“Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. It must be protected. I wish to express my solidarity with the women whose liberties are being undermined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”
French President Emmanuel Macron.
“I have always believed in a woman’s right to choose and I stick to that view, that’s why the UK has the laws that it does.” Conservative UK PM Boris Johnson, calling the reversal of Roe vs Wade, “a big step backwards.”
“My heart weeps for the girls and women of the USA. A huge set back. The right to a free abortion is one of the most fundamental rights there is. We must never compromise the unrestricted right of women to decide over their own bodies and future.”
Denmark’s PM, Mette Frederiksen
“We cannot take any rights for granted. Social achievements are always at risk of going backwards and their defence has to be our day to day. Women must be able to decide freely about their lives.” Spain’s PM, Pedro Sanchez
“[I am] very concerned about implications of [the US Supreme Court] decision on Roe v Wade and the signal it sends to the world. Banning abortion never leads to fewer abortions, only to more unsafe abortions.”
Belgium’s PM, Alexander De Croo
“The news coming out of the United States is horrific. My heart goes out to the millions of American women who are now set to lose their legal right to an abortion. I can’t imagine the fear and anger you are feeling right now.”
Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau
The major Western democracies are aghast. Angry American protestors across the nation march in furious and vociferous demonstrations. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs reversal of Roe v Wade may tilt voter sentiment back from its conservative vector, but a survey described below, taken before that decision, suggests that Americans blame Biden and the Democrats for excessive government failures, COVID restrictions, inflation – even as the rest of the world faces the same issues – and have bought into the GOP culture wars.
They also perceive border asylum seekers – running from corruption and violence enabled in significant part to American guns massively smuggled south – as taking their jobs and funneling ultimate leftist voters into our country. Without evidence. Too many Americans accept the GOP claims that Dems are rolling us towards “socialism” because that word is increasingly applied and resonates with older voters.
Yet there is almost no genuine veering towards full government ownership of wealth, the means of production and real estate – the real meaning of “socialism.” Unfortunately, increasingly Americans vote labels over substance, outsourcing their opinions to pundits, left and right. Right-wing voters cite the tiny four-person left wing “Squad” in the House as the clear spokespeople for the entire Democratic Party. They certainly are not. Nevertheless, the pre-Dobbs numbers augur particularly badly for the Dems.
“More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.
“But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump's Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa…
“Republicans benefited last year as suburban parents grew increasingly frustrated by prolonged pandemic-related schools closures. And as inflation intensified more recently, the Republican National Committee has been hosting voter registration events at gas stations in suburban areas across swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania to link the Biden administration to record-high gas prices. The GOP has also linked the Democratic president to an ongoing baby formula shortage.” Steve Peoples and Aaron Kessler reporting for the Associated Press, June 27th.
Meanwhile, Russia is looking at the American election disarray, believing that the United States is likely to push Congress back to Trump era isolation in the midterms and shove Putin-friendly Trump or his replacement clone back into the presidency in 2024. Russian media now openly admits its 2016 social media mis- and disinformation campaign inside the United States, replete with individualized messaging targeting American voter fears and biases; they actually take credit for tilting the margin of victory in electing Donald Trump. On their primetime news casts, their newscasters openly admit that Russia plans to continue its election interference, hoping to dull the American appetite to support Ukraine and NATO itself. They believe it is just a waiting game. A MAGA president is good news for Vladimir Putin, as he watched the isolationist right and left rise in the recent French parliamentary election.
Every US intelligence agency has affirmed that massive flood of Russian campaign influence, overt and covert, in 2016 and beyond. Indeed, as Russia expert, journalist and historian David Shimer tell us in an August 20, 2020 interview in the Yale News, this is nothing new: “Russian hackers and internet trolls sought to manipulate American voters throughout the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, as they [did] again in 2020. Their efforts represent the latest chapter in a 100-year history of secret operations by the Soviet Union’s KGB, Russia under Vladimir Putin, and the CIA to influence electoral outcomes in foreign countries…
“In 1919, Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, founded an organization known as the Communist International, or Comintern, which was meant to unite the communist parties of the world and to foment revolution abroad. It distributed money and supported propaganda organs in various countries to help communist parties compete more effectively at the ballot box and ideally win elections. Lenin’s vision was that communist parties would assume power, topple their governments, and abolish their national borders…
“There’s a misperception today that foreign electoral interference is somehow a political issue — that if you say election security matters, then you’re a partisan Democrat. History shows that that is just not so. During the Cold War… the Soviets sought to destroy the candidacies of Richard Nixon, a Republican, and of Ronald Reagan, a Republican. It just so happens that today Russia believes it is in its interest to support a Republican.
“But Russia’s aim here is to advance Russia’s objectives, which are to choose our leaders, to sabotage and delegitimize our process of succession, and to undermine public confidence in the democratic model, and that should offend and alarm all Americans, regardless of party loyalties…
“America still has no comprehensive national strategy to deal with this threat. And in many ways, things have gotten worse. Whereas President Obama sought to defend against Russian interference, the current president has solicited foreign interference in our elections, which signals to countries like Russia that they can continue executing these types of operations without risking serious consequences. I don’t see any unity in America about countering this threat or even acknowledging that it exists.” Make no mistake; our CIA has also used overt and covert measures to influence foreign elections as well. The era of American obsession with growing communism after WWII represented the heyday of those efforts.
Our Founding Fathers, living in a world that was 94% agricultural/rural with flintlocks and muskets as the personal weapons du jure, did not trust city slickers, fearing that urban voters were untrustworthy, not being people of the earth. So, they made sure that states’ rights were protected and that each state had two Senators, regardless of population. Thus, in today’s primarily urban America, 30% of the voters elect 50% of the Senate, an anomaly made much worse by the filibuster, making us the only purported democracy where a majority of the legislature cannot pass most bills.
As my recent Is the Populist Right Making American Democracy Impossible? blog points out, red states have pulled out all the stops further to marginalize blue voters. So, for urban voters to stake their claim to appropriate legislation and representation, they quite literally have to produce 1.8 votes for each rural vote cast! Will the Dobbs decision produce that margin in our elections? As most in the EU now recognize, quoted in the prestigious The Economist, at best the United States is a “flawed democracy.” It is a time of shame, sadness and minority rule.
I’m Peter Dekom, and we must all realize that the United States is not a representative democracy; it is an anocracy where roughly 30% of America (strongly guided by evangelical and NRA precepts) has become our governing “shot-caller.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment