Tag: politics

More on living Jewishly in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I don’t normally share here what I’ve posted elsewhere, but I wrote something quickly for Facebook and realised that it meant more than I realised and so I’m sharing it. I suddenly saw that what I thought was unique and personal, told a story about Australia and Australians and the different places Jews hold in this country. It’s not a full picture, or even close to a full picture. It’s how much of Jewishness is out of sight in Australia and how some of us handle this.

In other places I am still the person I always was, in Canberra no-one wants me to give talks to to be seen in public. Most people don’t hate me, but folks who have known me for years and even decades have recently started demonstrating a whole bunch of reactions to my being Jewish. For some, I’m hurting others simply by being myself: a couple of people have recently informed me of how privileged and white I am and how much of the cause of problems (both in Australia and elsewhere) can be blamed on me. For others, I’m a low priority in their life where previously I was a close friend, and when these old friends cluster or when a group of those who think along these lines get together, if I say something it will be instantly contradicted before anyone stops to consider what I actually said.

A part of this is because I’m forever-unwell and Australia does not handle illness with much style. Most of the change has, however, happened since COVID (which taught so many of us to not be our best selves) and especially since October 7. There are whole social groups and work-related groups I’m now simply not reminded of or invited to because I’m Jewish, and there are others I may share as long as I do not assert myself too much. The most amusing part of the whole shebang (and it really is amusing) is that I am not considered an expert on much at all in the circles that do not want me round. Given that I have two PhDs and another one about to be submitted and all kinds of books written and conference papers delivered and research done and talks delivered and… I am an expert in those topics, this is a very peculiar kind of wilful blinkering.

All of this is local. It has led to big lifestyle changes and those led to some thoughts on Facebook. Those thoughts (with amendments) are the rest of this post.

I’ve talked before about being a giraffe. My giraffehood comes from being the first Jew many Australians have met.

“Oh, I’ve never met a Jew before,” a person informs me, and looks at me as if I am in a zoo. This is why I call it being a giraffe. I’m willing to talk openly about my Jewishness, so I’m a giraffe who answers questions. The questions and comments used to be mostly kind and fair. They are less so right now. At the moment, after the surprise that I’m actually Jewish, I’m informed who I am and what I think and how horrid I am if I don’t use the words they tell me to use and announce my self-hate at once. Once a week, without fail, I’m told that either I worship Satan or murder children. (For anyone wondering, I have not done or ever have wanted to do either of these things.) These questions and comments, when experienced several times a week, make me feel as if I’m on show.

Today something provoked a very different memory.

In the days before COVID and before the current rise in antisemitism (so any time until the end of 2019) I gave talks and was on panels at a couple of larger functions a year on average. Every single time, it being (mostly) in Australia people would chat with me in the foyer or over coffee afterwards. Australians chat over drinks. It’s a part of who we are. Mostly the discussion leads with comments like “I didn’t know Australia had any Jews before” or, on one very special day “Do you really have horns?” When I was much, much younger, children would actually feel my head for those horns.

Every second chat (again, on average) someone would look around to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot. They would confide in me. Sometimes they had Jewish parents but were brought up Christian “for safety”. Sometimes they were happily non-religious, but knew that their parents had been Jewish and were curious. I have enjoyed many conversations about how OK atheism for different branches of Judaism with this group of interesting people and even more conversations about why parents would choose to leave the Judaism behind and even to hide it. Sometimes those who confided in me were practising Jewish but didn’t know anyone outside their family because it was safer to be not-Jewish when out in the world. Most of these individuals had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Some were from other backgrounds but their families had also memories of persecution, often very recent. The real discussion began when they discovered we could talk about these things but that it wasn’t the whole story. I was brought up to understand that the persecution is a part of our history but (sorry Cecil Roth) the lachrymose version of Jewish history hides so much more than it explains. My history self is working on this reinterpretation of Jewish pasts for the next little while, and that’s partly because it was so important to the individuals who came to me and talked about Jewishness in secret.

I was a different kind of giraffe for these folks. I was the Jew they could talk to safely. I never tell enough about them for anyone to be able to identify them. I have many conversations after panels and after giving talks or keynotes, and these people were among the many. Their privacy is important. No-one hides such a large part of themselves without very good reason. I use my not-very-good memory to forget their names and where they live. I would have to work hard to remember those details and I simply don’t try to remember. This has led to me being very forgetful of names and addresses and friends have to always remind me, over and again. This is not a large price to pay for the safety of others.

Occasionally (like now) I will mention their existence. I’m often and usually the first person they have every spoken to outside their immediate family about anything Jewish.

The number of people who shared their confidences with me diminished somewhat when the Australian census changed its collection style. The number of people who admitted to being Jewish in Australia also dropped dramatically. It was no longer possible to guarantee addresses and names would be detached from information collected and so identifying as Jewish carried different baggage to earlier. I suspect there are many Jewish Australians whose background is not known to the Bureau of Statistics any more. I once estimated that there were around 200,000 of these people, but there is no real way of knowing. Since I don’t think those who let me know they’re Jewish are more than the tiniest % of those who don’t talk about being Jewish Australian, I know the thoughts of a few dozen people, not of everyone who hides their Jewishness in Australia.

The number of confidences diminished to zero after October 7, but this is partly because I’m no longer invited to give many talks. I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Canberra or East Coast Australia, or my expertise is no longer valued, or people want to avoid problems, so I’m not invited to the sort of meetings where someone can seek me out quietly and find out more about their heritage.

What I miss most about those conversations is the recipe-swapping. I have two really wonderful Crypto-Jewish recipes that I’ve dated to the 17th century from a person who identified publicly as Latin American Catholic. I gave them information about books and websites where they could place their heritage and understand it better without having to break their public face. This was a win-win. Once a year I cook a 17th century Jewish recipe from that hidden tradition, to celebrate how much this person knew (and still knows!) and how amazing it was to hear about it. (I also cook these dishes to honour those who were murdered at the command of the Inquisition, and this is my normal public reason for cooking: today is not normal.) At moments like that I understand why I might be a safe person to talk to about things.

Since October 7 and the diminution in places in Australia that want to hear me, there has, as I’ve said been no-one sharing these secrets. This means that there are fewer people who touch base with those who are isolated and scared. Those who found comfort in me chatting about how to write family stories or how to teach cultural differences respectfully or how to interpret foodways or all those stories about the Middle Ages are not going to talk to a rabbi or visit a community centre when hateful slogans are painted on the walls or there was a fire bomb or anywhere where there is a crowd chanting Jewhate slogans outside.

Australia has always been somewhat antisemitic. It was also one of the important places where Shoah refugees came. It’s always had a Jewish population that feels safer unseen. Moments when strangers can reach out and share their identity are so very important, given all of this.

I think one of the reasons I was considered safe might have been because it’s not been wise to wear a magen david in Canberra for about 20 years, so I wasn’t flamboyantly Jewish… I was just Jewish. Or it may be for another reason. Thinking back, I had my first conversations along these lines when I was pre-teen, so it may be something about the way I hold myself. I honestly don’t know. Several people have said it’s because I talk so much, so maybe it’s that.

When I first started having those conversations I used to feel so guilty, because I couldn’t understand why these people hid their identity. I always kept everything secret because someone had asked it and because I respected them.

These days, life in Jewish Australia is far more problematic. I can see the wisdom in being a hidden Jew.

Reprint: Legal Ethics and the Constitution

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

Justice Department lawyers work for justice and the Constitution – not the White House

The U.S. flag flies above Department of Justice headquarters on Jan. 20, 2024, in Washington.
J. David Ake/Getty Images

Cassandra Burke Robertson, Case Western Reserve University

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

Since then, the DOJ has generally been run as an impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics.

Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump administration.

In February 2025, seven DOJ attorneys resigned, rather than follow orders from Attorney General Pam Bondi to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Adams was indicted in September 2024, during the Biden administration, for alleged bribery and campaign finance violations.

One DOJ prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, wrote in his Feb. 15 resignation letter that while he held no negative views of the Trump administration, he believed the dismissal request violated DOJ’s ethical standards.

Among more than a dozen DOJ attorneys who have recently been terminated, the DOJ fired Erez Reuveni, acting deputy chief of the department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, on April 15. Reuveni lost his job for speaking honestly to the court about the facts of an immigration case, instead of following political directives from Bondi and other superiors.

Reuveni was terminated for acknowledging in court on April 14 that the Department of Homeland Security had made an “administrative error” in deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, against court orders. DOJ leadership placed Reuveni on leave the very next day.

Bondi defended the decision, arguing that Reuveni had failed to “vigorously advocate” for the administration’s position.

I’m a legal ethics scholar, and I know that as more DOJ lawyers face choices between following political directives and upholding their profession’s ethical standards, they confront a critical question: To whom do they ultimately owe their loyalty?

An older man with a blue suit speaks into a microphone while a woman with blonde hair looks at him.
President Donald Trump speaks before Pam Bondi is sworn in as attorney general at the White House on Feb. 5, 2025.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Identifying the real client

All attorneys have core ethical obligations, including loyalty to clients, confidentiality and honesty to the courts. DOJ lawyers have additional professional obligations: They have a duty to seek justice, rather than merely win cases, as well as to protect constitutional rights even when inconvenient.

DOJ attorneys typically answer to multiple authorities, including the attorney general. But their highest loyalty belongs to the U.S. Constitution and justice itself.

The Supreme Court established in a 1935 case that DOJ attorneys have a special mission to ensure that “justice shall be done.”

DOJ attorneys reinforce their commitment to this mission by taking an oath to uphold the Constitution when they join the department. They also have training programs, internal guidelines and a long-standing institutional culture that emphasizes their unique responsibility to pursue justice, rather than simply win cases.

This creates a professional identity that goes beyond simply carrying out the wishes of political appointees.

Playing by stricter rules

All lawyers also follow special professional rules in order to receive and maintain a license to practice law. These professional rules are established by state bar associations and supreme courts as part of the state-based licensing system for attorneys.

But the more than 10,000 attorneys at the DOJ face even tougher standards.

The McDade Amendment, passed in 1998, requires federal government lawyers to follow both the ethics rules of the state where they are licensed to practice and federal regulations. This includes rules that prohibit DOJ attorneys from participating in cases where they have personal or political relationships with involved parties, for example.

This law also explicitly subjects federal prosecutors to state bar discipline. Such discipline could range from private reprimands to suspension or even permanent disbarment, effectively ending an attorney’s legal career.

This means DOJ lawyers might have to refuse a supervisor’s orders if those directives would violate professional conduct standards – even at the risk of their jobs.

This is what Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon wrote in a Feb. 12, 2025, letter to Bondi, explaining why she could not drop the charges against Adams. Sassoon instead resigned from her position at the DOJ.

“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations … because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor,” Sassoon wrote.

As DOJ’s own guidance states, attorneys “must satisfy themselves that their behavior comports with the applicable rules of professional conduct” regardless of what their bosses say.

Post-Watergate principles under pressure

The president nominates the attorney general, who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

That can create the perception and even the reality that the attorney general is indebted to, and loyal to, the president. To counter that, Attorney General Griffin Bell, in 1978, spelled out three principles established after Watergate to maintain a deliberate separation between the White House and the Justice Department.

First, Bell called for procedures to prevent personal or partisan interests from influencing legal judgments.

Second, Bell said that public confidence in the department’s objectivity is essential to democracy, with DOJ serving as the “acknowledged guardian and keeper of the law.”

Third, these principles ultimately depend on DOJ lawyers committed to good judgment and integrity, even under intense political pressure. These principles apply to all employees throughout the department – including the attorney general.

Recent ethics tests

These principles face a stark test in the current political climate.

The March 2025 firing of Elizabeth Oyer, a career pardon attorney with the Justice Department, raises questions about the boundaries between political directives and professional obligations.

Oyer was fired by Bondi shortly after declining to recommend the restoration of gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a known Donald Trump supporter. Gibson lost his gun rights after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor domestic battery charge in 2011.

Oyer initially expressed concern to her superiors about restoring Gibson’s gun rights without a sufficient background investigation, particularly given Gibson’s history of domestic violence.

When Oyer later agreed to testify before Congress in a hearing about the White House’s handling of the Justice Department, the administration initially planned to send armed U.S. Marshals officers to deliver a warning letter to her home, saying that she could not disclose records about firearms rights to lawmakers.

Oyer was away from home when she received an urgent alert that the marshals were en route to her home, where her teenage child was alone. Oyer’s attorney described this plan as “both unprecedented and completely inappropriate.”

Officials called off the marshals only after Oyer confirmed receipt of the letter via email.

A woman with dark hair and a purple blazer sits at a table with other people dressed formally seated nearby her.
Elizabeth Oyer, a former U.S. pardon attorney at the Justice Department, speaks at a Senate hearing on April 7, 2025, in Washington.
Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Why independence matters

In my research, I found that lawyers sometimes have lapses in judgment because of the “partisan kinship,” conscious or not, they develop with clients. This partisan kinship can lead attorneys to overlook serious red flags that outsiders would easily spot.

When lawyers become too politically aligned with clients – or their superiors – their judgment suffers. They miss ethical problems and legal flaws that would otherwise be obvious. Professional distance allows attorneys to provide the highest quality legal counsel, even if that means saying “no” to powerful people.

That’s why DOJ attorneys sometimes make decisions that frustrate political objectives. When they refuse to target political opponents, when they won’t let allies off easily, or when they disclose information their superiors wanted hidden, they’re not being insubordinate.

They’re fulfilling their highest ethical duties to the Constitution and rule of law.The Conversation

Cassandra Burke Robertson, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Professional Ethics, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Legal Ethics and the Constitution”…

Finally, results from Australia

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don’t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then… sort-of.

Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House but not the Upper. They’ve gained quite a few more seats in the House of Representatives, but many of them were gained by slender margins and some of them (my own, for instance) are still borderline and the votes are still being counted. It’s as if most Australians looked at the candidates and looked at elections outside Australia and said “We’re going to make our preferences matter.” When a single electorate goes to layers of preferences, counting is slow and it has to be revisited when the seat is a close call. This is happening all over the place.

In the Lower House, we voted out the leader of the Opposition and quite possibly the leader of the Greens in his/their own seats, plus gave their parties fewer seat. Dutton (Opposition) gave a graceful speech to cede everything. Bandt (Greens) is still claiming a Greens victory. He has between 0 and 2 seats in the House of Representatives That Lower House), dropping from four, but he’s focused on the number of primary votes his party received over the whole country, I suspect. They’re down, but not by much. My assessment of this is that a large number of voters do not see the hate that I see. Enough do, and so the Greens are diminished, but, unlike the elves, they’re not so diminished they will not go into the west. The far right Trumpet of Patriots, on the other hand, got so few votes that I look at the data and think “Are there any far right politicians in this parliament at all.” Our far right is the right end of the US Republican or the UK Tories, if that helps.

As I read things, most of the controversial far right and left didn’t get enough votes to get lower house seats. This includes a handful of virulent antisemites. Those candidates trying to push extreme views (not just hate of people who happen to be Jewish) also didn’t fair as well as the pre-election polls said. Our House of Representatives contains far less hate than I had expected. This is a good thing.

While the same pattern applies to the Senate, the nature of the Senate vote (namely the quota system) mean that the changes are less. The far right is diminished, but not nearly as much as in the Lower House. Greens will still have a lot of power, and may be led by someone who really, really hates Jews. In some ways the Greens holding balance of power is good: if they vote wisely, they can be a curb on extreme policies by the government, and, if they go back to the roots they’ve been avoiding recently, will also push for environmental care and social justice. This is not, however, what they did in some significant votes in the past, so the Senate may become just a mess. Everything depends on the Greens paying attention to Australia and not their inner voices.

An update on antisemitism: it’s worse this week both on the right and on the left. Voters are not the loud voices in Australia, because of our system and because we’re part of the western world’s set of shouting matches between so many people who refuse to think for themselves. This hate is largely the usual mob trying to share their bigotry. The big thing is that Australia as a whole has voted against hate and also against a Trump model of government. We remain our ratbag and mostly centre-left self. We no longer, however, have a functional left wing party (Greens are now far further left than they used to be) and we don’t have any functional right wing party (the Coalition is very close to Labor in many ways and we did not put the far right in their place). The outcome of our next election may well rest on whether anyone’s clever enough to change this.

The path our voting took supports that sense reported on in newspapers of most parties sucking right now. It also supports my view of Australia, which is that the quiet majority do their own thinking and we will not know what that thinking is until election day. This time they’ve voted for social cohesion and stability. We often do that. What looks to the world like the left, is actually the most stable option for us.

If any of this appears self-contradictory, it’s because the big thing Australia has done is quite extraordinary. It has said “All the elections outside Australia are not our story.” Australians write our own story, it appears.

For me, this means, despite the massive increase in antisemitism, we’re not following the 1930s German route. We have a lively and dangerous far right and far left, and an enormous amount of antisemitism, but the voters have said, “Not in my parliament.” We’re not doing what we did in the Morrison days, and following the US path, either.

I don’t know where we are going, but that’s a big improvement on last week. Better not to know than to know that Jewish Australia is walking into hell. We are not. Not safe. Not comfortable. Not loved by extremists on either side. But we are part of Australia and Australia itself says so. Every single Jewish candidate received a normal level of votes. None in office was thrown out of office. The question now is will the far right and the Greens accept this and reduce their polemic. If they do, then the hate will reduce and Australia will be a lot safer and I can return to my own life. I have books to write…

Reprint: Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

This article first appeared in The Conversation. I offer it here with permission because now, more than ever, we need hope. Hope and belief in our power to resist and ultimately defeat a tyrant.

Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize

Kevin A. Young, UMass AmherstDonald Trump’s first term as president saw some of the largest mass protests seen in the U.S. in over 50 years, from the 2017 Women’s March to the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder.

Things feel different this time around. Critics seem quieter. Some point to fear of retribution. But there’s also a sense that the protests of Trump’s first term were ultimately futile. This has contributed to a widespread mood of despair.

As The New York Times noted not long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.” That’s a common perspective these days.

But what if it’s wrong?

As a historian, I study how our narratives about the past shape our actions in the present. In this case, it’s particularly important to get the history right.

In fact, popular resistance in Trump’s first term accomplished more than many observers realize; it’s just that most wins happened outside the spotlight. In my view, the most visible tactics – petitions, hashtags, occasional marches in Washington – had less impact than the quieter work of organizing in communities and workplaces.

Understanding when movements succeeded during Trump’s first term is important for identifying how activists can effectively oppose Trump policy in his second administration.

Quiet victories of the sanctuary movement

Mass deportation has been a cornerstone of Trump’s agenda for more than a decade. Yet despite his early pledge to create a “deportation force” that would expel millions, Trump deported only half as many people in his first term as Barack Obama did in his first term.

Progressive activists were a key reason. By combining decentralized organizing and nationwide resource-sharing, they successfully pushed scores of state and local governments to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

When the sociologist Adam Safer examined thousands of cities and dozens of states, he found that a specific type of sanctuary law that activists supported – barring local jails and prisons from active cooperation with ICE – successfully reduced ICE arrests. A study by legal scholar David K. Hausman confirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what many politicians allege.

Another important influence on state and local officials was employers’ resistance to mass deportation. The E-Verify system requiring employers to verify workers’ legal status went virtually unenforced, since businesses quietly objected to it. As this example suggests, popular resistance to Trump’s agenda was most effective when it exploited tensions between the administration and capitalists.

The ‘rising tide’ against fossil fuels

In his effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry, Trump in his first term withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, weakened or eliminated over 100 environmental protections and pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy.

Researchers projected that these policies would kill tens of thousands of people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute to tens of millions of deaths, and untold other suffering, by century’s end.

That’s not the whole story, though. Trump’s first-term energy agenda was partly thwarted by a combination of environmental activism and market forces.

His failure to resuscitate the U.S. coal industry was especially stark. Coal-fired plant capacity declined faster during Trump’s first term than during any four-year period in any country, ever. Some of the same coal barons who celebrated Trump’s victory in 2016 soon went bankrupt.

CBS News covered the bankruptcy of coal firm Murray Energy, founded by Trump supporter Robert E. Murray.

The most obvious reasons for coal’s decline were the U.S. natural gas boom and the falling cost of renewable energy. But its decline was hastened by the hundreds of local organizations that protested coal projects, filed lawsuits against regulators and pushed financial institutions to disinvest from the sector. The presence of strong local movements may help explain the regional variation in coal’s fortunes.

Environmentalists also won some important battles against oil and gas pipelines, power plants and drilling projects. In a surprising number of cases, organizers defeated polluters through a combination of litigation, civil disobedience and other protests, and by pressuring banks, insurers and big investors.

In 2018, one pipeline CEO lamented the “rising tide of protests, litigation and vandalism” facing his industry, saying “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”

Green energy also expanded much faster than Trump and his allies would have liked, albeit not fast enough to avert ecological collapse. The U.S. wind energy sector grew more in Trump’s first term than under any other president, while solar capacity more than doubled. Research shows that this progress was due in part to the environmental movement’s organizing, particularly at the state and local levels.

As with immigration, Trump’s energy agenda divided both political and business elites. Some investors became reluctant to keep their money in the sector, and some even subsidized environmental activism. Judges and regulators didn’t always share Trump’s commitment to propping up fossil fuels. These tensions between the White House and business leaders created openings that climate activists could exploit.

Worker victories in unlikely places

Despite Trump self-promoting as a man of the people, his policies hurt workers in numerous ways – from his attack on workers’ rights to his regressive tax policies, which accelerated the upward redistribution of wealth.

Nonetheless, workers’ direct action on the job won meaningful victories. For example, educators across the country organized dozens of major strikes for better pay, more school funding and even against ICE. Workers in hotels, supermarkets and other private-sector industries also walked out. Ultimately, more U.S. workers went on strike in 2018 than in any year since 1986.

This happened not just in progressive strongholds but also in conservative states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. At least 35 of the educators’ strikes defied state laws denying workers the right to strike.

In addition to winning gains for workers, the strike wave apparently also worked against Republicans at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is a common side effect of labor militancy and mass protest.

Quiet acts of worker defiance also constrained Trump. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic featured widespread resistance to policies that raised the risk of infection, particularly the lack of mask mandates.

Safety-conscious workers frequently disobeyed their employers, in ways seldom reflected in official strike data. Many customers steered clear of businesses where people were unmasked. These disruptions, and fears they might escalate, led businesses to lobby government for mask mandates.

This resistance surely saved many lives. With more coordination, it might have forced a decisive reorientation in how government and business responded to the virus.

Labor momentum could continue into Trump’s second term. Low unemployment, strong union finances and widespread support for unions offer opportunities for the labor movement.

Beyond marches

Progressive movements have no direct influence over Republicans in Washington. However, they have more potential influence over businesses, lower courts, regulators and state and local politicians.

Of these targets, business ultimately has the most power. Business will usually be able to constrain the administration if its profits are threatened. Trump and Elon Musk may be able to dismantle much of the federal government and ignore court orders, but it’s much harder for them to ignore major economic disruption.

While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure. Building the capacity for that disruption will require sustained organizing in workplaces and communities.The Conversation

Kevin A. Young, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize”…

Australian elections are never what we expect

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

Three years ago on April 10, I wrote:

Australia’s much-awaited (by us, anyhow) election was called yesterday. This is not just any election. It’s our last opportunity to move away from rabid and corrupt politics.

Our next election is on Saturday and we live in a different country. Three years ago, we were ruled by a queen, and now we’re ruled by a king. For some reason, we are far more prone to jokes under Charles than we were under Elizabeth. Technically, most of the parties are still similar, but this is another pivotal election, and not because of Charles. This was our position three years ago https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/2022/04/10/why-the-aussie-elections-are-so-important-this-year-an-introduction-for-the-unwary

We still have Mr Dutton, currently Leader of the Opposition, who has an apparent and possibly heartfelt desire to be Trump-lite. He replaced Scott Morrison when we decided we didn’t want more Trump-lite three years ago, which makes it a mystery to me why he’s choosing this path right now. Maybe he knows something about Australia that I do not know? I suspect his party would have won the election if he had not made that decision. Why do I think this? Dutton was doing very nicely in the polls until his aim to copy Trump was clear.

Independent of his policies, are his nicknames. I suspect he’s in the running for the most nicknames in history of any senior Australian politician. The one that trumps all (sorry, I could not resist the pun) is “Mr Potato Head.” Australians seldom give nice nicknames. Our current prime minister is nicknamed “Albo” which looks innocuous until you allow for the Australian accent. Our accent means that we call our PM “Elbow.” Intentionally.

Back to the parties. Now, there are other parties (minor ones) who also desire to copy Trump. One has even renamed themselves “Trumpet of Patriots.” No-one speaks kindly of them, but speaking kindly of people is not common in this election. The longest debate I’ve heard about them was which nickname is the best. The one that sticks in my mind (not the most common, just the silliest) is “Strumpet.” In and of itself, this will not affect their votes. Their policies, however, are not compatible with the left, or anyone who votes sort of centralish. Most of us vote sort of centralish, which, in comparison to the US, is slightly left wing. Sometimes quite left wing. This means that the Strumpets are the closest Australia comes to a Trump-like party. They’re not that, though. They’re right wing modified by some current causes. Current causes are a big thing right now.

Back to logic and commonsense. Three years ago I explained that the LNP (which we call the “Coalition,” mostly) were in power and that they were right wing. They are still right wing. They’ve lost a lot of their reputation and are in the middle of a generational change. The vote three years ago caused that, in a way, as did their wipeout in the biggest state in the country. Many of the new candidates for this elections (especially in electorates like my own where not a single LNP person won a seat in either house) are shiny new people about whom we know… not much. (If I were writing this for Aussies, I would use ‘bugger all’ instead of ‘…not much’, but I am aware of US sensibilities about what is everyday English in Australia. Not so aware that I refuse to tease you about it, but aware.)

Labor is now in power, and have the Elbow as leader. Albo is not much loved right now (and neither is Penny Wong, who, three years ago, we all adored), but I suspect Labor still represents more than 50% of Australians. It is a party strongly linked to unions and ought to be quite far left (and once was further left) but now it’s the centrist party. Since I’m in the mood to point things out, the party has US spelling and not Aussie spelling because it was named by a teetotaller US founder. Australia being Australia, we named a pub after him, just as we named a swimming pool after a prime minister who drowned. (I wrote about some of this three years ago. Good historical jokes are worth repeating.) I firmly believe that Australia is everyone’s ratbag cousin who is very charming but gets up to much mischief.

Three years ago I talked about the Greens. This year, I want them at the bottom of everyone’s vote. This won’t happen. They have set up a whole branch of the left (including many people who used to be my friends) and those people exclude Jews and hate Jews and blame Jews and do not listen to Jews and… you can imagine the rest. Me, I live it. They’ve put forward candidates that put the bad stuff happening in the Middle East ahead of what’s happening in Australia. If they get as much power as the latest polls suggest (14% of the vote) then quite a few Australian Jews will either have to hide (many are doing this already) or leave (and some have already left).

The party has always been left wing, but now they’re closer to Communist than to the environmental activists they once were. I am often scolded for saying these things. I answer the scolds with the labels placed in Jewish Australians by their supporters.

Some of the new Left don’t even believe there are Jewish Australians. I had that discussion with someone just yesterday. They now believe I exist, but it took two hours to convince them. We’ve been here since the first long term European settlement in 1788 (one of the First Fleet babies was the first Jewish free settler), so many of us are descendants of colonists. Most of us are descendants of refugees. And every day someone scolds me for personally having colonised Israel and murdered Palestinian children.

The hate is carefully targeted. Most of the rest of Australia has no idea. It’s a bit like domestic violence. “That very good person can’t have caused that black eye. You must’ve walked into a door.” This is being Jewish in Australia right now. It’s why the bottom of both my ballots is already populated by the Green candidates.

There is a new environmental party (Sustainable Australia) which won’t be down the bottom of my ballot. They’re not going to gain power, but if they can increase their influence a bit maybe we can talk about what needs to be done to deal with climate change rather than about the problem of antisemitism. The antisemitism isn’t just the Greens, you see. ASIO (our CIA equivalent) gave its annual assessment publicly this year. They said that antisemitism is Australia’s #1 security threat. Media ignored it. The Greens ignored it. All the other major parties factored it into their policies, but are talking about housing and jobs and the like because we have a housing crisis. I am still dealing with the notion that the new Australia can’t keep more than two ideas in its head at once.

Everyone else belongs to small parties or independents. Lots of those already in Parliament or the Senate are being challenged. Some will get second terms, others will not.

David Pocock is one of the bellwethers. He was voted to replace Zed, who was right wing (LNP) and wildly unpopular as a person. Pocock won partly because he used to be a very famous sportsperson and partly because so many preference votes flowed to him. He was the third in primary votes, and won on preferences. (This is a very Australian thing, and I can explain the voting system again to anyone who has forgotten or would like to be able to follow our vote on Saturday night.) The thing is… he voted leftish for most of his time in the Senate. Frequently, he voted alongside the Greens. He replaced a right wing party in that Senate place. What will that do to his preferences next Saturday?

How many independents and small parties will get through in a strange election where the main left wing party expresses bigotry? It depends on how far we veer left as a country. It depends on how loyal we are to individuals in both Houses. It depends on how personal everything is, in a year when I’m hearing so many people talk about their vote as personal.

I see two big options. One is that a lot of these independents lose their seats. This would return control (in the Senate in particular) to the party with the most seats in the Senate. The other option is that Australians vote a lot of these people into Parliament and the Senate and make everything very, very complex. I’m hoping that this is unlikely, given that many of the independents or small party representatives care only about one issue or are cults of personality, or are “We are not Greens – we just vote with them” people.

We don’t know how many independents or representatives of small parties will get through. The nature of advance polls is to focus on the major parties, so we really do not know how much support these legions of political individuals have in any given region.

Part of this rests on the nature of preferential voting. In the electorate of Blaxland, for instance, which has possibly the highest number of Muslim voters in the country, will the Labor candidate be returned to power, or will Omar Sakr (the Greens candidate) be voted in, or will an independent specifically representing Muslims (the one suggested by the Muslim Vote) get in? The Muslim Vote focuses on Muslim voters and assumes that their main political desire is not about housing or education, but about creating a Palestinian state. I chatted with a friend today, who is also Muslim, but from Indonesia, and she had no idea that this group even existed. The public talk about Muslim votes assume that most Muslims who vote are either Palestinian or support Gazans. And yet… we have many Muslim Australians from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Malaysia and various African countries. I do not know if there is a voting pattern for all these people from all these backgrounds. Some are fully integrated into Australian society, some maintain boundaries and stay largely within their own communities.

My guide to the elections three years ago was a lot simpler. Right now, it feels as if life was a lot simpler three years ago.

PS Just in case you want to know what advice Jewish voters have been given, it’s “Make up your own minds, you’re adults.” We have, however, been given a guide to making up our own minds. 2025 federal election – ECAJ

In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

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I first posted this in August, 2019. I’m still here, still holding on to hope. We aren’t all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.

Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essays called “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness, and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me as well as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But the constant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaults on democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.

What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, such disregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and air water, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for our lives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not become the enemy?

I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistance is. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are many possible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person. Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters in front of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’s businesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). I wore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Those memories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember how frustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of 100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and so forth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friends still got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did were wounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave up hope that the senseless carnage would ever end.

But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching and chanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduring lesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, over and over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guess history, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling down a slope create a landslide.

My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when I saw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were a terrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parents were active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party” in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became the target of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillance since 1947.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalized citizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “went underground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and using only cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of those havens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretly watching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd to me to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time. Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard, terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Not unscarred — it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention to myself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better, more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from the mid-60s by Carl Oglesby (I think) on my door. I searched for it on the internet and couldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being a time to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another, and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, and equality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness, racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government, then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: we of the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.

This is what I tell young people today. I remember what my parents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or another during the Cold War:

Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, not just what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness. Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balance in your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.

In Troubled Times: This, Too, Shall Pass

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I first posted this in April 2023. It’s a good reminder.

I started a blog series, “In Troubled Times” after the 2016 presidential election. Folks I trusted said that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. That’s true now, too. You can read the first installment, “Becoming Allies,” here.

I came of age in the 1960s, demonstrating for civil rights and marching against the Vietnam War. I never burned my bra, but I volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the years before Roe v Wade. I am not bragging about my activist bona fides. I was one of many, and rarely in the forefront. However, I remember all too well the feelings of both elation and futility. The energy and inspiration of being surrounded by thousands of like minds, filling the streets of San Francisco, chanting and singing. We thought that if we could sing loudly enough and joyfully enough, we could change the minds and hearts of the nation’s leaders. And then came a day when many of us realized they were not about to listen to us. The war raged on, now captured on television in our living rooms.

That feeling of powerlessness was one of the driving forces behind my debut science fiction novel, Jaydium, by the way. My heroine is initially trapped on a dusty, barely-habitable planet at the back end of nowhere, and through a series of shifts through time and parallel dimensions, she ends up on an alien planet where she has the chance to change history by stopping a war. It’s about both re-engagement and the quest for peace (and I was tickled when Tom Easton of Analog praised the latter as unusual and laudable.) Writing it reflected my personal journey from withdrawal to participation.

I vividly remember how, in the late 1960s, my father, who was born in 1907 and lived through two world wars, pogroms, the McCarthy witch hunts, and more, would talk me down from desperation. When I was in a panic about the Cold War maneuver of the moment, he never dismissed my concerns; he was just coming from a broader perspective. And he was right. We got through those years without blowing the planet up.

Now I find myself in the position of being an elder—a crone, if you will. My earliest political memories date from the mid-1950s, including the terror of HUAC, the pervasive suspicions, racism, misogyny, and antisemitism that no one questioned. When I was a bit older, the anti-communist hysteria had faded somewhat (depending on where you lived), but not the rest. And always, in the years before oral contraception, sex meant fear of pregnancy. I knew girls in high school who got sent out of the country and returned the following year or so without their babies. Later, in the late 1960s/early 1970s but still before Roe v Wade, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. And heard many stories. Looking back, I cannot believe how ignorant I was about so many other issues.

I do not mean to brag about my life experiences or to enter into a contest of which times were worse. Each generation faces its own trials, and each generation is convinced that theirs are world-ending, worst-ever scenarios. This is one of many reasons why we need generational memory (not to mention history books!)

Goethe wrote: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” It’s horrible that we have to fight these battles over and over, playing eternal whack-a-mole with the agents of hatred. That’s why we need all the allies and moral ammunition we can get.

I am mindful of the old joke, “In my day, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.” I see no benefit in comparing one disaster to another. For the person affected by a catastrophic event, whether it’s an attack on them as a member of a vulnerable group or a purely personal tragedy, loss is loss, fear is fear, and grief is grief. Instead of belittling someone else’s pain, we have the opportunity to use our own as a wellspring of compassion and understanding. The lesson from history is not that those times were more terrible than those we face today. It’s that they passed. Sure, you might say, they were taken over by new, awful things.

But sometimes, either by a cataclysmic change or the slow progress of justice, things get better. Not all things, not for everybody, and not all at once. Small victories add up to shifts in consciousness. One of my antidotes to despair is to complete the following sentence:

“I never thought I would live to see…”

  •  People walk on the Moon
  •  A Black person become President
  • Same-sex marriage become legal
  • A woman Vice President

Now fill in your own.

I believe that many of the crises looming over us are reactions to those victories. Two steps forward and one step back. But the movement of history is on our side. Rights once gained are not easily (permanently) revoked. Once marginalized groups are accepted as deserving of respect and dignity, it’s a lot harder to take that away.

Right now there are many attempts to take away human rights and dignity. And lives, often for trivial excuses. It seems we are living in a time when vicious, outrageous, hate-fueled behavior is on the ascendency.

These times, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, we are called upon to protect the vulnerable and minimize the harm inflicted on them.

In Troubled Times: How Stories Save Us

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I first posted this in August, 2021. Hold on to hope!

Stories can heal and transform us. They can also become beacons of hope.

Quite a few years ago, when I was going through a difficult personal time, I came across a book about the inherent healing power of telling our stories. No matter how scattered or flawed our lives may appear, as we tell our stories, we gain something. Patterns emerge from seeming chaos, and our lives begin to make sense. It may be dreadful, agonizing sense, but even tragedies have order and consequence. I found that over time, the way I told my story changed, reflecting my recovery process and new insight.

The mirror side of story-telling is story-listening. While a confidential diary or journal can be highly useful, having someone hear our words can be transformative, especially if all that person does is listening. Not judging, not analyzing, not wondering how to respond, just taking in our words, a silent partner on our journey. Often we feel less alone in retrospect, no matter how isolated and desperate we might have been at the time. Additionally, a compassionate listener invites us to be kinder with ourselves.

Perhaps this is how Twelve Step programs work, apart from any Higher Power mysticism or Steps: that by simply hearing our own voices relate our histories, and having the experience of being heard, we open the door to viewing ourselves through the lens of new possibilities.

Personal storytelling calls for discretion, of course. Although it may be true that “we are only as sick as our secrets,” casually (or not-so-casually) violating a confidence from someone else is not the same as choosing to include the listener in our own private lives. Some of us never learned healthy boundaries about what is safe to share, and when, and with whom. We, or others, can be harmed by indiscriminate broadcasting of embarrassing, illegal, or otherwise sensitive information. The kind of storytelling I’m talking about, on the other hand, is as much about the journey as it is the facts.

Stories can get us through dark times by giving us hope and inspiring empathy. Stories work by creating a bond between the narrator or central character and the listener/reader. Who wants to read a story about a person you care nothing about? And if that appealing character has a different history or journey, or learns something the reader never experienced, so much the better. We accompany them into darkness and out again.

Hopeful stories provide an antidote to fear-driven stories. We find allies in unexpected places. Who would have thought that scruffy old Strider would turn out to be Aragorn (not me, not the first time I read The Lord of the Rings)? They remind us that even in times when all seems bleak, the tide can and does turn. Spring follows winter’s desolation. We, too, can be saved. Or, more to the point, we too are capable of setting aside those fears and reaching out to those in need.

I have a treasure trove of stories I come back to again and again. They re-kindle hope in me but also when I tell them, they create a bridge of empathy, even with people who appear to be “on the other side” of arguments. One story I heard in an inter-faith workshop, from a Catholic woman who had worked with The Compassionate Listening Project in the Middle East. She said that she and her colleagues listened to people from different sides of the conflict there, and that as the speakers made their points and felt their experiences valued, their stances softened. Each side became more willing to look at mutually beneficial solutions and to acknowledge the suffering and aspirations of the other.

So stories of hope and positive change affect not only the storytellers but the listeners. A recent blog post on the website of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) put it this way:

Fortunately, research also shows that messages framed in terms of hope, especially when coupled with messages that include positive feedback, can counter fearmongering effectively. Hope-based messages can also help people change their minds about key issues. Why? Because when people have made up their minds about an issue, they are prone to only hear facts that support their position – especially if they are already stressed and the facts they hear are framed in terms of fear. But, when people hear messages framed in terms of hope and positive feedback, they are able to digest new information in ways that can ultimately lead to a shift in perspective.

As we move through troubled times, let’s do our best to create and tell – and re-tell as many times as necessary – those stories.

In Times of War: A Flood of Horrific News

personby Deborah J. Ross
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This was originally posted in April, 2022, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was getting underway. It seems just as urgent now.

After the 2016 Presidential election, I wrote a series of blog posts, “In Troubled Times.” In them I explored my evolving feelings of disbelief, shock, horror, despair, fury, and rising determination. “Nevertheless, She Persisted” became our mantra. I hoped that my words provided solace and inspiration to others, and the process of putting them down did for me.

Now we face new, often overwhelming challenges to sanity. I find myself reacting to the news of the war in Ukraine, and yet being unable to look away. Then my friend, Jaym Gates, wrote this on her Facebook page, posted here with her permission.

Be really careful on social media for the next few days, friends. A lot of footage of Russian Federation war crimes, torture, rape, and murder just came out from Mariupol and other occupied cities. It is *horrific.* While it needs to be seen, shared, and remembered, it is going to be extremely traumatic to engage with.

If you’re a survivor of abuse or trauma, in particular, please be especially careful.

And send support to Ukraine if you can. What’s happening there is awful beyond words.

 My daughter, a psychology student, spotted this article by Heather Kelly in the Washington Post: How to stay up-to-date on terrible news without burning out.

It can be hard to look away from your phone and live your life while terrible events are unfolding, Kelly writes. There’s an unrelenting flow of images, videos and graphic updates out of Ukraine, filling social media, messaging apps and news sites.

It’s important to stay informed, engaged and even outraged. But it’s also important to pay attention to our own limits and mental health by taking breaks, looking for signs of burnout and consuming news in the smartest way possible.

That means setting some ground rules for the main portal connecting us to nonstop tragedy: our phones [or computers]. Here are some suggestions:

  1. Give yourself permission to take a break

It is okay to hit pause on the doom and go live your life, whether that means going outside with the kids or just losing yourself on the silly side of TikTok. It’s necessary for everyone’s mental health.

  1. Take time for self-care

A break is not a few minutes away from Twitter. Start with real breaks of at least 30 minutes to an hour so that your brain has time to come down from what you were last watching or reading. Ideally, you’ll put your phone down and take a technology break … or do some activities known to help with stress reduction, including exercise, mindfulness and meditation, journaling, engaging in hobbies and other activities you enjoy, spending time with family and friends, and doing faith-based activities if you practice.

  1. Change your news habits

Disinformation like propaganda is designed to capture your attention and elicit strong emotions, which can contribute to any anxiety you’re already feeling. Instead, stick with reputable sources. If you can wait, opt for deeply reported stories at the end of the day over constant smaller updates. Avoid using social media for news, but if you do, follow sources and people that contribute to your understanding of an issue rather than those that just generate more outrage.

  1. View your phone in black and white

In your smartphone’s accessibility settings there is an option to make the screen black and white instead of color. Some studies have indicated that turning this on leads to less screen time.

  1. Know when to ask for help

Look for signs that you are burned out or experiencing serious anxiety. First, consider whether you’re predisposed to reacting strongly to a particular issue. Anyone who has personally dealt with similar trauma or war in the past might find constant vivid social media posts about Ukraine to be triggering. [Italics mine.]

In conclusion: be kind to yourself, friends. Practice healthy boundaries and filters, and good self-care. Ask for help, whether it’s a friend or family member screening news for triggers, or a companion on a hike through the redwoods. Find safe people to reach out to. I’ll be writing more about our journey together.

 

Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants

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What Shakespeare revealed about the chaotic reign of Richard III – and why the play still resonates in the age of Donald Trump

In this circa 1754 illustration, two women scold Richard III in Shakespeare’s play.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

by David Sterling Brown, Trinity College

Written around 1592, William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” follows the reign of England’s infamous monarch and charts the path of a charismatic, cunning figure.

As Shakespeare depicts the king’s reign from June 1483 to August 1485, Richard III’s kingdom was wrought with chaos, confusion and corruption that fueled civil conflict in England.

As a scholar of Shakespeare, I first thought about Richard III and his similarities with Donald Trump after the latter’s debate with President Joe Biden in June 2024. Those similarities – and Shakespeare’s depictions – became even clearer after Trump’s election in November 2024.

Shakespeare’s play highlights the flawed character of a man who wanted to be, in modern terms, a dictator, someone who could do whatever he pleased without any consequences.

In his 1964 essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” writer James Baldwin concluded that Shakespeare found poetry “in the lives of people” by knowing “that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

“It is said that Shakespeare’s time was easier than ours, but I doubt it,” Baldwin wrote. “No time can be easy if one is living through it.”

A black and white drawing of Richard III.
An undated portrait of Richard III.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images

A villain?

In Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play, a common citizen says Richard is “full of danger.”

“Woe to the land that’s govern’d by a child,” the citizen further warned.

Beyond hiring murderers to kill his own brother, Shakespeare’s Richard was keen on belittling and distancing himself from people whom he viewed as being not loyal or being in his way – including his wife, Anne.

To clear the way for him to marry his brother’s daughter – his niece Elizabeth – Richard spread what now would be called fake news. In the play, he tells his loyalists “to rumor it abroad that Anne, my wife, is very grievously sick” and “likely to die.”

Richard then poetically reveals her death: “Anne my wife hath bid this world goodnight.”

Yet, before her death, Anne has a sad realization: “Never yet one hour in Richard’s bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep.”

That sentiment is echoed by Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, who regrets not strangling “damned” Richard while he was in her “accursed womb.”

As Shakespeare depicts him, Richard III was a self-centered political figure who first appears alone on stage, determined to prove himself a villain.

In Richard’s opening speech, he even says that in order to become king, he will manipulate his own brothers George, the Duke of Clarence, and King Edward IV, “in deadly hate, the one against the other.”

But as his villainous crimes mount up, Richard shares a rare moment of self-awareness: “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.”

Shakespeare’s Richard III and Trump

While the details of Trump’s and Richard’s lives differ in many ways, there are some similarities.

Much like Trump during his first term, Shakespeare’s Richard did not lead with morals, ethics or integrity.

Richard lied compulsively to everyone, as his soliloquys that contain his innermost thoughts make clear.

A black and white illustration of William Shakespeare.
An illustration of English writer William Shakespeare (circa 1600).
Rischgitz/Getty Images

Like Trump, Richard used empty rhetoric to persuade people with “sugared words” – he was not interested in speaking or promoting truth.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s Richard was a sexist and misogynist who verbally and physically disrespected women, including his wife and mother.

In the play, for example, Richard calls Queen Margaret, widow of King Henry VI, a “foul wrinkled witch” and a “hateful withered hag,” thus disparaging her older age.

He refers to Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, as a “damned strumpet” or prostitute, which she wasn’t.

Additionally, in order to cast doubts on his nephews’ legitimate claims to the throne, Richard spread false rumors about his mother, claiming that she was unfaithful.

A white man and a Black woman shake hands.
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump before their debate.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

For his part, Trump has no shortage of disparaging remarks about women. He once called his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton “the devil” and characterized former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “crazy.”

Trump repeatedly peppered Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign with sexist and racists attacks.

He initially refused to pronounce her name correctly and openly mocked her racial identity as a Black woman, even questioning her “Blackness.”

A new day?

Like Trump, Richard III used religion to manipulate and confuse public perception of his amoral image.

In the play, Richard stages the equivalent of a modern-day photo op, standing between two “churchmen” with a “prayer-book” in his hands.

Much like Richard, Trump has courted evangelicals and used organized religion to his political advantage, most publicly by selling a “God Bless the USA Bible.”

Trump’s 2020 photo op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington is another example. It occurred during protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer. Police in riot gear used tear gas to force protesters away from the White House; then Trump was escorted to the nearby church along with several administration officials.

As a political leader, Richard III left a legacy in English history as one of England’s worst monarchs.

That legacy includes his decisive defeat in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that led to his death and to a new era for England under King Henry VII.

After winning the throne, the new king offered a message of hope that suggested England would one day emerge from its time of civil discord:

Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen.The Conversation

David Sterling Brown, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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