Oregon occupation: a resistance against tyranny?

Prospect, January 14, 2016

If you want to understand the drama now unfolding in Oregon, checking out a photograph of Duane Ehmer riding his horse Hellboy across the high desert is not a bad place to start. Striving for the iconic, the Stars and Stripes in his hand, the Stars and Stripes on his jacket, the Stars and Stripes on his saddle blanket, he makes a pathetic, bathetic, cockeyed, grand—take your pick—spectacle, a performance for others, living out a dream for himself: Clint, Custer, the cavalryman at the crest of the hill, a Remington made flesh.

The stand-off at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge began when a group of people, some armed, occupied the refuge’s headquarters (no staff were present at the time) as a protest, they said, against the federal government’s harsh treatment of two local ranchers, 73-year old Dwight Hammond and his son Steven.

The Hammonds were in a fix. Two fires they had set on their ranch—the first in 2001 supposedly routine maintenance (although the prosecution argued it was designed to cover up poaching on government property), the second in 2006, a defensive ‘backfire’—had spread onto neighbouring federal land. The damage was minimal, but the Hammonds hadn’t notified the Bureau of Land Management—the US government body responsible for administering more than 250 million acres of public land—before lighting either. That was unwise, and, in the case of the 2006 fire, quite possibly dangerous.

Father and son were sued in a civil case (they ended up paying the government $400,000). They were also prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned, but for very small fractions of the minimum five years mandated by the law. The trial judge ruled that a five-year term would be “grossly disproportionate”; it would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” and, as such, be unconstitutional. The government appealed the sentence, outraged, perhaps, that these miscreants had got off too lightly. Then again, the Hammonds and the BLM, a sometimes overbearing body often resented by ranchers, had been feuding over grazing rights—and much more beside—for years. Uncle Sam may have simply taken the opportunity to deal with the Hammonds once for all.

But “grossly disproportionate” is routine when it comes to the application of America’s notorious minimum sentencing guidelines. After the appellate court considered the precedents that make the cruel all too usual, the Hammonds were resentenced to five years apiece, with credit for time served (both had already completed their original sentences). The two returned to prison this month.

The Hammonds’ plight attracted the attention of Ammon Bundy, one of the fourteen children of Cliven Bundy, the anti-government militant who had been at the center of the armed stand-off at his Nevada ranch in 2014 that (eventually) arose out of his longstanding refusal to recognize the authority of the BLM (and pay his grazing fees). The nut hadn’t fallen far from the tree: the younger Bundy arrived in Oregon to help, he claimed, the Hammonds out. The talk was of peaceful protest, but with ‘militiamen’ beginning to show up on the scene, the Hammonds, recognizing, I suspect, trouble when they saw it, said that they weren’t interested.

No matter: Bundy and his team took over the refuge buildings on 2nd January and, as at the time of writing, there they remain, backed up by a fluctuating number of supporters, some appreciated by Bundy, some not. Many are associated with the ‘militias’ and other ‘patriot’ groups operating on the wilder, poorer, whitest fringes of the American right, frequently lost to paranoia, conspiracy theory, and apocalyptic expectations of various kinds. If there’s one thing that unites them it’s their alienation from an America that is, in their view, no longer the republic of its founders and, as a result, of questionable legitimacy or none.

So far, the authorities have handled the stand-off with care, clearly hoping that the occupiers will drift away. It may be over twenty years since the deadly sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge, but there’s evidently little appetite on the part of law enforcement to risk a repetition of two tragedies made much worse by heavy-handed tactics, with hideous consequences then—and later: the Oklahoma City bombers were pushed further down the path to mass murder by those earlier deaths in Texas and Idaho.

For their part, the men with guns in a remote corner of Oregon may be acting out a script, however idiotic, of heroic last ditch resistance against the tyranny that has usurped their America, but, up until now, there have been relatively few signs that they want to take their own private Alamo much further than they already have: On the contrary, in fact.

But the Hammonds will stay in jail, and the BLM will stay in charge. This stand-off will do little or nothing to speed up the retreat from mandatory minimum sentencing which is belatedly—and gradually—underway. As for triggering any changes in the complex and politically fraught issue that haunts this confrontation—the way that the Feds manage and mismanage millions of acres (including about half of Oregon and, incidentally, more than a third of California) that would often be better in local, state or private hands—well, that’s not going to happen.

Donald Trump's Genius

Prospect, December 20, 2015

Greenwich Village, NYC, February 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

At a lunchtime meeting in Manhattan a month or so ago, a prominent member of America’s conservative commentariat—it wouldn’t be fair to name him—was invited to give his predictions for the 2016 election. He laughed and said that, as he had been forecasting the imminent bursting of the Trump bubble for months, he might not be the best person to ask.

But no one, not even, I suspect, the Donald, had expected that his campaign would do as well as it has. Within days of announcing his bid for the Republican nomination back in June, Trump was running at 11 per cent, sharing the top ranking with two senators. And that was just the beginning.

At the time of that lunch meeting, Trump was leading in the polls, followed by Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, in second place and Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman, in third. What these three had in common was that they had never held elective office, which, our speaker suggested, showed that Republicans were very unhappy with the politicians they had. And so they were. And so they are.

Trump’s genius lay in spotting one of the issues that made Republicans unhappiest—immigration—and making it his own. The reluctance of the Republican establishment to respond to the anxiety on the right—and not just the right—on this topic had opened up a gap in American politics. And in politics, if there’s a gap that is big enough, and promising enough, someone will come along to fill it. Trump, never previously known as an immigration hawk, swooped on the issue that, more than any other, has made his campaign what it is, basing a good portion of it on something that is easy to understand, if difficult to build: a wall along the southern border of the United States. Message sent. Message received. According to an August survey by Rasmussen Reports (admittedly a Republican-leaning polling group) some 70 per cent of likely Republican voters supported Trump’s wall, as, incidentally, did 51 per cent of all likely voters.

The Republican establishment only has itself to blame. It ignored the warning signals sent by the collapse of George W Bush’s proposed immigration legislation in 2007 (it was scuppered by a revolt on the right) and by the failure of an immigration reform plan cobbled together by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators in 2013.

Reasonable people can disagree over immigration, but it says something that none of the career politicians running for the Republican nomination had the sort of track record that immigration hardliners were looking for. Some of the candidates for the Republican nomination have since developed a tougher stance on immigration, not least Marco Rubio, the young senator from Florida, but they were never going to be enough to please a constituency riled by Trump and inclined to distrust anyone who is, like Rubio, from within the Beltway. The fact that Trump has taken more moderate positions on this question in the past hasn’t mattered. Outsiders get a pass, it seems.

Viewed in this context, proposing a “total and complete” and whatever else you might think about it, clearly unworkable ban on Muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was good, if brass-knuckled, politics. It linked the immigration controversy to security concerns sharpened by the Paris killings and a pervasive sense of a government that is not up to the job. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59 per cent of Republicans (and 36 per cent of Americans) would support such a ban.

So what now? With (considerable) effort Trump can be found a place within the existing American political taxonomy. In his own way, he’s very New York, so much so that it has been claimed that he would do better to run against Gotham’s unpopular mayor, Bill de Blasio. Stretch a bit—no a lot—and Trump can be seen as an uncontrolled, un-PC and rather less intelligent version of former mayor Bloomberg, another authoritarian billionaire with just a hint (in Trump’s case in his pre-presidential political musings) of an early 20th Century Progressive about him.  Quite a few Republicans have complained that Trump is not really a Republican, and not without reason. But then again nor was Bloomberg, yet he won his first two mayoral elections under that label.

Yes, Trump is, as the late Lord Charteris would have put it, “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”, a hard-edged huckster with more than a suspicion of the bully and the charlatan about him. But his brash, opulent and narcissistic excess, sprinkled with the stardust of show business, and the gold dust of however many billions he has (characteristically, it’s disputed) plays in America in a way still unthinkable in Britain.

If I had to guess (and a guess is all it is, believe me), Trump has reached some sort of peak in the polls: When the serious business of the primaries begins, his appeal will start to fade. What I don’t have to guess is that Hillary is already very pleased indeed.

How Corbyn Wins

The Weekly Standard, December 11, 2015

"Cameron moved so far to the left," a journalist told me in London, "that he pushed Labour into the sea. Then it reemerged as a monster." That's not really why David Cameron's Conservatives won the May general election, but the vivid description of what happened next illustrates how bleak the political landscape looked to Britain's center-left after Jeremy Corbyn became Labour's leader in September. But if those moderates had any consolation, it was their conviction that Corbyn wouldn't last at the top. Dour, dim, and ostentatiously shabby, Corbyn, 66, is a stalwart of the far left with a weakness for ideologically correct thuggery from Belfast to Caracas and beyond. His obvious unelectability would, argued optimists, quickly bring the party to its senses: Corbyn would fall on his sword or be pushed onto someone else's. A more suitable replacement would then take the helm.

Such hopes were knocked on December 3 by a by-election in Labour's deindustrializing northern heartland. Despite the party's advantages—longstanding strength in the constituency, a solid South Asian voting bloc (roughly 25 percent of the electorate), and the selection of Jim McMahon, a likable local moderate, as candidate—there was speculation Labour would be run close by UKIP. The populist Euroskeptic party now focuses much of its attention on the white working class, a strategy that delivered votes, if not parliamentary seats (it only has the one), at the general election and had led to a near miss at a by-election in a nearby Labour stronghold last year.

But it was not to be UKIP's day. Labour actually grew its slice of the vote by some 7 percentage points, to 62 percent. Denied its breakthrough yet again, UKIP increased its tally from 20 to 23 percent, while the Conservatives, a vanishing presence in the north of England, saw their share halved, to 9 percent. Yes, Corbyn was a very small presence in McMahon's emphatically local campaign, but it's also a good rule of thumb in U.K. politics that even the best local candidate will only add a thousand or so votes to his party's total. Whatever else can be said about this result—by-elections can be deceptive—it was not the resounding rejection of Corbyn his critics had doubtless (if discreetly) been looking for.

So what now? Corbyn may stumble from controversy to gaffe and back again, but he is appreciated by his party, if not his members of Parliament. A November YouGov poll revealed that two-thirds of Labour voters thought their new leader was doing "well." With this by-election safely behind him, Corbyn is not scheduled to face any potentially embarrassing electoral tests until May, which is bad news for any unhappy Labour MPs praying for a crisis to send him packing.

Thanks to the new voting rules that landed them with Corbyn in the first place, such a crisis could take a long time to arrive. These rules provided that any candidate for the Labour leadership had to be nominated by at least 15 percent of MPs. A (much) wider electoral college made up of party members, "registered supporters" (who had paid a princely ¢3 for this status), and "affiliated supporters" (mainly trade unionists, who did not have to pay anything at all) then chose the leader. Corbyn was held in so little regard by his parliamentary colleagues that he was set to fall at the first hurdle until a few of them—presumably possessed by their inner Menshevik—"lent" their nominating votes to Corbyn, not because they wanted him as leader but, they explained, to broaden the debate. The suckers gave him an even break. The consequences were catastrophic.

Interest in the contest and excitement over the possibility of a previously unthinkable Corbyn victory attracted huge numbers of new members to the Labour party, a surge that continued after Corbyn's triumph. Between May and early October, party membership nearly doubled, to 370,000 (the Conservative party has maybe 150,000 members). Just under half of the full members who voted opted for Corbyn, as did 84 percent of over 100,000 "three pounders," and 58 percent of the 72,000 "affiliated supporters" who voted, generating a majority that comfortably eclipsed his rivals. Corbyn's mandate is about as democratic as it gets. A revolt by MPs—by definition Westminster insiders—to try to reverse it wouldn't look good, and it's hard to imagine it would succeed: Labour's new wider electorate won't be willing to dump Jezza. It's even harder to imagine that enough moderates could be convinced to join the party to secure a change of course.

That means Brits—highly averse to divided parties—will continue to be treated to the spectacle of a leader at odds with much of his parliamentary corps (over a quarter of Labour MPs voted with the Tories to extend British airstrikes against ISIS to Syria, for example) and appealing over their heads to the constituency that gave him the top job (which, incidentally, opposes the bombing). Throw in the fact that Corbyn has yet to resonate with voters outside the Labour camp and the deep suspicion that much of the electorate feels for his attitudes to issues such as defense, terrorism, and immigration, and it's easy to see why the Tories are chuckling. If things don't change, they are forecast to be a shoo-in for the next general election, due in 2020.

That's very probably right, but it ignores the deeper game that Corbyn is playing. Until just a few months ago, opinions such as his were largely kept to the political fringe; now they are center-stage, and there is every chance that the result will be to drag Britain's public debate to the left, something that he would surely count as a win.  

Or consider this: Less than six months ago, Corbyn struggled to persuade more than a handful of MPs to support him as Labour leader. Now, according to recent polls, 30 percent or so of Brits say that they would vote him into 10 Downing Street. That's some 10 percentage points behind the Tories, but it's roughly the same percentage as voted for Corbyn's predecessor in May. The fact that Corbyn now heads one of Britain's two great political tribes matters.

 And his leadership is reshaping that tribe into something more in accord with his views. The inflow of so many new members, many of them younger and including a number of former Greens and Liberal Democrats (both parties are longstanding asylums for the utopian disaffected), must, if they stay, mean the growing Corbynization of Labour, a process that will only be accelerated by the departure of moderates with no taste for a fight. As incompetent as Corbyn and his comrades may sometimes seem (and are), they have the hard left's understanding of power. Corbyn's campaign tapped into popular resentments of a depth that his opponents struggled to deal with, but it was also cleverer and far more effective (trade union backing helped) than they had anticipated.

 After the revolution come the enforcers. Corbyn is inserting his people into the party's structure and, still gingerly (the Corbynista Twitter posse is not so diffident), trying to whip his MPs into line. In doing the latter, he will be assisted by the support of groupings of the pur et dur, such as the one named Momentum, now beginning to move into local parties. The (public) talk is of a broad church; the reality will be rougher. The sword hanging over moderate Labour MPs will be the threat of de-selection by their local party—meaning that they will no long-er be the candidate at the next election—something that would promise not only political disaster, but unemployment too. The fact that there is likely to be a redrawing of constituency boundaries (and a reduction in the overall number of parliamentary seats) before 2020 will only hand more power to the local activists who will decide who gets to stand where. Under the circumstances, many moderate MPs will feel constrained to keep dangerous thoughts to themselves, and as for mounting a challenge to Corbyn's leadership, well .  .  .

  If this is right, the party will change, but it will, more or less, hang together. There will be defections, but the great Labour split that some expect will not happen. And so, by 2020 Britain's principal opposition will be well on the way to becoming a party of the hard left, a transformation that would be yet another win for Corbyn, even if it costs him support for now: Current polling indicates that this radicalized Labour would be extremely unlikely to prevail in 2020, either alone or in conjunction with the leftist Scottish Nationalist party. But if, between now and 2020, some fresh catastrophe hits, say, the economy, or, for that matter, the Tory party, Corbyn's Labour will be there, ready to take advantage of what former Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan famously described as "events."

 That's not something to chuckle about.