The title comes from a 1989 book by the legal scholar Derrick Bell. He took it from a line in the Book of Jeremiah: “The harvest has ended, the summer is gone, and we are not saved.”
Bell’s point was that the civil rights movement had not ensured the success of multi-racial democracy in the United States. Mine is that last Tuesday’s elections did not either.
Friday Call:
Our guest for this Friday’s Zoom call, to talk about Donald Trump and his relationship with Jews, Muslims, Palestinians and Israel-Palestine, is Maggie Haberman, the renowned White House correspondent for The New York Times and author of the new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. As always, paid subscribers will get the Zoom link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video:
Election-deniers running for secretary of state, the position that oversees voting in the states, overwhelmingly lost last Tuesday, thank goodness.
Jonathan Chait’s profile of Ron DeSantis in New York Magazine.
The Washington Post’s coverage of Florida’s election police. And a video of what their arrests look like in practice.
Things to Read:
Jewish Currents (subscribe) asks four writers what the midterms mean for policing, youth politics, reproductive rights, and Israel-Palestine.
If you haven’t heard of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democrat who flipped a Republican House seat in Washington State that she was given a 2 percent of chance of winning, watch this
A deep dive into the historic collapse of Israel’s most liberal Zionist party, Meretz, which failed to win any Knesset seats in this month’s election.
A poster opposing boycotts of apartheid South Africa. Some of the language may sound familiar.
Dave Chappelle weighs in on Kanye West and Kyrie Irving.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I first wanted to say that this Friday’s Zoom call is going to be with Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. Many of you may know her. She’s probably the most well-known journalist who’s been covering Donald Trump. She has a new book about Donald Trump. We’re going to talk about, particularly about Donald Trump’s relationship with Jews, which is something that I’m curious to ask her about since she knows Trump extremely well, going back to his days in New York, and also his views about Israel-Palestine and how he behaved as president. So, I think it should be a fun and interesting conversation. She’s truly a remarkable journalist. So that’ll be this Friday for paid subscribers. As always, we’ll send out the link this Wednesday.
I wanted to talk for a minute about this last week’s elections, which has produced something which is very unusual, which is kind of liberals, progressives in the United States actually being happy about something, which is not something that one experiences very much recently. I think that there is reason to be very happy. And I think the most important thing that happened was not that Democrats kept the Senate, although that is important because it means that Joe Biden could confirm a Supreme Court justice and other judges. The most important thing that happened is that the people who will administer the elections in key swing states in 2024—from governor down to secretary of state to attorney general—will now overwhelmingly be people who believe in counting the votes and certifying the results. That shouldn’t be noteworthy, but in this environment it really is noteworthy. And it’s also important because Republicans clearly, I think, have now been taught a lesson that election denial, “stop the steal,” is bad politics. And, hopefully, that will mean that fewer election deniers get nominated the next time around.
But I think that it’s important to recognize that while the threat of not certifying elections, overturning elections in the way that Donald Trump tried to do in 2020 has receded, that does not mean that the threat to American democracy has receded. The threat to American democracy is still very, very real. And it’s driven fundamentally by this dynamic that—even though Republicans are doing a little bit better with Hispanics and Asians—that fundamentally demographic change to a less Christian, less White America still disfavors Republicans means that they’re hold on power is more and more tenuous. And so, you still see the Republican party making this decision to try to turn the American political system in a more and more anti-democratic direction to maintain a political system that can be dominated by White Christian men. And this does not only take the form of trying to overturn elections.
And so, it’s really important, even as we celebrate that fact, to look in particular at what has been happening in Florida, since one of the election results of this election is now that Ron DeSantis’ chances of being the Republican nominee rather than Donald Trump have certainly gone up. And Ron DeSantis is not an election denier in the way that Donald Trump was. But he is also someone who has made a very serious attempt, I think, to undermine democracy in the state that he has been running in a couple of ways that I think have been somewhat drowned out by what Donald Trump is doing but are very serious, nonetheless.
The first is the very aggressive gerrymandering that Ron DeSantis oversaw in Florida, which was not only an effort to ensure that Democrats could not get elected to the House of Representatives, but also was an effort to reduce the number of Black members of Congress that Florida would represent. And indeed, and I’m referencing here a profile of Ron DeSantis by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine, where he notes that what DeSantis was trying to do, by eliminating districts that had been set aside for majority Black districts, was trying to provoke a legal fight that would go to the now-conservative Supreme Court to override the Voting Rights Act protections that ensure that Black voters will be represented in Congress. Remember, the fundamental problem that existed before the Voting Rights Act was that in southern states—where you might have had 20 or 30 or even more percentage of Black voters if they only represented 20 or 30% of each Congressional district—you could have a situation, given the way American politics works, where there would be no Black members of Congress. The Voting Rights Act was an effort to respond to that. And so, DeSantis trying to overturn it is not just an effort to skew elections very aggressively in a partisan way so that Democrats can’t be elected even if they would have been in fairer drawn districts, but it’s an effort to return to an era where it’s much more difficult for Black people to have representation.
And even more profoundly in that regard is what Ron DeSantis has done with felon disenfranchisement. So, in 2018, Florida voters—to their credit—overwhelmingly voted to repeal a law in Florida that prevented former felons from being able to vote. This would vastly, disproportionately [disenfranchise] Black voters who go to prison in much, much higher numbers in Florida, as across the south and across the United States. And it was a relic of, as Jonathan Chait mentions in his profile, as he writes: “It was a relic of a post-Reconstruction era when white southern states used it in combination with laws heavily targeting Black men as a tool to limit voting.” So, this was a relic essentially of the last great assault on American Democracy, which brought in Jim Crow and overturned the Reconstruction era and took the vote away from Black Americans in the south after they had briefly had it in the post-Civil War era. And to their credit, Floridians overturned this by two-thirds vote in 2018 to give former felons the right to have the chance to vote. And what has Ron DeSantis done? He has made exercising that right impossible. What the Republicans under DeSantis did in Florida was they pushed through a law that said that the only way former felons could restore their right to vote would be to pay off all outstanding fines or court debt. At least three-quarters of such eligible voters did have court debt. The vast majority did not have the means to pay it back. But here, as Jonathan Chait notes, this was not even a good faith effort to actually recapture the money. Chait writes:
“The point of this bill was not to compel payments. Indeed, because the state has no central database listing all fines, many voters who had the money and an intense enough desire to vote to pay for the privilege could not do so. The bill’s purpose was to disenfranchise those voters. Republicans have been implementing voting rights restrictions across the country since about 2011, but no state has enacted a measure as sweeping and draconian as Florida’s. DeSantis is the only governor since the Jim Crow era to institute a literal poll tax.”
And if that wasn’t bad enough, DeSantis has also created a new Office of Election Crimes and Security, in which former felons are threatened with arrest if they do try to vote without having paid back these fines, which is, as Jonathan Chait notes, are basically in many cases impossible to actually pay back, and also threatening with arrest people who bring ballots that are asked by other people to drop boxes. So, it is now illegal in Florida to turn in more than two ballots that don’t belong to a close relative. This is very significant, because again, because Black Americans are much more likely to find it difficult to vote on election day because they live in areas where the voting lines are much longer, because they’re likely to work jobs that don’t afford them—again unlike in most countries, voting in the United States, there’s no holiday for election day. It’s not even on a weekend, right. This is not by accident. It’s because America has always been a country which has wanted to make it hard to vote, especially hard for certain people to vote. And so, the response to that again, particularly for people who work difficult jobs, long hours, or elderly people, was to allow them to fill out a vote in private, seal it, and give it to people who would then drop it in the drop box. Now, what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida is basically threaten those people that they could be committing a crime if they don’t follow these very, very, very much more narrowed rules about your ability to do that. Again, this is in a context in which there was no actual voter fraud going on. But clearly the effort is to intimidate Black voters— many of whom have, because of the nature of the racist American criminal justice system, have been engaged with the law in various ways—to threaten them with criminal prosecution, so that they just don’t go through the bother of voting because they’re intimidated into doing so.
So, this is Ron DeSantis, right? This is Trumpism 2.0, one might say. Yes, maybe it doesn’t have all of the pernicious and terrifying features of Trumpism 1.0, but I think we need to recognize, even as we see that a lot of people deserve credit for what happened last Tuesday in the midterm election, that the larger dynamics of this effort to make America less and less democratic, to fortify White Christian male dominance, those continue in different guise. And the danger is that people will grade so on a curve, that because Ron DeSantis is not Donald Trump, they won’t see him as a threat. Indeed, he is a threat. I hope to see many of you on our call on Friday with Maggie Haberman and that you have a good week.
And We Are Not Saved