The state of the democratic party

A Flawed "Popular Constitutionalist" Rationale for Disobeying Supreme Court Decisions
Harvard law Prof. Mark Tushnet and political scientist Aaron Belkin urge President Biden to disobey "gravely mistaken" Supreme Court rulings. Doing so would set a dangerous precedent likely to be abused by the right, as well as the left.

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/2...onale-for-disobeying-supreme-court-decisions/

excerpt:

In any event, the flaws in Tushnet and Belkin's argument go far beyond their take on this particular ruling. The course of action they advocate would effectively destroy judicial review. While they urge Biden to disobey Supreme Court decisions only when it comes to "high-stakes rulings that are based on gravely mistaken constitutional interpretations," political partisans will predictably make such claims about every decision they strongly disapprove of. And if one president successfully gets away with defying court decisions, he and his successors are likely to use this tactic whenever they think it politically advantageous to do so. The net effect will be the gutting of judicial review, at least on issues important to the party in power.

Even if you trust Biden to scrupulously differentiate "high-stakes" cases from ordinary ones, and "grave" errors from normal mistakes, I suspect you do not have similar confidence in Donald Trump, or whoever the next GOP president might be.

Tushnet and Belkin acknowledge that their proposal is not "risk-free," because "future GOP administrations would cite it as precedent for ignoring federal courts." But they then minimize this danger because "Republican presidents might well ignore federal courts regardless of what President Biden does," citing the GOP's "failure to hold President Trump accountable for inciting a violent coup."

It is certainly true that Trump—and possibly other future GOP presidents—might use these types of tactics. But they are far more likely to get away with it if Biden sets a precedent for how it can be done. It's worth noting that Trump ultimately failed in his efforts to circumvent court decisions holding that he lost the 2020 election. That's in part because of the continuing strength of the norm against such defiance. If a Democratic president successfully undermines that norm, Trump (or another right-wing authoritarian) can follow the same playbook.

Standard slippery-slope concerns about court-packing apply here, as well. Indeed, executive defiance of court rulings is an even slipperier slope than court-packing because it can be undertaken by the president alone, without the need for new legislation enacted by both houses of Congress. That makes it an even more attractive tool for a would-be strongman.

Undermining judicial review is a standard tactic of incipient illiberal authoritarians, who seek to concentrate power in the executive. American progressives readily see this when it comes to countries like Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and—most recently—Israel. The point applies here at home, too. If you think Trump and other Republicans pose a grave danger to liberal democracy, you should be wary of dismantling one of the major institutions standing in their way. Imagine, for example, if Trump had been able to successfully resist judicial rulings against his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Tushnet and Belkin's references to "MAGA justices" are presumably meant to associate the Supreme Court with Donald Trump's illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies. The MAGA turn has indeed shifted the GOP on major issues, such as immigration, trade, government spending, and others. These changes are among the reasons why I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, despite many reservations about the Democratic Party. And Trump has attacked basic liberal democratic norms far more than any other modern president.

But there is little, if any, distinctive "MAGA" or Trumpist element to the recent Supreme Court rulings that most incense progressives. Abortion, affirmative action, gun rights, the powers of administrative agencies, and conflicts between free speech and antidiscrimination law have been points of contention between left and right for many years.
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more at the link

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023...in-the-american-system-of-government-anymore/

The Left Isn’t Even Pretending to Work within the American System of Government Anymore
‘Popular Constitutionalism’ is merely ‘revolution’ by another name.
By JEFFREY BLEHAR
July 20, 2023 11:50 AM

Friends, allow me to introduce you to a legal scholar you might otherwise be unfamiliar with named Mark Tushnet, professor emeritus of law at Harvard University. Tushnet is notable as one of the leading lights of the critical legal studies movement (CLS), most known for spawning the sub-field of critical race theory. (So don’t worry — it’s just an obscure academic theory, not the sort of thing that insinuated its way into your child’s educational formation over a decade ago while you weren’t paying attention.) Like a bad penny or a Babadook haunting legal conservatives, he just keeps turning up at the most fittingly ominous moments, telegraphing what will next be coming down the pike from the Left.

If you’re familiar with critical race theory — one assumes that readers of National Review have encountered the term at least a few times — then you already understand the basic intellectual approach underpinning CLS: namely, that laws are imposed by society’s economic and racial winners to encode their privilege (the now-ubiquitous term “white privilege” emerged from this academic milieu) and are thus owed zero judicial deference if they are deemed to “uphold oppression” by the sorts of intellectuals and activists who call the tune of the times.

Tushnet is thus also notable as the man who galvanized the conservativelegal community (otherwise extremely dubious about Donald Trump as nominee) in 2016 like few others in recent memory, by publishing a single piece on Yale Law professor Jack Balkin’s blog Balkinization called “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” It remains almost unique in the legal world as a viscerally salivating manifesto of anticipated legal retribution: the plans they had for us if Hillary had won and Scalia, Ginsburg, and Kennedy had been replaced by progressive jurists instead.

I won’t reprint the entire thing, just Tushnet’s six salient bullet points and the selected details which boiled conservative blood across the land:

1 A jurisprudence of “wrong the day it was decided.” Liberals should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided. [. . .] What matters is that overruling key cases also means that a rather large body of doctrine will have to be built from the ground up.

2 The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars. [. . .] For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)

3 Aggressively exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling.

4 Related: Remember that doctrine is a way to empower our allies and weaken theirs.

5 Our models are Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, not David Souter or John Marshall Harlan.

6 Finally (trigger/crudeness alert), f*** Anthony Kennedy.
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It is difficult to overstate the shockwaves that this piece sent through the conservative legal landscape. I remember one colleague here sending it to me back then and saying, “Stuff like this may just end up getting Trump elected.” I laughed at that at the time. He laughed last. While it certainly isn’t what swung Wisconsin and Michigan into the Republican column in 2016, it absolutely played a major role in getting Federalist Society types fully engaged with the administration to ensure sane judicial conservative nominees once Trump shocked the world that November.

So you’ll be pleased to know that Mark Tushnet is back just in time for 2024 and raising eyebrows again with his most recent piece with Aaron Belkin, “An Open Letter to the Biden Administration on Popular Constitutionalism.” No prizes for guessing what “Popular Constitutionalism” means: It is a euphemism for arguing that Joe Biden should just ignore the Supreme Court altogether when it issues a ruling opposed to Democratic policy priorities. No, really, I’m not kidding. That’s the argument in whole:

We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations.

We have worked diligently over the past five years to advocate Supreme Court expansion as a necessary strategy for restoring democracy. Although we continue to support expansion, the threat that MAGA justices pose is so extreme that reforms that do not require Congressional approval are needed at this time, and advocates and experts should encourage President Biden to take immediate action to limit the damage.

The central tenet of the solution that we recommend—Popular Constitutionalism—is that courts do not exercise exclusive authority over constitutional meaning. In practice, a President who disagrees with a court’s interpretation of the Constitution should offer and then follow an alternative interpretation. If voters disagree with the President’s interpretation, they can express their views at the ballot box.
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Read that again! They’re not even trying to disguise the Left’s hunger for raw power anymore. He calls Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett “MAGA justices” and dismisses the Court’s opinions as “MAGA rulings” without even bothering to gesture to an argument as to why their status on the Court is somehow lesser than anyone else’s — it is meant to be understood that “associated with Trump” equals “illegitimate.” This does not even attempt to convincingly impersonate the language of legal argumentation; it is the vulgar branding-focused language of political partisanship. It’s hard to even find substance to kick against in the manifesto, because though it dresses its argument up in the language of legality, it is an explicitly lawless argument: A Democratic president can do what he wants if he feels it’s right, and if there’s a problem, well . . . there will be an election in four years or whatever, the people can “vote” about it then. This isn’t even plebiscitary democracy (which is barely a democracy at all), it’s just a pitch for blunt Caesarism.

To give you a further sense of how laughably threadbare the argumentative effort here is, note Tushnet & Belkin’s risible response to the idea that Republicans might someday use this power themselves: “Popular Constitutionalism in the form of presidential action [is not] risk-free, as future GOP administrations would cite it as precedent for ignoring federal courts. Notably, though, Republican presidents might well ignore federal courts regardless of what President Biden does.” Notably, huh? It’s notable that it occurred to them Republicans might do something (even though they haven’t), and that provides justification for beating them to the punch?

Tushnet’s indifference to even the most blatantly obvious counterarguments is appalling; apparently “Lincoln didn’t like the Dred Scott decision” is sufficient reasoning to justify Joe Biden’s ignoring the Supreme Court whenever it issues an inconvenient ruling — one which curiously omits the Civil War America fought to overturn Scott v. Sanford. And because Tushnet is an intellectual coward contemptuously playing a cynical political game, he fails to mention the one howlingly obvious example in American history where “Popular Constitutionalism” was genuinely put into practice: Andrew Jackson telling the Supreme Court to pound sand as he carted the Cherokee Nation off onto the Trail of Tears. A fine moment in Popular Constitutionalist history, indeed. (Tushnet would console the Indians with the point that they can “register to vote in the next election.”) In other ways, however, maybe this is heartening proof that “wokeness” is receding: After all, we’ve come a long way from renaming Democratic “Jefferson–Jackson” fundraising dinners out of disgust for Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans a decade ago to bringing back “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it” as a key progressive legal doctrine.
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conclusion

I should let this go, but I cannot. The incoherence in this piece is so staggering, so transparently governed by its authors’ political desires, that the one time it even tries to get specific it actively contradicts itself:

For example, President Biden could declare that the Court’s recent decision in the affirmative action cases applies only to selective institutions of higher education and that the Administration will continue to pursue affirmative action in every other context vigorously because it believes that the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong.
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Did you catch that? The one example of a recent case Tushnet and Belkin think Joe Biden should executively overrule or ignore in the name of “Popular Constitutionalism” just so happens to be the case that is extremely popular with the American public. It is, however, not popular among retired socialist Harvard law professors. When regarding the cruel comedy of calling for the president to plunge the nation into its worst crisis since 1861 in order to serve unpopular and illegal elite progressive social priorities in contravention of law an act of “popular constitutionalism,” one can only be reminded of Voltaire’s joke about the Holy Roman Empire.

But of course Tushnet knows this. He is intelligent, is pedigreed, and taught law for years; he surely understands (and evidently enjoys) the pleasures of cynical imposture in politics. He is in fact open about this in other venues; he once famously said that if he were a judge, he would decide every legal ruling on the basis of whether it would “advance the cause of socialism.” That, of course, was not mentioned in this piece, and that’s the depressing point: There is no need for his argument to hang together rationally, other than as a gauzy psychological salve for a certain type of intellectual trying to patiently mainstream the idea of naked overthrow of the American constitutional order to achieve “social justice.”

And it is the wave of the future for progressive legal argumentation, in an era where originalism has intellectually destroyed the idea of an unmoored “living Constitution” and the Supreme Court is dominated by originalism’s adherents. Tushnet’s intellectual journey is wonderfully illustrative of that point; how, as critical legal studies has grown in influence within the academy, it has rapidly decayed into an impulse that no longer expresses itself in ideas, but only in actions or irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. He first came to attention back in the mid aughts for a 2004 piece he wrote on the desirability of what he called “constitutional hardball,” i.e. the act of using political pressure and power grabs to fundamentally alter the American political settlement outside the four corners of the Constitution. For those who registered wariness at the idea, Tushnet granted in his conclusion that “in its most general form, the solution is for political-constitutional actors to behave like grown-ups”:

Consider, for example, the sheer distastefulness of constitutional hardball. That problem could be eliminated after constitutional transformation occurs—after, that is, we emerge from the tunnel into the new constitutional order. Then, the politicians having control of the government can revert to ordinary constitutional politics, and their opponents can, like Eisenhower and Nixon in 1960, play the game on winners’ terms, hoping to pick up a victory or two themselves. If our normative misgivings are founded in simple distaste for constitutional hardball . . . we can take some solace in the possibility that someday the Republicans might win.
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In other words: Suck it up and enjoy sustenance-level table scraps after we cram the revolution down your throats, America. This is the voice of blandly arrogant authoritarianism wrapped in academic garb. It is notable how specifically he addresses the Republican Party — no effort whatsoever is made to deny that he speaks, as a law professor, from an explicitly partisan Democratic perspective. And when the worm did turn against Republicans, when it looked like Trump was set to lead them to electoral disaster in 2016, there Mark Tushnet was proudly preparing to get the Left out of its “defensive crouch,” overturn every federal precedent standing in the way of the progressive-socialist project, and shoot the survivors of the culture wars on sight. It didn’t turn out that way. In 2023, there is amusingly somehow even less pretense — no attempted legal fig-leaf — suggesting that Tushnet failed to take his own earlier advice about finding solace in the possibility that someday Republicans might win.

Why does any of this matter? Viewed one way, Tushnet’s recent piece plausibly reads as the pathetic bleat of a man who has been completely broken intellectually on the wheel of events, all his beautiful dreams torn away from him by the cruel vicissitudes of badly timed elections and retirements. We should mock him and not worry about him, right?

Wrong. He is merely an academic voice saying the quiet part out loud about what I have contended for months is the activist Left’s real aim with regard to the federal judiciary. They recognize that, under the rules of a game they previously dominated, they have lost control of the Court and cannot push federal policy in unconstitutional directions simply by winning elections in the foreseeable future. The overarching goal therefore is to discredit the moral force of the Supreme Court, as a prelude to either expanding it — or doing something even more radical. This is a song we’ll be hearing more of in the future, in the Left’s drive to rewrite America’s structure of government by political demagoguery.
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https://jonathanturley.org/2023/07/...g-for-biden-to-simply-defy-the-supreme-court/

a day ago
The New Authoritarians: How Professors Are Now Calling for Biden to Simply Defy the Supreme Court
by jonathanturley
July 24, 2023

Below is my column in the Hill on the call of professors for President Joe Biden to simply defy the Supreme Court and decide for himself what is constitutional and what is not.

Here is the column:

“I shall resist any illegal federal court order.”

When “the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong,” the president should refuse to follow it.

Those two statements were made roughly 60 years apart. The first is from segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D). The second was made by two liberal professors this month.

In one of the most chilling developments in our history, the left has come to embrace the authoritarian language and logic of segregationists in calling for defiance and radical measures against the Supreme Court.

In a recent open letter, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.” Thus, in light of the court’s bar on the use of race in college admissions, they argue that Biden should just continue to follow his own constitutional interpretation.

The use of the affirmative action case is ironic, since polls have consistently shown that the majority of the public does not support the use of race in college admissions. Indeed, even in the most liberal states, such as California, voters have repeatedly rejected affirmative action in college admissions. Polls further show that a majority support the Supreme Court’s recent decisions.

So despite referenda and polls showing majority support for barring race in admissions, academics are pushing to impose their own values, regardless of the views of the public or of the courts.

However, even if these measures were popular, it would not make them right. It is precisely what segregationists such as Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.) argued, that “all the people of the South are in favor of segregation. And Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, we are going to maintain segregated schools.”

Tushnet and Belkin cite with approval Biden’s declaration that this is “not a normal Supreme Court.” Biden’s view of normalcy appears to be a court that agrees with his fluid view of constitutional law, by which he can forgive roughly a half of trillion dollars in loans or impose a national eviction moratorium without a vote of Congress.

Tushnet and Belkin know their audience. Biden has previously evinced little respect for the Constitution or the courts. Take the eviction case. In an earlier decision, a majority of justices had declared that Biden’s actions were unconstitutional, confirming what many of us had said for months.

Even after the majority declared it unconstitutional, Biden wanted to reissue the national moratorium. White House counsel and most scholars told him the move would be blatantly unconstitutional and defy the express ruling of the court. Instead, he consulted the only law professor willing to tell him what he wanted to hear and did it anyway. It was quickly again declared unconstitutional.

Other commentators and academics have gone from implied to open contempt for our constitutional norms.

Georgetown University Law School Professor Rosa Brooks was celebrated for her appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” after declaring that Americans are “slaves” to the U.S. Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.

MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has questioned the need for a Supreme Court.

In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

So the danger is now “constitutionalism,” as opposed to what Tushnet and Belkin call “popular constitutionalism.”

Many have called for the court to be packed with liberal appointees to bring it back to what Biden views as “normal.” Some of these calls before Biden’s Supreme Court commission echoed the same views as Tushnet and Belkin. Indeed, they cite Harvard professor Nikolas Bowie, who rejected the notion that “the constitutional interpretation held by a majority of Supreme Court justices should be ‘superior’ to the interpretations held by majorities of the other branches.”

The Framers saw the Supreme Court as playing a counter-majoritarian role when it is necessary to protect individual rights and constitutional norms. The alternative is what the Framers viewed as a tyranny of the majority, where popularity rather than principle prevails. For that reason, the Court has often stood with the least popular in our society and, since Marbury v. Madison, has had the final word on what the Constitution means.

Justice Robert Jackson once observed that he and his colleagues “are not final because we are infallible, we are infallible because we are final.”

That finality has been essential to the stability of our system for generations. While presidents such as Andrew Jackson taunted the court for its inability to enforce its rulings without an army, it has never needed one. Respect for the court is in our DNA. No matter our disagreements with a given decision, Americans will not tolerate defiance of the institution and the rule of law. That is why, despite the support for court packing by many law professors (including Tushnet, Belkin and Bowie), the public remains staunchly opposed to it.

What is most striking about these professors is how they continue to claim they are defenders of democracy, yet seek to use unilateral executive authority to defy the courts and, in cases like the tuition forgiveness and affirmative action, the majority of the public. They remain the privileged elite of academia, declaring their values as transcending both constitutional and democratic processes.

The problem is indeed “constitutionalism,” and their view of “popular constitutionalism” is a euphemism for “popular justice.”

Tushnet and Belkin show the release that comes with rejecting constitutionalism. They declare that it is not enough merely to pack the court: “The threat that MAGA justices pose is so extreme that reforms that do not require congressional approval are needed at this time, and advocates and experts should encourage President Biden to take immediate action to limit the damage.”

In other words, they are calling for Biden to declare himself the final arbiter of what the Constitution means and to exercise unilateral executive power without congressional approval. He is to become a government unto himself.

No doubt a new variation of “popular constitutionalism” would then be crafted if a Republican were ever elected and proceeded to mete out an alternative view of justice.

This is what Tushnet has advocated in “taking the Constitution away from the courts.” Once the courts are removed from constitutionalism, however, we will be left where we began centuries ago: with the fleeting satisfaction of popular justice.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law for George Washington University.
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the Democratic Party left me . . .

Pew: Seventy Percent of Democrats and Democratic-Leaning Independents Support Speech Limits

https://jonathanturley.org/2023/07/...c-leaning-independents-support-speech-limits/

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/muslims-vs-democrats-a-story-of-betrayal-hamtramck-gender-ideology-1c775323

Muslims vs. Democrats: A Story of Betrayal
Disputes over sexual ideology put to a test the left’s commitment to cultural diversity.
By Shadi Hamid
July 27, 2023 at 6:16 pm ET

Hamtramck, Mich., a Detroit enclave with 28,000 people, has the first all-Muslim City Council in American history. When it was inaugurated in January 2022, no one expected it to get crosswise with local Democrats. Yet local liberals have erupted against the council in a clash that is a microcosm of the national battle over religious freedom, tolerance, and the future of the Democratic Party.

The council passed a resolution in June prohibiting gay-pride flags from being displayed on city property. Former Mayor Karen Majewski described the decision as a “betrayal.” She and other Democrats felt they deserved gratitude for defending and supporting Muslims against Donald Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries.

The Trump era brought major gains for American Muslims. After Barack Obama largely kept them at arm’s length during his presidency, the Democratic Party embraced Muslims as a core constituency in its patchwork coalition of minority groups. For a time, being loudly and ostentatiously pro-Muslim was a reliable way to signal one’s anti-Trump bona fides. According to a 2016 survey by my Brookings Institution colleague Shibley Telhami, few things predicted partisan affiliation more accurately than attitudes toward Muslims and Islam.

But Muslims who were brought into the Democratic tent didn’t necessarily align themselves with the party’s evolving views. Asma Uddin, in her book “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” describes “a tacit agreement that Muslims, as religious believers, will never challenge any of the rights championed by the Left, such as a progressive vision of gender or sexual equality.” Muslims became an integral part of the party not as a faith community with distinct theological commitments but as a “marginalized” group requiring protection from Republican bigotry.

For a time the bargain appeared to be holding and even solidifying. According to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2007 only 27% of American Muslims said homosexuality should be “accepted by society.” By 2016 that number had jumped to 52%. Many Muslims justified the shift by arguing that while same-sex relationships may be haram—forbidden by Islamic law—they weren’t so under American law.

But during the Trump years, the Democratic Party veered sharply to the left on social and cultural issues. The Republican Party lost interest in Muslims, with Mr. Trump neglecting to antagonize them during his 2020 re-election bid. The new enemy was “wokeness,” and a growing number of Muslims found themselves on the GOP side of that divide. According to the AP VoteCast Survey, as many as 35% of Muslims voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, compared with 8% to 13% in 2016.

The Democratic Party’s cultural turn has intensified. In March the Montgomery County Board of Education—the largest school district in Maryland, in a Democratic stronghold with a significant Muslim population—informed parents that they would no longer be notified when their children were reading from the school’s approved “selection of over 22 LGBTQ+-inclusive texts,” and that no opt-outs would be tolerated. Hundreds of Muslim parents have since sounded out in protest, some of them joining Christians in filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the mandate.

The kind of Islamophobia not so long ago associated with the GOP is now making an appearance among Democrats. Montgomery County Council member Kristin Mink said that this issue casts “some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” In Hamtramck, Ms. Majewski, who lost her re-election bid in 2021, sounded a similar tune: “We supported you when you were threatened—and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

The left’s dismissal of Muslims as bigots echoes old right-wing insinuations that Muslims were more loyal to Shariah than to their country. Yet when Hamtramck’s City Council passed its ordinance, it did so by appealing to love of country and liberal neutrality, letting only national, state, city and prisoner-of-war flags to be flown. Mayor Amer Ghalib argued that the city government should maintain neutrality on contentious religious, racial and political questions.

Republicans doubtless sense an opportunity to make common cause with minorities while driving a wedge in the Democratic coalition. It’s easy enough for the left to dismiss white evangelical Trump supporters. But when the party does the same to Muslims, who for years had been loyal Democrats, it demonstrates its disrespect for actual cultural diversity.

Mr. Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, research professor at Fuller Seminary and author, most recently, of “The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea.”

Appeared in the July 28, 2023, print edition as 'Muslims vs. Democrats: A Story of Betrayal'.



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