The Danger of Collective Amnesia

At the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, I feel compelled to warn you that if we forget and move on from the tragedies of this past year, we’re setting ourselves on a dangerous path. Of course I understand the desire to forget all the unpleasantness and start a new chapter. But if we do, we’re inviting greater tragedies in the future. 

Let me remind you: Donald Trump lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don’t you? – he tried to overturn the results.

Trump twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.

Several Republican members of Congress encouraged the attempted coup by joining him in the big lie and refusing to certify the election — even after the mob desecrated the halls of our democracy.

This was in January of this year, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our memory. Meanwhile, those responsible for instigating the attack haven’t been held accountable in any respect — including by the media.

The Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before the attack.

But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley’s new book on big tech. It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley’s sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation “for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers” and as “a fierce defender of the Constitution.”

CBS This Morning interviewed Florida Republican Rick Scott, another senator who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of his sedition, either. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden’s spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.

Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election, or their continued promotion of Trump’s lies.

The media is supposed to serve as a crucial check on those in power. But in its breathless desire to cover the “news” it is failing to remind us of our recent past.  

The consequences of this failure are dire. 

Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and that President Biden is not legitimate, is not disappearing. A majority of Republican voters believe him.

That big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify an all-out assault on the right to vote. 

Hours after Florida enacted new voting restrictions, Texas’s Republican-led legislature pushed ahead with its own bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.

The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate launched a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County – farming out 2.1 million ballots to GOP partisans with no experience in ballot counting or election monitoring. At least one person involved in the recount participated in the Capitol attack.

The Republican Party even purged one of its leaders, Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth about the election.

Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are muscling their way into election administration, as they attempt to dislodge or bully local election officials who have always run our voting systems.

Trump’s big lie will continue to flourish unless the lawmakers who went along with it and have failed to renounce it face real consequences. 

That means no book promotions, no cushy interviews, no guest op-eds in the Sunday paper.

What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? If they must appear, they should be asked if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why. 

It also means a thorough independent 9-11 type inquiry into what happened, whether members of Congress were involved, how Donald Trump and others were involved. 

Republican leaders must not duck this. History is watching. 

They must be held accountable to the truth. Otherwise the trauma of 2020 will return — perhaps in even more terrifying form.

A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged under the country’s National Security Act for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The hospital’s owner and manager says the police have accused him of “false scare-mongering,” after he stated publicly that four of his patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out.

Since Covid-19 exploded in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, seems more intent on controlling the news than the outbreak. On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 Covid cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30 percent of worldwide Covid deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates that at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day.

The horror has been worsened by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.

One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse.

Vladimir Putin is busily denying the truth about Covid in Russia. Demographer Alexei Raksha, who worked at Russia’s official statistical agency, Rosstat, but says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth about Covid, claims that the daily data in Russia has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better. Like many experts, he uses excess mortality – the number of deaths during the pandemic over the typical number of deaths – as the best indicator.

“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates.

Russia was first out of the gate with a Covid vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polling puts the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60 to 70 percent. That’s because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating the public than on claiming success in containing Covid.

The U.S. is suffering a similar problem – the legacy of another strongman, Donald Trump. Although more than half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40 percent of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread.

Like Modi and Putin, Trump minimized the seriousness of the pandemic and spread misinformation about it. Trump officials ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay its severity. He declined to get vaccinated publicly and was noticeably absent from a public service announcement on vaccination that featured all other living former presidents.

Trump allies in the media have conducted a scare campaign about the vaccines. In December, Laura Ingraham posted a story on Facebook from the Daily Mail purporting to show evidence that Chinese communist party loyalists worked at pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccine.

As recently as mid-April, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined that if the vaccine were truly effective, there’d be no reason for people who received it to wear masks or avoid physical contact.

“So maybe it doesn’t work, and they’re simply not telling you that.”

Why then should anyone be surprised at the reluctance of Trump Republicans to get vaccinated? A recent New York Times analysis showed vaccination rates to be lower in counties where a majority voted for Trump in 2020. States that voted more heavily for Trump are also states where lower percentages of the population have been vaccinated.

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz claims  Trump bears responsibility for the hesitancy of GOP voters to be vaccinated.

“He wants to get the credit for developing the vaccine. Then he also gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it.”

Trump’s Republican Party is coming to resemble authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well – purging truthtellers and trucking in lies, misinformation, and propaganda harmful to the public.

Last week the GOP stripped Representative Liz Cheney of her leadership position for telling the truth about the 2020 election. At last week’s congressional hearing about the January 6 attack on the Capitol, one Republican congressman, Andrew Clyde, even denied it happened.

“There was no insurrection,” he said. “To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the United States, too – and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans.

America prefers to look forward rather than back. We’re a land of second acts. We move on.

This can be a strength. We don’t get bogged down in outmoded traditions, old grudges, obsolete ways of thinking. We constantly reinvent. We love innovation and disruption.  

The downside is a collective amnesia about what we’ve been though, and a corresponding reluctance to do anything about it or hold anyone accountable.

Now, with Covid receding and the economy starting to rebound – and the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol behind us – the future looks bright.

But at the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, let me remind you:

We have lost more than 580,000 people to COVID-19. One big reason that number is so high is our former president lied about the virus and ordered his administration to minimize its danger.  

He also lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don’t you? – he tried to overturn the results.

He twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.

Several Republican members of Congress joined him in the big lie and refused to certify the election. They thereby encouraged the attempted coup.

This was just over four months ago, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our collective memory.

Last Tuesday, the Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before they attacked.

But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech.” It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley’s sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation “for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers,” and as “a fierce defender of the Constitution.”

Last week, “CBS This Morning” interviewed Florida Republican senator Rick Scott, another of the senators who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of any of his sedition. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden’s spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.  

Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election.

What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? At the least, if they must appear, ask them if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why.

Pretending nothing happened promotes America’s dangerous amnesia, which invites more attempts to distort the truth.  

Trump is consolidating his power over the Republican Party, based on his big lie. The GOP is about to purge one of its leaders, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth.

The big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new laws to restrict voting. On Thursday, hours after Florida installed a rash of new voting restrictions, Texas’s Republican-led Legislature pushed ahead with its a bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.

The Republican-controlled Arizona senate is mounting a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County – farming out 2.1 million ballots to GOP partisans, including at least one who participated in the January 6 raid on the Capitol.

Last Monday, Trump even lied about his big lie, issuing a “proclamation” to co-opt the language of those criticizing the lie. “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the BIG LIE!” he wrote.

Most Republican voters believe him.

It is natural to want to put all this unpleasantness behind us. We are finally turning the corner on the pandemic and the economy.

Why look back to the trauma of the 2020 election? Because we cannot put it behind us. Trump’s big lie and all that it has provoked are still with us. If we forget what has occurred the trauma will return, perhaps in even more terrifying form.

By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against COVID-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.

Two thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9 stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined last Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6 trillion price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.

Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Clinton’s failed to accomplish and which Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as pre-school, public community c0llege, paid family and medical leave, home care, and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.

Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared to workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.

Besides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.

Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.

In his address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first hundred days. They had been accomplished “because of you,” he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.

Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Trump left it with little more than a list of baseless grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans – that Trump would have been reelected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.

Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he’s to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.  

Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.

Trump’s giant $1.9 trillion tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down,” make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.

Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.

At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes has alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.

Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and his overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism,” as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.  

The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.

With any luck, Biden’s plans might be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the right-wing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury.

Does Trickle-Down Economics Actually Work?

To the extent the Republican Party has any economic platform at all, it’s trickle-down economics. Unfortunately for the GOP, it’s based on three giant myths. It’s time to debunk them once and for all.

Myth #1: Tax cuts for corporations and the rich create more and better jobs. 

Wrong. Corporations used Trump’s giant tax cut to buy back shares of their own stock and boost share prices. From 2017 to 2018, stock buybacks increased by a staggering 50 percent. Lowe’s spent $10 billion on stock buybacks in 2018, and then fired thousands of workers with no notice or severance. Walmart and AT&T also laid off thousands of workers. 

And contrary to the claim that the tax cut would boost wages by $4,000 a year, a recent analysis found that in the year after the Trump tax cut, wages increased by about the same as they did before it, and then slowed. 

Tax cuts for rich individuals don’t trickle down, either. The rich simply get richer. Two years before Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned less than 23 percent of the nation’s wealth. A decade later, after two rounds of tax cuts for the rich, they owned over 28 percent. By 2019, after more tax cuts for the rich by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, people at the top owned almost 35 percent of America’s wealth. Meanwhile, average wealth barely budged for the middle class, and went negative for the bottom 10 percent.

It gets worse. During this pandemic alone, America’s 664 billionaires have added $1.3 trillion to their collective wealth and now own over $4 trillion. That’s almost double the wealth of the bottom half  — 165 million Americans.

But nothing has trickled down. Even before the pandemic, wages stagnated.

Myth #2: Tax cuts for big corporations and the rich spur economic growth.

Baloney. Not even Ronald Reagan’s surging economic growth rate was driven by tax cuts. It was driven by low interest rates and humongous government spending. 

George W. Bush promised his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would pay for themselves (sound familiar?) by spurring economic growth. That didn’t happen. A 2017 study led by one of Bush’s former chief economists found that the tax cuts had no significant effect on growth. In fact, growth declined, slowing to just 2.8 percent from over 3 percent during the Clinton years. The economic expansion under Bush was one of the weakest expansions since World War II.

Donald Trump claimed his tax cut would be like “rocket fuel” for the economy, and would spur annual growth of 3 percent. After its first year, growth slowed to 1.9  percent.

Finally, a recent study analyzing tax data spanning 50 years from 18 advanced economies found that tax cuts for the rich only benefited the rich and had no effect on job creation or economic growth. I, for one, am shocked.

Myth #3: Deregulation spurs economic growth.

More rubbish. The cost savings from deregulation go to corporate executives and major investors, while the costs and risks land on the rest of us. 

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rolled back regulations on everything from clean air and water standards to dangerous chemicals in products — benefiting chemical and fossil fuel executives and investors while forcing everyone else to deal with polluted air and toxins. 

His Labor Department loosened child labor laws and scaled back the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. Companies raked in savings, while workers were exploited. 

And with the help of Congress, he rolled back banking regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis — to the benefit of rich Wall Streeters and the detriment of everyone else.

Don’t forget Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory agenda allowed for-profit healthcare companies to flourish, contributing to the out-of-control health care costs we’re saddled with today. And that deregulation of the financial sector was a major cause of the 2008 crash, as it allowed banks to make risky bets.

In other words, the Republican trickle-down claim that deregulation helps us all is baloney. Regulations that protect you and me from being harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services are clearly worth the cost.

So don’t fall for trickle-down nonsense. Making big corporations and the rich even richer through tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks doesn’t make the rest of us better off. It just makes big corporations and the rich even richer.

A quarter century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican’s proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he jeopardized his reelection.

That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year, “the era of big government is over.”

Until last Thursday, that is, when Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80 percent per child.

As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton, “the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”

As a senator, Biden had supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.

First, COVID. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep COVID recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans now living paycheck to paycheck.

For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen.”

Whites who were putting more hours into paid work than ever – women had streamed into the workforce in the 1970s in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs – were particularly susceptible to the message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?

By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)

Yet when COVID hit, public assistance was no longer necessary just for “them.” It was needed by “us.”

The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud, and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr. Seuss to Mr. Potato Head.  

Trump obliterated concerns about government giving away money. The CARES Act, which he signed into law at the end of March, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.  

Part of the GOP’s incapacity to respond to Biden’s momentous redistribution was due to the Party’s equally momentous distribution upward – its $1.9 trillion 2018 tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20 percent. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down.

Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the Trump tax cut – became $1.3 trillion wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.

The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93 percent of the nation’s children — 69 million — receive benefits. Americans in the lowest quintile increase their incomes by 20 percent; those in the second-lowest, 9 percent; those in the middle, 6 percent.

Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Over 70 percent of Americans support the bill, including 63 percent of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.

Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cut for corporations and the rich.  

The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.

The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists have argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.

Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.

Donald Trump formally anointed himself head of the Republican Party at Sunday’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

The Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, is now dead. What’s left is a dwindling number of elected officials who have stood up to Trump but are now being purged. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s popularity has dropped 29 points among Kentucky Republicans since he broke with Trump.

In its place is the Trump Party, whose major goal is to advance Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Its agenda is to exact vengeance on Republicans who didn’t or won’t support the lie or who voted to impeach or convict Trump for inciting the violence that the lie generated, and to keep attention on his grievances.  

As the Trump Party takes over the GOP, anti-Trump Republicans are abandoning the party in droves – thereby weakening it for general elections while simultaneously strengthening Trump’s hand inside it.

It’s great news for Democrats and Joe Biden.

Democrats couldn’t hope for a more perfect foil – a defeated one-term president who never cracked 47 percent of the popular vote, left office with just 39 percent approval and is now hovering at an abysmal 34 percent, whom most Americans dislike or loathe, and a majority believe incited an insurrection against the United States.

The gift will keep giving. Courtesy of the Supreme Court, Trump’s tax returns will soon be raked across America like barnyard manure. Expect more of his shady business dealings to be exposed – more payoffs, cheats, and cons – as well as civil and criminal prosecutions.

The Trump Party isn’t interested in appealing to the nation as a whole, anyway.  It’s interested only in appealing to Trump and the base that worships him.

All this is making it nearly impossible for congressional Republicans to mount a strong opposition to Biden’s ambitious plans for COVID relief followed by major investments in infrastructure and jobs. Lacking unity, leadership, strategy, clarity or a coherent message on anything other than Trump’s grievances, the Trump Party is irrelevant to the large choices facing the nation. Democrats in Washington have the public square all to themselves.

Biden is in the enviable position of getting most of America behind his agenda – and he can do so without a single Republican vote if Senate Democrats end the filibuster.

Democrats have proven themselves capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But if they and Biden use this opportunity as they should, by this time next year COVID will be a tragic memory, and the nation will be in the midst of a strong economic recovery propelling it toward full employment and rising wages. With the GOP in disarray and rabid Trumpism turning off ever more voters, the 2022 midterm elections could swell Democratic majorities in Congress.

But the emergence of the Trump Party is deeply worrisome for America. It is a dangerous, deluded, authoritarian, and potentially violent faction that has no responsible role in a democracy.

Its Big Lie enables supporters of the former president to believe their efforts to overturn the 2020 election were necessary to protect American democracy, and that they must continue to fight a “deep state” conspiracy to thwart Trump. This is an open invitation to violence.

The Big lie also justifies Trump Party efforts to suppress votes considered “fraudulent.” In 33 states, Trumplawmakers are already pushing more than 165 bills intended to stop mail-in voting, increase voter ID requirements, make it harder to register to vote, and expand purges of voter rolls.

Democrats in Congress are responding with their proposed “For the People Act,” to expand voting through automatic voter registration across the country, early voting, and enlarged mail-in voting.

The incipient civil war pits a national Democratic Party representing America’s majority against a state-based Trump Party composed of a defiant and overwhelmingly white, working-class minority. It’s a recipe for a harsh clash between democracy and authoritarianism.  

Plus, there’s the small possibility Trump will run again in 2024 and win.

What’s good for Biden and the Democrats in the short run is potentially disastrous for America over the longer term. One of its two major parties is centered on a Big Lie that threatens to blow up the nation, figuratively if not literally.

While most of official Washington has been consumed with the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.

Congress is moving ahead with Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands health care and unemployment benefits, and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.

The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.

Trump left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The Republican Party is imploding. Since January 6^th, growing numbers of Republicans have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.

Republican infighting has created a political void into which Democrats are stepping with far-reaching reforms. Biden and the Democrats, who now control the White House and both houses of Congress, are responding boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since Great Depression.

Importantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation that big government was the problem.

The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.

Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.

Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.

A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.

Another conservative bromide is that a larger national debt crowds out private investment and slows growth. This view hamstrung the Clinton and Obama administrations as deficit hawks warned against public spending unaccompanied by tax increases to pay for it. (I still have some old injuries from those hawks.)

Fortunately, Biden isn’t buying this, either.  

Four decades of chronic underemployment and stagnant wages have shown how important public spending is for sustained growth. Not incidentally, growth reduces the debt as a share of the overall economy. The real danger is the opposite: fiscal austerity shrinks economies and causes national debts to grow in proportion.

The third canard is that generous safety nets discourage work.

Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense.

Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working – thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children. Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has put forward a similar plan.

This is just common sense. Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished, according to the most recent Census data.

The pandemic has also caused a large number of women to drop out of the labor force in order to care for children. With financial help, some of them will be able to pay for childcare and move back into paid work. After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers increased. A decade later, when Canada increased its annual child allowance, its economy added jobs.

It’s still unclear exactly what form Biden’s final plans will take as they work their way through Congress. He has razor-thin majorities in both chambers. In addition, most of his proposals are designed for the current emergency; they would need to be made permanent.

But the stars are now better aligned for fundamental reform than they’ve been since Reagan.

It’s no small irony that a half century after Reagan persuaded Americans that big government was the problem, Trump’s demise is finally liberating America from Reaganism – and letting the richest nation on earth give its people the social supports they desperately need.

Cancel Perks for the Worst President in History

How should the nation respond to an ex-president who has incited an insurrection, brought our democracy to the brink of destruction, and left so much pain and suffering in his wake?

In addition to being convicted in the Senate, which could bar him from running for office again, he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the cushy benefits former presidents receive.

These benefits were created under the Former Presidents’ Act of 1958, which was drawn up after Harry Truman told the House Majority Leader that he was going broke. 

The benefits in the Former President’s Act now include a yearly pension of over $200,000, an annual $1 million travel budget, an annual $500,000 travel budget for spouses, an office “appropriately furnished and equipped,” and staff to operate that office – for the rest of the former president’s life.

But what about a twice-impeached former president who did everything he could to attack Black and brown communities, and ended his presidency by inciting an insurrection against the United States government? 

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think someone with that record should receive millions in taxpayer-funded benefits at all, let alone every single year for the rest of his life. 

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to happen: A simple majority in Congress can pass a law barring this ex-president from the normal perks afforded to former presidents. For the sake of the country, Congress must do so. 

He should also be barred from receiving national security briefings now that he’s left office. There is no reason that someone this dangerous should be privy to the highest levels of intelligence as a private citizen – especially given his looming legal and financial entanglements with foreign entities. He was already a national security risk in office; as a private citizen, there’s no telling what he would do with classified information. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t take an act of Congress to cut off access to briefings: It’s up to Joe Biden, and Joe Biden alone. He has the power to prevent his predecessor from receiving any and all national security briefings. For the sake of America and the world, he must do so.

Regardless of how the impeachment trial in the Senate ends, one thing is clear: Someone who has disgraced the office of the president so maliciously should not reap its amenities for the rest of his life.

No cushy benefits. No national security briefings. No perks for the worst president in history.

This week’s Senate trial is unlikely to convict Donald Trump of inciting sedition against the United States. At least 17 Republican senators are needed for conviction, but only five have signaled they’ll go along.

Why won’t Republican senators convict him? After all, it’s an open and shut case. As summarized in the brief submitted by House impeachment managers, Trump spent months before the election telling his followers that the only way he could lose was through “a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself.”

Immediately after the election, he lied that he had won by a “landslide,” and later urged his followers to stop the counting of electoral ballots by making plans to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” against this “act of war” perpetrated by “Radical Left Democrats” and the “weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party.”

If this isn’t an impeachable offense, it’s hard to imagine what is. But Republican senators won’t convict him because they’re answerable to Republican voters, and Republican voters continue to believe Trump’s big lie.

A shocking three out of four Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won legitimately. About 45 percent even support the storming of the Capitol.

The crux of the problem is Americans now occupy two separate worlds – a fact-based pro-democracy world and a Trump-based authoritarian one.

Trump spent the last four years seducing voters into his world, turning the GOP from a political party into a grotesque projection of his pathological narcissism.

Regardless of whether he is convicted, America must now deal with the monstrous predicament he left behind: One of the nation’s two major political parties has abandoned reality and democracy.

What to do? Four things.

First, prevent Trump from running for president in 2024. The mere possibility energizes his followers.

An impeachment conviction is not the only way to prevent him. Under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, anyone who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution is barred from holding public office if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States. As constitutional expert and former Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman has noted, a majority vote that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States is sufficient to trigger this clause.  

Second, give Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.

White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of it need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.

A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance.

Big business, which used to have a home in the GOP, will need a third party. Democrats should not try to court them; the Democratic Party should aim to represent the interests of the bottom 90 percent.  

Third, disempower the giant media empires that amplified Trump’s lies for four years – Facebook, Twitter, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators. The goal is not to “cancel” the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth, and logic. Democracy cannot thrive where big lies are systematically and repeatedly exploited for commercial gain.

The solution is antitrust enforcement and stricter regulation of social media, accompanied by countervailing financial pressure. Consumers should boycott products advertised on these lie factories and advertisers should shun them. Large tech platforms should lose legal immunity for violence-inciting content. Broadcasters such as Fox News and Newsmax should be liable for knowingly spreading lies (they are now being sued by producers of voting machinery and software which they accused of having been rigged for Biden).  

Fourth, safeguard the democratic form of government. This requires barring corporations and the very wealthy from buying off politicians, ending so-called “dark money” political groups that don’t disclose their donors, defending the right to vote, and ensuring more citizens are heard, not fewer.

Let’s be clear about the real challenge ahead. The major goal is not to convict Trump of inciting insurrection. It is to move a vast swath of America back into a fact-based pro-democracy society and away from the Trump-based authoritarian one.

Regardless of whether he is convicted, the end of his presidency has given the nation a reprieve. Unless America uses it to end Trumpism’s hold over tens of millions of Americans, that reprieve may be temporary.

Thankfully, Joe Biden appears to understand this.