From the excerpt: Brian Taylor Cohen is host of the podcast, No Lie, his book Shameless: Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy was a #1 New York Times nonfiction...
From the excerpt:
“I fight because I am trying to buy time for democracy,” Marc Elias said. “I’m not trying to fix it. People who think I am fixing it are giving me and my litigation way too much credit. We are buying time because as soon as we strike down a law in court, they can go ahead and pass a new one. So I’m trying to buy time for democracy without an end goal of how that time will fix things—barring, say, a voting rights act.
“The other reason that I fight is much more personal. I come from a background of people who have always faced the possibility of the end of liberalism or democracy, depending on the era. It’s hard to say that tsarist Russia was liberal or democratic, or that prewar Germany was. So let’s say I come from a background of people who have always had to worry about whether or not the fate of government would turn against them, or whether the space that they had achieved in civil society would contract.”
Elias studied for his bar mitzvah in 1982, engaging with middle-aged Holocaust survivors who had been in the camps when they were in their twenties, and with American war veterans. Of his mentors, the person “with the greatest impact on me,” said Elias, “was not a Holocaust survivor. He was actually a guy who was a Jewish American who had fought in World War II for the United States. This was just a regular guy who was eighteen or nineteen years old and was drafted. . . . But then he found himself captured by the Nazis. So he was terrified, of course, because he was sent to a German stalag (POW camp). . . . He talked to us about what that experience was like. Despite the laws of war, the Germans identified the Jewish prisoners and gave them work detail. This guy was put onto doing agricultural work.
“He and a bunch of the other Jewish prisoners got this idea to take little pieces of barbed wire, which they could find around the camp. They decided they would use those little pieces of wire to poke holes in the produce before they delivered it, with the idea that it would spoil the potatoes. So they all went out there, picked and processed the potatoes, then would take barbed wire and surreptitiously poke holes, in the hopes that the potatoes would rot. Their rationale was that in doing so, they would starve the Nazi army. The produce would get sent to the army, and then the German soldiers would have nothing but rotten potatoes to eat, and they would starve.
“That image has always stayed in my head. Some nineteen-year-old American who had ended up in a Nazi stalag, segregated with other Jews, and they all took razor wire with their bare hands . . . and there he was, just repetitively poking holes in potatoes all day with bloody fingers, thinking that the net effect of that was going to be that the Nazis would starve in the war effort.
“I feel like I owe that to our democracy. I’m going to poke holes in the potatoes. Maybe it won’t matter at all. Maybe none of these cases I’m taking, in the end, will be the thing that keeps Donald Trump from getting back in office. Maybe it’ll be a landslide election one way or the other, but—while I’m here, while I can—I’m just going to keep poking holes until there are no more potatoes to poke.”
It’s difficult not to feel helpless as far as politics is concerned. How could we not? Just look at the forces we’re contending with: a right-wing disinformation machine, a Republican Party that is fundamentally opposed to democracy, conservative lawyers content to abuse the judicial system, and far-right legislators unwilling or unable to feel shame. The fact that Mitch McConnell—Mitch McConnell—is right now considered not sufficiently conservative is a testament to just how far and how fast the Overton window is shifting. McConnell, whose swan song we are witnessing in 2024, is unquestionably the individual most responsible for the hard right Supreme Court majority that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, gutted affirmative action, and generally tried to return the country to the nineteenth century. That his politics and methods seem moderate relative to his colleagues’ politics and methods underscores the extremism at work and the danger that poses for the country.
So if you’re feeling a sense of helplessness in the system, take comfort in knowing that all of this was designed to foster and cultivate that instinct. But also . . . get horrified with the knowledge that it was designed to foster and cultivate that instinct.
Brian Taylor Cohen is host of the podcast, No Lie, his book Shameless: Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy was a #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller this summer, and I'm looking forward to this read. [Reviewers indicate that if you follow his podcast, much of the material will be familiar, but they say it's well-organized and concise.]
This particular article talks about maintaining positive action and how every vote counts, even in the face of a continuous effort to cause cynicism, hopelessness, and despair about democracy.
From the excerpt:
Brian Taylor Cohen is host of the podcast, No Lie, his book Shameless: Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy was a #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller this summer, and I'm looking forward to this read. [Reviewers indicate that if you follow his podcast, much of the material will be familiar, but they say it's well-organized and concise.]
This particular article talks about maintaining positive action and how every vote counts, even in the face of a continuous effort to cause cynicism, hopelessness, and despair about democracy.