04 January 22
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Republicans are busy undermining the next election. But giving up on democracy isn’t an option. We must fight back, and here’s how
A year has passed since Donald Trump’s attempted coup and his supporters’ violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of US democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic. In the tumultuous year since, the immediacy of that sensation has waned – and the magnitude of the stakes has receded from memory.
In the rubble of the insurrection, the sheer shock of the moment jarred loose hints of long-lost bipartisanship and national unity and rekindled an appreciation of why a successful coup would have meant the end of all we care about. The House of Representatives expeditiously moved to impeach Trump for his role in fomenting the attack and 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict him on 13 February after a masterful presentation led by Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland. After Trump had become the first American president to be impeached twice, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump from the Senate floor, justifying his and many other Republicans’ votes to acquit only on the thin reed that, by the time of his Senate trial, Trump was no longer president.
Alas, the moment was short-lived. With Trump himself out of office and in exile at Mar-a-Lago, public attention quickly faded, Republicans abandoned their increasingly half-hearted search for accountability, and the leaders of their party began planning their next bite at the poisoned apple of power, an apple they told themselves had been stolen from them despite all evidence to the contrary.
Rewriting history and turning reality on its head, Republicans in Congress and their allies in rightwing media began absurdly to describe the deadly insurrection as a “mostly peaceful” protest, described rioters who brutally beat Capitol police as “political prisoners”, and suggested that any violence was attributable to some unidentified group of leftwing “antifa”.
To be sure, we have seen the rise of a veritable cottage industry of commentary warning sharply that America remains subject to what some have called a “slow-motion insurrection” or that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”. Yet the vast majority of Americans have turned their attention back to other concerns – from new and more infectious variants of the Covid-19 virus, to burgeoning inflation and increasingly palpable signs of global warming, to the myriad other problems that bedevil our nation and the world.
But for those of us who have continued to investigate the sources and facets of the assault on constitutional democracy, a sobering realization has become unavoidable: our country, and the legal and political institutions that prevent it from descending into despotism, are in even greater peril today than they were at the time of last November’s election.
That assault began in the runup to the 2020 election, when Trump and his cultlike followers spread the corrosive view that American elections had become inherently untrustworthy as demographic changes broadened the eligible electorate and thus that any outcome other than victory for Trump would necessarily be the result of fraud and must therefore be rejected by all means necessary.
With each passing day, more details about the means Trump’s team devised to undo the results of the November 2020 election have cascaded into public view, even though Republicans in Congress have made concerted efforts to obstruct the work of the special House committee created to uncover the sources of the attempted coup and the ensuing insurrection. The committee was charged to propose legislation to reduce the danger of a repeat performance, but because curing a disease requires diagnosing its cause, Republicans have seized on the committee’s search for causes to claim that its purposes were solely vindictive and not legislative.
In the course of designing possible remedies, the committee has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy broader, more far-reaching and better organized than was initially thought. That conspiracy featured deceptive PowerPoint presentations and duplicitous talking points designed to propagate the big lie that Democrats had indeed stolen the election and to lay out a blueprint for “stopping the steal”.
Understanding that blueprint requires appreciating the byzantine constitutional structure dating to our founding, a structure in which the presidency is awarded not to the winner of the national popular vote but to the candidate receiving the most “electoral votes”. Those votes are allocated among the states according to a formula slanted toward less densely populated states – states that have tended over time to favor the Republican candidate – with each state’s legislature determining the method for deciding how its electoral votes will be awarded.
As Representative Raskin, a leading member of the special House committee, described it to me, the basic plan for Trump to seize power despite his loss of both the popular vote on 3 November and the electoral vote on 14 December had been to pressure various officials to “find” enough nonexistent votes to flip the results of several key states in which the election’s outcome had been the closest.
Failing that, the plan was to pressure Vice-President Mike Pence, presiding over the 6 January joint session of Congress required under the constitution to count the certified electoral votes, to reject and return the slates of electoral votes certified by Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, depriving both candidates of the requisite majority of the electoral votes cast.
At that point, the choice of president would fall “immediately” to the US House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation casting a single vote in the resulting “contingent election”. That in turn would have made Trump the president-elect despite having lost the election, because more state delegations in the House were in Republican hands at that point than in the hands of the Democrats.
Part of the plot, we are now learning, featured Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act to declare something like martial law to put down the chaos and bedlam he and his inner circle would by then have unleashed on the Capitol, all the time blaming the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for not keeping order, a form of sinister gaslighting the Republicans have deployed ever since 6 January. Talk of that military option led the CIA Director to predict that “we are on the way to a right-wing coup”.
But most terrifyingly, we have learned over the past year that the Republican party plans to do it again. Some retired generals are warning that, without decisive action to hold all the wrongdoers to account, we will witness a march to another coup attempt, and one more likely to succeed, if Trump or another demagogue runs and loses. Trump’s Republican party has all but erased or openly embraced the violence of 6 January. And the party faithful have already set out to use state-level elections and legislative processes to better set the table to steal the 2024 election should that be necessary to their return to power.
And why wouldn’t they?
Those involved in the last attempt have – at least as of today – faced few if any social, political or legal penalties. Only the foot-soldiers, those who physically invaded the Capitol, have faced criminal punishment. And even they have been charged with no offense more serious than corruptly obstructing an official proceeding. As I have elsewhere argued, it would seem more fitting to charge those who organized, funded, and otherwise led the nearly successful overthrow of our government with insurrection or sedition.
Indeed, in the topsy-turvy world of Trumpian logic, the political base of the Republican party now appears by a large majority to believe that the real coup and insurrection took place not on 6 January 2021 but on 3 November and 14 December 2020, when Joe Biden and the Democrats supporting him were guilty of a “big steal” of the national election.
Students of how democracies fail and tyrannical regimes arise from the dust they leave behind uniformly teach that such groundless myths of wrongful defeat at the hands either of enemies within or of enemies without are invariably part of the demagogue’s narrative and of its hold on popular consciousness.
The specter of another coup attempt in 2024-25 may, at first blush, seem counterintuitive. After all, whether Donald Trump or another aspiring despot runs next time as the Republican party’s nominee, that candidate will have no access to the powers of the presidency when the national election occurs. But the corrupt actions that threaten soon to bring our constitutional republic to an ignoble end sadly do not require either an exercise of presidential power or the abdication of presidential duty.
They require only that the cult of Trump repopulate with party hacks the bureaucracy of honest vote-counters and nonpartisan election personnel at the state and local levels, and that Trump-backed lawmakers elected to state legislatures rig the voting rules to dilute the influence of all who might oppose a Republican victory. Because these steps are well under way, we face a challenge more daunting than we did even when the powers of the presidency were in Trump’s hands.
Nor can we count on the congressional voting integrity measures brilliantly designed with the help of Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, the Democratic representatives who led Trump’s two Senate impeachment trials, to save us from what the growing number of Republican state legislatures seem only too eager to do. For one thing, even before the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats control too few seats in the Senate to overcome the antiquated filibuster rules that make enactment of such voting rights measures with fewer than 60 votes an impossibility. For another, the US supreme court, as packed by means of dubious legitimacy by Trump during his presidency, is poised to hold unconstitutional virtually any meaningful voting protection or electoral reform Congress might enact even if that 60-vote obstacle could be carved away in a limited class of cases.
Even if something should derail another Trump run at the presidency, the means for another coup exist, and the temptation to seize power, this time cementing it more permanently, will surely tantalize a political party that seems openly hostile to the very premises of democracy.
Of particular concern to students of fascism – a governing form that almost always comes wrapped in violence – was the violence woven through the rise of Trumpism to the siege of the Capitol which was, of course, brutally violent. Participants came armed with body armor, firearms, knives, bear mace, Tasers and everything in between. They brought a gallows and chanted that they were going to hang the sitting vice-president. They brutally beat Capitol and DC police officers.
Nor was the violence limited to that day. Leading up to the 2020 election, Trump supporters had run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas, plotted to kidnap the Democratic governor in Michigan and stirred up brutal attacks across the country. In the period after that election, they physically surrounded and intimidated senators on an airplane and in an airport, calling them “traitors” and promising consequences for their perceived defection from Trump. They showed up at state capitols armed to the teeth and threatening retribution if state legislators did not allocate their electoral votes to Trump, or at least pursue fraudulent “audits” of the election results.
Far from being condemned, in the intervening year that sort of violence has been increasingly glorified by the mainstream conservative movement. In recent weeks, a congressman posted a Photoshopped video of himself murdering a Democratic colleague. A Fox News host discussed – to a crowd of radicalized anti-vaxxers – how they might most appropriately assassinate our nation’s chief epidemiologist with a “kill shot” in “an ambush”. Large crowds venerated a juvenile vigilante who shot three people on an American street.
The base is being primed for more violence in the run-up and aftermath of the next election. And the Trump-packed supreme court is poised to do its part by gutting what is left of America’s laws against carrying guns anywhere and everywhere – including maybe in courthouses, polling places and the like. It is no accident that the 6 January hotel command center of the group led by Steve Bannon and Roger Stone was christened the “war room”.
So what is to be done?
- We must resist state-level attempts to make voting more difficult. Instead, we must make vote-counting easier and use all legal means at our disposal to challenge publicly and in state and federal courts legislative district maps designed to dilute minority voters’ influence or to amplify the power of incumbency, as well as laws empowering state officeholders to designate presidential electors at odds with their state’s popular election results.
- We must use boycotts and grassroots political organizing to oppose the replacement of honest with corrupt election officials and the enactment of anti-democratic state laws.
- We must encourage the 6 January committee to complete its work thoroughly but quickly, including holding public hearings that spotlight the damning details of the plot that nearly succeeded, and making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice of all public officials – from members of Congress to the former president – suspected of such federal crimes as obstructing an official proceeding, aiding and abetting an insurrection or conspiring to commit sedition.
- We must fight back against suggestions that the justice department’s criminal investigations of the highest-ranking public officials should await any such criminal referrals from the committee.
- We must redouble our determination to hold criminally accountable, and potentially disqualify from ever again holding public office in the United States, everyone involved in the obscene trashing of constitutional democracy.
- We must publicly repudiate whatever misguided notions have led the Biden administration’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, to exercise extraordinary restraint in the pursuit of such full accountability, effectively placing the highest officeholders above the law.
Above all, we must not let the difficulty of the task ahead turn realism into resignation and sap the energy we will need to bring to this mission. As the distinguished Yale historian Joannne Freeman recently wrote, “Accountability – the belief that political power holders are responsible for their actions and that blatant violations will be addressed – is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it, there can be no trust in government, and without trust, democratic governments have little power.” And when democracy loses its grip as a guiding ideal, despotism fills the void and liberty is lost.
This is a battle we must not, cannot, will not lose.
Archbishop Desmund Tutu. (photo: WP)
The late anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu was no neoliberal sellout. His legacy was always to advocate structural reforms in South Africa.
In the international press, most sought to sanitize Tutu’s radicalism and present him purely as the Nobel Peace laureate who championed “rainbowism,” the South African post-apartheid paradigm of forgiveness and reconciliation. From this perspective, Tutu stands in his rightful place alongside his Nobel Peace Prize–winning peers — Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, and F. W. de Klerk — immortalized as bronze statues for posterity.
The image of Tutu, as found in even liberal publications like the Guardian, prefers to ignore his more radical political stances, from his critical position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which he drew parallels with apartheid South Africa; to his call for George Bush and Tony Blair to be tried as a war criminals for their invasion of Iraq.
In South Africa “The Arch” is most widely known for his place in the anti-apartheid struggle, as well as the fight for HIV/AIDS-related rights. In the wake of his passing, however, criticisms of him have emerged. The debate on South African social media driven by many of those too young to have participated in the struggle, along with those associated with former president Jacob Zuma’s faction of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has centered on accusations that Tutu was a “sellout” for his role in the transition because he presided over South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
In the eyes of this group, the TRC is seen to have failed in providing justice and closure to the majority by not jailing apartheid operatives and championing land and property redistribution. This is perhaps unsurprising and only the latest example in a pattern of debate in South Africa regarding the legacy of anti-apartheid struggle heroes, including Nelson Mandela.
It is undoubtedly important to look back openly and honestly on South Africa’s path to democracy but while the fairytale story of the miracle nation and its heroes papered over the cracks of a deeply flawed process and society, the alternative response threatens to repeat the same mistake by presenting complex historical processes and persons as stooges or servants of “white monopoly capital.” The debate regarding the legacy of Tutu is a forceful reminder of why we need to tackle this discourse head-on and grapple with the failures of post-apartheid governance, not least of all the Zuma factions’ own politics.
Tutu himself had a mixed legacy, largely tied up with his role as the chairperson of the TRC, South Africa’s primary transitional justice instrument. Unfortunately, despite its significance in public discourse, the facts surrounding the TRC and its complex role as a transitional justice instrument at a tumultuous period in South African history are not widely known. The TRC remains a deeply misunderstood process which contributes to a misreading of Tutu and the attacks on his politics and his legacy.
To understand Tutu and what he did and didn’t accomplish, we need clarity on this institution and the context in which it emerged. We argue that much of the social failings attributed to Tutu and his role in the TRC are in fact a product of the ANC’s failure to implement the Commission’s progressive recommendations and socioeconomic emancipation more broadly.
The Meaning (and Limits) of Transitional Justice
Transitional justice is concerned with questions relating to how an incumbent civilian and democratic regime should deal with conflicts of the past, in terms of attaining justice for victims of gross human rights violations; for apportioning either legal, moral, or criminal accountability for those violations; and restoring trust in a democratic political order that is grounded in respect for human rights. It is worth clarifying this concept of transitional justice because it is not meant to be an alternative to criminal or social justice. It is a provisional form of justice that seeks an answer to deal with heinous crimes constitutive of a former regime to form the foundations of a new order.
Truth commissions form just one model of transitional justice. The other most notable forms include trials like Nuremberg after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the “forgive and forget” approach as seen after Franco’s Spain and in Namibia, or the purging of former administrations as seen in transitions from Communism in Eastern Europe. Hence, comparative literature on transitional justice — as both an academic, and legal and practical field — tends to frame truth commissions within the “truth versus justice” debate on the one hand; or the relative priority that’s given to the interests of different sets of actors, for example perpetrators, victims, beneficiaries, collaborators, or bystanders on the other. In other words, transitional justice is always and everywhere incomplete and partial.
That a truth commission would be unable to effect justice for all South Africans was not something of which Tutu was unaware and, indeed, he did not intend to deceive the masses into believing it would. Evidence for this is printed in the opening passages of the TRC’s final report in which Tutu responds meticulously to the myriad criticisms made of the Commission at the time, most of which are the same criticisms echoing today from his critics. Before we address some of these, it’s important to provide an account of the social context out of which the TRC emerged.
The Commission
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was borne from a military stalemate. South Africa was forced to ask itself what priority was greater to bring about the least violent transition: through seeking justice, accountability, and retribution; or restoring human and civic dignity to victims (through truth-seeking and truth-telling, reconciliation and redistribution); or identifying which groups unduly benefited from oppressing the majority.
A critical point, however, was that the range of choice was not as wide as what it may seem with hindsight; it was purposefully constrained, something often lost in the current discourse where hindsight and the idea of the miraculous and peaceful transition mean it is easy to forget how unstable the country was in the early 1990s. The TRC was the product of a compromise rather than an unequivocal victory for anti-apartheid forces.
The immediate political context — that of a negotiated settlement — is reflected in South Africa’s Interim Constitution. This settlement precluded the possibility of criminal prosecutions of National Party officials, as had been seen with the Nazi officials following World War II. The Interim Constitution contained an implicit and explicit provision for amnesty; in other words, amnesty for those who committed crimes was the sine qua non for the negotiated settlement.
This suggests that both sides had agreed that amnesty was a prerequisite for the transition, the establishment of the transitional Government of National Unity and eventual plan for democratic elections in 1994. Neither the outgoing National Party negotiators nor the leaders of the ANC saw truth about the past as a priority, in fact both sides actively sought to bury the details about past violence.
Importantly, the amnesty provision in the Postamble to the Interim Constitution contains no mention of, nor specific requirement for the disclosure of truth about the conflicts of the past. There are some seminal formulations related to the need for “peace,” “reconciliation,” “forgiveness,” and “ubuntu,” which were later incorporated into the Preamble of the final Constitution and the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, the legislation that comprised the TRC’s mandate. However, there was no commensurate reference to the imperative for truth in the official discourse which narrated the new, democratic South Africa’s course.
The call for truth was instead articulated by human rights groups and civil society in the early 1990s as information became leaked about the covert killings and torture by state functionaries at the now infamous Vlakplaas, a farm that served as the headquarters for the Apartheid regime’s notorious death squad. These stories were leaked in underground publications like the Vrye Weekblad, where killings at Vlakplaas were linked to unresolved cases of political assassinations at the hands of South African Defence Force Special Intelligence units.
At the same time, after anti-apartheid organizations were unbanned in 1990 — including the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress, and the South African Communist Party (SACP) — numerous allegations arose about the ANC’s violent disciplinary tactics in its training camps located in Tanzania, Angola, and other Southern African countries through the 1980s, as well as reports about “necklace murders” by ANC-aligned political forces by civilians in townships, in which supposed spies were summarily executed by placing a petrol-drenched rubber tire around the victim’s neck and setting it on fire.
This was all taking place within the context of a “dirty war” in South African townships with conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the ANC fueled, again, by the “third force” of the apartheid state security agencies. It is often forgotten in the discourse around South Africa’s “peaceful transition,” that the country was on the brink of a major civil war, and between 1985 and 1995 upward of twenty thousand people were killed.
This context and the disclosures in the early ’90s prompted civil society groups and individuals like Tutu to express the distinctive need for, and right to, truth concerning past violence. If a general amnesty alone had been effected, as had been the proposal by the elite pacts, many of these crimes (both the covert crimes of apartheid’s security personnel as well as those committed by the liberation movements) would have been erased from the official historical record. Within this context, the idea that the call for truth was merely a flimsy and elite-led whitewash of the past is historically inaccurate. Rather, a key innovation of the TRC that was fought for by civil society groups — with respect to transitional justice mechanisms — was to make the amnesty conditional on truth-telling.
The draft legislation of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which set up the TRC, emerged from approximately a hundred fifty hours of public hearings in January 1995, where various civil society groups, NGOs, religious, mental health, and human rights groups made representations. It was in these public hearings that the two somewhat conflicting ideas of amnesty (provided for in the Interim Constitution), and a public truth process became fused in this idea of conditional amnesty: the controversial truth-in-exchange-for-amnesty compromise, provided certain conditions were met.
This was a novel feature in the taxonomy of truth commissions worldwide, and without it, arguably none of the knowledge uncovered by the TRC would be part of official historical memory. Its role was to enumerate and record the patterns of human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994, to act as a public acknowledgment of those experiences, and to bring about some form of restorative justice as a basis of a democratic South Africa. Critically, it was something which was fought for by civil society groups and by Tutu himself.
The Post-Apartheid TRC Legacy
This does not mean that we should not engage with and critique the TRC. Indeed, this was something Tutu actively encouraged. As he wrote in the forward to the TRC report:
Others will inevitably critique this perspective — as indeed they must. We hope that many South Africans and friends of South Africa become engaged in the process of helping our nation come to terms with its past…
One of the most salient critiques advanced by Mahmood Mamdani was that the TRC’s narrow conceptualization of victim and of a “gross human rights violation,” which did not include structural violations such as forced removals and bantu education, and that it individualized both victims and perpetrators, proposing individual reparations, when apartheid was a crime that targeted communities and groups and hence, reparations should have been community reparations.
While this is true, the TRC was candid about its limitations and always saw its role as just the beginning of a broader necessary process for social transformation. It explicitly states in Volume 1 of the report, that the provision of reparations to the “(relatively) few victims of gross human rights violations who appeared before the commission cannot be allowed to prejudice apartheid’s many other victims.” It maintained that resources should be allocated, “for essential social upliftment and reconstruction programmes,” where individual reparations were to be seen within the broader social and political context.
Critics of the TRC have revised its history to portray it as the defining act in a type of “rainbowism” which offered reconciliation for the oppressors without justice for the oppressed, combined with the impacts of neoliberal economic policymaking. Significantly, by the time the Commission submitted the report to President Mandela in October 1998, the ANC had already abandoned the economic policy of the Reconstruction and Development Program, which had mandated massive spending on public infrastructure and social welfare as a means to economic and social development, replacing it with the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy.
The reasons for this change within the African National Congress have been a major point of debate within the South African left. These early shifts by the ANC and the possible reasons for it are critical to understanding the limitations of the post-apartheid project to realize meaningful socialist change. However, the point here is that this economic decision-making was happening largely outside the formal transitional justice processes.
This separation was arguably misguided and related to the critique by Mamdani and others about the way in which the evils of apartheid were conceived and the subsequent ramifications for nation-building. However, even within the limited parameters of their position, the TRC and Tutu as chairperson saw it as the state’s prerogative to champion broad-based redistribution and social development.
This is evidenced in the final recommendations (Volume 5) of the TRC’s report in which it recommends state action in relation to socioeconomic redress: “[the government must close the] intolerable gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged in society by, inter alia, giving even more urgent attention to the transformation of education, the provision of shelter, access to clean water and health services and the creation of job opportunities.” The relationship between the realization of human rights and socioeconomic rights is affirmed when the report states explicitly that “the recognition and protection of socio-economic rights are crucial to the development and sustaining of a culture of respect for human rights.”
It was in fact Desmond Tutu who favored a tax on those who benefitted from apartheid, and this was an issue debated during the course of the TRC’s Institutional Hearings on Business. In relation to this proposal, the final report stated it did not wish to prescribe a particular strategy, but urged that “all available resources” be leveraged to combat poverty and inequality. Similarly, as has been pointed out by commentators on Twitter, Tutu himself did not renege on his call for a wealth tax nor was he content to let racialized “white” South Africans forget their role in continued oppression, reminding them of this in public appearances well into democracy.
As noted in Volume 6, Section 6 of the TRC report, the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee was not an implementing body, and since the publication of the TRC’s findings there has been no systematic effort by the ANC government to implement its recommendations. This is also evident in the fact that although the TRC denied 5,392 people amnesty (only 849 applicants were granted amnesty), the National Prosecuting Authority did not pursue most cases in which amnesty was denied or when a named perpetrator refused to apply for amnesty at all. This is a failure of the post-apartheid government and should be criticized by all South Africans. However, it is not a failure of Tutu himself nor even of the TRC.
The unwillingness for the post-apartheid dispensation to pursue these recommendations can rather be read as a symptom of a broad unwillingness by the government to incorporate the TRC’s findings as a central part of the post-apartheid nation building project. In fact, when the final report was released it was rejected by many, most notably President Mandela who in a special debate on the report of the TRC in parliament on February 25, 1999, accused it of “an artificial even-handedness that seemed to place those fighting a just war alongside those who they opposed and who defended an inhumane system.”
But, as a transitional justice instrument, rooted in international human rights law, the TRC defended its mission to report frankly on past human rights violations and acknowledge formally the traumatic experience of victims on both sides; and publicly name the perpetrators in an evenhanded way.
Limits to the Transitional Justice Paradigm
Of course, there are limits to the transitional justice paradigm, just as there are limits and constraints built into the liberal legal paradigm. Truth commissions are institutions that demand an acceptance and affirmation of liberal values and economic policy to prevent the recurrence of future human rights abuses. It is no coincidence that they gained traction in the wake of the “third wave” of democratization, where many countries in Latin America transitioned from right-wing authoritarian governments, but have done also alongside a further embrace of free-market economics.
Another concern with truth commissions and their focus on individual reconciliation and healing, which Tutu resonated with, is the notion that societal change is possible by appealing to one’s individual morality. These issues are revealed in the Institutional Hearings on Business, where various bodies like South Africa’s largest trade union federation, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), attested to the gross human rights violations for which major capitalist organizations were responsible, particularly in the mining sector.
However, these capitalists were never compelled to appear before the TRC nor to seek amnesty for these violations of human rights (given the politics of the negotiated settlement this is unsurprising as the leadership of the ANC was in the process of forming relationships with capital). Moreover, submissions to the TRC articulated that the continuation of capitalist relations of production would lead to a continuation of violence against working-class people into the democratic dispensation. The Communist Party’s submission stated:
In presenting the apartheid political economy as an integrated and coherent system of racial oppression, the struggle against capitalist oppression is twinned with that for democratisation. Resisting the growth of black trade unionism, and calling in the police during strikes, is thus seen as evidence of collaboration with the apartheid system against democratisation.
However, the liberal legal framework within which the TRC operated meant that there were limitations to the changes it would recommend. This is also a reflection of the balance of social forces at the time, in which capital remained strong and had already begun to recruit Black Economic Empowerment partners to company boards.
Here, the morality argument, which Tutu advanced, falls short. In the end, Volume 4 of the TRC report stated that the mining sector bore “a great deal of moral responsibility for the migrant labour system and its associated hardships” and the Commission appealed to the good will of business to pay into a national fund to assist with social upliftment projects.
It is no surprise that this never materialized. The report on the business sector is redolent of a particular misunderstanding of the key sin of apartheid as grounded primarily in its racial discrimination, rather than in the logic of capitalism and the inevitable exploitation it generates, as was proposed by certain submissions from workers’ movements and the SACP.
Defending Tutu’s Legacy
Despite all this, the TRC produced a vast archive of information and video footage which is freely available online. Yet this footage is not used effectively in school history classes, and is almost never broadcast on public television or radio. This is perhaps one reason why so many white South Africans are still able to deny the horror that was apartheid. It is clear from that footage that truth-telling was a significant process for many. It’s hard to dismiss raw, emotional clips where people spoke about the loss of their loved ones or met with people who were responsible for the deaths of parents, partners, and children as elite whitewashing.
In recent years, the ANC — after losing much of its moral status through corruption scandals, state brutality, and factional strife — has tended to use the negotiated settlement, the constitution, and the TRC as scapegoats for its own failure to deliver justice to the majority. Despite being in power for over two decades and possessing on various occasions the two-thirds majority required to amend the South African constitution, it has outsourced its own failures. The attacks on Tutu are part of this attempt to revise history to explain away the ANC’s shortcomings.
The archbishop’s death marks the end of an era: many are lamenting the loss of our moral compass as we face a dearth of moral leadership in South Africa. Indeed, the country is in a major crisis. However, while there is a need to soberly reflect on leaders like Tutu and their role in major processes like the TRC, this must be done with historical accuracy. Instead of blaming certain individuals for structural failings, we ought to learn from the successes and failures of past initiatives, move away from shallow analyses that see every post-apartheid problem as a product of a sellout of figures, and reignite the social movements of which Tutu was a part to combat social inequalities.
Tutu’s legacy and the legacy of the apartheid struggle depends on whether or not that happens.
A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Americans Seeking to Renounce Their Citizenship Are Stuck With It for Now
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "In recent years, Michael has come to regard the United States, the nation of which he has been a citizen all his life, as an abusive parent."
As many as 30,000 citizens living abroad have been unable to secure a ‘loss of nationality’ interview during the pandemic
“I can acknowledge my past association with that person while at the same time wanting to keep future association to a minimum,” he said.
Michael – the name is false as he requested anonymity to avoid being inundated with hate mail – found his disaffection with his native country reach crunch point in 2020. The chaotic end of the Donald Trump era combined with the inequities exposed by the Covid pandemic made him despair of being an American.
“Coronavirus made me realize that in the US, if you’re not a member of the moneyed elite you’re left to fend for yourself with virtually no help from the federal government,” he said. “The farcical presidential campaign made me realize that I don’t want to be a member of a society in which my vote is made irrelevant by gerrymandering or the electoral college.”
And so Michael decided to renounce his US citizenship. Having moved to Finland 10 years ago, he would break the ties that officially bound him to a country whose values he no longer recognised.
That’s when Michael’s troubles really began. He discovered that along with thousands of other US citizens living abroad, he was caught in a Kafkaesque trap.
For almost two years, since the pandemic struck in March 2020, most US consular missions around the world have suspended their expatriation services for those wishing to give up US citizenship. The US embassy in London, the largest of its sort in western Europe, announces on its website that it is “currently unable to accept appointments for loss of nationality applications” and is unable to say when services will resume.
The US state department says giving up citizenship requires a face-to-face interview with a government official, and that it is too risky given coronavirus.
Delays have led to a growing mountain of disgruntled citizens. By some calculations, there may be as many as 30,000 people among the 9 million US citizens living abroad who would like to begin the renunciation process but can’t.
Joshua Grant is one of them. He was born and raised in Selma, Alabama, until he moved to Germany when he was 21 to learn the language.
He has been there ever since. He lives in Lower Saxony and married a German citizen last year. Grant, 30, feels ready to acquire German citizenship, but under German law he must let go of his US passport. Easier said than done.
He submitted a pile of paperwork to the US embassy in July 2020. Nothing has happened. He has written emails to the embassy staff, with no reply.
He contacted the office of US senator from Alabama Richard Shelby. They passed him on to the state department, which in turn passed him back to the bureau of consular affairs, which mentioned the pandemic.
“It’s very taxing. My whole life in Germany is on hold,” he said. “It’s funny: people in Germany tend to see the US as a liberal country where the rule of law was established, but I can’t even find anyone in the US government to talk to.”
Nine US citizens abroad who have found themselves unable to give up their nationality are now suing the state department in a federal court in Washington. The suit, brought on the plaintiffs’ behalf by the French-based group Association of Accidental Americans, likens the situation to feudal times.
“The US appears intent on preventing its citizens from exercising their natural and fundamental right to voluntarily renounce their citizenship,” it says.
Some people want to give up US citizenship because the government has been making the burden of being an American more onerous for those abroad. In 2010 the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was passed, requiring foreign banks and other financial institutions to report on any clients they suspect of being American to the IRS.
The US is also one of only two countries (the other is Eritrea) that tax people on their citizenship rather than where they live. That forces Americans abroad to declare their global income to the IRS, with possible tax implications.
The impact of these burdens is reflected in the number of people who renounce each year. Between 2000 and 2010 it remained relatively steady at less than 1,000 people, but after FATCA came in, the numbers rose sharply to a peak last year of almost 7,000.
Some of the would-be renouncers are “accidental Americans”, having acquired citizenship because they were born in the US though they have lived elsewhere all their lives.
That label could be applied to the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who was born in New York but has not lived in the US since he was five. Johnson renounced his citizenship in 2017, having said he was outraged a few years earlier by having to pay the US tax authorities for gains on the sale of his London home.
Marie Sock, the first woman to stand as a presidential candidate in the Gambia, was forced to pull out of the race recently after she failed to get any response to her request to renounce her US nationality from the US embassy.
She explained in a video posted on Facebook that under Gambia election law, presidential candidates must be sole Gambian nationals.
James – also not his real name – was born in Texas but has not lived in the US since he was four. He now lives in Singapore.
He became disillusioned when he learned that because his son was born outside the US he would not be eligible for US citizenship, and yet because of James’s citizenship he would treated as if he were a US taxpayer. That struck him as a modern form of taxation without representation.
“The double standards really annoy me,” he said.
For the past year he has been trying to get through to an official who will help him renounce his citizenship, without success.
“I never asked for US citizenship, and now I’m not even allowed to give it up.”
f which he has been a citizen all his life, as an abusive parent."
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is "in crisis and at risk of failing." That sentiment is felt most acutely by Republicans: Two-thirds of GOP respondents agree with the verifiably false claim that "voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election" — a key pillar of the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Fewer than half of Republicans say they are willing to accept the results of the 2020 election — a number that has remained virtually unchanged since we asked the same question last January.
"There is really a sort of dual reality through which partisans are approaching not only what happened a year ago on Jan. 6, but also generally with our presidential election and our democracy," said Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, which conducted the poll.
"It is Republicans that are driving this belief that there was major fraudulent voting and it changed the results in the election," Newall said.
Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents agree that U.S. democracy is "more at risk" now than it was a year ago. Among Republicans, that number climbs to 4 in 5.
Overall, 70% of poll respondents agree that the country is in crisis and at risk of failing.
Deep partisan divisions about what happened on Jan. 6
The country can't even decide what to call the assault on the Capitol. Only 6% of poll respondents say it was "a reasonable protest" — but there is little agreement on a better description. More than half of Democrats say the Jan. 6 assault was an "attempted coup or insurrection," while Republicans are more likely to describe it as a "riot that got out of control."
Americans are bitterly divided over the events that led to Jan. 6, as well.
"I think the Democrats rigged the election," said Stephen Weber, a Republican from Woonsocket, R.I. "And who the hell would vote for Biden?"
More than 81 million people voted for Biden, compared with more than 74 million for Trump. Biden won with 306 electoral votes to 232 for Trump.
But Weber is skeptical. In a follow-up interview, Weber said he doesn't trust mail-in voting and doesn't believe that Democratic lawmakers have the country's best interests at heart.
"They want to change it to something else. We don't want it changed," he said.
Democrats also expressed dismay about the state of democracy — but for very different reasons. In follow-up interviews, they voiced concern about voting restrictions passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures in the wake of the 2020 election. And they struggled to make sense of the persistent belief in the fiction that Trump won.
"When Trump first came out with his 'big lie,' it just never occurred to me that so many Republicans would jump on board," said Susan Leonard of Lyme, N.H.
"It's like a group mental illness has hit these people," said Leonard. "I cannot believe this is happening in our country. I'm scared, I really am."
Republican support for false claims is remarkably stable
The poll found that support for false claims about election fraud and the Jan. 6 attack have been remarkably stable over time.
For example, one-third of Trump voters say the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by "opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents" — a baseless conspiracy theory that has been promoted by conservative media since the attack, even though it has been debunked.
"They probably had some antifa people, or they paid those people to do that and try to say that it was Trump's people," said Krissy Cripps, a Republican from Carterville, Ill., in a follow-up interview. Cripps said without evidence that the Democratic National Committee was likely responsible for the false flag operation.
Claims of major fraud that affected the results of the election have also been widely disproved. But large numbers of Republican voters remain unmoved.
Heidi Kravitz remembers watching Trump's lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, at a news conference shortly after the election.
"He had a stack of papers as evidence," said Kravitz, a Republican from Salem, Ore., in a follow-up interview. "And I was just like, 'OK, well, then why don't we at least check that?' Like if there's nothing to hide and if it is not true, then why don't we just check it?"
Giuliani did appear in federal court for the first time in decades, asking a judge to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania. That case was quickly dismissed for lack of evidence.
A New York court later suspended Giuliani's law license in the state due to "false and misleading statements" about Trump's 2020 election loss. Giuliani now faces a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over baseless claims of widespread election fraud.
Democrats want more accountability for Jan. 6
The poll found widely diverging views of Trump's role in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Two-thirds of Democrats agreed that "Trump and his allies broke the law trying to overturn the election," while most Republicans believe they were "exercising their correct legal right to contest the election," or that they "did not go far enough."
In follow-up interviews, Democrats expressed frustration with what they see as the slow pace of the House select committee that is investigating the Jan. 6 attack. And some voiced disappointment with the length of the sentences handed down so far for those convicted of participating in the attack on the Capitol.
"They need to be held accountable," said Stafford Keels, a Democratic voter from Florence, S.C. Keels says that includes anyone who helped organize the events — all the way up to the former president.
"Trump and the rest of those guys should be in jail more than the rioters," Keels said in an interview. "The rioters should be doing years. But they're the ones who pushed the lie."
Few Americans of any political stripe seem to be paying much attention to changes in voting laws at the state level.
We asked about efforts to reduce access to absentee ballots and early voting, and to give state legislatures more power to determine the outcomes of elections. Majorities of voters on both sides of the aisle said that would make elections less fair, not more.
There was somewhat more support for election reform at the federal level. A proposal to standardize election rules across states drew support from a majority of Republicans and Democrats. The idea of allowing any voter to use a mail-in ballot was popular among Democrats, but not Republicans.
A majority of Americans rule out political violence — but a minority does not
The poll found that a majority of Republicans and Democrats alike reject political violence.
"In a way, it is reassuring to see that the system hasn't totally broken down," said Newall, "that most Americans on both sides of the aisle are still not willing to engage in violence."
But more than 1 in 5 poll respondents say violence is sometimes justified — either to protect democracy or American culture and values.
Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to agree that "it is OK to engage in violence to protect American democracy"; 32% of Trump voters agreed, compared with 22% of Biden voters.
The poll was conducted Dec. 17-20, 2021, with a sample of 1,126 adults online in English. The poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points for all respondents.
Reporter Katie Nielsen is detained by police during the Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, California. (photo: Stephen Lam/Reuters)
If we don’t take corrective measures quickly to increase media literacy and slow the spread of disinformation, journalists working in the United States will become bigger targets for those who disagree with the information and perspectives we disseminate.
It’s already happening.
Last month, a judge in New York sentenced a man to three years in prison for threatening dozens of people, including journalists and members of Congress, for accurately reporting the results of the U.S. presidential election. The man, Robert Lemke, 36, sent text messages and voice mails, including pictures of the gravesite of CNN reporter Brian Stelter’s father and a message that described his mother’s house, implying Lemke was there.
Lemke believed the “big lie” and was prepared to threaten others for disagreeing with his demonstrably false views.
Traditionally journalists have wanted to stay away from the center of the stories they cover. Most of us would like nothing more than to do our jobs of chronicling and analyzing events with some measure of privacy. But that’s becoming impossible.
The pressure is on to make our work stand out, as success is increasingly linked to web traffic. And as journalists’ profile and perceived influence rise online, leaders with authoritarian mindsets, and their followers, see the reach and independence as a threat to their power.
Many journalists have endured years of online harassment and abuse in silence. The industry has become desensitized to these attacks, accepting them as an occupational hazard. We see the opportunity to inform a wide audience as a privilege that comes with responsibility — and you have to have thick skin, we tell ourselves.
The stakes, though, keep getting higher as our society becomes more polarized. Of course, this was most evident on Jan. 6, when Trump supporters attempted a coup at the U.S. Capitol.
Acknowledging the gravity of the moment, Post publisher Fred Ryan honored 38 of our colleagues who covered the Jan. 6 insurrection with The Post’s annual Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism.
The award honored their commitment to carrying out the job in a volatile and dangerous environment, and also acknowledged the tremendous personal risk they took. These journalists need recognition, but they also need care and support. We tend to forget that as an industry.
We don’t talk enough about the trauma many journalists endure — in large part because we are not supposed to know about it: Journalists never want to eclipse the subjects and broader themes at the heart of our stories.
As journalists covered the insurrection, documenting the most direct threat to our democracy since the Civil War, people hurled threats and insults in their direction. “Murder the media” was scratched into a door of the Capitol. Some in the mob chanted “CNN sucks” as they destroyed equipment owned by the Associated Press.
“I’ve covered conflict abroad and it wasn’t until reporting on social unrest throughout 2020 that I had to consistently go out with a military-grade gas mask, a bulletproof vest and eye protection,” Maranie Staab, an independent journalist who has been covering protest movements that erupted in different U.S. cities, including Pittsburgh, Portland and Syracuse, told me.
Staab says she witnessed “countless instances where the press was targeted, attacked and obstructed by law enforcement as well as groups on the far right and factions of the far left.”
Without proper accountability, we are bound to face more and better organized assaults on our democratic institutions. And that includes the free press.
I have written about the decline in press protections in Mexico, Iran and many other countries. The dehumanizing treatment of critical journalists by the nationalist Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has led to India becoming one of the deadliest places in the world to report. In 2021, four journalists were murdered and no one has been held accountable for those crimes.
We monitor press freedom to shine a light on those who want to obstruct the free flow of information in different societies. And that knowledge offers important tools for press freedom defenders across the world.
The United States, which prides itself of having a constitutionally enshrined right to freedom of the press, is seeing the tactics of dehumanization and intimidation long deployed by nondemocratic states.
Discrediting the press isn’t new, but this country is entering a new and darker chapter. President Donald Trump didn’t write it, but his brand of hateful showmanship was uniquely successful at fanning the fire. Putting it out will be difficult and, frankly, less “catchy” — headlines about disinformation and attacks on public figures don’t get a lot of sympathy, or clicks. But that’s precisely why it has to be a priority. Because if press freedom crumbles in the United States, if journalists feel threatened and vulnerable for speaking truth to power, then the outlook for democracy — here and abroad — will become bleaker than it already is.
A man holding a child reacts as the members of the Kurdish family from Dohuk in Iraq wait for the border guard patrol, near Narewka, Poland. (photo: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images)
“Our life there isn’t safe, as you see about ISIS and everything else,” Iraqi Ahmad Rebaz said.
They have been stuck here for over a month in the hopes of entering the European Union. Despite several failed attempts to storm the frontier amid the frigid temperatures, many still hope they will be allowed in.
“I don’t want to stay in Iraq because life there is difficult, even our life is dangerous. Our life there isn’t safe, as you see about ISIS and everything else,” Iraqi migrant Ahmad Rebaz, 27, told The Associated Press, referring to the Islamic State group. He said his wife had recently given birth to their second child in the nearby Belarusian city of Grodno.
Since Nov. 8, a large group of migrants, mostly Iraqi Kurds, has been stranded in Belarus at a border crossing with Poland. Most of the migrants are fleeing conflict or hopelessness at home, and aim to reach Germany or other Western European countries.
The EU has accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of waging a “hybrid attack” against the bloc. Officials say he is luring thousands of migrants to Belarus with the promise of help to get to Western Europe to use them as pawns to destabilize the 27-nation EU in retaliation for its sanctions on his authoritarian government. Belarus has denied engineering the crisis.
About 600 migrants, according to the Belarusian Red Cross, are living at the Bruzgi logistics center as of late December. It is a warehouse facility where they have set up a makeshift camp, placing mattresses and tents in the rows that once housed shipping containers. Belarusian authorities and the Belarusian Red Cross have provided them with food and other necessary supplies.
Poland took a tough stance against the migrants’ illegal entry, reinforcing the border and pushing those attempting to get in back into Belarus. The Polish approach was largely met with approval from other EU nations, who want to stop another wave of migration, but has also been criticized by human rights groups.
Belarusian authorities have also criticized Poland and other European nations for mistreatment of the migrants, while playing up their own efforts to return them to their home countries and to create decent living conditions for those staying at the border crossing at Bruzgi.
But as temperatures fall below freezing, life at the border becomes more and more challenging. In the heated warehouse, it’s still so cold that people inside are keeping their outerwear on.
The migrants “need immediate help because the weather is getting more and more cold,” said Zanyar Dlshad, an 18-year-old from Iraq living at the logistics center who hopes to make it to Europe to reunite with his brother and to study at a university.
“It’s so cold and I don’t believe people can keep up with this,” he said.
While most migrants say they want to travel on to Germany, some say they are willing to settle in any country to avoid having to return to Iraq.
“If Belarus, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, or any other country gives us citizenship I’ll accept. For me there’s no difference. But (I’ll) never ever come back to Iraq,” said Farhad Mahamad, a 34-year-old migrant from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Several hundred Iraqi migrants have already left Belarus on evacuation flights organized by the Iraqi government, and more are beginning to agree to return home with the help of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
Last Wednesday, about 10 people at the Bruzgi logistics center filed documents to the IOM representatives on site to arrange their return to Iraq.
Mohamed Refaat, senior operations coordinator of the IOM, told the AP that they would be taken to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, by bus before continuing their travel to their home countries.
The site of dramatic clashes between Polish border guards and migrants at the Kuznica-Bruzgi border crossing, in the meantime, is empty of the crowds of people that gathered here last month.
However, some migrants say that they aren’t willing to wait at the warehouse much longer and are ready to brave the cold temperatures of what they call “the jungle” — the forested areas at the border — with the hope of finally making it through to Poland.
A firefighter monitors the Dixie fire near Janesville, California, which burned more than 800,000 acres and destroyed over 1,000 structures. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
After another devastating year, it’s clear that Californians can’t keep trying to “fight” wildfires. Instead, they need to accept it as their new reality.
In hindsight, it’s clear that this romance between California and her citizens was fundamentally unstable, built on a lousy foundation and crumbling for years. But when you’re enmeshed, even the troublesome patterns are hard to see. All Californians tell their stories. Ours, courtesy of privilege (race, education, a house purchased in the 1990s), are mundane. Police escorted us over flaming hills as we tried to return home from backpacking trips. I woke up to texts from friends: HAVE YOU HEARD FROM YOUR PARENTS? ARE YOUR PARENTS OK? after their neighborhood in Napa burned. My parents — thank God — were already with me. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, started turning off power to millions of residents in an attempt not to ignite (more of) the state. We all knew these so-called public-safety power shut-offs were an appalling sign of a diseased empire. You couldn’t just abandon basic functions and duties, could you? But it turns out you can.
The dominant story in California these days is that the orange, dystopian smoke-filled sky that blanketed the state on Sept. 9, 2020, was proof that our beloved was corrupted and had been for some time. We were in the midst of the worst wildfire season in the state’s history, and the evident wrongness traumatized us and shook us awake. Living in California now meant accepting that fire was no longer an episodic hazard, like earthquakes. Wildfire was a constant, with us everywhere, every day, all year long, like tinnitus or regret. The dry spring was bad; the dry summer, worse; the dry fall, unbearable. Even a wet winter (if we caught a break from the drought) offered little reprieve. All thoughts, all phenomena, existed relative to fire. Where we are now — January, the fresh and less fire-alarming time of year — should be the moment for us to relax and reassess what we’re doing in California and how to live here well. Yet the rains turn the burn scars into mudslides and allow the next season’s flora, what the foresters call fuel, to grow.
Billboards beckon us to Miami. Fantasy communes blossom in Maine. For those of us committed to sticking it out, our relationship task is making peace with smoke. (I should say this exercise is not for everyone. A recent study found that a month of medium-to-heavy wildfire smoke — what much of California experienced over the last few years — increases the risk of preterm birth by 20%. As one of the study’s authors told me, “Wildfire is literally making it unsafe to be pregnant in California.”)
One afternoon in August I lay on the deck of my friend Kevin’s cabin not far from Mono Lake, in the eastern Sierra Nevada, and told myself that I could love, in some deeply-flawed-but-beautiful kintsugi way, the ash-paste air. Kevin’s cabin is perfect — was perfect. Out in the sagebrush, off a dirt road, next to an aspen-lined creek in the high desert, the cabin has everything and nothing: no electricity, no running water. Just one 10-foot-by-12-foot room with a sliding-glass door onto the epic mountain sky. Each summer — often several times a summer — my family drove over Tioga Pass, crossed the cattle guard up into Lundy Canyon, stripped on the rock beside the swimming hole, plunged into the snowmelt and emerged, elated and cleansed. The light shimmered off the aspen leaves like God’s own disco ball. We felt rich every time we arrived.
This year, after I jumped in, I told myself I still felt renewed despite the smoke. That was a lie. The next day we hiked up into Twenty Lakes Basin, where you could cliff-dive and bathe in glacial melt. The world here, too, did not feel OK. The meadows looked dull green from drought and ash. This was not the California I first married, but to be honest, I’m not the same person, either. Time is a beast. Did choosing to stay here mean a life defined by worry, vigilance and loss?
Aching and eager to escape my own boring loop of depressive thoughts, I met with Alex Steffen, a climate futurist, on the back patio of a bar in Berkeley. Steffen, a 53-year-old mountain of a man with a crystal-ball-bald pate, hosts a podcast and publishes a newsletter called “The Snap Forward.” The idea behind both is that the climate crisis has caused us to get lost in time and space; we need to dig ourselves out of nostalgia and face the world as it exists. As he explained to me in his confident baritone, yes, California, and the world, are in bad shape. But the situation is not as devoid of hope as we believe. “We have this idea that the world is either normal and in continuity with what we’ve expected, or it’s the apocalypse, it’s the end of everything — and neither are true,” he said. That orange sky in 2020? “We’re all like, Wow, the sky is apocalyptic! But it’s not apocalyptic. If you can wake up and go to work in the morning, you’re not in an apocalypse, right?”
The more accurate assessment, according to Steffen, is that we’re “trans-apocalyptic.” We’re in the middle of an ongoing crisis, or really a linked series of crises, and we need to learn to be “native to now.” Our lives are going to become — or, really, they already are (the desire to keep talking about the present as the future is intense) — defined by “constant engagement with ecological realities,” floods, dry wells, fires. And there’s no opting out. What does that even mean?
We’re living through a discontinuity. This is Steffen’s core point. “Discontinuity is a moment where the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work,” he said. “It is extremely stressful, emotionally, to go through a process of understanding the world as we thought it was, is no longer there.” No kidding. “There’s real grief and loss. There’s the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened.”
I found Steffen’s sweeping, dark pronouncements comforting. He at least had language and a functional metaphor to describe what was going on. Most of us have dragged our feet and deluded ourselves for too long about the state of the world. While we remain stuck, our world pulled away from our understanding of it. We’ve now fallen into a gap in our apprehension of reality. We need to acknowledge this, size up the rupture, then hurl ourselves over the breach.
As we sat there, the bar’s concrete patio filled up with young, busy people and their laptops, their gatherings part of an endless stream of work meetings displaced by the pandemic, individuals trying to make the shapes of their lives as “normal” as possible — the whole premise of which, Steffen argued, was a mistake. The mind-set locks us into defining ourselves as the trapped inhabitants of someone else’s broken world.
Relinquishing the idea of normal will require strength, levelheadedness, optimism and bravery, the grit to keep clinging to some thin vine of hope as we swing out of the wreckage toward some solid ground that we cannot yet see. “We’re no longer dealing with a fire regime in the woods that responds to the kinds of mild prevention and mild responses, the sensible responses we have thought about, and that thought alone is a crisis,” Steffen said. “It means the lives we had we no longer have.”
How did our fire problem get to this point? (Californians: To live here these days means either knowing all this or refusing to learn. So the primer below will either be a review or something you’ll have a strong urge to skip, but shouldn’t.)
One, California has a Mediterranean climate. Much of its landscape evolved with fire as a natural part of the cycle. Which is to say, it needs to burn.
Two, colonizers stole the land from Indigenous Californians, who knew how to live well with the ecology and burned vegetation at specific times of the year in part to maintain the health of the landscape and keep themselves safe. Then settlers, with government help, killed native Californians. Now very few people continue those Indigenous practices, and we have not returned land to the tribes. “I truly know almost everybody who has a cultural knowledge of fire, and I could probably count them, including myself, on my two hands,” Don Hankins, a Plains Miwok geography and planning professor at California State University, Chico, told me. This was the same conversation in which he noted that places near him that haven’t burned are just waiting. “In Butte County, we talk about the three remaining green ridges: the ridge I live on, the ridge to the north of me and the one just north of that. Those are the last three places where fire hasn’t been.”
Three, the United States Forest Service grew up between World War I and World War II and has since engaged in a forever war with fire. The war analogy is not a stretch. In 1947, Smokey Bear started exhorting citizens, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” sounding remarkably like Uncle Sam recruiting YOU to fight for the United States Army. The USFS owns more than half of forested California. (The state owns about 3%.) For the last 116 years, the agency has practiced an exuberant form of fire suppression, in part because it’s mandated to protect the nation’s forests and rangelands for multiple, sometimes conflicting uses: recreation, watershed health, propping up rural economies. A result is that California’s forests are now stuffed like a hoarder’s garage, with 300 to 400 trees per acre. Pre-USFS, the number was 30 to 70. You can think of the excess biomass as a huge fire debt. That debt will be paid off, willingly or not.
Those three factors lay the basic groundwork. The dangers continued compounding from there.
We logged; and then, especially in far Northern California, we mostly stopped logging to protect the spotted owl and other endangered species. This meant that we removed the biggest, most valuable, most fire-resistant trees, old-growth nobles that take centuries to regrow, and left behind whole middle schools of plantation-style stands. These stands tend to burn hotter and send flames up into the canopy. Canopy fire is generally bad. Good fire creeps along the forest floor, clearing out fuel on the ground.
At the same time, California’s population exploded: to 39.5 million in 2020 from 3.5 million in 1920. The state also created a gothic regulatory framework that made most urban and suburban housing outrageously expensive, difficult and slow to build. So, people moved deeper into the WUI, or wildland-urban interface — the areas where the human-built landscape bumps up against the natural world — often seeking affordable homes. Now Californians are out there, everywhere, nestled among the fuel.
The accelerant on this pyre: We’ve spewed, and keep spewing, carbon dioxide and methane into the sky, trapping heat on our planet, making California hotter and drier. The core problem is known as the “vapor-pressure deficit.” There’s not enough moisture in the air. Hot, dry air means hot, dry fuels; hot, dry fuels mean wildfire. Preventing ignitions now takes drastic measures.
The culpability of PG…E is hard to fathom. As the planet warmed and the company paid bonuses to executives and dividends to shareholders, it allowed vital equipment to fall into disrepair. Power lines blew down in high winds, setting off fires through huge swaths of the state. This keeps happening. As of this writing, PG…E has pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. It owes more than $24 billion in damages. The company, finally, has plans to put 10,000 miles of power lines underground — a nice start that will take years.
Humans, meanwhile, continue to be careless and set the world aflame. Firecrackers, cars throwing sparks, a rancher hammering a metal stake into a wasps’ nest, expectant parents igniting pyrotechnic devices at gender-reveal parties. “Don’t smoke cigarettes on your hike in the dry grass hills!” one exasperated fire scientist told me. “That’s why we closed state parks.”
A result of all this? More fires, with more severity. The acreage itself isn’t bad. We have a backlog that needs to burn; might as well get to it. But the critical dryness along with the pileup of fuels makes many wildfires grow too big, too hot, too fast. This wipes out huge tracts of trees, kills sequoias that are thousands of years old and makes many wildfires impossible to fight.
The threat is not just in the woods. California is 33% forest, 7% grassland and 8% chaparral (bushes and shrubs). Those grasses and shrubs are “flashier,” meaning they burn easier and faster. This brings fire into communities, and once fire is in a community, the houses are the fuel. Worst of all (I’m only sort of kidding), plants grow back. This makes “fuels management” a maintenance problem, a Sisyphean chore. We can’t just balance the fire debt and call ourselves good. If we do, we’ll be right back in jeopardy soon.
None of this is a surprise. Fire professionals have known for decades that every step of this 18-dimensional disaster was coming. In 2014, the quadrennial review by the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service laid out four scenarios for how the fire landscape might look in a decade or so. Two of the scenarios are “high impact” — bad. They sound far too familiar.
Scenario No. 1 — Hot, Dry and Out of Control: Year-round, higher-intensity and more destructive fire spreading into communities that have not seen wildfire in 100 years. “Fire behavior is now so extreme that, because of safety concerns, the community is limited in terms of what fires it can suppress with ground forces alone.”
Scenario No. 2 — Suppression-Centric: Forests are more flammable than ever. Thirty percent of the United States population is affected by smoke. This is “driving considerable disillusionment from air-quality concerns and lifestyle disruptions. ... The country is a tinderbox and conditions are continuing to deteriorate.”
In 2015, the Forest Service’s “Futuring Fire Policy” memo sounded the same. We’re headed for more cataclysmic wildfires. Suppressing fire now just delays the catastrophe.
When I called around to fire experts this fall for an update on the situation, the response was grim. People started talking to me about zombie towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills — towns almost guaranteed to incinerate. The darkest statements came from the most knowledgeable people. “I do think that we’re going to have significant community destruction,” one retired senior official told me. “We are going to be playing just a completely defensive game. I don’t know that we will ever get ahead of it until we have so much destruction that we kind of eliminated the problem.”
Eliminated the problem. Whole towns burned off the map.
I asked Zeke Lunder, the best wildfire analyst that I knew, who should be worried. He rejected the whole premise of the question. Worried? Ha. We’ve passed that stage. We exist in a world of knowing that not everywhere nor everyone will be spared. “We need to accept that there’s going to be a fire,” he said. “It’s going to burn the whole town down. When that happens, let’s have identified a pot of money to buy these 5,000 lots that are in the worst places and we know are never going to be safe. So, let’s buy them and rebuild in a footprint that’s defensible.”
I asked if he knew of any towns doing that. He said no.
Being a climate futurist is a strange gig. You’re not the practitioner; you’re the rhetorical wizard. Lord knows we need smart people like Steffen to inspire ideas that will help us escape our deadly status quo. But until the transcendent creative geniuses arrive, we also need to work with what exists, even if we know it’s not enough. That means addressing our wildfire problem with what’s dully and bureaucratically known as “forest management.”
Forest management is a catchall phrase for a Swiss Army knife of large-format landscaping tools. Relevant to mitigating wildfire risk, those include prescribed fire (burning on purpose, when conditions are favorable, to pay down the fire debt); mechanical thinning (pruning at vast scale); and cutting fuel breaks (creating wide belts of land with few fuels, so fire can’t run across). Increasingly this means partnering with tribes, who have been fighting to reclaim their traditions, as well as their lands.
Toward these ends, the state of California is now investing a lot of money in forest management — $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience over the last two years. Nonprofits are funding community projects. Locals are burning and thinning around towns themselves. The federal Build Back Better package included $14 billion, to be spread across the country over the coming decade, with $10 billion specifically for the wildland-urban interface. We’re talking about a lot of trees here. Tens of millions of acres of California are overloaded with fuels. A recent state-federal agreement aims to treat a million acres per year. But we’re never going to clear out the tree hoard through human effort alone.
This brings us to one other forest-management tool in the knife: “managed wildfire.” This one, however, does not always pair well with the other overabundant species out there in California: people. Managed wildfire (perhaps a bit of lexicological wishful thinking) means allowing wildfires to burn for what foresters call “resource benefit,” i.e., the health of the forest. There’s no scientific dispute that this is necessary and good. We’ve got an overstock of trees; we need to work with nature, not against it. But managing, as opposed to suppressing, wildfire sounds terrible to many voters because it requires residents to trade short-term harms (fear, smoke, potential loss of property) for a long-term good (lower risk in the future). If you accept the full scope of the dilemma, the bargain pencils out. But if you don’t acknowledge how dire California’s wildfire situation is, forget it. Managed wildfire is a political nightmare.
Tensions between scientists and politicians erupted early in the 2021 fire season, when the Forest Service didn’t bring its full suppression efforts to fight the Tamarack fire. (Several other fires posed more imminent threats, and the Forest Service did not have the resources to fight all of them equally.) In July, that fire got out of control, destroyed 23 buildings and spawned a fire tornado near Markleeville, a tiny unincorporated town. The Forest Service responded by shutting down managed wildfire not just in drought-ridden California but throughout the United States for the rest of the year. Forty-one scientists wrote a letter to the Forest Service’s chief, Randy Moore, arguing that this would only make the wildfire problem worse, which of course he knew. Many of the signatories believed he was caving to political pressure from a local congressman, Tom McClintock, and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who was then facing a recall. Condoning houses burning for resource benefit plays poorly in rural districts.
A few weeks later, I stood at the Minaret Vista overlook, in Mammoth Lakes, staring down at hundreds of square miles of forested ravines with Stacy Corless. She used to be the executive director of a nonprofit, but in 2015 she became a Mono County supervisor and last year, the chairwoman of the Rural County Representatives of California. She knows the topography of state fire politics all too well. The town of Mammoth Lakes is “surrounded by national forest,” Corless told me. “Completely surrounded.”
The landscape below us was a hiker’s paradise and a wonderland for flames. “The accusation is that people like me have made this quote political, but come on. There’s nothing political about life and death and loss of property and trying to deal with evacuations,” she said. “If you’re a scientist, or if your constituents are the trees, or whatever, yeah, that’s one thing. That’s your job to think of that first. But if it’s your job to think of people. ...”
Granted, there’s the baseline problem that our propensity for extractive conquest — our history of ruining anything and everything in exchange for gold, oil, water, land, lumber, you name it — created the need to manage our forests and their fires at all. But this is politics in a discontinuity. You’re governing for the world you and your constituents wish you still lived in, a place you may even believe you still inhabit. But it’s gone.
The false sense of long-term stability in these communities is also propped up by what economists call a moral hazard: a situation in which individuals tolerate excessive risk because they know they won’t bear the full cost. Fire protection in the West is a free public good, paid mostly by the federal government, some by the states. Take that benefit away and ask residents and developers to pay for the firefighting they use? Californians would stop deciding to move to the WUI because it’s cheap. Counties would stop approving new developments for the property taxes.
Aurora Mullett, an insurance agent in El Dorado County, drove me around the Sierra foothills in the black Mustang convertible she usually shares with her dog. “This is the stupidest [expletive] I’ve ever seen,” she said, waving at a newish subdivision. “This place catches on fire two or three times a year.” Magical thinking serves no one well on the fire front. Close to the still-smoldering burn scar from the Caldor fire, all the houses remained pink from retardant drops. Already, Mullett told me, the El Dorado County supervisors had discussed waiving the ordinances requiring locals to spend the extra money to rebuild to the current wildfire code, just as supervisors in Butte County did after the Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018. (The El Dorado supervisors later changed their minds.)
Mullett raised her kids up here in these woods. She loves to hike and fish just over the knoll in the Desolation Wilderness. But she has seen too much. She knows nothing we do is enough. She might run for insurance commissioner. Hedging her bets, she also bought some property on a lake in Tennessee.
This is the moment in the story where you and I would both like me to introduce a majestic, mood-changing solution, a Gladwellian big idea. This is the best I’ve got: We need to stop thinking a dashing rescuer in a red slicker or yellow fire-resistant shirt should come save us from wildfire. We don’t fight hurricanes. We don’t fight tornadoes. No one assumes there will be an armed defense from an earthquake or a flood. Instead, we bolt our houses to our foundations. We raise our homes on stilts. Now we, Californians of the Anthropocene, need to grow up, take responsibility and stop expecting to be saved.
Kimiko Barrett, who studies wildfire at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that aims to make “complex data understandable” so others can make better decisions around land use, helped snap this into focus for me one afternoon. We have, she said, “a home-ignition problem, more than a wildland-fire problem.” So simple, yet such a profound shift. Until we accept this, we’re going to remain deluded and stuck.
This is the unsexy part of the marriage that involves the endless trips to Lowe’s. In practical terms, what we’re talking about here is home hardening (the preferred jargon for fireproofing your home from the outside). The details are about as thrilling as moving a stack of firewood farther away from your house. Homes ignite in two different ways: from the fire front (direct flames and heat) and from embers (chunks of burning stuff that blow in the wind). Hardening against embers is relatively easy: Install a fireproof roof; place screens over eaves; clear a “defensible space” (a perimeter with nothing flammable). These measures are also cheap. California spent about $4 billion fighting fires this year. A recent white paper, “A New Strategy for Addressing the Wildfire Epidemic in California,” suggests appropriating $1 billion to retrofit 100,000 homes every year. (Ideally this would target homes built before 2008, when the state began mandating the use of ignition-resistant materials on all new construction in high-fire risk zones.) If all houses in California built before 1995 had been retrofitted to 2012 standards, another 2021 paper found, the state would have saved $11 billion in losses from the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons alone.
Alexander Maranghides is a fire-protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who has spent the last four years studying the material landscape that allowed Paradise to be destroyed. He’s a details guy. With him, all the emotional clothes-rending and finger-wagging around the climate crisis is gone. In their place: the thrill of facts. He explained that fire exploits weakness, just as water does. If you harden your home 90% of the way, and you’re in the path of a high-intensity wildfire stoked by fierce winds, “there’s going to be millions of embers,” and your house is going to burn. “You can harden your home for embers. You put a shed next to your house. An ember lands on your shed, ignites and burns your house,” Maranghides said, walking me through a PowerPoint. “You can do the same with your car. You harden your home for embers. You park your car next to your house. The ember ignites the car. The car burns the house down.” Then your house burns your neighbor’s house down too.
Maranghides’ employer is the agency that in 1973 published the America Burning report. That report led to fire-resistant pajamas, a new fire code and the creation of the U.S. Fire Administration. Structure fires in the United States dropped 54% between 1977 and 2015. His goal is to do the same for wildfire. “I’m not saying this lightly — it’s not accusatory,” Maranghides said. “It’s not about forest fires. Forest fires will happen, and forest fires will burn out. But whether a forest fire turns into a devastation like Paradise or not has to do with how we build and live.”
A look at the California 2022 wildfire budget suggests we have a lot of cognitive work to do. Of the $1.5 billion total, only $25 million is for home hardening.
Then there’s the far more radical, DIY, save-yourself-from-wildfire move: choosing to stay and defend your own home. There’s an impeccable logic in the idea that if you’re going to eat meat, you should be willing to kill the animal yourself. Does it follow that if you’re going to live in a high fire-risk zone, you should be willing to stick around and snuff out embers with your own shovel or rake (or, as one man in Mendocino County used, a gallon of milk)? The impulse to defend yourself embodies a certain Western frontier ethos. Is this the kind of bravery required of us now?
The Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Calfire, are “already admitting that they can’t do this on their own,” Amanda Stasiewicz, a social scientist at Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University, said. “The next question is, Well, then how are we going to do this together? Because as much as long-term partnerships around fuels reduction are fantastic — getting PG…E infrastructure underground, reducing emissions, all that stuff, fantastic — people right now want to know what their options are to keep their lives safe if we continue to demonstrate that we can’t keep up with the pace and scale of the work that needs to be done.”
Californians, especially deep in the WUI, have many questions: Would it be safe for a bunch of us to shelter on a golf course? There’s an old mining shaft on my property — should we shelter down there? But thinking you want to stay and standing before a fire are two different things, like practicing Lamaze and childbirth. Many of the 173 people who died in the 2009 Black Saturday bush fires in Australia remained at their properties but then panicked and tried to flee when they heard the fires racing toward them.
Shortly after the Caldor fire burned over the Sierra crest in late August — the second fire in history to do so; the first was a few weeks before — I drove up to Hayfork, a former-logging-now-cannabis-growing town in far Northern California that, like Mammoth Lakes, is surrounded by national forest. The country was then at what the National Interagency Fire Center blandly calls Preparedness Level 5, meaning red alert, all the country’s wildfire resources maxed out. In California alone, the Dixie fire, which eventually grew to almost a million acres, was then burning, along with the McFarland fire, the Antelope fire, the River Complex fire and the McCash fire. Hayfork sat under smoke from the Monument fire.
At the Northern Delights cafe, a science teacher turned pot farmer walked in staring at his phone. A friend had just texted him a photo: hot-pink retardant had dropped over the friend’s cannabis crop. For the last 20 years the former teacher and his family have lived out in the Hayfork woods, across the road from a chunk of Forest Service land, which he described with remarkable good cheer as “a frightening display of fuel management.” He and his wife have a deal: If they can see flames from the house, she leaves with the kids. He stays behind. Their relationship with fire is as intimate as it gets. Sometimes they turn out their lights to sleep and their bedroom glows.
In early September, I drove to Tahoe. A veil of smoke from the Caldor fire still hung over the lake. People were water-skiing and paddle-boarding — a vision of a diminished world, neither destroyed nor preserved but decayed. For a few weeks at the end of August, the state had been consumed with fear that the vacation town of South Lake Tahoe, an emblem of the splashy, golden California we all married, would burn. Nobody could believe the fire had run down from the mountains into the lake basin, including all the people who always knew it would.
South Lake had survived through a combination of luck (the wind shifted), good local fuels management and an epic firefighting effort, which one expert guessed cost $1 billion. Up on the granite cliffs above Emerald Bay, I kind of broke down. That spot is sublime: the huge blue lake, the huge blue sky, the Sierra crest — a dazzling, heart-stopping vision. But I could also see the scars that remained from the Angora fire, in 2007, and they are hard to comprehend. So many blackened trees standing: dead. These trees are an indictment, a museum of failure. They are not coming back.
That night, in Tahoe, it rained. The next morning the sky opened up again as I crossed Donner Pass. At a gas station I read a Twitter thread by the novelist Michael Chabon, a Californian, about nihilism versus existentialism. He’d read a draft of his son’s college essay in which that son tried to imagine his own future. Chabon saw his child fighting “to swim against the rising floodwaters of nihilism all around.”
Chabon understood why a person would feel that way about the world, and, in particular, about the world right now. Chabon had felt that way himself once, too. But he also knew, having lived here on Earth for a while, that nihilism is a dead end — no path out. The alternative need not be false hope, or even the belief that the world is not essentially broken and absurd. The alternative is to make your own purpose and meaning, whatever the situation.
This is a hard, daily task for all of us, perhaps even a required practice if you’re a professional savior. This November, Thom Porter, the chief of Calfire, announced that he was stepping down after just three years on the job. Before he resigned, he told me that he worried that he had blown it. He had been a forester his entire adult life, defined his job as leaving a safer world for his “kids and grandkids, all of our kids and grandkids.” He thought that he had failed, that we all have failed. “Here’s a grim thought for you,” he said at the end of our call. “Forests, in California, are more resilient than humans are in California.” If we keep doing what we’re doing, the forests will die, then some will regrow. The humans will have to flee California for good. “They’ve done it before,” Porter said of the trees, “and they’ll do it again if we don’t get our act together and figure out how to make sure that California and the West are places where humans can continue to reside.”
Across California — across the world — it’s easy, even comforting, to sit in despair. To stay depressed and mired in a state where not that much has truly changed. But nihilism is a failure of imagination, the bleak, easy way out. We need to face the lives before us. We need to name the discontinuity: See, there it is, the tear in the universe created by our fear and greed. What we believed was the present is actually the past. That was Steffen’s message to me in the Berkeley bar. We failed to keep pace with the future. And the longer we sat there, drinking our beers, the wider the gap became.
We can’t fix California’s wildfire problem with a big idea. We can only settle into the trans-apocalypse and work for the best future, the best present. That starts with acknowledging that our political structures have failed us and keep failing us every day. The powerful have failed the vulnerable. The old have failed the young. The global north has failed the global south. We have failed one another.
It’s a real, grown-up, look-mortality-in-the-eye moment we face. In Tahoe, after coming down from the cliffs at Emerald Bay, I took a walk in the woods with two forest ecologists. They moved to South Lake just before the pandemic began, knowing all the risks. But they love it here. They want to love their lives. For work, they climb and study giant sequoias to see the toll our world is having on them. First, they load a compound bow, then shoot an arrow trailing a fishing line over a tree branch. Next, haul a rope, ascend the trunk and survey a tree’s giant limbs for bark-beetle scars. When giant sequoias have enough water, they expel the beetles with sap. When they don’t, the majestic trees die from the top down.
This summer, in Kings Canyon, as the wildfires approached, firefighters wrapped giant sequoias in aluminum foil. This included General Sherman — 2,200 years old and the largest single tree on Earth. This act was meager, and it was devotional. It’s what we’ve got now. The good news is, some of the moves we need to make are easier, more straightforward and more under our control than we imagined, if we’d just allow ourselves to get them done. The bad news is that there is just going to be loss. We’re not used to thinking about the world that way. We’re not used to paying for our mistakes.
There is beauty in the sequoia scars, bleeding out sap. And there’s beauty in the sequoias when they have none.
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