I have been studying and writing about Roman emperors for more than 30 years. I never imagined I would live in a time and place where the judicial system might give more extensive legal immunity to an American president than any Roman emperor ever enjoyed. Until last Thursday.

Contemporary imagination often assumes that Roman emperors enjoyed absolute authority to do what they wanted with their empire’s resources, wealth, and military power. They did not. Rather, Roman emperors were magistrates who held office for life, managing the Roman state on behalf of its citizens. This position gave emperors vast powers to initiate wars, choose administrators, appoint generals, order criminal investigations, and take the property and lives of convicted criminals. But, like their fellow citizens, Roman emperors were subject to Roman law.

Emperors themselves said so. In 429 C.E., the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III explained that “a reigning sovereign must be subject to the laws because our authority is dependent upon that of the law and it is the greatest attribute of imperial power for the sovereign to be subject to the laws.” It is only by accepting that laws apply to every Roman, the emperors continued, that we are able to “forbid others to do what we do not suffer ourselves to do.” In other words, an emperor claiming an exemption from Roman law had no right to expect his fellow citizens to obey those same laws.

A few decades later, Priscus of Panium, a Roman official and rhetorician who served as an ambassador to the court of Attila the Hun, explained to an acquaintance he calls Graikos why Roman legal procedures must apply equally to everyone. Graikos had once lived in Roman territory but had chosen to live among the Huns. He told Priscus he preferred the Hunnic empire, where, unlike in Rome, Attila limited corruption, did not assess high taxes, and presided over a people who did not trouble one another. True, the brutal barbarian king could do what he wanted to anyone. But Graikos still believed this was better than Rome, where “lawsuits are much protracted, much money is spent on them,” and everyone is distracted from doing what they want by concerns of when or even whether a legal penalty will be enforced.

Priscus corrected Graikos sharply. “Those who founded the Roman state,” he said, “ordained wise and good men to be guardians of the laws so that things should not be done haphazardly.” In Rome, “the laws apply to all, even the emperor obeys them,” and “the time taken in cases results from a concern for justice lest a judge err in his decisions.” Under Attila, by contrast, “one must give thanks to Fortune for freedom.” In a society without laws, Priscus asserted, your life and property are protected only by fate and the whims of Attila. Realizing his mistake, Graikos “wept and said that the laws were fair and the Roman state was good.”

It is, then, astonishing to read the April 25 transcript of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Donald J. Trump v. United States. The day began with Donald Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, boldly asserting, “Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it.”

As the proceedings continued, the exchanges became increasingly shocking. At one point, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what would happen if the president “orders the military” to assassinate a political rival. In response, Sauer claimed that such an order “could well be an official act” and thus render the president immune from prosecution. Then, near the hearing’s conclusion, Justice Samuel Alito took on an incredulous tone as he asked the government’s lawyer, “If [the president] makes a mistake, he makes a mistake; he’s subject to the criminal laws just like everyone else?”

Any serious Roman jurist would know how to answer Alito’s question. They would respond as the 10th century bishop Nicholas of Constantinople did to the emperor Leo VI when he tried to get married illegally: “It is evil, a most evil doctrine to say that, because one is an emperor he is permitted to do wrong in a way that no one would permit his subjects to do.” Romans knew that even the limited liberty permitted by their autocracy depended on every citizen, regardless of their station, being equally subject to the protections and restrictions of a common legal system. To assert otherwise would be to leave the Roman world of law and enter the unpredictable, anarchic kingdoms led by people like Attila the Hun.

Alito is, without a doubt, a finer legal scholar than I am. But he is not a finer legal scholar than Tribonian or Papinian or many of the thousands of other jurists who taught and wrote about a tradition of Roman legal scholarship that stretched across nearly 2,000 years. These wise men refused to grant the powers to an emperor that Alito and Sauer seem to want to grant to an elected president. Maybe our Supreme Court could learn something from reading their work.

The post Will the Supreme Court Give the President More Immunity Than a Roman Emperor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Arnold,

I’m enjoying your new Netflix action series, FUBAR. You’re funny and convincing as a retiring CIA agent who is pulled back into a very messed-up intelligence conflict because he didn’t realize his daughter is also a secret agent.

You also may not realize that, in real life, the door just opened for you to be pulled back into the FUBAR (“F’ed Up Beyond All Recognition”) of our national politics. I’m writing to ask you to walk through that door immediately, and run for president for the good of our country and our world.

You’ve long said that you would run for president, if it weren’t for two facts: that you were born an Austrian citizen, and that Article II, Sec. 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “no Person except a natural born Citizen… shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The article hasn’t changed, but American devotion to the Constitution and its provisions on presidential eligibility has.

For the destruction of this rule and so many other norms, Donald Trump is responsible. Incredibly, he has inspired leading Democrats and Republicans to take the position that being constitutionally ineligible to serve as president is no longer a barrier to running for president.

A new consensus has emerged: Voters have the right to choose whomever they want as president, no matter what the Constitution says.

This is the product of Trump’s own ineligibility for the presidency. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment bars any officer of the U.S. who took a constitutional oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”—as Trump did after losing the 2020 election—from holding any other government office. Leading constitutional scholars, from right and left, have delved into the law and history and affirmed that Trump isn’t eligible.

But being constitutionally ineligible hasn’t stopped Trump from running from office or taking the lead in the Republican polls. And it hasn’t stopped Trump from remaining on the ballot in every state, including the two states where he has been ruled ineligible (Colorado, by a court, and Maine, by the secretary of state). With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to decide the question of eligibility nationwide, and its conservative majority all but certain to keep Trump on the ballot, state actions have not taken effect.

Arnold, this makes it clear that you can run. Who could object without looking like a hypocrite?

The courts can’t, once they’ve blessed Trump’s unconstitutional run. And Trump certainly can’t, given both his own ineligibility and his repeated promises to “terminate” the U.S. Constitution itself, as he pursues dictatorial power in a new term.

You should be able to jump into the Republican primaries posthaste. If that doesn’t pan out, you’d be the perfect presidential candidate on the bipartisan No Labels ticket.

Why do you need to run? It’s simple. Because Trump must be stopped. And no one will stop him.

The media won’t stop him, because they need in the race to draw audiences to keep their desperate enterprises afloat. Democrats won’t stop him because they want to run against him—he’s the weakest and most beatable of the Republican presidential contenders in a general election. As California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, explaining why Trump remains on the state ballot, “In California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

The Republican Party would do better in the elections with a non-Trump candidate, but party leaders don’t want to risk losing Trump supporters. And Trump’s Republican challengers, fearful of his deranged base, are simply too scared to challenge him aggressively, even in debates when he’s not present.

You, on the other hand, have challenged him openly for years. And he hasn’t been able to lay a glove on you in response. That’s because you’re not a normal politician—you’re an entertainer both more popular than Trump (FUBAR is among the most watched shows on Netflix) and more skilled at parrying media attacks. (I know this firsthand, from covering you and writing two books about you.) You’re as famous as he is, but more respected. You’re that rare political figure who can make Trump look small.

In entering the race, you should emphasize that Republicans and Democrats, by allowing Trump to stay on the ballot, have all but rubber-stamped the notion that voters should get to choose whomever they want as president, Constitution be damned. You might also say that we should embrace this new American era of democratic openness. After all, the U.S. has long limited voter choice to just two parties, routinely striking smaller parties and their candidates from ballots.

And when your opponents refer to that Article II requirement that candidates be natural born, you should make two arguments. First: Despite the accident of your Austrian birth, you’ve always felt American in your heart and soul—a “natural born” American, in the vernacular of our times. Second: If the Biden vs. Trump matchup is the best that native-born citizens can do, then it’s high time to open the race to foreign-born contenders.

But you shouldn’t just run to stop Trump. You should run to win.

As I was reminded while interviewing you this summer, you have huge visions of the future—for massive improvements in education, for the restoration of health of a country whose people are dying younger, and for a complete revamping of American infrastructure to realize our greatest dreams in economy, technology, and environment. By contrast, the tired President Biden hasn’t offered a detailed second-term agenda, much less a vision. And Trump talks endlessly about the past, about history, about grievance, about the 2020 election.

By offering your ideas, you can show the poverty of Trump and Biden’s campaigns, and how America can escape its current malaise by dreaming big about the future. “When you don’t have a vision of the future, it’s easier to look back,” you wrote in 2023. “When you don’t have a vision, today doesn’t have much meaning because you don’t know why you’re here doing what you’re doing right now, and tomorrow is downright scary.”

Now, I know that running for president is hard, and let’s face it, you’re 76 years old. But you’re still younger than Trump and Biden.

I know that running for president when the Constitution still says you can’t might look crazy and illegitimate. But the recall that elected you in California was also called crazy and illegitimate.

I know that your friends, family, and co-stars won’t want you leaving them to jump into politics again.

But is anything more important than using your power to try to save our FUBAR country?

The post Run, Arnold, Run! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was in favor of keeping Donald Trump’s name on the presidential ballot in California.

Until I went to Berlin this fall.

At a Saturday conference on German election law—if you haven’t noticed, your columnist is a democracy nerd—I met an entrepreneur named Gregor Hackmack. He’s so committed to democracy and participation that he launched a non-partisan online platform last year to enable dialogue between everyday people and elected representatives.

But now he’s organizing a petition to ban Germany’s second most popular political party—the far-right AfD, or Alternative for Democracy—from participating in elections.

Hackmack is wrestling with one of the hardest questions in democracy: When, if ever, can a democracy exclude anti-democratic politicians and parties from democratic elections?

The question is urgent because around the world democracy is threatened by authoritarian leaders who won office through democratic elections. Some of the world’s most oppressive governments—including those in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia—are led by men who came to power through voting.

It’s also a question now forced upon Americans by Trump’s return bid for the White House.

Blocking candidates or parties from elections doesn’t come naturally to democratically minded people. Nor should it—it’s a despot move. Autocracies and dictatorships routinely maintain and extend their power by blocking opposition figures from standing for office, such as when the Chinese government banned pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong’s 2020 vote.

So why and how could we justify blocking candidates? One answer to that question, now getting attention in declining democracies, might be called the Democratic Self-Defense Exception: You should bar parties and politicians only when they threaten democracy itself.

The self-defense exception is the logic behind current legal efforts by pro-democracy nonprofits and some to remove Trump from 2024 ballots in most states.

It is also why it makes sense for people around the world to examine how Germany, where the Nazi party took power through elections, reckons with those who threaten its democracy.

In Germany, AfD is the political party that poses a danger to democracy—and society. AfD partisans and officials make threats against democratically elected officials. One party leader has expressed pride in Germany’s “World War II accomplishments.” The party embraces racist policies towards migrants, and pledges mass deportation and cancelation of citizenship for minority groups.

Yet since its founding in 2013, AfD has secured support from one-third of voters in economically-marginalized eastern parts of the country, and from 21% of respondents in national polls, the second-highest of any party.

Germans like Hackmack are arguing for banning the party because such racism and anti-migrant policies violate the German Basic Law, the country’s governing document, which was developed after World War II with the assistance of American political scientists. Specifically, AfD’s critics say the party aims to undermine the democratic order as expressed in Article 1 of the Basic Law, which calls human rights and human dignity “inviolable.”

They also point to Article 21, which specifically provides for banning parties determined to be “unconstitutional” because they do not “conform to democratic principles,” “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order” or “endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Germany’s federal constitutional court gets the final say on banning a party.

To those who suggest that banning AfD would only make it more violent and dangerous to democracy, supporters of the ban respond emphatically. They state that Germans’ expectation of heightened violence is itself reason to keep the party off the ballot: “The democratic process is undermined if it takes place permanently under the sword of Damocles, that a group with real power options wants to torpedo precisely this process,” wrote the constitutional law expert Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz in support of the ban.

To those who suggest that banning the party is a political question best left to voters in future elections, German Institute of Human Rights director Beate Rudolf, a ban supporter, writes: “German history in particular has shown that the free democratic basic order of a state can be destroyed if positions of contempt for humanity do not meet with energetic opposition in good time and are thus able to spread and gain acceptance.”

Hackmack and other supporters—including members of the country’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union—have gathered more than 400,000 signatures on a petition demanding the parties and national parliament ask the constitutional court to ban the party. A TV comedy show has joined the drive. Still, it’s unclear whether the petition will succeed; it’s been decades since the court banned a party.

Here in the U.S., Trump represents one pressing threat to democracy. The former president led an insurrection after losing the 2020 election, and has announced plans for a second presidency that sounds like dictatorship, including mass firings of civil service workers and prosecutions and even executions of Trump’s political opponents (whom he calls “vermin”).

Seeing how Germans are re-examining the Basic Law because of AfD’s threat to their democracy, I understood better why Americans are rereading the U.S. Constitution because of Trump’s threat here. Various interest groups and voters have filed suits in 28 states seeking to bar the former president from primary ballots. Trump’s conservative critics, including law professors and judges, are pushing hardest to boot him from the ballot.

“A president who tried to use force and fraud to stay in power after losing an election should not be allowed to wield the power of office ever again,” writes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. “And we need not and should not rely on the democratic process alone to combat such dangers.”

The legal grounds for the ban efforts come from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which excludes from future office any person who has taken an oath to support the constitution and then rebelled against it, either through insurrection or by giving “aid and comfort” to the constitution’s enemies. Trump’s actions—his efforts to overturn the election, the January 6 insurrection, and his ongoing promises to violate the Constitution if he returns to office—all satisfy this criteria for ineligibility.

But these efforts have not been treated with the same seriousness that Germany gives its anti-democratic threats. The litigation hasn’t gotten much traction in the courts, or political support, even from Trump critics. As a practical matter, Trump’s eligibility will likely be decided by the courts; so far, no judge has been willing to bar him (with one jurist ducking the question with a dubious technical ruling).

In California, state officials—Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—have also taken no visible steps to block him from the March 2024 ballot before a December 28 deadline. That’s especially maddening because Trump has attacked California democracy, ever since his 2016 defeat in the state, with lies that our elections are “rigged.”

Trump has claimed that efforts to remove him are themselves an attack on democracy. In this gaslighting, he embodies the definition of “hypocrite” given by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: “The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”

Trump also argues, falsely, that taking him off the ballot violates his rights of voting or free speech. But democracy grants no inherent right to be president. What citizens of democracies instead have—as I was reminded in Berlin—is a responsibility to protect democracy, even when it means excluding those who won’t abide by its rules.

The post The Case for Taking Trump Off the Ballot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can we decipher the nuances of today’s form of extreme nationalism? And what is new about it when compared to, for instance, the ultra-nationalism that led to fascism and dictatorships in the 20th century?

To answer that question, consider today’s nationalist political movements like you do the vegetable section in your grocery store. There are a variety of neo-national movements and leaders, but they are all metaphorically vegetables.

Varieties of neo-nationalism range from political movements and parties (think Brexit or the National Front, rebranded the National Rally, in France under Marine Le Pen), to neo-nationalist leaning governments (with wannabe autocrats like Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the evolving story of Modi’s India), to illiberal democracies (Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Andrzej Duda’s Poland and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey), to authoritarian states (think China, Russia, and North Korea at the extreme end).

Hybrids abound. But most neo-national movements, parties, and governments are characterized by some combination of right-wing anti-immigrant, nativist, anti-science, anti-globalist (sometimes couched as anti-Western), and protectionist sentiments. When in power, they seek to squelch or even eradicate criticism.

And neo-nationalist leaders often have a core constituency that includes conservative religious groups—a marriage one finds in India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and here in the U.S., but not in secular China where the Communist Party is the state religion.

Some of this is familiar. Like right-wing populist movements in the past, neo-nationalist supporters and parties are often reacting to their own sense of waning political power, and perceived declines in social status and economic opportunity. Demagogues, then, step in to feed off a desire to preserve or reclaim a seemingly lost national cultural and political identity.

In Russia, you can find such backward-looking neo-nationalism. Vladimir Putin is infatuated with asserting Russia’s power and place in the world in order to revive nationalism and reclaim in some modern form both Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empire.

But if you really want to go back to the future, go to China.

Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is a rewind to hero-worship politics. He demands increased loyalty to the party, and has built a personal cult around himself reminiscent of the founding leader of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Xi’s goals are to preserve the existing domestic political order, to restore territory seen as lost (namely Taiwan), and to pursue a new global economic dominance and increasingly military presence in Asia, and beyond. Xi’s autocratic China is also portrayed as a superior model to established democracies that seem incapable of governing.

One of Xi Jinping’s earliest nativist edicts—in 2013, just a year after assuming power—was for the Chinese people to avoid Western values and what he called the “seven unmentionables.” These included “Western constitutional democracy,” human rights, media independence, promoting “universal values” in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership, judicial independence, pro-market liberalism, and “nihilist” criticism of the party’s past.

For all the attention on autocratic regimes like Russia or China, it is the illiberal democracies that are growing the fastest in number. These are nations that often in the aftermath of dictatorships elect their leaders but have no history or culture of participatory democracy and civil liberties. Elected right-wing nationalists then establish a political environment that employs a mixture of corruption, demagoguery, and a lighter version of repressive regimes of the past, often with wide popular support.

Some illiberal democracies border on being authoritarian regimes. These are characterized by indefinite presidential terms, the repression or control of media outlets, erosion of judicial independence, the transfer of state resources to an oligarchy, and the persecution of opponents—along with the maintenance of some semblance of open elections.

Perpetually staying in power is often one major objective of neo-nationalist leaders. An example is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In a call to arms, in 2014, Orbán infamously declared the end of liberal democracy in Hungary and his intention to build “an illiberal new state based on national values.” He cited China, Russia, and Turkey as his inspiration and encouraged others to follow. Indeed, autocratic leaning states and their leaders are supporting each other, sometimes to mitigate international sanctions, other times militarily—Putin’s support of Belarus’s autocratic government being one example.

What fuels the popular support for neo-nationalism? Orbán and other protagonists leverage the politics of fear to attack and blame perceived enemies, domestic and foreign, wrapping themselves in a mantle of patriotism. Such tactics were prevalent in previous forms of extreme nationalism.

But the causes and practices of today’s breed of nationalism (and hence the prefix neo) are newer and modern, and have three accelerants.

The first is the rapid pace of globalization and the economic uncertainty and fear it produces. While globalization, and specifically the growth of transnational trade, promised cheaper goods and a rise in living standards, it also led to economic stagnation and oftentimes an actual decline in living standards among lower- and middle-income populations in regions of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and elsewhere.

The second accelerant is the pace of immigration and demographic changes among and within many countries. Today’s shifts in demography are historic, and are marked by mass immigration, mostly to Western economies, caused in part by the search for jobs as well as displacement caused by war, poverty, climate, and dysfunctional societies.

Open borders, open markets on an unprecedented scale, and the shock of the Great Recession, are all widely recognized causes for a populist reaction characterized by anti-globalism, nativism, protectionism, and opposition to immigration.

The third accelerant is the ability of a new generation of populists and demagogues to use technology and social networks to promote themselves, find allies for their movements, both at home and abroad, and attack enemies. The ease at which social media and its algorithms can distribute false narratives has added considerably to the power of political movements. Right-wing populists in many nations now bypass conventional media and build followings—like President Trump using Twitter for significant policy directives sandwiched between aspersions on political opponents.

Technology in the service of neo-nationalist leaders does not end there. In China, Russia, and in many illiberal democracies, new technologies offer paths for monitoring and punishing dissent, for spreading disinformation, and concerted efforts to subvert established democracies—what is termed sharp power.

Xi’s China, for all its backward-looking cult-making, has led both technologically and tactically. The state has imposed firewalls controlling access to websites and strict rules on what can be discussed. The 1989 events in Tiananmen Square are off limits to the web and discussion in China. So is the mass incarceration of ethnic Muslim Uighurs, again part of a nationalist drive for conformity.

Such suppression is blatantly overt, but other tools are more subtle and decidedly novel. Beijing has developed a Social Credit System using data sources, such as artificial intelligence and face recognition technologies, to give each citizen a score on their social and political conformist behavior—with the threat of penalties and even jail for those that stray. Putin’s Russia is experimenting with this in Moscow.

Combining new and more conventional forms of surveillance, like encouraging citizens to report on each other’s broadly-defined seditious activity, sometimes leads to arrests, or the loss of a job. It is not so much the number of academics, civil rights lawyers, or other pro-democracy advocates put in jail, but the message it sends to induce fear and encourage political conformity—whether in China, increasingly in Hong Kong, or elsewhere. One objective is self-censorship. And it works, particularly if practiced over a long period.

It’s crucial to note that nationalism—whether in new forms, or in revivals with new characteristics—is not solely the domain of right-wing politics. Modern nationalism also has a variant on the left side of the political divide. The left shares anti-globalist views espoused by nationalists of the right—for example that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), multilateral trade agreements, and even the EU, are conspiracies to increase inequality and erode national sovereignty. And there is intolerance for civil debate on both sides of the political spectrum.

One might also consider the nuances of nationalism that led to the Arab Spring. Nationalist movements that started with calls for participatory democracy and economic opportunity eventually resulted in religious conservative governments or new autocratic regimes—think Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and, perhaps, Tunisia since Kais Saied’s presidential coup earlier this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic should have eroded the attraction of neo-nationalists’ messaging. Think about the remarkably short period—just one year—from discovery of the virus to the creation of multiple effective vaccines. This governance and scientific success was built on decades of publicly funded biomedical research and it should have elevated the value of global collaboration and scientific inquiry.

Instead, the virus provided an opportunity to reinforce extremist views, spread fantastical conspiracy theories, and thus solidify and expand the power of savvy neo-nationalist leaders in much of the world. China used the pandemic as partial cover to crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong. In other corners of the globe, extreme nationalists used the pandemic to argue that international organizations are ineffective and pose a threat to national sovereignty.

Where is the world headed? Numerous non-profits monitor and provide data on this march of autocrats and right-wing nationalist movements. Freedom House, an NGO that monitors global freedom, has chronicled a long-term decline in democratic governments “broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies.”

Varieties of Democracy or V-Dem, which uses an extensive dataset relying on local country experts, estimates that some 68 percent of the world’s population live under autocrats and autocrat-leaning governments—up from 48 percent in 2010.

Optimists might see a few signs of slowdown in the march of neo-nationalist political leaders and autocratic-leaning governments. The desire of young people in Hungary and Poland to stay in the European Union poses a political obstacle for nativist policies. The neo-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party just lost seats in the Bundestag. Trump lost to Biden. In France, Le Pen’s party is not making major gains, at the moment.

Societies with strong democratic traditions and civil discourse may appear to be partially immune to the worst scenarios of nationalism gone haywire.  But danger lurks for both established and new democracies. Donald Trump, despite his near-coup, remains a viable political candidate and has created a playbook for Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who has insisted that he can only lose the pending presidential election if it is stolen.

Perhaps democracy is more fragile than many of us would like to think.

Writing in the midst of the Great Depression and reflecting on nationalist movements in Europe and America, Sinclair Lewis warned in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here of a dystopian American future in which a charismatic and power-hungry demagogue leverages fear and nationalism to become president. The first American writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, Lewis gave voice to a worry that fascism could emerge in arguably the world’s first modern republic as an outgrowth of economic disruption and populist anger.

The United States has an antiquated electoral process, a justice system seemingly incapable of swiftly prosecuting a treasonous political leader, and a Republican Party cheering on a possible autocrat. Only a year ago the U.S. was close to a complete constitutional meltdown instigated by a morally bankrupt neo-nationalist.

It can happen here.

The post What’s New About Neo-Nationalism, Anyway? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Modern childhood is less than 150 years old, and so is our way of talking about children as being fundamentally different from adults. This care and concern for the young has flowered in a variety of ways in modern society, and emerges in a mix of public emotions and policy advocacy. But sometimes, as with QAnon, it can also lead to outright conspiracy theorizing. We can, in turn, learn a lot about QAnon—and our vulnerability to conspiracy theories—if we trace its focus on children to its roots.

Our cultural training to be outraged over threats to childhood emerged in the decades after the Civil War, as mechanized industry, growing cities, and American childhood collided, literally. Children playing in streets were no match for motorized vehicles. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American city newspapers regularly reported children killed by streetcars and automobiles, and by the time the 1890s rolled around, outrage over children’s deaths led social reformers in Chicago and other cities to open private playlots and urge city leaders to build public playgrounds so children could play off the streets. Children on the streets were not a new concern. But setting aside public space so children could play safely? That was new, and this early advocacy reflected a changing attitude toward childhood, one that posited that it was a unique life stage requiring special protection.

The growing public stance of care and concern for the young was broader than public safety regulations, extending to morality concerns, such as in the mid-1950s when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent. The influential text argued that both violence and sexually suggestive images in comic books led to juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s argument fit into a postwar pearl-clutching panic over so-called crime comics, stoked on the national stage by Senator Estes Kefauver, whose hearings on juvenile delinquency fed local efforts to censor mass culture, and presumed that parents were losing control over their children.

This kind of rhetoric has been recycled, decade after decade, focusing on different issues and with different cadences, but always highlighting putative dangers to childhood and youth. Arriving a decade after Wertham, and feeding into a backlash to desegregation, bilingual education, and sex education was conservative journalist John Steinbacher’s, 1970 bestseller The Child Seducers, which started with a controversy over sex education in Anaheim, California, and spun a tale of 50 years of worldwide conspiracy that would first provide “sex instruction” to children and then somehow turn libertine impulses into the destruction of America.

The spinning of conspiracy theories coexisted in each decade with a more serious focus on policy that addressed children’s needs. Importantly, both were expressions of the modern idea of childhood. Take the work of lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, active at the same time as Steinbacher, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund. An expert in both claiming the moral high ground and advocating specific policies, Edelman began with a 1973 report on children denied schooling, and moved on to almost every material issue touching children: poverty, education, healthcare and beyond.

The increased overlap between serious concerns and conspiracizing may have been an artifact of the Baby Boom. Children born at the peak of the Boom graduated high school in 1974. So, of course, public attention focused on this generation—not just Steinbacher’s ravings and Edelman’s serious concerns but panics and arguments over the effects of divorce, the trends of teenage pregnancy, advertising on children’s television, misbehavior in high school, and more. But the aging of the Baby Boom after the 1970s just meant that they became parents, dominating the discourse of childhood from a different perspective, bringing their experience as postwar consumers, including as consumers of their own parents’ concerns.

As Boomers were becoming parents, and dominating American demographics as young adults, President Ronald Reagan helped promote concerns about strangers and child kidnapping. Pictures of missing children appeared on milk cartons, thanks to private milk distributors choosing to contribute to the public discourse about stranger danger. Private companies encouraged parents to fingerprint their children, just in case they became victims of gruesome crimes.

As Paul Renfro describes in his new book on the era, Stranger Danger, this moral panic obscured the fact that the vast majority of children reported as missing were (and today remain likely to be) either teenage runaways or taken by noncustodial parents. Rather, what this campaign really did was obscure the more probable dangers of domestic violence and sexual abuse perpetrated by adults already known to their victims.

The birth of the internet only added a new layer to these concerns: the danger could come from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day. In the 1990s, parents could read fearmongering headlines like “Youngsters Falling Prey to Seducers in Computer Web” or “Cyberporn … Can We Protect our Kids—and Free Speech?” While most child abuse is local, with the abuser well-known to the child and family, these stories suggested that emails and chat forums would connect children and youth directly to strangers who would abuse or kidnap them, and the initial connections could happen in their own bedrooms. In turn, this public panic has sent policymakers of all political stripes scrambling after boogie monsters—such as with the Communications Decency Act of 1996, an attempt to criminalize indecency online that the Supreme Court struck down the following year as unconstitutionally vague.

The so-called bathroom bills of recent years contain one of the most crucial tells about the rhetoric of childhood, or the pairing of rhetoric about precious children with public rage. Driven by legislators in North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia, bathroom bills intend to closely regulate which children go in which school bathrooms—just like states mandated racial segregation in schools and public bathrooms a century ago—and they target transgender children in the guise of protecting other children. This outrage was never over the safety of all children’s bodies but the need to decide which bodies belong where.

Every decade or so, we have an opportunity to refocus on what matters most to children instead of what triggers adults. But this long history of public panic shows that we have not redirected our outrage. We are still too easily distracted by our passionate promises to childhood. Not children, but childhood in the abstract, most commonly symbolized by white children, who are portrayed as being pure.

An ugly symmetry of modern American childhood pairs public outrage on behalf of children with public and publicly acceptable rage at children. Here childhood is protected, childhood is sacred, childhood is something to rage about if threatened. But not every child. We must remember: In 1955, the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In 1989, Donald Trump placing newspaper ads demanding the return of the death penalty in the middle of the Central Park Five case involving false prosecutions of a 16-year-old, two 15-year-olds, and two 14-year-olds. In 2014, police killing Tamir Rice at 12. This spring, Adam Toledo, 13.

Until we start to resist our cultural training, we will continue to be triggered into public outrage, which serves our feelings as adults, not our responsibilities to real children. Our vulnerability to that outrage did not expire with the Trump administration, nor did our capacity to be distracted by moral panics, nor our ability to simultaneously proclaim that we would protect childhood in the abstract while also raging at living, breathing, individual children.

Already, the QAnon conspiracies of 2020 have morphed; we hear fewer nonsensical allegations in public about Hillary Clinton and more about COVID vaccines, and bills in multiple states to restrict how we teach about the history of racism in the United States.

But a good portion of the conspiracizing in 2021 still revolves around children, because of that long history of modern childhood ideology and training for outrage. This readily available passion is part of modern public discourse—and it is not just among QAnon adherents. It is all of us, vulnerable to mistargeted outrage that distracts us from larger, systemic dangers to children.

The post The Cycle of Public Panic Over Childhood That Got Us to QAnon  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How strange to watch Trump’s failed insurrection on Congress unfold from one’s living room TV during COVID lockdown—sidelined by stay-at-home orders, reduced to binging the way one might devour The Queen’s Gambit or Ozark into the wee hours with snacks and pets sharing the couch. Watching an attempted coup was a strangely stupefying and passive experience.

It all looked a bit like a mash-up of movie motifs—angry white mobs with pitchforks from Frankenstein, many resembling extras from Hillbilly Elegy, self-righteously storming the seat of power, each addled MAGA-wearing inglourious basterd starring in the action movie of their life.

Even as we wondered how far the horror show would go, there were numerous moments along the way that seemed staged, performed almost pro forma, for the benefit of the larger narrative. Perhaps this was Trump’s obligatory scene, anticipated by the national audience and provided by the willing protagonist after years of veiled and not-so-veiled promises and gestures worth a thousand words.

In a sickening way, the storming of the Capitol was a real-time made-for-TV event, an entertainment designed to mainline directly to the emotions and to narcotize the critical eye, leading straight to racism, xenophobia, demagoguery, and fascism.

At least that’s what Bertholt Brecht would have thought. The great German playwright, who had a front-row seat to the early acts of the Hitler show, found his answer for such theatrical manipulations in 1936. Verfremdungseffekt, shortened to the V-effekt or awkwardly translated into English as “the alienation effect,” was meant to cause a jolt that forced an audience awake and into an analytical mind. Brecht was intent that the viewer be disabused that the play they were watching was somehow predestined, inviolable, or written in stone: He wanted them to understand that what they were watching was real.

Brecht knew that reality is corruptible, particularly when presented in emotional terms by skilled storytellers. Drama can give dimension to grievance, blood and thunder, and make it all seem true as gospel. The playwright could use V-effekt to carve out alienation and distance from the emotional demands and expectations of lead characters. Rather than settling back and being entertained by the story, Brecht asked his audience to sit up and pay attention to the tells—the unconscious clues that, when put together, help reveal the fundamental manipulation taking place.

Traditionally, the playwright employs the V-effekt. But with stakes as high as they are now, it’s up to us to stop the sturm und drang. Applying the V-effekt to the events around the failed putsch demands that we jolt ourselves awake, whether we are watching it unfold on FOX, MSNBC, or 4Chan. We are participants, too, even if we are made to feel otherwise.

Perhaps it’s Azdak in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle who most embodies the jolt that awakens the audience, destroying their illusion of being unseen spectators in the events taking place by addressing them directly. Facing rampant injustice, including the successful coup by a “Fat Prince,” Brecht stops the action and introduces us to Azdak, the witty and corrupt judge who must determine who is guilty and who is innocent. Announcing his proclivities upfront and revealing his weaknesses for wine and women, he makes no attempt to hide his unsoundness as a judge. Yet precisely because of his very human vanities, he proves to be a keen arbitor of wrong and right.

“You want Justice, but do you want to pay for it?” Azdak asks. “It is good for Justice to do it in the open. The wind blows her skirt up and you can see what’s underneath.”

Torsten Schemmel plays the role of judge Azdak in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (Vorpommersche Landesbühne 2009). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This is our time to demand to see what’s underneath. According to multiple news sources, Trump-friendly internet users described the assault on Congress as “like a movie” and “the best show they’d ever seen.” The trouble, of course, is that it was not a movie. It was real. People died.

Despite identifying emotionally with their leading man, the Capitol rioters were blind to the fact that Trump actually had little or nothing to do with them or their interests. In his rabble-rousing speech at the Save America rally just before the assault, Trump promised to walk alongside his fans; of course, he was nowhere near when the deal went down.

As reality-star-in-chief, he groomed us to expect the narrative he unfolded to be performed yet again by others on his behalf. Trump’s story was designed to aggrandize him while giving his devotees their very own part in a real-life action movie.

Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual’s judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” he wrote.

Watching the events of the Capitol insurrection and its aftermath, I found myself searching within for that same symbolic hammer—not as a weapon or a shield but as a tool to jolt myself awake, to shake off the dopamine effects of four-plus years of the Trump saga and to pound out an alternative to their zero-sum fallacy.

It helps to be a playwright. Our vocation is not tethered to capital in the same way as screenwriters; we can, and usually do, lose money on our creations. It dawns on most of us over time that it’s better that way, that the artistic freedom to tell an inconvenient truth can coexist somewhat—but not entirely—with capitalism. At a certain point, the narrative needs a jolt, even if it means biting the hand of our benefactors and awakening the ire of our audience.

It’s long been said that theater is an invalid at Death’s door, yet theater hasn’t expired in 2,500 years. I like to think it’s partly because the best playwrights take a hammer to the zero sum of their reality and reshape it.

The reshaping involves intellectual empathy, the ability to consider the experiences of others—not just who they are but where they come from and what they’re reacting to. Intellectual empathy can be grown, but it takes work. One must support diverse and unpredictable responses from individuals about the story they are seeing. One must deny groupthink and the urge to join the throng making pat conclusions because it feels good or it is expected of them. Intellectual empathy extends beyond the binary conventions of tribalism. It analyzes characters on and off the stage and judges them not just on what they say but what they do.

The continued indignation on both sides of the political aisle in America today is simply another narrative convention, pre-determined, even programmed deep within us. If we’re not careful, our emotional investment gets us stuck in a Marvel Comics world of superheroes and supervillains who fight for or against us. One bad real-life movie begets another.

What we need to be doing, instead, is fighting for ourselves. If we want to change the story of our country, we are the ones who need the alienation effect, and we need it now. The movie conventions of endless cause-and-effect and kneejerk action-reaction need to stop. The narrative needs a reboot.

Describing his V-effekt, Brecht writes:

Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living.

Perhaps the failed insurrection was the jolt needed to reawaken our intellectual empathy. It remains to be seen. The story is ours to tell.

The post The Theatrical Concept Powerful Enough to Break a Trumpian Spell  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Historical parallels can teach us much about our own fraught social and political present; we’ve seen the dynamics of demagogic politics play out many times, and Trump rose to power in part because of ignorance of these precedents. There are no simple lessons from history, but fixing our broken educational system and remaining grounded in our collective past can help us avoid the mistakes of previous generations and shore up the very edifices of civil society, the rule of law and liberal democracy, that are now at risk.

Those of us who study the history of the 20th century have always been aware of a dual mechanism at work in undermining democracy and in the establishment of authoritarian regimes. The first part is the Big Lie—Hitler’s claim that the Jews caused Germany’s downfall, and Goebbels’s discovery that the bigger the lie and more frequently you repeat it, the more likely it is to be believed. The second is social accommodation—that many, if not most law-abiding and decent citizens, not least civil servants, academics, intellectuals, and white-collar professionals, value their personal careers more than adherence to moral principles, ethical codes, or, when it comes right down to it, the lives of others. But seeing this unfold once more in front of our eyes has been, well, eye-opening.

Two examples from the not-too-distant past illustrate my point, and have direct parallels to and implications for the present. The QAnon conspiracy theory is obsessed with the notion of a cabal of individuals who are both part of a deep state controlling American (or world) politics and an international ring engaged in pedophilia and extracting babies’ blood. One root of this “theory”—and one QAnon believers refer to frequently—stretches back to one of the most destructive forgeries of the 20th century, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated book produced in Russia in 1903 and then disseminated throughout Europe and the United States (where Henry Ford was a prominent supporter). According to the text, the Jews were plotting to take over the world. A second, much older root, is the medieval belief in the need of Jews to use the blood of Christian children to produce matzah (unleavened bread) for Passover, which led to an array of blood libel attacks on Jews well into the modern period.

That both so-called theories stood in stark contradiction to reality—the Jews were a powerless and often persecuted minority, and Jewish law strictly forbids the eating of blood—did nothing to weaken their capacity to trigger both terror and violence. The “Protocols” were proven definitively to be a forgery in the early 1920s, yet continued to be used as antisemitic propaganda and incited popular sentiments well into the second half of the 20th century and beyond in Europe and the Middle East. To be sure, in the wake of the Holocaust, the influence of such “theories” greatly diminished, and antisemitism in general appeared no longer respectable.

Yet antisemitism has always thrived on a combination of resentment, ignorance, and superstition, which are also at the root of the current spread of QAnon. Rational and reasonable people would prefer to describe all of these theories as peripheral and ephemeral phenomena. But we should not be complacent about their dangers.

The second phenomenon—social accommodation—is that of individuals with decent, and in some cases even stellar reputations, becoming increasingly besmirched by policies that they might have never pursued under different circumstances. Many members of the Trump administration stayed in their positions long after they had understood that. Some did so, perhaps, because of the mesmerizing effects of power; but others seem to have believed that were they to leave, they would be replaced by those who would make things much worse.

General Jim (Mad Dog) Mattis, for instance, was considered one of the “adults in the room” during his tenure as Trump’s secretary of defense. He resigned in December 2018, but only in June 2020 did he state to the Atlantic that Trump was “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people,” noting that America was “witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership,” and demanding accountability for “those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” Yet in retrospect there is little doubt that Mattis’s two-year tenure served to legitimize a president whose policies were unravelling America’s alliances with other democracies, associating it with the world’s worst tyrants, and tearing at the seams of its internal social cohesion. In this sense, even as Mattis, and many before him, might have seen himself not as complicit in evil but rather as putting bounds to it, he simultaneously facilitated and legitimized its spread.

This is of course not new; indeed, it is a central conundrum of politics throughout history: the tension between setting limits to power and becoming complicit in its misdeeds. But the 20th century has supplied particularly devastating examples of such ambivalence of goodness, or evil, depending on one’s perspective, most notably under an array of fascist and communist regimes.

One striking example of the consequences of accommodation with evil is the notorious case of Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in the Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust, to whom the writer Primo Levi dedicated some deeply moving pages in his unforgettable essay “La Zona Grigia” (“The Gray Zone”). Rumkowski wanted to save the Jews in the ghetto by setting them to work for the Germans. But the Germans wanted him to help them round up all those unable to work—the elderly, the sick, and the children—so as to transport them to Auschwitz, where they were gassed. Rumkowski complied, believing that this was the only way to save the rest of the ghetto’s inhabitants, as he explained in his terrifying speech to the community, calling upon parents to “give me your children.” Eventually, everyone, including Rumkowski himself, was gassed. Perhaps he thought he was engaged in a noble mission; perhaps he enjoyed the trappings of relative power as the ephemeral “king of the Jews.” But his memory will always be associated with bringing Jewish children to the Moloch of Nazism.

We should recognize that the spread of disinformation, fabrications, and lies, from which conspiracy theories grow and on which they thrive, depends on ignorance, resentment, and prejudice. Ignorance is the consequence of a failing education system; resentment is the product of a sense of being left behind and of broken promises; prejudice feeds on both, and is the opiate that appears to restore dignity to those who have been deprived of it. When people are given not just hope but also practical ways to improve their own and their children’s circumstances, they become less susceptible to demagogy, hatred, and violence. It is an investment that every society should make for its own sake. Good, affordable schools and jobs bring us all much greater security than nuclear aircraft carriers, and cost much less.

The predilection of generally decent and at times even idealistic men and women to become complicit in the politics of authoritarianism, and to rationalize the enactment of inhumane, illiberal, undemocratic, and at times illegal policies, is also a consequence of circumstances and upbringing—in this case, of the elites. And so we have to ask ourselves: How is it that those who went to the best educational institutions, studied law, politics, and even history, could facilitate, indeed, actively participate in dismantling political systems based on the notion of a shared humanity and the dignity of the individual?

The great French historian, Marc Bloch, who fought in World War I and was tortured and executed by the Nazis as a member of the Résistance in World War II, tried to understand what happened to French society on the eve of the great collapse of 1940 in his essay “Strange Defeat.” Bloch identified the desire of his own generation to pursue their careers after the catastrophe of 1914-1918 at the expense of building back up their nation as one of the factors at the root of France’s inability to stem the Nazi tide. Bloch echoed his fellow intellectual, Julien Benda, who warned about what he called “The Treason of the Intellectuals” in 1927. Benda lambasted European, and especially French intellectuals, for having abandoned rational thinking and internationalism. Instead, they chose to support integral nationalism—one of the main harbingers of fascism—whose anti-Enlightenment ideology and alleged politics of realism (country first) threatened, in his words, “to situate the good outside the real world.”

To my mind, it is time for this country, too, to undertake a thorough analysis of its own near defeat with the rise to power of Trump and all he represents. It is not enough to focus on the followers of conspiracy theories, the rumor-mongers, the bigots, the violent, and the less educated—though they need our help, too. We need to give account to ourselves as educators, writers, academics, journalists, and, yes, politicians, in order to understand how we too facilitated the rise of this dark wave of prejudice, crudeness, callousness, and inhumanity. This is no time to celebrate but rather to invest in a new ethical, engaged, and, yes, political education, open to the world, literate in history, and compassionate vis-à-vis all of society.

A good place to start would be a revolution in the education system and a struggle against its increasingly segregated, unfair, and unequal structure. Elitist schools produce elitists, and elitists have little stake in equal chances for all; hence we must provide new opportunities for those who have been increasingly denied them since the great opening of American education in the early postwar decades. If we are to prevent the rise of a second, and perhaps more effective version of Trump, it is high time to begin reforming the society that brought him to power and, despite his disastrous record, still won him over 70 million votes.

The post Conspiracy and Complicity Got Our Democracy Here appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You can go, you know,” my colleague replied.

“I would have to cancel class.”

“Don’t cancel class. Teach the inauguration with your cell phone. Your students will love it.”

I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

In our digital age, presidential inaugurations create opportunities to teach and learn intimately together. They bring urgency to the study of history and politics, by connecting the past to the present. They demonstrate how the disquieting power of patriotism, and the way we experience patriotic ritual through media technologies, might be used to mask gross inequities in America’s unraveling social fabric.

Since 2009, I have taught the inauguration every four years as a history-in-the-making event, traveling to Washington, D.C., for both of Obama’s inaugurals and for Donald Trump’s in 2017. I initially taught the event to students in two introductory political science courses. In 2013, I taught it in a digital storytelling course, and in 2017, in two introductory U.S. history courses.

This year, I am teaching the inauguration in an Asian American history course and a historiography seminar. Only this time, heeding COVID-19 restrictions, I am at home today, and will be engaging with students through browser windows. And I am engaging not just with an inauguration, but with the January storming of the Capitol by a violent mob.

How, I’ve been wondering, would I incorporate these events into my teaching?

In planning, I thought about how students and I are likely to remember this insurrection. I also thought about how social media shapes today’s political and historical events.

Back in 2009, instructional technologists at the community college where I then taught helped me set up a learning activity that modeled the Obama campaign’s groundbreaking use of social media to connect voters and candidate. I asked students to watch coverage of the inauguration at home and to communicate with one another and me via email, text messages, Facebook posts, and online class discussion boards. I encouraged them to think about how the processes were creating a sense of community and to consider the long-term potential of these communities to bring about changes they wanted to see in the world during their lifetimes. My hope was that students would build their reflections into an ongoing “vision for the world” project they completed over the term.

Back then, like most teachers, I was occasionally frustrated by the fact that students were using their phones and laptops in class to chat with friends and surf the internet. I sometimes threatened to confiscate the devices, until the 2009 inauguration helped shift my perspective. I started to realize that I could help students and others learn to use the devices to do much more than combat boredom. Community builds through sharing stories, ideas, and thoughts. How do these processes work?

I purchased a Blackberry Curve smart phone and learned how to use it to send and receive emails and text messages as well as take pictures and create short videos.

Obama’s first inauguration on January 20, 2009, drew an estimated 1.8 million people, the largest public event ever at the National Mall. After riding a crowded Metro train and walking for nearly two hours, I made it to the closest available public viewing spot of the Capitol dais where the president, first lady, and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would stand for the swearing-in.

I stood with my friend Jenny and my husband, Jim, craning my neck to see a Jumbotron screen some distance away. Aretha Franklin began singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

A red light on the Blackberry Curve blinked. I was receiving a text message from a student.

“Hi Himanee! I’m so excited for you! Where are you standing? Can you see anything?”

“Just a lot of heads, but I can hear Aretha singing. Where are you?”

“Watching TV. What’s going on now?”

Outgoing President George W. Bush appeared. A ripple of boos erupted. The Blackberry blinked again.

“Do you think it’s appropriate to boo g.w. bush?” another student asked via text.

“Well, not really. How about you?”

“It is their right to display their feelings towards the outgoing president but personally I would not boo him. Did you?”

During the course of the day and into that evening, I received about a dozen text messages and 20 emails, and students posted nearly 200 comments on online course discussion boards. They asked whether I had seen protests; whether there were rules regarding the use of religious texts (such as the Bible that had belonged to Lincoln that Obama used in taking the oath of office and in the voicing of prayers); and how I felt as an ethnic minority being at the inauguration. Some who were unhappy with the election results expressed fatigue over hearing Obama’s name over and over again.

These voices braided together captured a history we co-created. Underlying the messages were questions of credibility: Was the crowd I was standing in like the one they saw on TV? Where did race and religion fit in a secular America? And did people who did not like the new president fit into this America? In this sense, I learned the students were not passive observers but rather—with the help of technology—active participants.

My own combination of being on site while participating with my students online also taught me a few striking lessons.

In 2008, I had imagined a sort of kinship with Obama, at least in part because Obama’s campaign had created this sense of relationship through its relentless use of the same communicative tools I was now using to teach. I saw him as his campaign portrayed him to me: as a community organizer, a basketball player, the first “hip-hop president,” a person who was about the same age as me and was non-white, like me.

At the inauguration, a different Obama surfaced: a flag-loving commander-in-chief of armed forces in a geopolitically powerful America. American flags lined the Capitol as well as the steps leading down to reflecting pools and the Mall pathways, and the firing of a cannon followed after Obama took the oath of office.

I asked myself if this was my vision for America. Or was my vision the crowd of people around me—the people huddled in coats, stomping their feet to stay warm; the small child holding the hands of his parents and chanting “Obama! Obama!”?

I learned later that even though the inauguration was a public event, a select group of people had better seats. Members of Congress receive color-coded “tickets” that they typically distribute to their monied supporters, staff, and campaign volunteers. The public viewing areas begin where the ticketed spots end.

This deeper understanding of the inaugural made me want to keep using it as a classroom tool. Nearly four years later, in fall 2012, I was an assistant professor at SUNY Empire State College in upstate New York, teaching digital storytelling. My students were learning online and using the tools that once had been distractions for multiple uses.

My class began one day after the inauguration and was fully online, so I took a different approach. First, my co-teacher and I initiated a collective story using a platform called StoryTimed. We began the story—my colleague from her home in Buffalo, and me in D.C, a few days before the inauguration. Then we let the students take over. I also expanded the definition of classroom to include my entire social network of friends and colleagues via Facebook and Twitter. And, finally, an undergraduate whom I invited to participate added a steady stream of comments to my Facebook event and posted updates I sent her by text when the internet lines jammed in D.C. Unable to immediately access the digital conversation, I immersed myself in what was happening around me.

As with 2009, flags and military salutes etched the edges of the ceremony’s narrative. These images evoked 20th-century political scientist Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined community, where people who do not know each other imagine the nation into being through a tacit agreement to imbue shared symbols with meaning. That idea carries a sinister warning, Anderson argues, in that it can lead masses of people into a blind love for the nation and its representative symbols— flags, artillery, the president—and a forgetting of the often violent and inequitable underpinnings of that nation’s existence. In 2013, I stood in a mostly African American and mostly women crowd—a group of college students, teachers, and community organizers. We did not know each other, but we came together, singing “Amazing Grace” and repeating lines that flashed across a Jumbotron screen about the nation’s potential to heal. When Obama and his family appeared, we cheered with joy.

Crowd exiting a Metro station and trying to get to the Mall in 2013. Courtesy of the author.

“Here come Malia and Sasha,” I said in a message posted to Facebook. “This is a very loved family. You can feel it. It’s like we know them ourselves!”

“Here comes the President!!!” posted my student.

“Obama looks like he’s loving this moment. He was just announced and when he broke out into a grin, the crowd exploded,” I replied.

I left feeling as if I had attended a spiritual gathering, with a renewed consciousness of the power that community could wield. I just hoped it would not blind me or anyone else to the deep inequities that remain in America’s social fabric.

Well in advance of the 2016 election, I arranged to teach the 2017 inauguration to two U.S. history classes. My plan this time was to start the conversations on election night and to sustain them in the days leading up to and following the inaugural ceremonies, in hopes that students would find continual connections between past and present, and would reflect on how both could help them find future ways to participate in civic life.

Students dug into the history of the Electoral College, wrote essays exploring the post-Civil War Reconstruction and its relationship to the nation’s present divisiveness, and engaged in discussions with me throughout the long night in which Donald Trump emerged victorious.

For the week of the inauguration, I asked them to view and discuss online virtual exhibits at the Smithsonian’s history museums while I shared discoveries I made while visiting in person. We conversed via Twitter and Facebook not only about the inauguration but also about the Women’s March that took place the day after. Many students participated in women’s marches in their communities, and shared pictures and comments.

Students were curious about the size of the crowd and whether it was as racially and ethnically mixed as those at Obama’s ceremonies. They also asked me if I had seen any protests or violence and urged me to stay safe. The Trump supporters I did encounter, however, were congenial. We talked on the Metro and in lines at security gates before entering the Mall about the weather, the festivities, and “the rich people” who had tickets. Around me, the gathering was sparse and mostly white, reflecting the differences between the nation that Trump supporters were imagining into being and myself. Students quoted snippets of Trump’s short speech and expressed wishes for the nation’s divisiveness to end. After the ceremony, I lingered by a Jumbotron screen, watching the Obamas depart the White House in a military helicopter. As the helicopter flew over the Mall, I impulsively started running with a few others toward it, arms in the air, waving good-bye.

The 2021 inauguration is expected to be a limited live event with heavy security. The National Mall has been closed, and only members of Congress will be present. Trump has said he will not attend Biden’s inauguration, the first departing president to deny his successor such a courtesy in 152 years.

Classes started again this week. On Tuesday, I asked students to take part in a dialogue being hosted by my college on the historic significance of Kamala Harris’s election. Today, I plan to teach the inauguration by asking students to join me at https://bideninaugural.org, where the event will be livestreamed. We will converse together on in-class discussion boards, and I plan to ask them to reflect on how to write the history of this inauguration for the generation to follow.

In preparation, I’ve been thinking a lot about something I expect to see on the livestream: the face masks we’ve all been asked to wear in public to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

In this tense moment, perhaps the mask might emerge as a new symbol of a new kind of nation. Wearing a mask is like making a sacrifice. It’s done to protect others from contracting the coronavirus, should you be carrying it. It is a call to work together to help the world heal.

The post How to Teach an American Inauguration appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Besides, who needed modern distractions when the history was so thrilling? The story of treason—attempts to overthrow the government or to aid our enemies—is nothing less than the story of America itself. Our country was forged in the American Revolution by people willing to commit treason against Great Britain, and the Confederate cause in the Civil War was the largest-scale act of mass treason in our history. The individual characters are riveting, from Benedict Arnold and his sordid betrayal of West Point to the poet Ezra Pound, prosecuted for treason for broadcasting fascist propaganda from Mussolini’s Italy. The accused persons represent every segment of society, from a former vice president (Aaron Burr) to the local leader of a miners’ union prosecuted for treason against West Virginia in the 1920s.

The Revolutionary War officer Benedict Arnold was a traitor to the American cause who defected to the British Army in 1780. Here, Arnold is depicted providing plans to surrender West Point to the British to his friend British Major John André. André was later captured and hanged; Arnold got away. Courtesy of C.F. Blauvelt/Library of Congress.

For many years, I worked on the book that would become The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution. I could proceed at a glacial George R.R. Martin-agonizing-over-The Winds of Winter pace because there was no obvious connection to current events. In 2015, a Zócalo Public Square essayist confidently proclaimed that “We’re living in what has to be the nation’s golden age of loyalty.” The essay was headlined, “Is Treason now Just a Punch Line?”

And then that world was turned upside down with the political rise of Donald J. Trump. The first phone call from a reporter came in July 2016, after Trump publicly encouraged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails. The question—which I would quickly become used to—was: “Is this treason?” And the answer (which I also quickly became used to, given the Constitution’s narrow definition of the crime), was no. But the calls kept coming, becoming a flood after Trump’s inauguration, as antennae perked up at further revelations about Michael Flynn, Russian interference in the election, the Mueller investigation, and the infamous meeting at Trump Tower.

Around this time, my literary agent asked me to write a second book about treason, one that would bring the story up to the present day, and that would lay out the byzantine law of treason in a manner accessible to interested citizens. I wasn’t sure I was ready to take on another book so quickly, but as misguided treason charges and countercharges swirled through our national debate, I came to realize that we were in a unique historical moment. If we were going to be arguing about American treason law so much, we should at least have a better understanding of what it is—and maybe even more importantly, what it is not.

All nations have treason laws to deal with the problem of disloyalty. But if those laws aren’t carefully circumscribed, they can easily become a tool of domestic oppression—a tendency the framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized all too well. In the tumultuous years prior to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, British authorities had threatened to prosecute American tax protestors for high treason in England, far from the protections of a local jury. Prominent attorney James Wilson, who represented Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, explained the problem this way at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “Crimes against the state! and against the officers of the state! History informs us that more wrong may be done on this subject than on any other whatsoever.” Wilson and the other framers of our Constitution accordingly chose to define the crime directly in the document itself—and to define it narrowly. Article III, Section 3 restricts the offense to “levying war against the United States” or “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Although these phrases pose many interpretive difficulties, they clearly prevent treason prosecutions for offenses such as criticizing the government or organizing a political party.

There have been few actual treason prosecutions under the U.S. Constitution, and only one person, Hipolito Salazar, has been executed for treason under federal authority (a truly bizarre case from the Mexican-American War—Salazar was a Mexican citizen, tried and convicted on Mexican soil). A handful of American presidents have been traitors, though none during their time in office—and none were prosecuted. Our first five presidents all committed treason against Great Britain during the Revolutionary War, well before the adoption of the Constitution. During the Civil War, former president John Tyler committed treason when he supported military actions against the United States in his role as a member of the Virginia Secession Convention. Curiously, the older crime of treason against individual states was not definitively eliminated by the Constitution and states have occasionally brought charges, most notably the 1859 prosecution of John Brown by the state of Virginia for leading the raid on Harpers Ferry.

Other than the distinctive case of the secessionists during the American Civil War, it’s rare for disloyalty to rise to the level of treason as defined in the Constitution. So why is it that treason—or “treason”—is now so regularly discussed? There are two simple reasons: what Donald Trump does, and what Donald Trump says.

First, for many people, Trump’s conduct raises considerable suspicions about his underlying loyalty. Trump consistently seems to place Russia’s interests ahead of America’s, whether by ignoring or condoning blatant Russian misbehavior or by kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Trump’s consistent failure to publicly criticize Putin is perhaps the most bewildering aspect of his presidency. Many Americans fear the worst, pointing to news reports suggesting that Trump’s tangled financial dealings involve significant debts to Russian sources. It is not irrational to suspect that Russia may have all kinds of personal or financial kompromat on him.

In a colloquial sense, Trump’s conduct—far beyond the bounds of normal presidential behavior—may have betrayed the country. But nothing Trump has done (or is alleged to have done) formally rises to the level of treason as a matter of criminal law. Foreign nations like Russia are “enemies” only if we are in a state of open war with them. Despite all the covert back and forth with Russia, we are simply not in a state of open war. For similar reasons, Americans who spied for the Soviet Union, like the Rosenbergs or Aldrich Ames, were prosecuted for espionage (which doesn’t require a state of open war), not treason.

Still: “it’s not technically treason” is a strange thing to have to say about an American president.

Second, unlike any of his predecessors, Trump uses his presidential podium to routinely accuse other Americans of treason, targeting congressional Democrats, anonymous critics, James Comey, Adam Schiff, and, perhaps most notoriously, his predecessor, President Barack Obama.  In a Tweet (naturally), Trump claimed that the “ObamaBiden Administration” had committed “treason” by spying on his 2016 presidential campaign. These accusations lack even the flimsiest basis in fact or law—but unfortunately many of Trump’s supporters take him at his word. They are convinced that actual traitors permeate the Democratic party and the federal government.

We have become so numb to the excesses of Trump’s rhetoric that it is easy to forget just how extraordinary this is. Treason is a capital offense and routinely described as the highest crime in American law, worse even than murder. Accusing a fellow American of treason is (or at least used to be) one of the most significant utterances a president could possibly make. But now it often doesn’t even make the news.

Since the current excitement over treason and disloyalty is so heavily tied to Trump’s distinctive behavior and rhetoric, it will likely dissipate significantly when someone else occupies the Oval Office. At the same time, even a defeated or termed-out Trump may continue making outrageous claims from the sidelines, thus risking continued pollution of our political rhetoric.

American treason law is a rich and rewarding field, one that is absolutely central to the larger story of America itself. On some level, I suppose I should be pleased that the subject into which I have invested so many years of research is now attracting a much wider audience. But, as fascinating and surreal as it is to be queried regularly by reporters about whether the president of the United States has committed treason, I’d much prefer to live in a world where that question doesn’t arise.

The post Why ‘Treason’ Usually Isn’t Treason appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Around this time, a militia group called the Nusra Front, with ties to al-Qaida, had formed near Nahas’s town. He had heard rumors that they’d kidnapped and killed several gay men.

Nahas, who had near perfect grades in his third year of college, stopped going to school, fearful that his soft voice and gentle gestures might reveal what he’d kept secret his whole life. Since the war’s beginning earlier that year, friends he’d known since grade school were beginning to affiliate with extremist groups. He spent most days and nights in his bedroom—never expecting violence at the hands of his own family. But his father, an affluent contractor with close ties to the Assad government, saw his son’s effeminacy as an affront to their family’s honor.

In the hospital, Nahas made a decision that would change the course of his life: Despite huge risks, he would flee to Lebanon, nearly 15 hours away by road. Scraping together bills and coins, he bribed a taxi driver to take him to the border and pretend that his passenger was mute. At each checkpoint, Nahas sat paralyzed in silence, fearing guards would see through the ruse, interrogate him, and return him to Idlib. Or worse.

His plan worked. He made it to Beirut, then Turkey, where he applied for refugee status with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Nearly two and a half years later, he boarded a plane to San Francisco to begin a new life.

Between World War II and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States resettled more refugees than any other country in the world. In 2013, for the first time, the U.S. began concerted efforts to resettle people persecuted due to sexual orientation and gender identity. Hillary Clinton’s State Department, via the Department of Health and Human Services, issued its first major grant to help resettle queer refugees to an agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jewish Family and Community Services—East Bay.

I met Nahas at JFCS, where I was volunteering while producing a documentary about dislocated queer immigrants. As horrific as his account sounded, I quickly learned that nearly all queer refugees experience trauma, if not torture. As LGBTQ civil rights and marriage equality were accelerating quickly in many western countries, being gay or transgender in many parts of the world had become a hostile proposition. Anti-queer violence and state-sanctioned homophobia was on the rise, especially in countries in Africa and the Middle East. To this day, it’s illegal in 70 countries to be gay or lesbian; seven of these punish homosexuality with the death penalty.

In the early days of my research, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker, or how refugee resettlement works. Refugees get their asylum or “refugee status” conferred outside of the United States through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Once approved and vetted by Homeland Security, they are assigned to cities with refugee resettlement agencies who receive federal money to help them integrate into American society. Part of this support includes small living stipends, food stamps, and basic medical insurance. Asylum seekers, on the other hand, are people who have already made their way into the United States, often on student or tourist visas, and then must present their case before immigration courts; they receive no benefits while they wait for a ruling.

From 2013 to 2016, as LGBTQ people fleeing persecution began to find refuge in the United States, the effort to integrate them was made more complicated by the fact that refugee resettlement is traditionally predicated on families: A family flees a war-torn region of the world and is resettled in an American locale connected to a community of its diaspora. An Iraqi family resettling in the Bay Area might be introduced to local mosques, grocery stores, or community centers of other Iraqis and Iraqi Americans.

Most LGBTQ refugees are not fleeing with families; they’re often fleeing from families. So a gay or trans Iraqi arriving in San Francisco might prefer to see anybody but other Iraqis. This conundrum leaves LGBTQ refugees isolated and at much higher risk, according to researchers, for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and what is called “internal displacement.”

“Internal displacement”: I learned this phrase while working closely with Junior Mayema, another client at the agency where I volunteered. A gay man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mayema had fled repeated harassment in Kinshasa, then faced anti-gay police brutality in Cape Town, South Africa, before receiving refugee papers to resettle in San Francisco. He, too, had dreamed of America’s queer sanctuary, hoping for community, stability, and perhaps even a new love in his life. But in the first year I knew him, over many hours of filming, I witnessed Mayema experience anything but stability: moving more than 10 times in as many months, couch-surfing his way through the San Francisco Bay Area, and relying on strangers, sometimes older benefactors, for support.

It might have seemed noble to help LGBTQ refugees resettle in San Francisco, with its immigrant-friendly policies and a culture steeped in queer liberation. But the Obama administration forgot one basic reality: Try living on a monthly refugee benefit of $350 in one of the world’s most expensive cities. For someone whose life was fraught with trauma and the precariousness of major migration, repeated displacements within San Francisco meant repetition of that trauma.

There were other hurdles. Mayema, for example, is a dark-skinned, gender-nonconforming person with HIV, whose thick Congolese-French accent made his English difficult to understand. One host enthusiastically invited Mayema into her home to provide a diverse “cultural experience” for her inquisitive high school daughter—until they discovered that he drank and was often depressed. He was quickly made to pack his bags again.

For such reasons, many LGBTQ refugees find themselves isolated with few options for housing and livelihood. I met Cheyenne and Mari—a charming mid-20s couple whom I was introduced to through Melanie Nathan, director of the African Human Rights Coalition, a small organization based in San Anselmo, California. They had been successful musicians and popsicle entrepreneurs in Luanda, the capital of Angola. But neighbors had cut their electricity and water, killed their dog, and harangued them incessantly every time they left the house. Nathan recalls: “One man would come and masturbate outside their window threatening: ‘We’re coming in to rape you, to kill you… and we’re going to burn your house down.’”

Desperate to find safety, Mari convinced her mother to let the couple stay temporarily at her home. But instead of offering them refuge, Mari’s mother prepared a dinner that made them violently ill.

Unable to get to a United Nations office to apply for refugee status, Cheyenne and Mari applied for student visas and registered for a two-week English course at a language academy in San Francisco. Such visas are extremely difficult to secure for short courses, yet they’d managed to get them and book plane tickets out of Angola.

As difficult as life is for refugees, it’s doubly hard for asylum seekers. In addition to that monthly stipend of $350 for eight months, refugees receive a one-time payment of $1,100 upon arrival, medical insurance, and food stamps. Asylum seekers receive nothing. And, once in the U.S., the onus falls on asylum seekers to find an attorney and navigate a legal process that takes years. They are also unable to receive a work authorization permit until six months after filing their petition. This cruel regulation puts them in a double bind: To survive as they navigate the bureaucratic quagmire and heal from intense trauma, they either have to work under the table, legally jeopardizing their asylum case, or rely on the generosity of others.

For some LGBTQ refugees in San Francisco, it was the kindness of strangers that filled the gap. By late 2015, many individuals, often older LGBTQ retirees and members of faith communities, had begun offering housing, jobs, donations, and other assistance. Among my fellow volunteers, I found unexpected alliances forming between many older white gay Americans who had faced McCarthy-era persecution in the 1950s and present-day LGBTQ refugees. Over the course of making our film Unsettled, the numbers of queer refugees and asylum claims rose. A new and robust infrastructure to support dislocated LGBTQ people took root in San Francisco, and cities such as New York and Chicago as well.

Then, everything changed.

A year after the 2016 presidential election, I called Amy Weiss, then-director of refugee services at JFCS. While donations were at an all-time high, and strategies for more effectively resettling and integrating queer refugees had greatly matured, the number of refugees allowed into the United States had fallen to a trickle under Donald Trump’s new immigration policies. Currently, the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. is at an all-time low and 80 percent less than in 2016. This closing of America has come when the world has more refugees and migrants than at any time since World War II.

Over the past few years, speaking at film festivals and events to draw attention to the plight of LGBTQ refugees, I’m often asked whether I think America’s turn toward tribalism and xenophobia will continue to pervade national discourse. It’s a fair question: Anti-immigrant rhetoric that energized Trump’s campaign has translated consistently into policies maligning and restricting immigrants of every stripe. The new migration protocols on the U.S.-Mexico border are more draconian than at any other time in recent history. Under the “remain in Mexico” policy, most Central American asylum seekers are now being denied their right to have their day in asylum court.

However, I try to remain cautiously optimistic: Back before the Trump administration, during one of our film shoots, I attended the San Francisco Pride Parade, an increasingly corporatized event to which many activists have become inured. But this time, I saw something new: Nahas, Mayema, Cheyenne, and Mari, and a dozen LGBTQ refugees were all marching together in a small contingent. Their simple handmade signs stood out among the fancy rainbow logos of corporate behemoths like Facebook and Google, even Walmart.

Not long after, Nahas was made Grand Marshal of the New York City Pride celebration and was invited by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to testify before the Security Council: the first time that august body heard live testimony from an openly gay person.

During that trip, Nahas and I visited the Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 unrest that helped catalyze a national gay rights movement. We hopped on the Staten Island Ferry to catch a better glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t help but wonder at his journey: This self-professed shy man, whose sole strategy to survive growing up in Syria was to remain silent, was now speaking on an international stage and carrying a new banner for queer liberation.

Looking at the statue and at the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at its base, I began to wonder, given the Trump policies: How many fewer people from the masses of tired, poor and queer we will ever get to know? And how quiet will this land be without their voices?

The post When San Francisco Tried to Be the World’s ‘Queer Sanctuary’ for Refugees and Asylum Seekers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.