Before The American Revolution, Native Nations Guarded Their Societies Against Tyranny

An artist’s depiction of life in Cahokia. Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

BY KATHLEEN DUVAL

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH

CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy.

They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But as I discuss with Ken Burns in his new documentary, “The American Revolution,” there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans.

Although most Americans today don’t know it, there were large centralized civilizations across much of North America in the 10th through 12th centuries. They built massive cities and grand irrigation projects across the continent. Twelfth-century Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi River, had a central city about the size of London at the time. The sprawling 12th-century civilization of the Huhugam had several cities of more than 10,000 people and a total population of perhaps 50,000 in the Southwestern desert.

The ruins of these constructions remain, more than 1,000 years later, in places as far-flung as Phoenix, St. Louis and north Georgia.

The American Colonists and founders thought Native American societies were simple and primitive – but they were not. As research has found, including my own, and as I explain in my book, “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to checking and balancing power.

Powerful rulers led many of these civilizations, combining political and religious power, much as monarchs of Europe in later centuries would claim a divine right to rule.

In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began, which has been called the Little Ice Age. In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people. Elites began hoarding wealth. The people wanted change.

Spreading out

The residents of North America’s great cities responded to these stresses by reversing the centralization of power and wealth. Some revolted against their leaders. Others simply left the cities and spread out into smaller towns and farms. All across the continent, they built smaller, more democratic and more egalitarian societies.

Huge numbers left Cahokia’s realm entirely. They found places that still had game to hunt and woods full of trees for firewood and building, both of which had declined near Cahokia due to its rapid growth.

The population of the central city of Cahokia fell from perhaps 20,000 people to only 3,000 by 1275. At some point the elite left as well, and by the late 15th century the cities of Cahokia’s realm were completely gone.

Encouraging engaged democracy

As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making.

These societies intentionally created balanced power structures. For example, the oral history of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace.

Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils.

An ideal of leadership

Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was.

They strove for consensus, though they didn’t always achieve it. In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others.

Leaders generally governed by facilitating decision-making in council meetings and public gatherings. They gave gifts to encourage cooperation. They heard disputes between neighbors over land and resources and helped to resolve them. Power and prestige came to lie not in amassing wealth but in assuring that the wealth was shared wisely. Leaders earned support in part by being good providers.

‘Calm deliberation’

The Native American democracy that the U.S. founders were most likely to know about was the Iroquois Confederacy. They call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the “people of the longhouse,” because the nations of the confederacy have to get along like multiple families in a longhouse.

In their carefully balanced system, women ran the clans, which were responsible for local decisions about land use and town planning. Men were the representatives of their clans and nations in the Haudenosaunee council, which made decisions for the confederacy as a whole. Each council member, called a royaner, was chosen by a clan mother.

The Haudenosaunee Great Law holds a royaner to a high standard: “The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans – which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will.” In council, “all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.”

The law said the ideal royaner should always “look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.”

Of course, people do not always live up to their values, but the laws and traditions of Native nations encouraged peaceful discussion and broad-mindedness. Many Europeans were struck by the difference. The French explorer La Salle in 1678 noted with admiration of the Haudenosaunee that “in important meetings, they discuss without raising their voices and without getting angry.”

Politicians, government officials and everyday Americans might find inspiration in the models of democracy created by Native Americans centuries ago. There was an additional ingredient to the political and social balance: Leaders looked ahead and sought to protect the well-being of every person, even those not yet born. The people, in exchange, had a responsibility to not enmesh their royaners in less serious matters, which the Haudenosaunee Great Law called “trivial affairs.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

What Could Have Stopped Hitler — And Didn’t

The German foreign minister Walter Rathenau was everything the Weimar Republic’s nationalist right wing hated: Jewish, rich, a staunch supporter of the young German democracy and actively working for reparations with the Allies. He was murdered in 1922. Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

BY CASEY SCHWARTZ

On a rainy morning in June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister, rode out of his Berlin villa in an open convertible. As his chauffeur slowed at a curve, a second car overtook them. A man in a long leather coat raised his pistol and shot Rathenau five times. For good measure, a second assassin threw a hand grenade into Rathenau’s car. The blast lifted the foreign minister from his seat.

Rathenau was everything Germany’s nationalist right wing hated: Jewish, rich, a staunch supporter of the young German democracy and actively working to reach an agreement over World War I reparations with the Allies. His death reverberated throughout the country and beyond. When Franz Kafka heard the news, he bitterly responded that he was surprised the murder hadn’t happened sooner, it was “so very much part of Jewish and German destiny.”

“Political murder was the order of the day in the early Weimar Republic,” the German historian Volker Ullrich writes in his new book, “Fateful Hours.” Violence was a fact of Weimar life. Assassinations, coups, occupation — all of these storms and more hit the young, wobbly German republic in just the first four years of its existence. And yet, not only did the Weimar Republic survive its early challenges, Ullrich argues, but its demise was never inevitable, even as late as January 1933 — the month Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

Ullrich, translated here by Jefferson Chase, is not the first to make this argument; he follows in the footsteps of the many scholars who have set their sights on Weimar over the years, among them Peter Gay, Eric Weitz and, most recently, Harald Jähner. But Ullrich breaks new ground, laying out his case in illuminating granularity, moving inch by inch through the political machinations that began with the establishment of Germany’s first democratically elected government, in 1919, and ended with the chancellorship of Hitler.

And much more so than in any of his previous books, which include a two-volume biography of Hitler, Ullrich explicitly positions “Fateful Hours” as exemplar and warning for our own perilous, norm-shattering times. “It’s in our hands to decide whether democracy fails or survives,” he writes.

Friedrich Ebert, the German democracy’s first president, came from the left. His Social Democrats faced deep-seated opposition: a bulky coalition of discontents forced into unlikely alliances — while the Social Democrats themselves relied on the right-wing Freikorps to put down armed rebellions.

Ullrich emphasizes that the Social Democrats didn’t do enough to fundamentally change German society while they could. By 1925, Ebert was dead, and a former officer of the Imperial German Army, Paul von Hindenburg, had triumphed in the national elections. This victory, celebrated by the right, was one of the major inflection points in the nation’s fate. It would be Hindenburg who appointed Hitler, however reluctantly, to the chancellorship.

Ullrich summons a chorus of eyewitnesses along the way to this apocalyptic outcome, including the noted diarist Victor Klemperer and Sebastian Haffner, whose memoir, “Defying Hitler,” is one of the masterpieces of the era. It is Haffner who gives the most indelible description of the nation-shaking hyperinflation that hit the young republic in 1923. In the face of this profound economic instability, experience and expertise also lost their value, and the young and quick-witted sprang up to displace their elders. “The 21-year-old bank director appeared on the scene,” Haffner wrote. “He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties and supported his embarrassed father.” Haffner, like his contemporaries Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, saw a direct path from the trauma of inflation to the triumph of Nazism exactly 10 years later.

Many histories of the Weimar Republic bask in the cultural fermentation occurring in those years: the extraordinary movements happening in painting, in cinema, in sex. Ullrich barely mentions these aspects of Weimar life, most of which were in any event centered in Berlin. By focusing so narrowly on Germany’s politics, he gives the reader an ominously clear view of the step-by-step buildup to Nazism, and all of the moments it could have been stopped, but wasn’t.

What might have been done to alter its brutal ascension, from the dangerous flexibility of Article 48 to grant rule by emergency decree to the fallout from the Great Depression? Ullrich tells us, insistently, that history is ultimately decided by individual people, while giving a curious minimum of detail as to who these individuals actually were. Of Friedrich Ebert, we hear only that he was formerly a “saddler” whose lack of higher education annoyed the Wilhelmine elites. And this is more character development than we get for most.

Instead, what becomes apparent in Ullrich’s fine-grained political ticktock is how much was decided by chance and luck. For example, Hindenburg’s 1932 decision to dissolve the Brüning cabinet came at a time when the German economy was still in tatters, and the radical National Socialist Party held more appeal to the populace than it might have just two years later when Reichstag elections would have otherwise been held.

Still, though the main players may remain psychologically opaque, the road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out here in gleamingly sinister detail by a historian who knows the period as well as anyone could. And the playbook is only too familiar. One of the Nazis’ first targets was school curriculums. They managed to ban the antiwar classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” three years before Hitler was installed as chancellor in the Reichstag.

The parallels to our own moment aren’t perfect, but they are resonant enough to make us ask, once again, who or what it will take for us to save ourselves.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

What America’s Divided And Tumultuous Politics Of The Late-19th Century Can Teach Us

Can today’s divided America learn something from the divisions of the past? zimmytws, iStock/Getty Images Plus

BY ROBERT A. STRONG

SENIOR FELLOW, MILLER CENTER,

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

People trying to understand politics in the United States today often turn to history for precedents and perspective. Are our current divisions like the ones that preceded the American Revolution or the Civil War? Did the dramatic events of the 1960s generate the same kind of social and political forces seen today? Are there lessons from the past that show us how eras of intense political turmoil eventually subside?

As a scholar of American politics and the presidency, I believe one American historical period is especially worth revisiting in this turbulent moment in the U.S.: the 20 tumultuous years between the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley in the second half of the 19th century.

The two decades between 1876 and 1896 are usually remembered as a time when the cities in the East grew rich and the West was wild – a “Gilded Age” in New York City and gunslingers on the frontier.

It was also a time when Americans struggled with immigration issues, racial injustice, tariff levels, technological change, economic volatility and political violence.

There was even a president, Grover Cleveland, who served two nonconsecutive terms in the White House – the only time that happened before Donald Trump.

In the elections between Grant and McKinley, the nation was closely divided. No president in those years – not Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison – served for two consecutive terms. No presidential candidate won more than 50% of the popular vote, except the Democrat Samuel Tilden. And Tilden, after winning 50.1% of the ballots cast in 1876, lost in the Electoral College. That happened again in 1888 when Cleveland, the first time he was seeking a second term, won the popular vote but failed in the Electoral College.

The narrow victories that characterized presidential politics in the 1870s and 1880s were matched by constant shifts on Capitol Hill. In the 20 years between Grant and McKinley, there were only six years of unified government, when one political party controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the remaining 14 years, presidents encountered opposition in Congress.

The U.S. has the same kind of divided politics today.

Heating up partisanship and raising stakes

President Bill Clinton had two years of unified government; President George W. Bush had less than that. Barack Obama, Donald Trump in his first term and Joe Biden all came into office with party majorities in the House and Senate, and then, like Clinton, their parties lost the House two years later.

Divided politics, with close elections and neither party in power for very long, make partisanship more intense, campaigns harder fought and the stakes sky high whenever voters go to the polls. That’s part of what produced instability in the second half of the 19th century and part of what produces it today.

Divided government is, of course, one of the most powerful “checks” in the constitutional system of checks and balances. Intense competition between political parties can prevent the national government from making rash decisions and serious mistakes. It can sometimes generate compromise.

But there’s a cost. Political division can also allow critical problems to fester for far too long. The dramatic changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution after the Civil War were not seriously addressed in federal legislation until the Progressive Era early in the 20th century.

In the second half of the 19th century, Congress raised or lowered tariffs – depending on which party controlled the White House and Capitol Hill. The nation debated immigration but only once passed meaningful legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A long list of issues connected to railroads, banks, currency, civil service, corruption and the implementation of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments were ignored or only partially addressed.

When major legislation was passed in 1883 to create a merit-based civil service – reforming the spoils system of political appointments – it passed because Garfield’s 1881 assassination by a disgruntled federal job seeker temporarily pushed the issue to the top of the national agenda.
Immigration, fake news and riots

Political violence accompanied the period of closely divided national elections in the 1870s and 1880s.

In the 1880 presidential campaign, both candidates – the Republican, Garfield, and the Democrat, Winfield Hancock – called for restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States. Neither supported the complete ban that many Westerners wanted.

But just before Americans went to the polls, newspapers across the country printed a letter, allegedly written and signed by Garfield, that endorsed an open border to Chinese immigrants. Before anyone could learn that the letter was a fake, there was public uproar. In Denver, an angry mob burned down all the homes in Chinese neighborhoods.

There were more incidents of political violence: anti-Chinese riots in Los Angeles in 1871, in San Francisco in 1877 and in Seattle in 1886.

Throughout the 1880s, anti-immigrant nativists targeted immigrants from Italy and sometimes vandalized Catholic churches.

Political violence in the South successfully suppressed Black voting rights and reestablished white control of state and local politics.

Realignment

Political division in the second half of the 19th century produced more problems than solutions. How and when did it end, or become less intense?

The simple answer is what political scientists call a “realignment,” a major shift in national electoral patterns.

In 1893, the first year of Cleveland’s second term, the nation suffered a financial crisis followed by a severe economic depression. As a result, McKinley was able to win solid victories in 1896 and 1900 and build a Republican coalition that dominated presidential politics until the election in 1932 of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.

It’s not hard to imagine how an economic disaster, or a crisis of some kind, could shake the country out of a period of closely divided politics. But that’s a painful way of building a higher level of national unity.

Can it happen when large numbers of voters get thoroughly frustrated by languishing issues, swings back and forth in Washington, nasty elections and rising political violence?

Perhaps.

But either way – responding to crisis or finding a public change of heart – is a reminder that voters are the ultimate arbiters in a functioning democracy. Today, as in late-19th-century America, elections make a difference. They can mark continued division or they can take the nation in a new, and perhaps more unified, direction.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Can The World Prevent A Genocide In Sudan?

A woman from El Fasher at a displacement camp in the Darfur region of Sudan in late October. Mohammed Jammal/UNICEF/AP

BY PHILIPP KASTNER

SENIOR LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL LAW,

THE UN IVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Two years ago, a power struggle erupted between two factions of Sudan’s military. Today, this conflict is spiralling out of control, with thousands being killed in what a United Nations report has called “slaughterhouses”.

Last week, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling Sudan’s army, captured the city of El Fasher, the last hold-out in the western Darfur region held by the military.

Soon after, reports of ethnically motivated massacres emerged. The World Health Organization said 460 people were killed in just one incident at the city’s hospital. Witnesses described widespread executions and sexual violence targeting certain ethnic groups.

A UN fact-finding mission found already last year that both sides in the conflict have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Rights groups and analysts are now sounding the alarm about a possible genocide taking place. Some say the killings are reminiscent of the start of the Rwanda genocide in 1994, which killed a staggering 800,000 people.

The atrocities are also following the same troubling pattern as in Darfur 20 years ago, which killed an estimated 300,000 people.

Back then, celebrity activists such as George Clooney helped put Darfur on the map. It became a major foreign policy issue in the United States, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. The genocide in Rwanda was still relatively fresh in people’s minds. The slogan “never again” was still taken somewhat seriously.

The global attention eventually led the International Criminal Court to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for allegedly directing the campaign of mass killings in Darfur, the first sitting head of state to be indicted.

Sudan is now home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Hundreds of thousands have been killed since 2023, 12 million people have been displaced and 21 million people face what the UN calls “high levels of acute food insecurity”.

Yet, compared to the early 2000s, the international community has been largely silent.

Why global attention matters

It would be tempting to say the wars and suffering in Gaza and Ukraine have overshadowed Sudan in the minds of global leaders and concerned citizens alike. But this does not mean the world can’t do anything.

Global awareness did not solve anything by itself in Darfur 20 years ago, but it was a first step. It led to the eventual deployment of a peacekeeping mission by the United Nations and the African Union.

The mission was too small and limited, but it showed that international peacekeepers can still have a positive impact in the 21st century. They can monitor ceasefires, implement disarmament programs, protect civilians and prevent further escalations of violence.

More attention – and pressure – also needs to be placed on the external actors supporting both sides in the current conflict. These countries are pursuing their own strategic interests in Sudan and consider the power struggle a chance to increase their influence in the region and exert control over Sudan’s natural resources.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are backed by Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Russia. The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has been accused of funding and providing weapons to the Rapid Support Forces in clear violation of an arms embargo.

While these countries deny arming both sides, rights groups say a flood of weapons has nonetheless entered the country. The United Arab Emirates, in particular, is accused of covertly supplying drones, howitzers, heavy machine guns and mortars to RSF fighters in Darfur.

The United Arab Emirates has only just started to distance itself from the RSF following the recent atrocities in El Fasher.

What’s needed to bring peace

A ceasefire must urgently be agreed to, so humanitarian corridors can be opened to allow aid organisations to do their work.

All outside military support to the warring parties must end immediately. The current arms embargo is too limited and has been poorly implemented – it needs to be strengthened.

And more sanctions should be imposed, especially on the perpetrators reportedly responsible for international crimes. In January, the Biden administration levied sanctions on the RSF commander and several UAE-based companies supporting him – these must now be expanded.

This would make it more difficult for Sudan’s lucrative gold trade to continue to be used by both sides to sustain the war.

For the peace to hold in the long term, both sides must also agree on a mechanism to disarm or integrate the RSF fighters into the regular forces.

Establishing some form of justice and reconciliation process can also contribute to preventing further violence. This sends a clear signal that committing crimes will not be rewarded. It can also help communities heal and give peace a better chance.

Nothing of this sort has really happened in Darfur over the past couple decades. Instead, political actors continued to exploit and aggravate ethnic tensions. The RSF, in particular, has recruited fighters from the infamous Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur atrocities in the early 2000s.

A further complication is the increasing fragmentation of the situation, as the Sudanese Armed Forces and RSF are not perfectly integrated armies. They do not have centralised control over their various coalitions of fighters.

This means that while getting the leaders to agree on a ceasefire is important, it may not be sufficient.

As a result, peace initiatives must include local agreements with individual rebel leaders and smaller factions of fighters, which can greatly increase the security of the population in particular areas.

To be clear, lasting peace does not come from some miracle peacemaker. In fact, nothing tangible came out of previous attempts at peace talks aimed at ending the conflict this year.

But this is where other actors can play an important role. The United Arab Emirates, for example, may now feel pressured to exert a more positive influence on the RSF and urge it to come to the negotiating table. The same applies to Egypt and the Sudanese Armed Forces.

And a more comprehensive plan then needs to be worked out, ideally through an international organisation like the United Nations or the African Union, with the goal of empowering the people of Sudan to make their own political decisions.

Sudan is a stark reminder that making lasting peace takes huge efforts. The devastating situation in the country demands the world keep trying.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Overwhelm The Public With Muzzle-Velocity Headlines: A Strategy Rooted In Racism And Authoritarianism

The seemingly unending barrage of stressful news is a strategy with ties to the past. zimmytws/iStock via Getty Images

BY ANGIE CHUANG

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM,

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

The headlines documenting President Donald Trump’s plan to send federal troops to San Francisco followed a familiar arc. “Trump claims ‘unquestioned power’ in vow to send troops to San Francisco,” The Guardian reported on Oct. 20, 2025. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle blared: “S.F. threatens to sue if Trump brings in National Guard.” Then, on Oct. 23, “Trump reverses his decision to send troops to San Francisco,” as ABC News put it, after Trump posted that conversations with the city’s mayor and tech moguls had swayed him.

It was another example of how Trump’s shifting policy positions, racially inflammatory statements and threats frequently fuel a flurry of headlines, reflecting what some psychologists are calling “media saturation overload” or “Trump stress disorder.”

This barrage of information may seem like overcommunication from a hyperactive administration. But it is much more than that.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Meanwhile, many journalists have openly acknowledged fatigue with the pace and nature of the Trump administrations’ news cycles, amid frequent newsroom layoffs, mergers and closures.

I am a longtime journalist and now scholar of journalism and race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’ press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement. They are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.

Headlines at ‘muzzle velocity’

The Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies include claiming victim status while often laying blame on immigrants or other scapegoats in ways that I believe betray racist intent. At the same time it has overwhelmed journalists and the public with breaking news.

This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon, an influential Trump supporter and strategist in his first administration, during a 2019 PBS “Frontline” interview, when he described the media as “the opposition party.”

“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. … Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Bannon has long been associated with the alt-right, a movement known for rhetorical tactics that minimize and obfuscate its true aims.

A strategy forged in Trump’s first term

As I detail in my book, “American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging,” Trump and his key advisers have been developing, refining and ramping up their news media manipulation for a long time.

An early example of this is the way the administration used these tactics through Trump’s public responses to the fatal violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The two-day rally was organized by a white nationalist blogger and attended by members of neo-Nazi, white supremacist and far-right militias protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park. They marched with tiki torches, flew Confederate and Nazi flags and chanted antisemitic and racist slogans.

Amid violent clashes with counterprotesters on the second day, a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring many others.

My study of television news coverage of Unite the Right found that the majority of news reports focused on the contradictory and inflammatory statements that Trump made about the antisemitic and racist protesters. Trump’s Aug. 15, 2017, press conference remark about blame on both sides after what happened garnered the most news media attention: “I think there is blame on both sides,” he said. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

Exploiting chaos

The uncertainty surrounding what he meant created a cycle of news stories implying and denying that he sympathizes with white supremacists.

This is-he-or-isn’t-he intrigue spurred a surge of what fits the description of Bannon’s “muzzle-velocity” news headlines: “Trump declares ‘racism is evil’ amid pressure over Charlottesville” followed closely by “Trump defends White-nationalist protesters” and “Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Charlottesville.”

With the focus on Trump’s comments and what he might have really meant, the news media ultimately missed covering at the time the long-term threat posed by these white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Echoing a playbook from the past

Scholars have identified the fascist roots of these “post-truth” strategies: strongmen leaders uninterested in establishing leadership through honesty and transparency.

A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the second-term president is overwhelming the public into “organized despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s Germany.

A 2019 analysis of Trump’s narrative style describes how he presents himself as a “strongman” fighting invisible forces of censorship and suppression. It also points out that this was part of the appeal of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.

Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics in the German press such as name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition – communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers, radio, film and posters.

A key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy is using race without directly referring to it. For example, Trump has described cities with large nonwhite populations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago as “out of control” or “dirty,” contrary to actual crime statistics. He’s also questioned Kamala Harris’ racial identity, suggesting she “happened to turn Black.” And referring to Black football players who had been protesting systemic racism by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump said, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” which many observers interpreted as racist because he was insulting people of color for the act of protesting racism.

This racial coding has been used by white supremacist groups to mask their true intent. They also use less overt labels such as “alt-right” or “pro-white” as a “rhetorical bridge” to the mainstream public.

In the case of the NFL protesters, the plausible deniability became an actual denial. Trump perfected this move when, during a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he said, “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by,” referencing another group accused of thinly veiled racism.

Drowning in headlines

I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in this country as an American.

This media saturation – drowning the public with a thousand Trump-generated headlines – allows his administration to keep dominating and controlling national attention.

But the media-consuming public can use the tools they have to encourage news outlets to better inform the public by identifying the media saturation strategy and reporting on why leaders are using it.

Otherwise, if news consumers let the headline overload do what it’s intended to do, and become overwhelmed and paralyzed, they become pawns in what I consider a ploy to make America less egalitarian and less democratic.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

A Brief History Of Congressional Oversight, From Revolutionary War Financing To Pam Bondi

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota speaks at an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 7, 2025. AP Photo/Allison Robbert

BY GIBBS KNOTTS

PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE,

COASTAL CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

Routine congressional oversight hearings usually don’t make headlines. Historically, these often low-key events have been the sorts of things you catch only on C-SPAN – procedural, polite and largely ignored outside the Beltway.

But their tone has shifted dramatically during the second Trump administration.

When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 7, 2025, what took place was a contentious, highly partisan, made-for-TV-and-social-media confrontation.

The hearing occurred on the heels of the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, which many legal experts view as an example of a president targeting his political enemies. Bondi came ready to fight. She refused to answer many questions from Democrats, instead launching personal attacks against these members of the U.S. Senate.

When Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, asked about the deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago, Bondi retorted, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.” The clip went viral, as Bondi likely intended.

From our perspective as political scientists who study the U.S. Congress, congressional oversight has played an important role in American democracy. Here’s a brief history.

Inquisitory powers

In simple terms, oversight is the ability of Congress to ensure that the laws it passes are faithfully executed. This generally means asking questions, demanding information, convening hearings and holding the executive branch accountable for its actions.

Oversight isn’t specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, which lists the powers of Congress, includes the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper,” without identifying an oversight role. Once laws are enacted, Article 2, Section 3, states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

However, the framers viewed congressional oversight as a key component of legislative authority. They wanted presidents to take Congress seriously and structured the Constitution to ensure that the executive would be accountable to the legislature. As James Madison urged in Federalist 51, the separate branches of government should have the power to keep each other from becoming too powerful. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote.

The framers drew from the examples of the British Parliament and Colonial legislatures. In 1621, Sir Francis Bacon was charged with corruption and impeached as Lord High Chancellor after an investigation by a committee of the British Parliament. And in 1768, the Massachusetts Assembly conducted an investigation of Gov. Francis Bernard that led to a formal request to the King of England for his removal.

At the Federal Convention in 1787 that produced the Constitution, Delegate George Mason noted that members of Congress possessed “inquisitory powers” and “must meet frequently to inspect the Conduct of public officials.” Even though this idea was never written down, it was a habit of self-government that early Congresses put into practice.

Early oversight hearings

Congressional oversight began almost as soon as the first Congress met. In 1790, Robert Morris, the superintendent of finances during the Continental Congress and a financier of the American Revolution, asked Congress to investigate his handling of the country’s finances and was exonerated of any wrongdoing.

During this period, congressional investigations were often referred to select committees – bodies created to perform special functions. These panels had the power to issue subpoenas and hold individuals in contempt. Since there was no official record of debates and proceedings, the public relied on newspaper accounts to learn about what had happened.

In March 1792, congressional oversight exposed businessman William Duer, who signed contracts with the War Department but failed to furnish the needed military supplies. This shortfall contributed to a stunning U.S. military defeat against a confederation of Native American tribes in the Northwest Territory.

Congress eventually removed the quartermaster general from his role for mismanaging the contracts. Duer was simultaneously involved in perhaps the first American economic bubble, which burst at the same time as Congress’ hearings. He ended up in a debtor’s prison, where he died in 1799.

Throughout the 19th century, Congress continued to quietly exercise this power. The work was often invisible to the public, but the issues were important. Hearings from December 1861 to May 1865 on the conduct of the U.S. Civil War produced a detailed record of the war, exposed military wrongdoing and condemned slavery. In 1871, the Senate created a select committee to investigate Ku Klux Klan violence during Reconstruction.

Investigating corruption and criminal acts

Congress started to use its oversight power more aggressively in the 1920s with the Senate Committee on Public Land and Surveys’ high-profile investigations into the Teapot Dome scandal.

Hearings revealed that Interior Secretary Albert Bacon Fall had secretly leased federal oil reserves in Wyoming to two private corporations and had received personal loans and gifts from the companies in return.

The investigation found clear evidence of corruption. Fall was indicted and became the first U.S. Cabinet member to be convicted of a felony.

The U.S. Supreme Court helped to shape the legal foundation of congressional oversight. In McGrain v. Daugherty, decided in 1927, the court held that congressional committees could issue subpoenas, force witnesses to testify and hold them in contempt if they fail to appear. Two years later, in Sinclair v. United States, the court ruled that witnesses who lied to Congress could be charged with perjury.

These cases granted the judicial branch’s sanction to what had long been an implied legislative power, cementing the constitutionality of congressional oversight.

Oversight highs and lows

The modern era of congressional oversight has produced some very important reforms – and some truly regrettable spectacles.

The most important example of bipartisan congressional oversight came in response to reporting by The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The two journalists wrote about the 1972 burgling of Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel and subsequent cover-up efforts by the Nixon administration.

On Feb. 7, 1973, the U.S. Senate voted 77-0 to establish a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, which brought together Democrats and Republicans to investigate what came to be known as the “Watergate scandal.” The committee’s work spurred action in Congress to impeach President Richard Nixon, leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and to the enactment of legal reforms to provide an institutional check on presidential power.

Another high point for congressional oversight came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Seeking to learn how the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil had occurred, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss, who chaired the Senate and House Intelligence committees, formed a joint committee to investigate intelligence failures before and after the attacks.

This inquiry produced several important recommendations that were ultimately adopted, including the creation of a director of national intelligence and a Department of Homeland Security, as well as better information sharing among law enforcement agencies.

Congress’ oversight can extend beyond the executive branch when the actions of private actors raise questions about existing laws or spur the need for new ones. As examples, investigations into medical device safety and Enron’s 2001 collapse examined malfeasance in the private sphere that existing regulations failed to prevent.

However, the power to expose corruption can also be used as a tool to score partisan points and generate outrage, rather than holding the executive branch accountable for actual malfeasance. Notably, in the 1950s, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy turned oversight into inquisition and used the power of media to amplify his accusations of communist influence within the federal government.

Democracy needs oversight

Congressional oversight has strengthened the democratic system at many points. But hearings like Bondi’s recent session before the Senate Judiciary Committee aren’t the first, and likely won’t be the last, to substitute sound bites for substance.

As we see it, the problem with allowing oversight to become political theater is that it distracts Congress from quieter and more meaningful oversight work. Slow, procedural work isn’t likely to go viral, but it helps keep government accountable. The task of a deliberate legislative body is to reconcile those very different impulses.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Dick Cheney’s Expansive Vision Of Presidential Power Lives On In Trump’s Agenda

Vice President Dick Cheney appears at a Washington D.C., event in 2007. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

BY GRAHAM G. DOBBS

PROFESSOR OF POLITICSL SCIENCE,

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

Former Vice President Dick Cheney will be remembered for many things. He was arguably the most powerful vice president in American history. He was a paragon of conservatism. He was the architect of many of the more extreme measures in President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

But Cheney’s legacy, after his death on Nov. 4, 2025, will also include a crucial development that dates back a half-century, when he served as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. Based on his experience in the Ford administration, Cheney felt that Congress had overreacted in its efforts to rein in the presidency after the abuses of President Richard Nixon. He thought that the assertive Congress of the 1970s had gone too far and had emasculated the presidency, making it nearly impossible for the president to get things done.

As Cheney told an interviewer in 2005: “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority, that it’s reflected in a number of developments – the War Powers Act. … I am one of those who believe that was an infringement upon the authority of the President. … A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the ’70s served to erode the authority, I think, the President needs to be effective especially in a national security area.”

Cheney’s experience in the Ford years set in place a decades-long effort to enhance presidential power, to reinvigorate an office that he believed Congress had wrongly diminished. When Bush surprisingly picked Cheney to be his vice president in July 2000, Cheney finally had a chance to right that perceived wrong.

Bush was happy to expand his own power, and the Bush administration made bold assertions of presidential power in a variety of areas. In many instances, Bush and others sought to justify his actions by invoking the unitary executive theory, a conservative thesis that calls for total presidential control over the entire executive branch.

Now, nearly two decades later, President Donald Trump is using this theory to push his agenda. He set the tone for his second term by issuing 26 executive orders, four proclamations and 12 memorandums on his first day back in office. The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up.

These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights. He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For some scholars, these actions appear rooted in the psychology of an unrestrained politician with an overdeveloped ego.

But it’s more than that.

As a political science scholar who studies presidential power, I believe Trump’s recent actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory, which is perhaps the most contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades.

A prescription for a potent presidency

In 2017, Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited: “You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive.

Formed by conservative legal theorists in the 1980s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies, the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power.

There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory. And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify. But in its most basic version, the unitary executive theory claims that whatever the federal government does that is executive in nature – from implementing and enforcing laws to managing most of what the federal government does – the president alone should personally control it.

This means the president should have total control over the executive branch, with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees. Put simply, the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will.

The president could boss around the FBI or order the U.S. attorney general to investigate his political opponents, as Trump has done. The president could issue signing statements – a written pronouncement – that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws, like George W. Bush did in 2006 to circumvent a ban on torture. The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates, as Trump has suggested. And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress, as officials argued during Bush’s presidency.

A constitutionally questionable doctrine

A theory is one thing. But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court, it can become governing orthodoxy. It appears to many observers and scholars that Trump’s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more. And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish.

Until recently, the judiciary tended to indirectly address the claims that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory.

During the country’s first two centuries, courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v. U.S. in 1838, which limited presidential control of the postmaster general, and Myers v. U.S. in 1926, which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon.

In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And in Morrison v. Olson the court in 1988 upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire an independent counsel.

Some of those decisions aligned with some unitary executive claims, but others directly repudiated them.

Warming up to a unitary executive

In a series of cases over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has moved in an unambiguously unitarian, pro-presidential direction. In these cases, the court has struck down statutory limits on the president’s ability to remove federal officials, enabling much greater presidential control.

These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing, anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey’s are on increasingly thin ice. In fact, in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2019 concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure was unconstitutional, he articulated his desire to “repudiate” the “erroneous precedent” of Humphrey’s.

Several cases from the court’s emergency docket, or shadow docket, in recent months indicate that other justices share that desire. Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed.

In Trump v. Wilcox, Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Slaughter, all from 2025, the court upheld Trump’s firing of officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Previously, these officials had appeared to be protected from political interference.

Total control

Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents.

In Trump v. Boyle, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent … there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least a reasonable prospect) that we will do so.” And in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority was “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s and finally officially embrace the unitary executive.

In short, the writing is on the wall, and Humphrey’s may soon go the way of Roe v. Wade and other landmark decisions that had guided American life for decades.

As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice, Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called “deep state.” Other conservatives hope it will diminish the government’s regulatory role.

Kagan recently warned it could mean the end of administrative governance – the ways that the federal government provides services, oversees businesses and enforces the law – as we know it:

“Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control. Congress created them … out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties – none of whom a President could remove without cause – would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”

If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive, the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president, a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.

Judicial approval of the unitary executive theory might well have pleased Cheney by enshrining a significant means of enhancing presidential power. But ironically, the former vice president would be displeased for such power to be accessible to the current president, whom Cheney criticized, calling Trump a “threat to our republic.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

All Government Shutdowns Disrupt Science − In 2025, The Consequences Extend Far Beyond A Lapse In Funding

The government shutdown will continue until Congress can pass a bill reopening it. Samuel Corum/AFP via Getty Images

BY KENNETH M. EVANS

FELLOW IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, 

AND INNOVATION POLICY, BAKER

INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY,

RICE UNIVERSITY

U.S. science always suffers during government shutdowns. Funding lapses send government scientists home without pay. Federal agencies suspend new grant opportunities, place expert review panels on hold, and stop collecting and analyzing critical public datasets that tell us about the economy, the environment and public health.

In 2025, the stakes are higher than in past shutdowns.

This shutdown arrives at a time of massive upheaval to American science and innovation driven by President Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to extend executive power and assert political control of scientific institutions.

With the shutdown entering its fifth week, and with no end in sight, the Trump administration’s rapid and contentious changes to federal research policy are rewriting the social contract between the U.S. government and research universities – where the government provides funding and autonomy in exchange for the promise of downstream public benefits.

As a physicist and policy scholar, I both study and have a vested interest in the state of U.S. science funding as a recipient of federal grants. I write about the history and governance of American science policy, including the nation’s investments in research and development.

In the context of broader policy reforms to federal grantmaking, student and high-skilled immigration, and scientific integrity, this shutdown has both known and unknown consequences for the future of U.S. science.

Funding freezes, data gaps and unpaid workers

Over the past two decades, the story of government shutdowns has become all too familiar. Shutdowns occur when Congress fails to pass an appropriations bill before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, and, paraphrasing Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, the government can no longer spend money.

This funding gap affects all but essential government operations, such as the work of postal workers, air traffic controllers and satellite operators. Nonessential employees, including tens of thousands of government scientists, are barred from working and stop receiving paychecks.

With scientists and program officers at home, activities at the nearly two dozen federal agencies participating in research and development, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, come to a halt. New grant opportunities and review panels are postponed or canceled, researchers at government laboratories stop collecting and analyzing data, and university projects reliant on federal funding are put at risk.

Extended shutdowns accelerate the damage. They leave bigger gaps in government data, throw federal employees into debt or lead them to dip into their savings, and force academic institutions to lay off staff paid through government grants and contracts.

Funding, public services and the rule of law

Even for shutdowns lasting a few days, it can take science agencies months to catch up on the backlog of paperwork, paychecks and peer review panels before they return to regular operations.

This year, the government faces mounting challenges to overcome once the shutdown ends: Trump and the director of the White House budget office, Russell Vought, are using the shutdown as an opportunity to “shutter the bureaucracy” and pressure universities to bend to the administration’s ideological positions on topics such as campus speech, gender identity and admission standards.

As the budget standoff nears the record for the longest shutdown ever, agency furloughs, reductions in force, canceled grants and jeopardized infrastructure projects document the devastating and immediate damage to the government’s ability to serve the public.

However, the full impact of the shutdown and the Trump administration’s broader assaults on science to U.S. international competitiveness, economic security and electoral politics could take years to materialize.

In parallel, the dramatic drop in international student enrollment, the financial squeeze facing research institutions, and research security measures to curb foreign interference spell an uncertain future for American higher education.

With neither the White House nor Congress showing signs of reaching a budget deal, Trump continues to test the limits of executive authority, reinterpreting the law – or simply ignoring it.

Earlier in October, Trump redirected unspent research funding to pay furloughed service members before they missed their Oct. 15 paycheck. Changing appropriated funds directly challenges the power vested in Congress – not the president – to control federal spending.

The White House’s promise to fire an additional 10,000 civil servants during the shutdown, its threat to withhold back pay from furloughed workers and its push to end any programs with lapsed funding “not consistent with the President’s priorities” similarly move to broaden presidential power.

Here, the damage to science could snowball. If Trump and Vought chip enough authority away from Congress by making funding decisions or shuttering statutory agencies, the next three years will see an untold amount of impounded, rescinded or repurposed research funds.

Science, democracy and global competition

While technology has long served as a core pillar of national and economic security, science has only recently reemerged as a key driver of greater geopolitical and cultural change.

China’s extraordinary rise in science over the past three decades and its arrival as the United States’ chief technological competitor has upended conventional wisdom that innovation can thrive only in liberal democracies.

The White House’s efforts to centralize federal grantmaking, restrict free speech, erase public data and expand surveillance mirror China’s successful playbook for building scientific capacity while suppressing dissent.

As the shape of the Trump administration’s vision for American science has come into focus, what remains unclear is whether, after the shutdown, it can outcompete China by following its lead.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE