Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.
Separate stories of what is going on in a week, taken as a moment, an instance of the experience of the time, can also be ordered by ranking the distinct contributions of simultaneous events for their dramatics and their unpredictability, which do not mean the same thing, in that dramatics have to do with conflict and resolution, as happens in D-Day and unpredictability has to do with whether the Allied attack on Normandy would succeed. The current war between Hamas and Israel is an easy story, as AOC would say, where Israel has a right to defend itself but Palestine has a right to survive. These are intractable and opposing forces that noone has a clue how to manage better than it does by Israel every five years or so “mowing the grass” and depleting the stores of arms Hamas has accumulated in the interim, though one might blame Condi Rice for having allowed an election to take place in Gaza that allowed Hamas to take control, to its own surprise, and that group has remained in control of Gaza ever since, without elections, elections something the West Bank Palestinians also having decided to eliminate, even though the Israelis, who do have free and fair elections, are troubled with too many of them, because the two sides are so equally divided, and so Israel has had four elections in two years, Netanyahu managing to remain in charge of it all and now his usual interlocutor with the United States, saying that there are no atrocities, and no one able to find evidence otherwise.
The Israeli-Hamas war, then, is, at the moment, just a repetition of the similar previous wars and will calm down when Hamas has used up its missiles and the Israelis have used up the patience of the United States to bring the war to an end. Nothing new, even if commentators say that the fabric of Israeli society has become tattered, although pro Palestinians have long said, and were wrong to say, that Isrrael was nt a country that could endure because it was not based on a firm ethnic religious identity, as was Islam, rather than ragamuffins whio found themselves on the eastern Mediteranian shore a little more than a hundred years ago. But the fact that Israel has been at constant war with its enemies from well before the creation of the state has to be very trying, an exceptionalism not to be envied and wonder whether the israeli people might lose heart and give in to bitterness and engage in outrages that might make its allies turn away. That is the long range problem, though not in the present moment of violence.
The second issue this week is the unmasking of the American population now that so many people have been vaccinated and because cases of coronavirus are now so low. This event is not really a drama but merely a milestone in the process of ending the political and social response to the stages whereby epidemics grow and then die away though commentators try to make it into a drama by suggesting that the CDC is uncertain about its guidance about who should or should not unmask, as if the CDC should give clear guidance rather than just say the facts as to what are now the risks of catching coronavirus, very much down because the vaccines work and so many people have gotten their vaccines. As is often the case, the media miss the point which is that sooner or later there would be a large unvaccinated population along with a largely vaccinated population and there would be this brief time when people will decide whether to be cautious or incautious. No drama; only alternative choices where not much is to be said for either one, whether to be cautious and still mask or be incautious and wear no mask. Just as well to let private businesses decide how to manage their customers. It would have been an unnecessary intrusion for the Biden Administration to insist on one policy or the other. Conservatives would have lambasted the CDC for getting into social policy rather than just commenting on the state of play in the pandemic.
A third story that is less predictable but very familiar is the story of Liz Cheney. She is an old fashioned conservative who upholds constitutional values and felt obliged to say the truth that Donald Trump is a risk to the Constitution, someone, as Cheney said, should never again be close to the Oval Office. The House Republicans decided to oust her from a leadership role in the Republican House Caucus for that reason and so she can be considered a pariah or a martyr for her principles, the caucus deciding to support Trump perhaps because their contributors and supporters are still taken with Trump or even because some of them believe that the Biden election was fraudulent. So one story is whether this is a temporary setback and that Cheney is planning the long game, eventually to reclaim the Republican Party to its pre Trump configurations, risking, however, to be shunted into political oblivion.
Forget about the fate of Lyne Cheney. Look rather to the fact that time and again the Republican Party has refused to get over Donald Trump even though he was defeated and apparently disgraced. Kevin MacCarthy and Mitch McConnell had each been outspoken against Trump in the day after the insurrection, but drew back from it afterwards. The Republican caucus might have created a free slate for the future if it had simply signed a general circular saying that the Biden election was a fair one or by denouncing the insurrectionists as a kind of loyalty oath to the Constitution, which they did not do, instead skirting the key issues and offering lies about what happened. The conviction of Trump after Trump’s second impeachment would have ratified that the party was free and clear of him, returning to whatever might have happened in 2016 when all the other candidates deeply loathed Trump and had as its standard bearer instead either Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, whatever their shortcomings and even their loss at the polls, which were fully expected by all, Trump included. So the Republican Party remains in limbo, without an anchor other than the enthusiasm of the Trump supporters and so without the ballast that conservatism provides. It has difficulty standing on its own feet. That is the real flavor of this Republican political moment.
There is another chance for The Republican Party to right itself as that erstwhile conservative party, though the time to do so will be delayed until the 2022 election when Democrats can campaign against the trump loyalists, pillorying them for being insurrectionists that the American people will by that time have soundly rejected especially because indictments by this time will have been leveled against Trump by New York City and by Georgia, or maybe the Democrats will have taken the Biden line which is to go past the Trump era, and focus on what Biden had accomplished in the past two years what with coronavirus, economic growth, and lods of money going to jobs and social service and most important, the beginning of a guaranteed minimum income through large tax deductions for children. Either way, Biden wins in the midterms and that finally thrashes Trump and his acolytes, while a Republican victory in the House and Senate bodes very ill. So here we have politics as usual, most elections important or even crucial, and we will see, and it is important what will happen, but that is politics as usual, as I should hope so, knocking on doorbells, getting people registered, driving people to the polls and doing all the things that are usual in politics and so seem separate from the central choices, the existential choices, that voters can decide and only they can decide, just as happened when they elected Lincoln because they were fed up with placating the South. Cheney is part of the sideshow, the foothills, until the real dramatic event that takes place in 2022, the Republicans not yet having done so, remains as a disloyal opposition, enmeshed in its lies, not willing to go free.
The fourth and most consequential of the current political stories has to do with the ongoing negotiations between the Biden Administration and the Republican leadership about the negotiations concerning the Jobs Act, which would spend two trillion dollars to provide, among other things than broadband, highways and bridges, money for nationwide charging stations for electric cars, free community college for all, money to provide elderly and disabled with nursing homes or health care home assistants, and other matters that are infrastructure in the sense of providing a platform so that people can go to work. Biden and others, both Republicans and Democrats, are saying that they have had cordial and promising progress on moving towards a compromise even though the two sides differ on the total cost of the package and also disagree on how to pay for the bill, the Republicans insisting on user fees, so that truck drivers and truck companies will pay more to help fix the roadways, while Democrats think that user fees are a tax on working and middle class people, and so do not support that source of revenue, preferring to tax the rich.
Negotiations about the Jobs Act may or may not work and both sides are mum about the actual state of negotiations, and so there is not much going on that is dramatic. Biden wants to see a way forward by Memorial Day, the threat that he will move to a reconciliation bill that requires just Democratic Senators, if the Republicans do not move a long way to Biden’s proposals, just as happened with the American Recovery Act. Pulling off that process again would be tricky. Whatever the republican decision, it will be consequential. Biden would have to maneuver through reconciliation one more time and might be thwarted by the procedures. Republicans who don’t compromise may find the voters to have found them obdurate and support Democratic candidates in 20222, or else Republicans will prevail in Congress because the Biden Administration has failed to deliver on anything but its first promise. Whether Biden is a spectacular or a failed President remains uncertain.
Either way, this negotiation and some of its associated events provide the flavor of the times that some of us might like to recapture. What is it like to feel a government where one significant part of its Congressional membership does not pledge allegiance to the peaceful transition of power? Is Lynne Cheney a voice in the wilderness or the start of a long journey to her own being President? Wars come and go, but the Constitutional makeup is supposed to endure and the problem at the moment is that all the sides claim to be patriotic. The flavor of the Triangle Fire was in part, after all, that the girls wore, shirtwaists, ten years before the flapper style. Were the girls pre-revolutionary Feminists, waiting to get rid of all those clothes? Similarly, we can wonder whether news reports about war and legislation are told through ever more opinionated and biased news sources may also contribute to the difficulty of sorting out the politics of things and also the legislation. Fifty years in the future we will try to taste the flavor of fifty years before as the context that explained really what happened. The trick is to notice the atmospherics of what is happening right now, this week, so as to have the temper of our times explain what is very soon to come. Shirtwaist dresses were a clue. The absence of a peace movement in Israel or in Gaza is a clue that the present war will start again in four or five years. And also, maybe, Liz Cheney getting the ostriches in their Republican Congressional Caucus to see that their interests lie in getting beyond Trump.