judges who have neither the training nor time to make wise and scientifically-based decisions.

Then, on July 1, the court in Trump v. United States declared the president of the United States is above the law when conducting “official acts.” Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, writing in the New York Review of Books, said of the decision:

In effect it invests the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, repudiating the foundational principle of the rule of law. Trump and his supporters have pledged to wield unfettered executive power and unleash a scorched-earth assault on the “deep state,” which is to say the existing constitutional and institutional order, if he is reelected. In the current crisis, that threat’s most powerful ally is the Supreme Court of the United States.

Roberts, in his majority opinion, dismissed with a wave of his hand concerns raised by Sonia Sotomayor’s angry dissent, which hypothesized a rogue president could order the assassination of a political rival.

Europe moving in a different direction

What is happening here is dramatically at odds with what I witnessed while in Europe. Voters in Great Britain saw fit to oust a Conservative party who misrule over the past 14 years imposed a punishing austerity and helped engineer Brexit, which has slowed economic growth to a crawl. During that time span, funding for England’s beloved National Health Service was cut by 4.8% in inflation-adjusted pounds. That paled in comparison to the 21% cut in support for public housing; the 15% cut in education budgets; the 38% cut in the Home Office (the equivalent of Homeland Security here); and 51% cut in the criminal justice system. There were also massive cuts in support for local governments and the arts.

Indeed, a succession of Tory governments couldn’t cut NHS as much as it would have liked because the massive cuts in social spending made England a much poorer and sicker nation. Lines for discretionary procedures have reached unprecedented levels while general practitioners complain bitterly they’ve been stretched beyond what is good for their patients or their own health. Doctors-in-training engaged in a work stoppage while we were in London.

But now there is hope that all that will change after the UK’s Labor Party won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament and installed Keir Starmer, a left-leaning member of Parliament, as prime minister. The Fleet Street press was predictably cautious. The Conservatives lost so many seats that many pundits predict the rightwing, anti-immigration Reform Party, which won about 14% of the vote and is led by Nigel Farage, will soon take over the Conservative Party, much like Trump has taken over the Republican Party in the U.S.

Finally, in France, the New Popular Front, which combined France’s leftwing and centrist parties (the latter led by President Emmanuel Macron), decisively defeated the far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally Party, which had won the most votes in a first round of voting. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, is openly questioning France’s continued participation in NATO and the European Union.

With war raging on its eastern border, Europe is facing the prospect of Russia’s Vladimir Putin having an ally in the White House. They are voting accordingly and voting against joining that parade. It appears the rest of what we used to call the free world has a clearer view than many here of the threats posed by authoritarian rule.