The 2024 election boils down to this.

     "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah. The rest is just  commentary."

          Rabbi Hillel the Elder, 110 BCE

 

     "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right."
          Bill Clinton, 2002 CE

Trump is on track to win back the presidency. Trump is the strong and wrong candidate.  Biden is the weak and right one.

Radical simplification of the kind Rabbi Hillel offered gets us to the essence of the choice voters will make in November. The great majority of voters will follow the inertia of their party brand. Democrats vote for Democrats, Republicans vote for Republicans. The past decade demonstrates the power of party inertia. Everything that Republicans supposedly believed in for 50 years -- from Nixon through Reagan to Bush One, Dole, Bush Two, McCain, Cheney, Romney, and McConnell up to January 2016 --  got removed and replaced.  A Republican voter of January 1 of 2016 should be a Democrat, except for the issue of abortion.  My party right or wrong.

Democratic pundits are frustrated. The USA worked its way out of the Covid crisis very well by the standards of the rest of the developed world. Employment is strong, inflation has been defanged, and the stock market is high. But the public isn't feeling it.

Voters aren't giving Biden credit. Why? Bill Clinton said it. Biden does not look or sound like a strong leader. Biden is badly miscast for the role of 2024 Democratic candidate. He has a weak voice and he looks feeble. It is image and optics, but it is real. He doesn't look the part of a leader confidently leading America into the future. He isn't hope and change. He isn't Jack Kennedy. 

Since Congress is so palpably ineffective, voters are attracted to an executive who appears willing and able to steamroll over opposition and get things done. Right and wrong can be hard to discern. Some people think it is high time for some cruel action on the border. Unengaged voters find reasons to question whether January 6 was really all that bad. What is not in question is Trump's arrogant, belligerent, damn-the-torpedoes strength of will. Trump says he will be a dictator on day one. He was boasting.

Democrats will stick with Biden, of course. He is what Democrats have, and you play your hand.

Their job will not be to show that he is right. They will try to show that he is strong. It is casting against type, and sometimes it works.

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The Taylor Swift Conspiracy: A tale full of sound and fury

The Taylor Swift Conspiracy is fun to write about.

It is a bit of crazy levity in a political environment that is deadly serious and consequential.  

I found meaning in the controversy because I enjoy looking for hidden consequences from political events. Maybe a few hundred thousand young voters in key states will see this as disrespect for a symbol of their generation. I understand that feeling. Back in the 1960s, I didn't like establishment stiffs like Nixon criticizing Levis. Maybe voters of any age will see this manufactured controversy and decide that Trump and his allies have slipped another notch from manic-crazy to manic even-crazier and now outright dangerous.  After all, if the GOP team picks a fight with Taylor Swift and imagines that Democrats are competent enough to orchestrate a plot to fix an NFL season, then they are crazy enough to start shooting missiles at flying unicorns. And maybe there is another group of people who are just sick to death of the Trump era of political polarity and see this as another and final straw in the politicization of everything, from cities to football teams, to celebrities, Disney, and beers. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Mostly I consider it a huge, unforced error by team MAGA. If they want to reveal themselves as wacko, I can just sit back and watch the show.

Tony Farrell is a college classmate who had a long career in marketing. When he does guest posts I mention his management of the Trump Steak campaign back when Tony worked at The Sharper Image. It is a gentle way both to tease him and credential him. He worked at the highest levels of American product branding. This blog looks at candidate branding -- which is essentially the same thing as product branding, as has been recognized for decades.

Farrell is retired now. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. I asked him what he makes of this Taylor Swift thing.

Tony Farrell and family in California

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

On Taylor Swift and Conspiracy

First question: Why am I doing this -- writing a guest post on the "Taylor Swift NFL Conspiracy" hoopla?

Well, Peter asked for my thoughts, speculating that my professional experience in marketing and (mainly) merchandising could lead to an interesting perspective. We’ll see.

In San Francisco not too long ago, I encountered a crazed homeless guy, filthy and addled and barking insane nonsense to someone I could not see. I later noted that what he said was not covered in the next day’s news.

Second question: If not him, why Taylor?

It is obvious the Swift Conspiracy is total, complete and absolute nonsense, but that does not mean it isn’t entertaining and fascinating. The latter two criteria are the only reasons I’m writing this and the news is covering it.

Anyone who’s been a merchant (as I was) or a music producer or other servant of mass consumerism knows that the emergence of a fad product or a hit tune or a viral meme or a blockbuster movie is an utter mystery. They are created by the organic fusion of billions of tiny interactions that cannot be predicted or controlled. If you get one, you ride it, like a wave.

I am sure that, at any one time, thousands of conspiracy fantasies are being conjured, nurtured, put out there to maybe grow and then certainly die, some day. Almost all die without notice; the rarest few emerge like this Taylor Swift whopper. One cannot point to anyone who created it; Trump had nothing to do with it, I’m sure. But there it is, here and on Fox.

Conspiracies have great allure. They can be endlessly fascinating, even across decades. (The JFK assassination conspiracies are thriving, still!) This is because conspiracies can be wonderfully creative; they can be the best-ever stories; one can join the world’s largest writers’ room and participate! Any fact or set of facts that point away from the conspiracy (or disprove it utterly) simply make it even more compelling, if not addicting. For many, this kind of creative social engagement is seen and felt as unusually entertaining and validating. The more one is disconnected from the real world, the more credible the most fantastic claims would be. Besides, all kinds of grounded, sane people love science fiction, fantasy and other inventions of the mind. Conspiracies are simply one manifestation of that very human sentiment. At heart, true belief is not required.

I recommend not adding any facts to the fight to derail this conspiracy; you are doomed to further it in your well-intentioned efforts.

You know, I never liked rap music until my younger daughter told me to not think of rap as music but as poetry, or some other kind of narrative art. And soon enough, I learned to appreciate rap, and judged it quite differently; I even came to really like some rap “songs.” In a similar vein, I suggest thinking of conspiracies as improvisational theater, where the latest drop in the pond creates new and ever-expanding circles of story. Trumpism as improv? Makes sense to me!

But to answer Peter’s most direct question to me, “Is there any upside to Trump going after someone as popular as Taylor Swift?” Nope. None at all.

 

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Humans come in varieties.

Is "race" real?

I consider it real in the sense that other people believe in it. But I don't.

Today's Guest Post author looks at population differences. She writes that the notion of race is too imprecise to be useful in medical science.

College classmate Constance Hilliard is an evolutionary historian who has devoted the past fifteen years to investigating the intersection of evolutionary history and human health.  Her latest book, Ancestral Genomics: African-American Health in the Age of Precision Medicine, has been published by Harvard University Press with a release date of April 16, 2024.  She maintains a website: Evolutionary History & African-American Health.

Hilliard

Guest Post by Constance Hilliard

In late August of 2008, the last item on my check-off list as I wound up a year-long visiting professorship in Japan was a medical wellness exam. Their national health insurance program made the task virtually free. At the age of 59, I had taken considerable pride in the few lifestyle changes that I had adopted over the course of that year. Strolling through a lush garden on the way to campus each morning and making culinary choices that favored the artistic presentation of broiled salmon bento boxes over the sheer poundage of steak and fries had lightened a load that I had not known I carried. But that was before the clinic called me back for an urgent consultation and informed me that I was suffering from kidney failure.


Returning home to Texas two weeks after that devastating diagnosis, my longstanding primary care physician informed me that I had been misdiagnosed. Handing me the lab report, he insisted that my kidneys were perfectly fine. It was then that I noticed a check-off box for “race” at the top of the form. When I asked him what that was about, he merely shrugged and said that it was some kind of algorithmic adjustment that laboratories used. Suddenly, I remembered a remark the Japanese doctor had made at the time of the diagnosis. “Given your lab results,” he said, shaking his head in puzzlement, “quite frankly I have never seen such a healthy-looking patient at such a late stage of renal disease.” Relief entangled with utter confusion launched me on the most iconoclastic journey of my academic career. After all, hadn’t I insistently taught my students over the years that “race” was not biological. It was merely a social construct?


This investigation led me as an evolutionary historian to vital clues that might broaden the way the medical community approaches population differences in health. For instance, the median Japanese daily intake of sodium is 10,000 mg. Americans consume between 3400 and 5000 mg/sodium/day. On the other hand, as an African-American of slave descent, my ancestors emanated from one of the most sodium-deficient regions of the world, that is, the deep interior of West Africa. They farmed in the sweltering heat of the tropics, consuming less than 200 mg/sodium/day. These communities had never tasted table salt, and seasoned their food with the burnt ashes of millet and other plant leaves, a compound high in potassium chloride.

Harvard University Press

Modern medical researchers had for years puzzled over the fact that 75% of African-Americans over the age of 55 suffer from salt-sensitive hypertension, in some cases leading to kidney failure. But we can now see that an ancestral population carrying highly-sodium-retentive gene variants (APOL 1 g1 and g2) will fare poorly in a U.S. food culture, where the median consumption is 3400+/mg/sodium/day. It should also become apparent that an African-American professor who takes a blood test calibrated to a healthy Asian population genetically adapted to a sodium consumption pattern of 10,000 mg/day will appear to a local doctor to be on the verge of a serious medical crisis.

Race is a meaningful social tool in America’s civil vocabulary. It helps us celebrate our cultural diversity and calibrate how far we’ve come in addition to how much farther we need to go in order to realize our aspirations as a truly democratic society. It can also at times serve as an approximation of population differences as was the case in correcting my kidney failure misdiagnosis. Nevertheless, it is far too crude and imprecise a measurement of genetic populations and needs to be removed from medical science. This is especially the case now that we have the greater precision of DNA ancestry testing. The model that I have developed in my own health disparities research classifies populations according to the unique ecological niches to which their ancestors were genetically adapted. This methodology offers vital clues to chronic diseases and certain cancers whose etiologies have previously been misinterpreted.

 

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Easy Sunday: What the heck were they thinking?

Inside the head of a January 6 "patriot."

Today's Guest Post is an imagined inner dialogue, done for humor by a humorist.

I have talked with exactly one person who travelled from Medford, Oregon to Washington, D.C. to participate in the January 6 event. He seemed exhilarated to have been there. He told me he stood in the cold to hear Trump speak but did not enter the Capitol. He said the people who entered the Capitol were patriots. He said he thought Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not in the USA, and never should have been allowed to be president. He said Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide, no question about it, and that Biden was an illegitimate president, too. I kept hoping he was joking and was just trying to get a rise out of me, but, alas, he was dead serious.

Gerald Murphy is a retired high school English teacher. He writes short plays for schools and community theaters. He used to write satirical posts on the Next Door site with a narrator voicing quirky ideas. That ended. He was kicked off the site after numerous complaints from neighbors to the Next Door moderators. Neighbors didn’t recognize satire when they read it.

Gerald Murphy with grandson Winston 

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

                             BEST INTENTIONS

I came to Washington with the best intentions. There were many rumors about votes in Philly, and I tended to believe them. After all, where there is smoke, there’s fire. And there was plenty of smoke rising from the 2020 elections. My go-to social media sites were exploding with accusations of rampant voting irregularities. And Donald Trump, my president, was certain the election had been stolen from him. He wanted us to come to Washington on January 6th. I obeyed the call, even though my sister thought I was an idiot for going. I just knew everything would turn out great, and it would have if it weren’t for a hangman’s noose, a crushed helmet, and a stupid laptop computer.

The speeches by Trump and others got us all riled up, and we were on our way to the Capitol Building in a wild (yet peaceful) patriotic parade. Some guy behind me mentioned that it would be cool if we brought along a hangman’s noose, just to show our determination. He had a rope, but he admitted he had no idea how to make a noose. I volunteered to help him, since I was well acquainted with various knots from my youthful Eagle Scout experiences. I quickly assembled something passable, and soon I was being filmed by many marchers, including some who railed against Vice President Pence when they saw my work. Some other guys were hammering some sort of wooden platform together, and they insisted I give them the noose. I did so since I had no use for it.

Soon the crowd was getting louder and louder and more and more pushy. They pushed me up the stairs and I found myself directly in front of a cop who had his helmet caught between a door and a door jamb. He was screaming in pain, and I could see the problem was that his helmet had caught his head inside this very bad place. I figured the only way he could get free was if we could crush his helmet into pieces, which would allow him to pull his head out. I joined others who were helping to push against the door to free him. Many of my fellow patriots filmed us as we attempted to save him. You probably have seen some of our hard work on television.

Later I was able to get into some congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s. Everyone I knew hated her a lot, so I was expecting to see pictures of Stalin and Hitler in her office, but it was actually kind of boring. Other patriots were ransacking stuff, but I hit the jackpot when I grabbed her laptop computer. I waved it around in triumph for pictures, but I really had no use for it. When another guy asked for it, I gave it to him. I didn’t want to get in trouble for stealing, even in a good cause.

At the end of the day, I got bored hanging around the Capitol. I thought maybe they might arrest some of the marchers who destroyed some stuff and broke some windows, but they let us all go home scot-free.

It was a quiet ride home on the train to Philly. When I got to my house, everyone started calling me and saying how I was on TV all day long, and not just from other marchers filming me. Turns out the Capitol has closed-circuit cameras all over the place. They even have one video of me waving a confederate flag, which I did only for a joke. They had confederate flags all over the place. Go figure.

Of course, I’m in jail now, and my dumb sister, who voted for Biden, says I had it coming. I could have gotten mad at her for saying this, but it turns out she’s the only one who visits me here. She tells me I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life, but this was the dumbest.

Hate to say it, but I kind of agree with her.

 

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Shameless.

Shamelessness is Trump's super-power.

Trump rode a wave of public distrust of institutions. He supercharged that distrust. He made it normal. Then he made it required.

Public trust in institutions is at a low ebb.

Congress: Gallup puts Congressional job approval at 13%. We don't need Gallup to tell us that Congress is not addressing America's problems. We see it. Nearly everyone recognizes we have an unsolved problem with immigration. Congress is busy intentionally not solving the problem, hoping to score political points.

Courts: Discussion of courts by politicians and commenters now describe judges as "_______ appointed," presuming judges will decide cases to meet a partisan outcome. 

Religious institutions: Pedophile priests; mega-church hucksters.

Media institutions: Fake and biased news.

Health institutions: Fake drugs, corrupt CDC, inflated costs.

Universities: Hotbed of wokeness and plagiarism graduating unemployable people loaded with debt.

Police: Bad apples.

FBI: Deep state tyrants.

Elections and Democracy itself: Rigged, rigged, rigged.

I could go on. I urge readers to comment, naming institutions they think enjoy high public trust. I am at a loss.

Trump's genius for shamelessness expanded on this foundation of distrust. He started with a proof-of-concept exercise, asserting that Hawaii's vital statistics records, plus the contemporaneous newspaper birth announcements, were faked. Trump persisted. A great many Republican voters wanted to believe Trump. Their own birth records are real, of course, but not Obama's. Trump sold it and a majority of Republican voters bought it. Partisan advantage trumped trust in a state's official records.

Trump demonstrated that one could simply assert a position, and a significant number of people would believe it, not a reality posited by our institutions of society. That provided leverage on another, perhaps equal-size group of people, people who do not fully believe Trump, but who do not dare disagree openly with the body of people who do. Go with the stampeding herd. This is where the generalized distrust of institutions is so important. Trump enablers and fellow travelers cannot openly side with the institution, because they are perceived as weak, and Trump is adamant.

My own U.S. representative, Cliff Bentz, is an example of fellow-traveler Republicans of the kind that are commonplace among Republican officeholders nationwide. Bentz voted against accepting the electoral votes certified for Biden in Pennsylvania, notwithstanding an 80,000-vote majority and an election reviewed and approved by the Pennsylvania courts. He needed to bow toward Trump's election denialism lest he face primary opposition. Most of the presidential candidates hoping to replace Trump granted that Trump, not the institutions of justice, was right. Mike Pence, the Christian conservative presidential candidate who chose the Constitution over Trump's assertion of shameless self-interest, spoke to sparse, inattentive Republican audiences, and got 2% in the polls before dropping out. 

Going along with a shameless assertion contrary to traditional authoritative truth isn't just normalized in the GOP. It is essential, if one is to be a Republican in good standing and not a RINO. 

It is a new GOP. Ronald Reagan knew he had broken the law and his word when he sold arms to Iran to pay for aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. He was ashamed. He apologized. There was an outside moral standard that he had not met. The L.A. Times headline read: "President apologizes for Iran-Contra role: Says he needs no protection from the truth."

Oval Office apology

Richard Nixon knew it was wrong to obstruct justice by telling the FBI not to investigate the Watergate break-in by claiming it was a secret CIA operation. It was a lie. He felt guilt and shame, so he tried to hide what he did. Nixon knew it would be illegal to destroy tape recordings made in the Oval Office. He could have shamelessly burned them and dared courts to do anything about it. He didn't. Both presidents understood there was a standard of behavior outside themselves that they would be ashamed openly to flout.

Trump is shameless. He looks at the institution and its verdict and says "no."  He is defiant, not obedient to rules or norms. Trump exercises the shameless willfulness that Athens exercised over the Milians, as described by Thucydides. Winners take what they will and institutions suffer as they must. Republican voters want a winner; however he wins. Shamelessness is power. There are no rules.

This is a rough patch in democracy's road and I hope we come out of it.

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The Great Taylor Swift Conspiracy

It's all rigged! It's a plot!

NY Times headline: Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the MAGA meltdown

Coincidence? Don't be naive.

Trump and MAGA have figured it all out.

Steve Bannon:  NO coincidences

Don't you see the pattern? 

Democrats rigged it so that Taylor Swift would be Time Magazine's "person of the year" instead of Donald Trump, the obvious and rightful winner.

Plus, Joe Biden and Democrats connived so that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would date. 

And they picked Travis Kelce, not just any NFL player. Kelce did an ad for Covid vaccines and for Bud Lite. That's an obvious give-away.

They also rigged it that Kelce would receive and make spectacular catches, making him a star almost worthy of Taylor Swift.

It took some doing, but Democrats arranged that heartland Kansas City would go 11-6 to get into the Super Bowl. They have rigged it so that the Chiefs will beat the liberal-city San Francisco 49ers when they play. Democrats are re-positioning themselves toward the center for the general election. 

Democrats rigged it that game cameras would repeatedly cut to Taylor Swift as she watched Chief games, masterfully linking Taylor Swift, the NFL, the abortion issue, and the youth vote.

It is in service of a master plan. Isn't is obvious? The plan is that Taylor Swift would endorse Biden and swing young voters and persuadable homeland middle-America types to vote for Biden, and thereby steal the election. 

Whew.

The source and impetus for the MAGA-team attack onTaylor Swift may have come from Trump's own disappointment that Swift is getting as much bright-light attention as is Trump. Maybe more. Certainly better. Who knows? Anonymous sources supposedly close to Trump say it goes back to that Time Magazine recognition. I don't know the reality of the source. I do know that Fox, Newsmax, and pro-Trump allies like Vivek Ramaswamy are on board with the attack, however it started.

I also know Trump could have shut down and reversed the Taylor-Swift-is-bad story -- and still can -- with some simple tweets or comments in a rally speech. He need only say that he thinks Taylor Swift is an extraordinary woman, a great entertainer, a great businesswoman, and an all-American star. Say he is a fan, not that he likes her 25% less than before.

The fact that he isn't doing this means he politically owns the meme.

CNBC Headline: Trump allies ramp up attack on Taylor Swift in advance of the Super Bowl

Regular readers of this blog recognize its recurring theme that political communication often backfires. The intended, denoted message is one thing, but the actual message is often the opposite. The primary, delivered-and-received message of the MAGA attack on Taylor Swift is that Trump picks utterly unnecessary fights because Trump and his allies are unhinged. "Unhinged" is a word Nikki Haley is using now.

This attack sends a message that is in perfect sync with the Democratic narrative for the 2024 election. Sure, Biden is old, Democrats concede that. They must. But Biden isn't dangerous, not in the way that Trump is dangerous. Trump is unstable and consumed by such jealousy, resentment, and insecurity that he lashes out at anything. That's the simple Democratic message: old and calm Biden versus batshit crazy Trump.

When Trump and MAGA world attacked Colin Kaepernick they chose someone easy to malign, a Black man with afro hair who took a knee in protest to injustice. It was easy to mis-characterize his action as an insult to all-American patriotism. He was an easy target.

Not Taylor Swift. Not an attractive, wildly popular, White, female country-pop crossover singer-songwriter following her heart. 

I fully accept the criticism some make of this blog that I give too much attention to facile impressions instead of serious matters of policy. Yes. I consider that criticism evidence not that these impressions are unimportant, but rather than their effects are unacknowledged and therefore especially powerful. Impressions do not operate on a rational mind considering denoted content. The impressions aren't conscious. We have a gut reaction to this MAGA attack.

Trump and his allies are sending out a simple message that they are wacko.

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The president denies an election -- in Guatemala

Democracies end when leaders refuse to honor an election they lose.

Readers will notice the parallels. 

There is a lost election, a president who won't leave, a Congress with members loyal to the leader, an effort to delay an inauguration, and a Guatemalan version of Taylor Swift, a young woman with a huge social media following, who motivates young voters.

The problems at our southern border don't "just happen." People in Guatemala are fleeing something.

Jack Mullen spent his youth in Medford, Oregon. He joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Oregon. He cited the summer months working alongside me thinning and picking pears as "agricultural experience," and the Peace Corps assigned him to Guatemala where he grew crop demonstration plots. He wrote me this introduction to his Guest Post.

"My Guatemalan years, 1970-72, were rather uneventful by recent Guatemalan standards. Then-President General Carlos Arana Osorio's benign neglect towards rural Guatemala meant that I, and other Peace Corps volunteers, worked in a peaceful environment, largely unaware of national politics.

The government's benign neglect ended in the 1980s, long after I left, when militias, along with the Guatemalan army, and with the tacit approval of the Reagan administration, destroyed over 600 villages and killed over 200,000 inhabitants, mostly women and children. Many fled to Mexico, and years later to the U.S.

For those concerned with long-term solutions to our border policies, I feel the Biden administration's efforts to uphold Guatemala's recent election of Bernardo Arévalo will play a role in keeping Guatemalans from fleeing their country. Most of the people I worked with in Guatemala in years past feel the same."

Jack Mullen in New York City

 Guest Post by Jack Mullen 

One of the Western Hemisphere’s most corrupt countries, Guatemala, with help from the Biden Administration, is now, of all places, a beacon for democracy.

The history of Guatemala’s governance ever since the 1954 U.S.-led military coup has been nothing more than a series of shady politicians, backed by a corrupt military, all in the service of the country’s oligarchy.

Last year, in the words of one diplomat, Cinderella arrived.

As I noted in the December 18 Guest Post, an unusual new political force, voters under the age of 30, along with disadvantaged Mayan indigenous groups, worked together to give an anti-corruption congressman, 65-year old Bernardo Arévalo, a landslide Guatemalan presidential election victory with 61% of the vote.

The five months between the August elections and Arévalo’s planned January inauguration provided ample time for Guatemalan election-deniers to swing into action.

Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras’ investigators raided the national electoral offices, seized boxes of vote tallies, and declared the election a fraud. Members of Arévalo's newly-created Semilla (Seed) Party, including Marcela Blanco, the local TikTok dancer who inspired so many young Guatemalans to vote, were arrested.

Photo from Blanco's Instagram account

An October nationwide strike by students and indigenous Mayan groups actually scared a number, but not enough, of Guatemalan elites into accepting the August election results. On November 30 the Guatemalan Congress stripped the immunity from four of the top electoral judges, causing them to flee the country in fear for their lives.

Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley, along with Senators Tim Kaine and Peter Welch, flew to Guatemala. On December 8, the three senators pressed President Alejandro Giammattei’s cabinet to respect the democratic transfer of power. The Cabinet agreed. However, short hours later, a Guatemalan prosecutor and the Guatemalan Congress declared the August election “null and void.”

The U.S. State and Treasury Departments flew into action. The State Department cancelled visas for two-thirds of the members of the Guatemalan Congress and the U.S. Treasury applied the Magnitsky Act and froze U.S. assets of various Guatemalan oligarchs.

This was unlike anything the U.S. government had done in the past. The Giammattei administration had developed close ties with the President Trump. The Trump administration remained silent when Giammattei closed down an American-funded anti-corruption commission.

A huge, early crowd packed the National Plaza on January 14 to witness the noontime swearing in of Bernardo Arévalo as Guatemala’s president. Not so surprising, Guatemala’s Congress held a secret special session with the intent of postponing the inauguration.

Arévalo’s noon swearing-in was postponed. Arévalo could not be found. The disappointed crowd, many of whom had come from the far reaches of the country, grew anxious. As the sun set with the Guatemalan army surrounding the crowd in the plaza, still no sign of Arévalo. I don’t know what went on during the secret meeting of the Guatemalan Congress, but shortly after midnight, Arévalo was sworn-in as president of Guatemala. I’d like to think that inside the walls of the corrupt Congress, a Guatemalan Mike Pence upheld the legitimate results of the election.

Guatemala is treated as a small speck on the world stage. The Guatemalan narrative deserved much fuller coverage by the U.S. press. An engaged electorate rose up, and against all odds, and with a big boost from Gen Z voters, stopped authoritarianism in its tracks.

Meanwhile, inside the U.S., a general ennui encases young U.S. voters. The overriding issue with them is the age of the presidential candidates, so why bother to get involved and vote?

Democracies die either by a coup d’etat or by an uncaring electorate. The U.S. must not fall asleep, otherwise historians will write: Democracy 2023-24, when Guatemala woke up and America slept.

 

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