The New York Review of Books: The Rules of the Game

The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination will begin to assume a more concrete shape on the nights of June 26 and 27, when twenty candidates take the stage in Miami for the first round of debates. They qualified to participate by meeting one of two criteria before June 12: securing a minimum number of donors (at least 65,000) or registering more than one percent support in three major polls. The qualifying criteria are the same for the second round of debates in Detroit on July 30 and 31. For the third round, to be held on September 12 and 13 (in a location not yet chosen), the criteria are essentially doubled, which could winnow the field considerably. The Democratic National Committee has sanctioned twelve debates, to be held until next April. [...]

There are reasons to think that this time the nomination battle could drag into June 2020, when the primaries end, or even, some have suggested, all the way to the convention in July, making for the first truly contested Democratic convention since 1952, when Adlai Stevenson arrived and declared himself to have no interest in the nomination but delivered a welcoming speech so good that it ultimately led to the delegates choosing him on the third ballot over Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. The reasons have to do, first, with new rules the party wrote after the Clinton–Sanders battle in 2016, and, second, with a growing schism in the party between its two poles of influence in the age of social media: the younger, urban, and more left-leaning people who carry out a daily and often pestiferous political dialogue on Twitter, and the older and more traditionally liberal-to-moderate people who make up the actual backbone of the party across America. If there is a division within the party that will bring it to ruin in 2020, this is it. [...]

The most contentious issue they faced was the power of the high-ranking party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates, a category that had been conjured into existence after the 1980 election to try to ensure the success of mainstream candidates (the move was a delayed response to the 1972 nomination of George McGovern, whose campaign was seen as too left-wing by many party regulars and who lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide). Superdelegates could vote at the convention, and in 2016 they gave Clinton a big advantage. Many of them endorsed her before the primaries even began, and they were counted in the running delegate totals published daily in The New York Times, The Washington Post, fivethirtyeight.com, and other venues, perhaps giving the impression that she had earned more delegates in the primaries and caucuses than she had. [...]

Democrats in the Pew survey skew younger than their Republican counterparts. About 43 percent are under forty, and just 12 percent are over seventy (the numbers for Republicans in those categories are 32 and 17 percent, respectively). A rather remarkable 56 percent are female. Just 54 percent are white, as opposed to more than 70 percent of Democrats on social media, with blacks and Latinos constituting 19 percent each (Republicans are 81 percent white). Of four designated income levels, the most represented by far is the lowest, under $30,000, at 36 percent. Likewise, of four designated education levels, the most represented by far is high school or less, at 37 percent—although interestingly, 15 percent of Democrats have graduate degrees, while only 8 percent of Republicans do. About a third of Democrats don’t express a religious affiliation, which means two-thirds of them do, which again is quite different, at least in my experience, from Twitter Democrats, who seem for the most part irreligious.

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Politico: What if Trump won’t accept 2020 defeat?

“It’s been a worry in the back of my mind for the last couple years now,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat. California Rep. Ted Lieu, a frequent Trump critic and early impeachment inquiry supporter, acknowledged the same concern but said he trusted law enforcement “would do the right thing” and “install the winner” of the election. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told her party to prepare for the possibility that Trump contests the 2020 results.[...]

Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley said a lingering incumbent would simply become irrelevant once the new and duly elected president is sworn in. At that point, the defeated president is nothing more than a guest, “if not an interloper,” in the White House, the George Washington University professor noted.[...]

Trump continues to talk up the prospect that he could serve past the constitutionally mandated period. On Twitter last weekend, Trump pondered, “do you think the people would demand that I stay longer?” The line mirrored language he used at a rally in Pennsylvania last month where he talked about living in the White House for 20 years. [...]

In March 2018, Trump praised the ruling Communist Party of China for abolishing presidential term limits. Then, a month later, he publicly pondered why he couldn’t be in office for 16 years, an apparent reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who died during his fourth term. The 22nd Amendment, ratified a few years after Roosevelt’s death, prohibited future presidents from serving more than two consecutive elected terms.

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The Atlantic: AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence

The anti-war movement inverted this moral logic. In the 1969 book that helped make him famous, American Power and the New Mandarins, Noam Chomsky argued that “by any objective standard, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world.” Invoking some of the most notorious fascist crimes of the 1930s and 1940s, the anti-war leader Jerry Rubin declared, “Vietnam is the Guernica, the Rotterdam, and the Lidice of the 1960s.” This antiexceptionalist discourse—which denied America’s moral superiority over the adversaries it had long contrasted itself against—even penetrated the Democratic Party. In 1971, George McGovern—who the Democrats would nominate for president the following year—called Richard Nixon’s bombing of Southeast Asia “the most barbaric act committed by any modern state since the death of Adolf Hitler.”[...]

The generational divide is evident in polls. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.” Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better. A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives. While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one. [...]

Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.

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Vox: When white supremacists overthrew a government

In November 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 white men expelled black and white political leaders, destroyed the property of the city’s black residents, and killed dozens--if not hundreds--of people. How did such a turn of events change the course of the city? For decades, the story of this violence was buried, while the perpetrators were cast as heroes. Yet its impacts resonate across the state to this day.

In the new Vox series Missing Chapter, Vox Senior Producer Ranjani Chakraborty revisits underreported and often overlooked moments from the past to give context to the present. Join her as she covers the histories that are often left out of our textbooks. Our first season tackles stories of racial injustice, political conflicts, even the hidden history of US medical experimentation.

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Vox: Marion Wilson was the 1,500th person executed in the US since 1976

Wilson is the 74th person executed in Georgia since 1976; the second person in Georgia executed in 2019; and the 10th person executed in the US in 2019. Texas has held the most executions, at more than 560 since 1976.

Yet the dwindling number of death sentences carried out in the US indicates that the option is no longer as popular. While there has been a slight rise in executions since 2016, when the number hit an all-time-low at 20 executions, there has been a general downward trend of executions since the early 2000s. There’s been a shift in public opinion on the issue, too: Support for the death penalty has gone from 80 percent in 1994 to 56 percent in 2018, according to Gallup.[...]

States are starting to reflect this shift their own sentencing policies: Most recently, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty on May 30. While the other 29 states still leave death penalty as an option on the table, it is just a handful of states — Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia — that practice it regularly.

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EURACTIV: Treaty against democracy: Franco-German arm wrestling reflects different political visions

On the other hand, since coming to power, Emmanuel Macron has given clear priority to decision-making rather than debate, and has taken full advantage of Parliament’s reduced powers in France. For him, taking into account the will of the European Parliament was not a priori on the agenda.[...]

On the German side, the emphasis on candidate Manfred Weber is based precisely on the democratic legitimacy of the European Parliament, and of the candidate representing the strongest group. Who happens to be German.

It is only after hearing the voices of two European Parliament heavyweights that Germany considered reevaluating its unfallible support for Manfred Weber. The situation has changed when the social-democrats and the liberals have indicated they were not supporting the EPP candidate.[...]

The French president had tried to turn things around in February 2018, by trying to set up a small proportion of transnational lists in the European elections. This was rejected as there was no majority in favour in the European Council.

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Politico: The greening of Germany

Over the past year, support for the country’s environmental party has doubled. In several recent polls the Greens have even overtaken Chancellor Angela Merkel’s seemingly unbeatable Christian Democrats (informally known as the “Blacks” in Germany’s party color spectrum). [...]

While Bütikofer said there’s no single reason for the Green’s recent success, he cited the party’s long-standing commitment to combatting climate change, now Germans’ top political priority, as essential.[...]

Though Merkel’s ministers are dutifully ploughing through the fine print of the coalition agreement, trying to combine ideological opposites means the government’s priorities are more about preserving the status quo than breaking new ground. [...]

In last month’s European election, 1.5 million voters defected from the Social Democrats to the Greens. Many left-leaning voters support the Greens because they feel the Social Democrats have violated their ideals by backing painful social reforms. [...]

What’s more, Germans have become much more comfortable with a party many used to regard as far out of the mainstream. Two-thirds of Germans think the Greens will play an important role in shaping the country’s politics in the coming years, according to a study published this month. More than half believe the party represents modern, centrist policies.

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