Why I Care About Democracy

Maybe you’ve figured out that I’m a pragmatist but not a centrist. I’ve done legal work in the environmental movement, the poor people’s movement and the movement for equal rights for Blacks, gays and women. Some of that was as an attorney in the legal services system. Some of that was part of the work I did with the New York Civil Liberties Union. I care. But a country like ours is like a huge tanker – it takes a lot of time and tugs to turn it. So I’m often frustrated. This commentary is an outlet for me – to put some effort into keeping our politics moving in a decent direction. I can live with that even though things won’t change instantly.

But losing democratic government to extremists who think they’ve the right to threaten, intimidate and demand we do what they want, is not acceptable to me. They’ll destroy everything I care about. They’ve drawn on people who admire Hitler’s Nazis and their racial and religious persecution. I don’t trust them with my life. I don’t trust them with yours. I don’t trust them with the rights of Blacks, browns, women, girls, gays, the poor or working people. Guns aimed at democratic government don’t purify democracy – they end in dictatorship where everything is for the dictators and nothing for the people. I don’t trust dictators. So I can be patient with democracy but I can’t be patient with those who would tear it down so they can be the dictators’ storm-troopers, wear his emblem and rule our lives with impunity.

That’s a world where everything takes bribes and justice is irrelevant.

There are good and bad people everywhere. But does the system care? Is the system rigged so justice has no chance and any petty tyrant who doesn’t like us can beat us down. That’s dictatorship.

Democracy is a world in which we can help each other, work for justice, for so-called ordinary people, for the downtrodden. We won’t always succeed. Corporations and bad people are constantly trying to take everything they can from us – sometimes take our very lives – but democracy is the way we fight back.

Democracy is precious, the way we hold hands or put our arms around each other and do the best we can for love, justice and decency.

If you need data, democracy produces more for its people than dictatorships do. Some autocratic societies have gotten better, but their people would still rather live here because we treat people better – not always, but usually. And where we fail, there’s room to work for improvement.

When I was younger, New York political parties used to balance their tickets with a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew, recognizing that good people worship in all kinds of places. We haven’t come close to opening all the doors for African-Americans that I’d like to see but we’ve been opening opportunities. We haven’t come close to rewarding working people for their contributions and squelched the union movement over the last fifty years though there are signs of improvement recently. Farmers and red states have asked a lot of the rest of us and get a disproportionate share of the welfare budget, not the groups they rail against. But the future in a democracy belongs to coalitions, to the groups that work together, that recognize each other’s humanity and bring everyone in the circle of care and concern. That’s what I’m for. That’s why I care about democracy.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Sept. 20, 2022.

Dealing with the Threat of Civil War in America

Last week we started discussing Barbara Walter’s analysis of the danger of civil war in America. Let’s address how to stop it. But because most measures run into Congress, all roads lead through election day.

She wrote “The best way to neutralize a budding insurgency” is to remove the grievances by “improving the quality of government services,” “bolster[ing] the rule of law, [and] giv[ing] all citizens equal access to the vote.”[1]

Walter argues that extremists’ grievances stem both from feelings of ethnic loss, and loss of factory and mining jobs. She adds, accurately, that

many working-class and middle-class Americans live their lives “one small step from catastrophe,” … [which] makes them ready recruits for militants. … [R]eal political reform and economic security would make it much harder for white nationalists to gain sympathizers and would prevent the rise of a new generation of far-right extremists.[2]

Many extremists aren’t poor. Nevertheless the combination of MAGA ethnic discomfort and the desperation of working people fueled the attack against democracy, the Capital and other armed threats and murders. MAGA folk think they’ll do well with revolution and treason is a technicality to them.

Violent revolutions typically build on working people’s grievances and then give the rich the money, like the Communists in Russia and China or dictators in Latin American. Dictators fleece the public for themselves and their rich friends. Those with most to lose expect to gain by violence. Indeed, MAGA Republican representatives have already rewarded the richest Americans, saying tax breaks for the wealthy would create jobs, which turned out to be in China or elsewhere abroad. Meanwhile, they’re the major threat to everything we care about – workers’ rights, women’s rights, equal care and concern for all Americans, global warming, the survival of American democracy, justice and just plain civilization in America.

Reversing that depends on taking control of Congress. But the MAGA extremists’ Republican representatives fought all Democratic proposals to improve American workers’ lives – medical care, the minimum wage, workers’ rights, good jobs for American working people and projects to benefit us all.

Walker also wants to take away

the social media bullhorn … [to] turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers, and enemies of democracy. America’s collective anger would drop almost immediately, as it did when Donald Trump could no longer reach every American twenty times a day, every day.[3]

As Voltaire once said, “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” But the protection given to media to circulate falsehoods was also enacted in the 90s – so that too depends on Congress.

Walter also explains how enforcing the rule of law helps to defeat efforts to intimidate us, to reestablish trust in government’s ability to protect us from violence, and to discourage people from seeking the protection of extremists.[4] Enforcing the rule of law is partly independent of Congress, but not independent of the courts that Trump restaffed.

So before we can write needed laws, we citizens have to organize, encourage people who share our concerns to vote, and vote the entire ballot to put good people in; we have to get ourselves and each other to the polls, protect voters at the polls, and stand up for election workers trying to give us an honest count. No one can do that for us. Government of the people, by the people and for the people depends on our standing up for it.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 13, 2022.

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[1] Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, 209

[2] Id. at 209-10.

[3] Id. at 214.

[4] Id. at 212.

How Civil Wars Start – The Threat

A new book by Barbara Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, discusses The Political Instability Task Force, and its predecessor, the State Failure Task Force, which uncovered what leads to civil war. I used their work to discuss preventing Trumpian extremism in my book, Unfit for Democracy. Walter is trying to help us survive him.

911 took our eyes off domestic American terrorism which has been deadly ever since the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, and the principal terrorism threat most of the time since. As Walter describes, by 2007, a Department of Homeland Security team found “bomb-making manuals, weapons training, and hundreds of militia-recruitment videos” on “‘right-wing’ … extremist websites and message boards.” But an “outcry” from congressional Republicans pressured DHS to withdraw the report and repeatedly blocked investigations into domestic terrorism because of extremist support. Still, the FBI found extremists infiltrating law enforcement much like the KKK had done in the age of segregation.

A student of mine described how domestic terrorists used threats of violence to intimidate judges and elected officials where he came from. We’ve now had judges, congressmen and other officials threatened, shot, sometimes killed, a plot intercepted before the perpetrators could kidnap and execute a state governor, and threats to the FBI have spiked.

Unfortunately, that’s what the gun movement has been about. The NRA started as an organization of hunters but hunters’ rights have never been threatened. The issue has been the ability to threaten, shoot and kill Blacks and public officials.

The extremists have been arming for decades. The NRA disavows subversion, but it was taken over by extremists using Confederate rhetoric about fighting Washington tyranny. It supported people arming themselves with powerful weapons that could take on the police or the Army. It backed extremists turning themselves into fighting forces with caches of guns. The thrust of private militias trying to take on American government by force and violence has long been obvious. They’ve been using gun shows and social media to advertise the need to deal with what they call tyranny in the U.S. Their ads, militias and videos shaped domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, whose bomb killed more than two hundred people in Oklahoma City, those who tried to kidnap the Michigan governor, shot members of Congress and attacked the capital on Jan. 6. Their threat to America is very real. The portion of America that sympathizes is closer to the size of some of the world’s most vicious takeovers than most of us would like to realize.

That leaves two questions: What are the likely effects, and what can we do to stop it?

The likely effects are disastrous. Violent revolutions almost always result in the rule of rufians who have only their own interests at heart. The American Civil War was fought over the right to enslave other people. Not surprisingly it resulted in self-appointed bands of thugs committing murder and mayhem long after the War was officially over. The extremists aren’t fighting for equality but to reinstitute “white” racial dominance. The right to control or attack others with guns turns people into tyrants, and a gun-toting mob we should fear. It’s the first step to the violent overthrow of our Constitution and country. As Walter pointed out, terrorists magnify their power by intimidating those who don’t “believe the government can take care of them or protect them from violence.”

I’ll get back to what we can do to stop it next week.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Sept. 6, 2022.

The Threat of White Nationalist Violence

A number of us have been trying to communicate that Confederate symbols reflect the ideology that underlies much of the gun movement, various private militias and armed organizations.[1] White nationalist racism has been evident for decades at gun shows, militia get-togethers and in their social media. With NRA help, they’ve been working to refight or reverse the results of the Civil War.  Their guns are intended to give white nationalists political power, and the killing sprees, often with streaming video, are welcomed to generate copycats and trigger the new war, which they’re convinced they have the weapons to win. They are not for democracy in America; the Confederacy is the future, not the past.

Reporting makes it look like school shooters are a random bunch of deranged individuals. But those killers study white nationalist literature, read the manifestos and watch the videos of their predecessors. Nothing is truly random. White nationalist antipathy toward African-Americans, people of color, Jews, Muslims and liberals leads to murders in churches, Temples, Mosques, grocery stores, and concerts.  These extremists are fundamentally disloyal, arming themselves for war against America.

Their disloyalty drives taking law into their own hands. Dislike for rules about grazing on federal lands led to an armed standoff with park rangers. Dislike for election results led to storming the capital. As their arrogance spreads, we’re all in their sights.

After the Civil War, supporters of the defeated Confederacy used murder to reduce their opponents’ voting power. Malcolm Nance, whose new book, They Want to Kill Americans, I strongly recommend, updates that story. Terrorists have no moral scruples. All of us are potentially in their sights.

Of course the white nationalists are being taken for a ride. Nance eloquently summarized a point analysts and economists have been trying to make, that under the white-nationalist-driven-Republican Party, most Americans “would see none of the profits of America but would literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich.” Neo-Confederates haven’t connected their financiers and candidates with damage instead of service to the working classes who make up the bulk of the whites these racist extremists claim to defend. They’re for a lawless jungle run for the benefit of wealthy kleptocrats.

So what do we do?

First, we can take the wraps off investigating domestic terrorism – it should have been obvious since McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 that homegrown white terrorism is a major problem in the U.S, and getting worse. But because of ties between violent white nationalist groups and the Republican Party, Congress hasn’t dealt with it effectively, though the FBI is finally catching up.

Second, despite the Court, we can put limits on guns; we can remake the illegitimate Court; and, if necessary, rewrite the Second Amendment.

Third, with our votes, we can make Republican support for violent extremists toxic.

Fourth, vote – we can wrap up our skepticism and get ourselves, family and friends to the polls. The religious right, their white nationalist allies, and corporate supporters can tell you voting pays huge dividends. There are enough of us to restore our country – if we get ourselves, families and friends to the polls.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary, with minor changes, was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on July 19, 2022.

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[1] See my Unfit for Democracy (NYU Press, 2016), chap. 8.

The Investigations

Let’s talk about the investigations of Trump’s effort to overturn the election. I’ve been hearing lots of people criticizing Attorney General Garland for being slow, saying nothing and some even accuse him of not being committed to the investigation of Trump. Let me be clear, when you hear anyone making remarks like that, realize that they are talking from ignorance and know little or nothing about how an investigation like this proceeds.

First, Garland is proceeding like the Justice Department has always proceeded against the Mafia and similar large organizations. It started against the people at the bottom and has been working its way up that ladder. That process not only yields information but gradually yields people who are willing to testify and provides paths to documents, witnesses and the evidence one needs to convict the big shots. You don’t just file against the boss and go to court shouting guilty, guilty. Good lawyers aren’t that naïve.

Second, although I claim no inside knowledge, congressional investigations and Justice Department investigations have to work together. The House Special Committee has to be sure that nothing it does will interfere with what the Justice Department is doing. Witnesses, for example, can be offered immunity so that they will give testimony without pleading the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering, but responsible House leaders wouldn’t offer immunity without checking with the Justice Department.

That points to something else – the House investigation can turn up information the Justice Department can use. It’s too simple to ask why the Justice Department couldn’t get the same information. Witnesses can be very skittish and it matters who talks to whom and how they come across. The House Committee has been doing very valuable work with the witnesses and in putting the story together. If I were Garland, I would want to take advantage of their effort even if it’s only the first draft of the story the Justice Department will put together.

There’s another issue – how will the public handle indictments? And how will a jury treat an indictment? It should be obvious that high profile cases are now typically fought in public before they are fought in court. That affects everyone involved, their willingness to deal with the time, energy and dangers of handling these cases – we have already heard testimony about intimidation. One good way to protect witnesses from being attacked, killed or punished is to put them on the public record before anyone can tamper with the evidence by threatening, intimidating or hurting witnesses. It will be a while before that could be done at a trial. Trump has been trying to rally the public to his side since it became clear he was going to be 7 million votes short of reelection. And the House is fighting back.

So if I were Garland, I would keep my mouth shut. I would not want to upstage the Special Committee. I would want to encourage, not impede, its work. And when you are trying to bring down a man with obvious power, you want to leave no stone unturned. The law can be slower than many of us would like, and outcomes are never guaranteed, but the Justice Department is one of the best legal organizations in the country and they will be ready for him when they come. I wouldn’t want to be Trump’s lawyer this time.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on July 12, 2022.

Trump’s Path to Violence

There’s too much important news, but everything depends on elections working properly. And I felt sick listening to the hearings last Tuesday. Trump and his team publicly spread rumors about election workers, and skipped any process, due or otherwise. Their rumors led to vicious threats. At the hearings, a Georgia election worker told us neither she nor any of her colleagues will work the next election. She, her family and neighbors were continuously harassed. She described constant interference, phone calls, being staked out, her home invaded, racial epithets hurled at her, and told ominously she was lucky this is 2022, not 1922, referring to the lynchings that the Ku Klux Klan and similar lawless mobs of thugs would have done in 1922. The FBI told her and her family to go into hiding – for months. So vicious have the mobs been that she’s afraid even to go to the grocery store. Trump should be known by the thugs he keeps as friends. No self-respecting American has any business supporting this kind of thuggish lawlessness.

What we’re seeing is reminiscent of the racist groups that ruled the segregated states by violence, intimidation, and murder. Afraid for themselves, sympathetic whites kept their mouths shut when Blacks were attacked or when thugs and their ringleaders were implicated in other wrongdoing . Everyone tried to abide by racist rules for self-preservation. Even the future Justice Hugo Black joined the KKK as a young lawyer to expand his contacts and clients. The Klan and the racism it enforced dominated the segregated states, subjugating Blacks and cowing decent whites. The lack of freedom there wasn’t much different from what we rightly condemn in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China.

In American states dominated by racists, Blacks were lynched in front of large crowds as a spectacle that often included burning as if they were bar-b-que. Onlookers took home charred body parts as souvenires. If people were lucky their homes were burned and they were merely driven out. That’s where lawlessness goes. A lecture describing one such lynching is permanently seared into my brain.

Mob violence affects us all because it establishes rule by the sword. The U.S. and states like New York passed laws to protect people from the Klan. Mobs don’t respect due process. They feed on each other heedless of factual or legal limits. There were over 6,400 lynchings between the Civil War and 1950, and more since. People were yanked out of jails lest they be acquitted. We know the innocence of some but it’s impossible to establish the guilt of any, given the complete absence of due process. Fourteen year old Emmett Till, visiting from up north, was murdered for a conversation with a white woman – he was accused of flirting or whistling at her – whether he did hardly matters. Rule by the sword knows no bounds.

Trump and his minions use weapons the way no self-respecting gun-owners would. They substitute his hunch or belief for election numbers. There’s no democracy without counting ballots. There’s no freedom if rulers are imposed by hunch or belief. There’s only egotism, greed and self-interest. It turns the rest of us into servants, serfs or slaves of the rulers. Trump’s encouragement of violence and intimidation have one end – the destruction of everything we admire about the country we’ve called home.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 28, 2022.

Psychopaths on the Bench

The Supreme Court says we can’t keep guns off our streets and we have to defer to the gun nuts. Well, the Supreme Court has made it’s decision – now let them enforce it. I’d fight back with everything at our disposal.

Combatting Racism in America

The Israeli paper, Haaretz, reported that Israel had approved construction of some 4,000 units on the West Bank for Israeli settlement. The US State Department condemned the announcement. As University of Michigan Middle-East expert Juan Cole described it, Israel would take “land owned by Palestinian families and bring in squatters from Israel” to settle on their land. Now we learn that Israeli soldiers beat and kicked pall bearers at a reporter’s funeral.

I drafted commentary condemning what happened. And then Payton Gendron killed ten people at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo. And it’s clear that the racists in this country have been buying racism and murder in all guises filled with made-up conspiracy theories and racial libels. One moment it’s Blacks, the next is Jews, and another moment its Muslims. Actually I was studying that in the 90s and Republicans blocked every effort to investigate the dangerous racism of armed private militias training around the country. Their efforts to block investigation of armed racist groups then and their embrace of racist slander now mean they own it.[1] Patriotic Republicans need to create a new party of patriots which the existing Republican Party is not.

Tut-tut – but what are we going to do about it? Suburbanization and other forms of segregation don’t work – it permitted and even encouraged a reign of intimidation and terror in the formerly segregated South; Israel segregates its Palestinians from its Jews in schools and towns and see how that is solving problems. So what should we do? Take down Trump and all his followers? Then what?

My work has had me focused like a laser on the US Supreme Court? It is a major problem. Yes, but how long will dealing with that take? I’d vote to defund all the expenses that allow it to function like a court – but who’d join me?

Real gun control? We now have an armed population like the places most likely to suffer civil war. In fact the diffusion of guns is one of the stongest indicators of a country about to fall apart.[2] Gendron’s real-time posting of the video of his attack was obviously intended to incite a race war. Some of us have been trying for years to deal with guns. Are we going to hold our breathe?

How about creating liberal militias designed to counteract the armed racist militias? That of course is an invitation to civil war in which the defenders will be blamed for starting it.

Repeal the Second Amendment? The rules for amendments will block that.

National service or restore the draft? That would force people to work together. The military  has dealt with integration more effectively than most American institutions. There has long been a movement for national service. It’s hardly clear if it has a political chance but it is one I would wholeheartedly support – it may be the one response that could change our society for the better.

Each and all of those strategies? Racism and prejudice are universal threats. We have to stamp them out all over or be consumed by them.

Here in Albany, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, men and women, gays and straights, Blacks and whites have all prayed together, with each other and for each other’s safety and well-being. That’s as it should be.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 31, 2022.

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[1] Kenneth S. Stern, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate 128 (Norman: U. Okla. Press, 1997)

[2] Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics, 175-77 (New York: NYU Press 2016)

On the Anniversary of Mother’s Death

— For the podcast, please click here. —

Some people talk about immigrants as if they’re threats.

Last Tuesday, I lit a candle for the anniversary of mother’s death. I was sixty miles away at college in New Jersey when I got the call to come to the hospital, hopped a train, switched to the subway and headed for the stop at the Williamsburg Savings Bank – I didn’t remember its name but remember my panic trying to find the right station and the hospital. Mother was still alive when I got there. While alone with her, in words burned into my memory, she said “It’s a good life; I don’t want to leave it.” A little while later she began coughing blood; we tried to find a nurse but it was all over. I never got to introduce her to her daughter-inlaw or grandchildren.

Mother was an immigrant. She came to the US in steerage with her twelve year old brother, Sam; mama was 8. If they’d stayed in Eastern Europe, they’d have had a small chance of survival. Mom and dad were very deliberate about not teaching me Yiddish. If you’d known them, you might not have realized they could speak it – their English was excellent, largely unaccented, and they were proud of it – even Brooklynese barely made a mark on their tongues. They wanted me to be an American. My dad tried to serve in World War I. His older brother served in France and I had cousins who served in World War II. America was good to them and they loved our country.

We didn’t get further out of state than New Jersey. But we traveled the length and breadth of this state. When I was a boy, a train engineer, Mr. Benedict, took me onto a yard engine in Hancock, NY, and let me take the controls. We Square Danced with the locals on the shores of Lake Champlain and men who’d been in the Dodger organization tried to give me pointers about pitching and batting. In 1955 my dad started taking us to Chautauqua, just about as far west in New York State as you can get. Chautauqua was founded in the 1870s as a summer school for Protestant Sunday school teachers. In the 1950s there were still no places of worship except Protestant churches and you had to be Protestant to own property, but we always felt welcome and loved the place.

On all the trips, to the Southern tier, Lake Champlain and Chautauqua there were historical places to see – markers, forts and battlefields from Saratoga to Lake Erie, homes where presidents lived, where President Grant wrote his autobiography, the Schuyler Mansion here in Albany, and many others. Dad and I became students of American history, joined the American History Book Club and devoured what we bought. When I was eleven, because I kept getting sick, a doctor in Crown Point pumped me full of penicillin and a doctor in Glens Falls lanced my ear drums. So I spent the time going through Kenneth Roberts’ historical novels – Northwest Passage about the French and Indian War, Rabble in Arms about the Revolution – and lots of books about Lincoln and Civil War history. I also studied the history of the labor union movement and lawyers, like Clarence Darrow, who fought for the working man.

Dad and I were born here, though he only learned English in school just like my mother did, but I knew the generation that came over. In my experience, love of America isn’t extraordinary, but typical, of immigrant families, with good reason.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 3, 2022.

Controlling Our Bodies Requires Saving American Democracy

— For the podcast, please click here. —

Most people don’t realize that Roe v. Wade was the brainchild of two Nixon appointees, Justice Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger – the so-called Minnesota twins because they had grown up together in Minnesota. Blackmun had been counsel to the Mayo Clinic and he and Burger had corresponded about abortion rights well before Roe v. Wade came to the Court. So they were ready and waiting for it.

As a moral issue Roe was about people’s rights to control their own bodies. It has never seemed a close moral case to me. But the legal implications of litigation are often much more complex than the moral issues. Roe was controversial from the beginning even among liberal law professors. I particularly remember an article by John Hart Ely criticizing the legal foundations of Roe. And Gerald Rosenberg famously argued in The Hollow Hope that women would have had a more secure right to abort without Roe. I’m in print, in an article with my friend David Schultz, disagreeing with Rosenberg.

But I want to make a different point than the ones that Ely, Rosenberg, or David and I made, that it is important to understand the price we have paid for the freedom we believe in and what that means for the future.

When Roe was decided, the Court was mopping up some of the civil rights cases in the midst of a backlash. Many of us remember the White Citizens Councils and racist violence. But most of the country was appalled. The racists had no chance of taking over the country. They had no claim to the moral high ground, and even its opponents understood that. Segregation, lynching, denials of voting rights were basically indefensible.

But Roe was a bugle call to many religious groups. The racist and religious groups reached different people despite some overlap. Church groups had a religious fervor and an organizational engine that the racists could not achieve by themselves. Karl Rove and others put many of them together. In doing so, they created a movement that threatens the core of American self-government.

Racism clearly underlies a great deal of what is happening now in the country and a large part of support for Mr. Trump. But the religious fervor of church groups built a separate movement around gender and sexual issues before some of the religious groups merged with the racists. The combination is lethal.

By nationalizing the social, gender and sexual issues on top of the Civil Rights revolution, the Court made a large group of Americans willing to attack American democracy. It was once possible, though unfair and expensive, for people who believed in the freedom to control their own bodies to rely on the law in states like New York and Massachusetts even though they’d be wise to stay out of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and other states that had tried to destroy the country in the Civil War. But now, freedom-loving people cannot be sure of freedom anywhere in the country when American popular government is under attack by racists who recognize no rights but their own. What was a religious movement aimed at a moral issue is now fueling an attack on democracy itself.

Let’s be clear – no dictatorship, no government based on aiming weapons at its own people, supports women’s rights, privacy rights or sexual rights. In other words, with their sights trained on popular government, everything is at risk, all the freedoms we care about. The price of protecting everyone’s control of their own bodies is that we all have to fight for democracy with everything at our disposal.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 26, 2022.