It’s official: 2024 is U.S. Year of the Coward | Will Bunch Newsletter

Yesterday was Memorial Day, a national holiday that was created to honor the roughly 1,304,705 American troops who died in wars since the nation’s founding, even if the day was overtaken by the seasonal joy of cookouts, family, and baseball. Memorial Day 2024 seemed slightly off-key, given the horrifically bad weather, the U.S.-armed massacre abroad in Rafah, and a looming election that threatens the freedom so many died for. Please take a moment to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and then work to end the utter senselessness of war.

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So where are the strong?/And who are the trusted?

— Nick Lowe, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding”

I can’t recall a year that began with so much fear and loathing as 2024 — the year, we’ve been told, when the fate and the future of U.S. democracy would be on the line. The implication was that the American Experiment can be saved, as long as we have the courage to fight for it. In other words, 2024 would be a year for the strong, and the trusted.

So, five months into this thing, where are they?

The epic fail of 2024 came into sharp focus last week. First, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley — who’d positioned herself as the GOP’s anti-Donald Trump in the truncated Republican primaries and accurately assessed the 45th president as ”unhinged” — made the un-shocking announcement that she’ll nevertheless vote for Trump in November. Despite Trump’s 88 felony counts, his two impeachments, and even being adjudicated as a rapist, somehow Haley thinks President Joe Biden is the “catastrophe.”

The pundits all said the same thing — that Haley is doing what she needs to do to preserve her future in the Republican Party. This despite the fact that a lot of smart, sane people are legitimately worried if there’ll even be an election in 2028 if an anti-Trump coalition that ought to include people like Haley doesn’t coalesce to defeat Trump in 2024.

The problem, of course, is that the supposed moderate wing of the GOP doesn’t hold a monopoly on fecklessness. Consider the recent reporting from the New York Times that Supreme Court justice and far-right stalwart Samuel Alito and his wife flew not one but two partisan-flavored flags over their homes — an upside-down American flag adopted as a symbol of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag that today is a symbol of Christian nationalism.

The Alito revelations were just the latest bombshell ethical lapse from the nation’s highest court, following the disclosure of all sorts of billionaire gifts and perks to keep another dependable far-right vote, Justice Clarence Thomas, on the bench. We can only imagine the pit-bull attacks from Republicans that might occur over similar revelations about the liberal justices (although there have been none).

But here on Earth-One, the Democrats who hold a D.C. power base in the Senate have shamefully tip-toed around the crisis at SCOTUS. There should be nationally televised Senate hearings and aggressive use by the Senate Judiciary Committee of its subpoena power. Instead, the chair of that committee, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, and his Democratic colleagues have responded with pointless pleas for Alito to recuse himself from Trump-related cases and a sternly worded letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, who is all but guaranteed not to respond.

Why would Roberts respond to these 98-pound weaklings? Why would anyone?

The truth is that throughout the world, ever since the day that Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922, the threat of an authoritarian, or even fascist government has been a constant. And for every tyrannical Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin who makes it to the top, there are just as many failures who get forgotten by history. As the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky explained in their 2018 instant classic, How Democracies Die, democracies only survive when people who disagree about ideas, but support liberty, unite to defeat would-be dictators.

That would mean a world where Nikki Haley endorses Biden, and where Dick Durbin strikes fear into the heart of a corrupt jurist, instead of the other way around.

There are exceptions that prove the rule. For example, there is former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, whose stance on abortion and voter suppression I strongly disagree with, but who is fearless in telling the truth about Trump’s unfitness to return to the Oval Office. There are just not nearly enough of these brave politicians. This election year was supposed to be an epic of heroes and villains; instead there are only the bullies, and the many they intimidate.

But how did 2024 become The Year of the Coward in American life? Fear is definitely the greatest motivator in U.S. politics, whether it’s politicians afraid of a Trump-directed mob, either virtual or real, going after them or their families, or newsroom leaders who think defending democracy looks like bias, or Democrats who’ve adopted a beaten-dog pose ever since the time of Ronald Reagan. And let’s be honest: A lot of that fear involves keeping the perks and prestige of elite status in a neoliberal society — like the high salary for a subservient college president.

Ever since the 1960s, a libertarian right and a New Left that centered individual freedom over collective action have found common cause in creating a culture that is too risk-adverse to take on a bully, even when that bully threatens all the things they claim to stand for. The rot of cowardly individuality has corrupted the institutions essential to preventing dictatorship.

Instead of a fearless news media holding fascism at bay, we watch the Washington Post sit for more than three years on the story of a Supreme Court justice literally flying the flag of bias and partisanship over his own home, until it finally turned up in the New York Times, even while Alito wrote the devastating opinion that undid a half century of women’s reproductive rights.

Instead of business leaders understanding that a free society is actually good for the bottom line, we get cowards like Philly suburban native Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire CEO of the Blackstone private equity firm, who months ago proclaimed the GOP needs “a new generation of leaders,” but now will give money to Trump. He insists the reason is fighting antisemitism — even though it was Trump who invited a notorious Holocaust denier to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. It’s more likely that Schwarzman is enticed by the massive tax cut that billionaires have been promised in a second Trump term.

Instead of leadership from our universities, we see the rank timidity of college presidents eager to appease the new McCarthyites in Congress by calling riot cops on protesters, suspending and expelling student activists, or refusing to confer diplomas — anything to cling to their high-paying jobs.

The only folks left who can stand up for democracy are the ones with the most to lose: the everyday people. Whatever you think you would have done to fight 1930s totalitarianism or Jim Crow segregation is what you should do to save democracy right now. And on Nov. 5, even in The Year of the Coward, we can be heroes, just for one day.

Question: What are your thoughts on the U.K. elections? — Via Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) on X/Twitter

Answer: Just on style points, there is a lot to like: The elections across the pond are shorter and funnier (with the current Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s aimless wanderings across the English countryside) than ours, with the ironic date of July 4, which is always a good day for upending the government in London. On substance, the race feels like a hybrid of our elections in 2020, with the unpopular Conservatives clinging to power, and 2024, with Labour’s Keir Starmer facing deep divisions on the left over Gaza and other issues. Like here at home, let’s hope the center-left party prevails for now and that a more progressive movement can rise later in the 2020s.

I thought you guys would have a lot to say about fixing the U.S. Supreme Court from its current corrupted state — and you did. Several agreed with me that both Justice Clarence Thomas (billionaire gifts) and Samuel Alito (partisan flags, other lapses) should be impeached — but that it could never happen in the current Congress. The main debate wasn’t whether other measures such as a code of ethics, term limits, or expanding the court to 11 or 13 justices are a good idea, but rather which one is most feasible. “If this were done under a Democratic president, the addition of two liberal judges would make arguments more meaningful and increase the likelihood of some balanced judgments without ‘packing’ the court,” wrote Marged Lindner. Dennis J. Wall took a more down-to-earth approach: “Officials should hold at least one press conference every day and demand recusal until Justice Alito recuses or refuses.”

📮This week’s question: President Joe Biden is coming to Philadelphia on Wednesday to launch a bigger effort to woo Black voters, as polls show some are in danger of abandoning the Democrats. What should Biden be saying or, more importantly, doing to ensure a strong performance with African Americans? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Black voters” in the subject line.

The American president was furious at the prime minister of Israel when he saw the news about an hours-long air attack by the U.S. ally, which had killed many civilians. “I was angry,” the president wrote that night in his diary. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately [and] said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.” The Israeli president called back just 20 minutes later to say he’d halted the bombing and “to plead for our continued friendship.” According to his biographer Lou Cannon, the president — Ronald Reagan — hung up the phone after talking to Israel’s Menachem Begin about the siege of Beirut in August 1982 and said to an aide: “I didn’t know I had that kind of power.”

You know who else doesn’t seem to know he has that kind of power? The current president, Joe Biden. Ever since Israel responded to Hamas’ barbaric attack of Oct. 7 with a relentless campaign that has killed more than 35,000 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, Biden has evolved from a bear-hug embrace of embattled right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a form of political schizophrenia. Despite stepped-up pressure on the Israelis to curb civilian casualties, the Biden administration has mostly kept the pipeline of U.S. arms flowing and condemned international efforts to mandate an immediate ceasefire, or to sanction alleged war crimes by Israel. In March, however, Biden himself bluntly declared that an Israeli invasion of the Gazan city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinians have evacuated, would be crossing “a red line.”

It must have been drawn with invisible ink.

Over Memorial Day weekend, following a demand from the International Court of Justice that Israel halt operations in Rafah, aerial strikes on the city instead intensified. The most unconscionably horrible moment came when Israel reportedly fired eight bombs that destroyed a refugee tent encampment in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, killing at least 45 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Gruesome images of the dead flooded social media.

“I didn’t know what to do to help people as they burned,” a displaced Gazan named Ahmed Al-Rahl told the Washington Post. Around him there were “dismembered bodies, charred bodies, children without heads, bodies as if they had melted.” Although the Israeli government insisted two Hamas leaders had been killed in the strike, Netanyahu later took the unusual step of admitting the attack had been “a tragic mishap.” But the U.S. government has said very little about this tragedy, so far. In the coming hours, we should learn whether there ever was a “red line” around Rafah, and whether words from the 46th president have any meaning at all.

Five years ago today, I posted a column based on a visit to Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center and a sneak preview of a special exhibit there on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the heated enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that attempted — with very mixed results — to undo the long national nightmare of slavery. The column was written in the shadow of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Baltimore and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and a growing sense that Americans had never been told the truth about our racial history — but especially the white riots, the lynchings, and the rise of Jim Crow laws that violently reversed progress in the 19th century. I wrote that “the real story of the Civil War era is less triumph and more like, triumph followed by a stunning betrayal. The fact that Southerners called their role in this betrayal ‘Redemption’ is beyond Orwellian.” Read the rest: “Why the lies my teacher told me about race in America after the Civil War matter in 2019.”

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