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In a recent interview withMSNBC, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt issueda stern warning to Americans who have not yet grasped the nature of our present crisis of democracy. "We have an autocratic movement teeming with violence and the intimations of violence in this country," he said, inviting viewers of the liberal news channel to imagine "that domestic terrorist, that criminal who desecrated the American flag by wrapping it around his head, who committed violence in the name of right-wing extremism."

What is it that he has heard? He has heard that he lives in an occupied country with an illegitimate president who lost the election, who was put into power by millions of fraudulent votes, mostly Black and brown votes out of the inner cities.

Discussing the threat still posed by former President Donald Trump, Schmidt observed that Republicans seem obsessed with "the language of violence, the image of the gun, the idea that their countrymen are their enemies":

So, historically, we knowwhen you put all of that fuel on the groundand you start throwing sparks at it, you can ignite a conflagration, and when you dehumanize people the way that this man and this movement has, in the end, it kills people. Historically, this type of politics has wound up, in its worst excesses, killing tens of millions of people. That's why it's such a frightening moment, and that's why it's time to wake up and understand that we don't have a shortage-of-panic-buttons problem. We have a political extremism problem that is very quickly metastasizing into violent extremism that we'll be dealing with for a generation because of what happened over the last five years.

New polling and other research show that tens of millions of Americans have been radicalized into potentially supporting political violence in order to remove Joe Biden who they perceive as ausurper from office. This is part of alarger pattern where the Republican-fascist movement will support any strategy or tactics they believe will help preservetheir "way of life."

To that point, a new poll from the University ofVirginia's Center for Politics shows that more than 50% of Trump voters would supportsecedingfrom the Union. Given theracial grievance andwhite supremacy politics of Trump's followers, such a course of action could leadto a second American civil war. It is no coincidence that a fair number of Trump's terrorists waved Confederate flags as they attackedthe U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Ultimately, the coup attempt of Januaryisonlya prelude tosimilar events in the future, whenRepublicans and their allies fully intend to overthrow any election they lose, and therefore deemillegitimate. In a much-discussed recent essay at the Washington Post, Robert Kagan summarizes this moment of existential crisis:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial.

We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.

What comes next? Can a full-on collapse of America's democratic institutions and political culture be stopped? Whyhas the mainstream news media consistently normalized the anti-democraticand other politicallydeviant behavior of the Trump regime and the Republican Party? Can the media confront its own culpability in terms of failing to warnthe American people about the rising threat of fascism?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Norm Ornstein,emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the bestselling books "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported" and "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism."

Ornstein has been a guest on numerous cable and broadcastnews outlets, includingCBS News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and "PBS NewsHour."His essays and other writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Foreign Affairs, The Atlanticand other leading publications.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

American democracyand our system of government feels like it's all on the verge of collapse. Thesedeep crises that made Trumpism possiblefeellike a type of national breakdown or crackup. My concern is that once things are this broken, they cannot be put back together again. Help me make sense of these feelings and intuitions.

I believe that it is more broken than anything else. There are several layers of problems here.

One layer is that the Republican Party has really descended into the abyss. It's not a party anymore. It's a cult,a full-blown cult. We could call it a cult of personality, but it was really a cult before Donald Trump came along. He's just the leader right now. We see this, for example, with the fact that literally only two Republican members of Congress were willing to stand up to a violent insurrection and a complete collapse of norms and that is in the House and Senate combined.

Mitch McConnell is saying that if the Republicans recapture the majority in the Senate, he won't vote to seat any Supreme Court nominee from Joe Biden. There is also the COVID response by Republican governors and other elected officials.

This problem is going to get worse before it gets better at the level of elected officials. Every serious candidate that Republicans have for president is going to be saying, "I'm just like Donald Trump, except I'm tougher, meanerand stronger." Anybody who is even to the slightest side towardsanity is going nowhere in today's Republican Party. That is a big problem at the level of elites and across the federal, stateand local levels.

There is also the problem that begins with the leadership of Trumpand extendsdown through Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Laura Ingrahamand many others,including social media more generally. That's the problem of disinformation, misinformationand conspiracy theories.

There is a majorcultural gap that is not going away anytime soon. For example, 30% of the Republicans basically say that violence is appropriate if people are supposedly trying to "destroy your way of life."In this case, "destroying your way of life" meansbasically doing anything that does not protect white people first.

Then you've got the fact that there'snot just voter suppression, but that direct attempts to overturn the results of lawful and fair elections are running rampant.

We are also seeing a Supreme Court that willbasicallyprovide no boundaries. There is the farce of having the most extreme partisan justices saying, "Well, it's ridiculous to think that decisions are made on the basis of personal views or partisanship." These Supreme Court justices are not only partisans, they are liars.

We can mitigatesome of these problems with election and voting reform. We can also reform the laws that enabled Donald Trump to use executive power in misguided ways. But ultimately, I would say the system is broken.

Why do America's political elites,especially thepundit class,keep treating these "revelations" about Trump and his regime's criminality and attacks on democracyas something surprising? The coup attempt and attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 were all obvious and threatened in public by Trump and his followers.

The sheer volume of scandals dilutes the impact of each of them singularly and together. Most people don't pay close attention, day to day,to what's going on. When you see a scandal become something of political consequenceis when it gets hammered away at, day after day and week after week. That can be a real scandal or a faux scandal.

An example would be the Afghanistan withdrawal. The American news media were all over that story for 10 days. Almost all of the coverage was harshly critical. For a large number of Americans who had not really spent three minutes thinking about Afghanistan previously, the story is processed as being something terrible that happened all of a sudden.

The signal that goes out to the general public is that if something is discussed on the front page on a regular basis, or on the cable news programs and the Sunday programs, overand overand over again,it must therefore be something serious and important. If a news story comes up and thendisappears the next day, that must mean it is not important.

There is an obsession with being "neutral" and doing the "both sides" type of coverage. They do not know how to treat abnormal behavior, therefore the American news media largely normalizes it. And there's a certain amount of bandwidth that news organizations are going to give to stories about a presidentor a president's familyor an administration. If there are 20 stories, 19 of them are not going to get covered and the 20thstory will soon be superseded by another one that comes along.

We are also in a situation where the mainstream news media wants to show equal treatment, which means they take a president likeJoe Biden, who doesn't have scandals of any significance, and then blow them up by using the same amount of bandwidth as was used to cover Donald Trump. That story on Biden has more resonance because there is only one such story to focus on.

So many members of the media kept denying even the possibility that Trump and his regime would attempt a coup. They were openly contemptuous of voices who kept trying to warn the public about what was obvious and imminent. Will those individuals and organizations in themediaever publicly explain or apologize for their failings in terms of Jan. 6 and the Trump eramore generally?

The New York Times, just days before the 2016 election, hada front-page, above-the-fold story saying that the FBI says there is no evidence of Russian connections to Trump's campaign. That story had a big impact. Whoever in the FBI gave the Times that story lied. Now, does the Times out the person who lied?

If you have a source and the bargain is that they will remain anonymous if they give you significant information,and they lie to you, that bargain is broken.Has the New York Times ever apologized for publishing an utterly inaccurate and distorted and deceptive story that could have turned the election? No, of course not. Are there news organizations that are willing to apologize for their failures or their misleading stories? No. If you get a story on the front page that's wrong and you show factually that it's wrong, you'll get a correction somewhere inside.

This notion that a news organization never explains and never apologizes unless they are under threat of a lawsuit that could cost them large sums of money is deeply ingrainedin the DNA of journalism. This is especially true of large and highly influential news organizations. If they are wrong about a major story because they just didn't get what was going on, not because they published something that was flat out wrong the likelihood that you'll get an apology or that they'll learn a lesson from it or do anything about it is zero.

It is one thing to make mistakes and or do false equivalents on the small stuff. When a country is at a point where it iscrystal clear that the fundamentals of your political system are on the cusp of being destroyed, the first thing that will happen, ifand when those democratic norms and institutions are gone, is that the free press will no longer exist. We have seen that with every authoritarian society. So the failure to change, to understandand to be blunt about the reality of what's happening in this country is not just reckless for the American people. It is suicidal for the news media. In the end, that just shows how ingrained these practices I outlined above are.

For Black and brown folks, poor and working-class folks, women as a group, gays and lesbians, undocumented peopleand other marginalized folks, none of this isan abstraction. America's democracy crisis and the rising fascist tide areliterallya matter of life and death for those communities. But so many in the media elite are members of a social milieuwhere they are deeply invested in the system and have convinced themselves that they are immune from these threats. Is it that simple?

In general, it is just denial. It's denial and it is also just an unwillingness or inability to change decades-long patterns of behavior. In terms of the reporters who cover the White House and Congress, their own careers are tied to access. They pal around with the people they cover. I see not just Manchin and Sinemabut many others talking about their "Republican friends" and how they can all get along. I know a lot of these Republicans. I've had meals with many of them.

There are some who are really kind of fun to be around not the completely crazy ones but othershave gone along with all of the bad behavior. You can get lulled into thinking that is all just temporary, orthat the Republicans really don't believe these extreme things. You can convince yourself that it's only asmall fringe group doing such things. It distracts a person who operates in this political insider world that the Republicans vote for these policies repeatedly. They protect each other and they're all in on the cult.

There is another disconnect as well. So many members of this political class I am describing have never faced discrimination. It is just not on their radar screens in the same way aspeople who have. They're not sensitive to it. How can you not look at what we have seen, with a violent coup and everything else that's followed, and not recognize that you are at risk of racism and nativism?

People who have had in their family histories a history of discrimination and worseare going to be more sensitive to the path that's being taken here in this country and sensitive to the reality that this is the same roadmap that we saw in Germany.

But even for a whole lot of journalists who are or should be in that category, it gets superseded by the way in which they do their own business. To me, that is as sad as anything else.

Is American democracy and its political culture and governmental systemfacinga legitimacy crisis?

Yes, the United States is experiencing a legitimacy crisis. One recentprominent example: the Arizona fraudulent "audit" says that Biden "won."

How do I analyze that? What it says to me is this is the setup for the next election. What is going to happen is that the Republicans and their agents will say, "We, we did it fair and square so we can do the same thing all over again." And thenthey'll bring in the Cyber Ninjas or whoever and overturn the results of the next election.

The Trumpists and other Republicans have completely undermined the legitimacy of elections by targeting election workers as well.

The events of Jan.6were also at attack on the legitimacy of Congress. Gerrymandering, and the waythe Senate does not properly represent the will of the American people arealso a part of the country's legitimacy crisis.

For example, 30% of Americans will elect 70 senators. Those 30% of the population are in no wayrepresentative of the diversity of the country or its economic dynamism.

Those senators will not be representative of the country, and they are not going to be sensitive to the concerns of a large number of Americans. Over time, this notion that you voteand you're supposed to end up with representatives who will reflect the larger public's needs and views is going to disappear.

There is also the Electoral College, which is growing more and more distorted. Even if the elections are fair, it means there's a greater likelihood that we will elect, several more times, presidents who lose the popular vote, perhaps bymillions of votes.

At some point the majority of Americans are going to see those presidential elections as illegitimate.We've got crises all over the place in this country and society.

Excerpt from:
Norm Ornstein on the crisis of democracy: "This is the same roadmap we saw in Germany" - Salon

Perhaps the U.S. Senate should be restructured to eliminate the disproportionate power of less-populous states. (Senate Television)

Recently a White House commission heard testimony on a controversial proposal to strip the U.S. Supreme Court of its power to rule on the constitutionality of American laws. The court has grown too powerful and undemocratic, several witnesses said.

A few weeks later, a legal scholar wrote that it was time to lengthen the ludicrously short two-year terms that members of the House of Representatives serve under the Constitution. Little can get done, he wrote, in an atmosphere of perpetual campaigning.

Around the country, there are conversations underway about how the U.S. Senate could be restructured so that it doesnt allot the same number of senators two to a state like Wyoming, which has fewer than 600,000 people, as it does to California, which has nearly 40 million people. The current system leaves millions of Americans grossly underrepresented.

Theres also talk of doing away with the electoral college, of banning corporate money from politics, of breaking up the biggest states (Los Angeles County could become the countrys eighth-largest state!), of depoliticizing redistricting and of allowing noncitizens to vote.

Many of the proposals are old ones, long backed by frustrated academics and head-in-the-clouds idealists, but in my circles at least, I hear a new sense of urgency for radical, structural change in the government.

Is it any surprise?

The country is in the grips of crisis, stuck, incapable of moving forward. Presidents cant fulfill their agendas. Congress cant agree on legislation. The Supreme Court is deeply politicized. Were still reeling from four years under President Trump, who trampled on democracy and its rules. Bipartisanship is pass.

Problems as serious as the climate crisis, economic inequality and racial injustice, and problems as simple and uncontroversial as rebuilding crumbling infrastructure and covering our national debts, seem insuperable in the face of partisanship and enmity.

Its no wonder Americans are eager to reinvent or reinvigorate democracy.

Story continues

Id like to tell you that change is coming. Many of the proposals, after all, would improve our lot. The electoral college is an anachronism of course the presidency should go to the candidate who wins the most votes. The structure of the Senate is a glaring violation of the principle of one-person, one-vote; the result of a deal from 1787 that badly needs reassessment.

But ironically, at a time when people are willing to consider big changes, big changes may be more distant than ever.

Truly substantive reforms eliminating the electoral college or remaking the Senate, for instance, or undoing the Citizens United decision would require amending the U.S. Constitution.

Well, great, you might think thats why we have an amendment process, to keep the 234-year-old Constitution up to date with the modern world. Lets get started.

But dont get overexcited. In the 50 years since 1971, only one constitutional amendment has been approved, a relatively insignificant one about when congressional pay changes can go into effect. The amendment before that extending the vote to 18-year-olds could never succeed in todays partisan environment because it would be likely to benefit one party over the other.

More than 11,000 amendments have been proposed since 1789, but only 27 have been enacted.

Why so few? Because theyre extremely hard to pass. Too hard. To succeed, a constitutional amendment is usually proposed by a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress. After that it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states (currently, 38 of them). Thats right a double supermajority.

Good luck with that in this political climate. One critic recently went so far as to question whether the U.S. would ever pass a constitutional amendment again, quoting Aziz Rana, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, saying: We have an amendment process thats the hardest in the world to enact.

And if you want to change that amendment process? That requires an amendment.

Even legislative change that could be accomplished by Congress alone for instance, rewriting the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 is virtually impossible in the polarized mess of present-day Washington.

Thats why so many Democrats are focused on eliminating the filibuster, which makes it impossible to pass most legislation without a 60-vote supermajority in the 100-member Senate. Because the filibuster is a Senate rule, it could be abolished relatively easily through procedural maneuvering.

Theoretically.

But not all Democrats agree on doing away with the filibuster, so even finding a majority to do so could be difficult.

Eliminating the filibuster is the kind of change that seems like a great idea when as is now the case for Democrats your party is in power but is not strong enough to surmount the 60-vote threshold. But if you get rid of it, you must be prepared for the consequences when your party loses its majority (which could easily happen to Democrats in the Senate next year). You might come to regret the change.

Many of us were brought up on American exceptionalism and post-World War II braggadocio. It was common to hear the U.S. called the greatest country in the world, and for children to be taught that our Constitution was the most democratic and progressive there was.

That self-image has been badly battered recently.

For a society to remain healthy, responsive to its citizens and truly democratic, it needs to be able to change. And that doesnt happen easily in the United States.

Nevertheless, what choice do we have other than to keep trying, to vote our consciences, to protest peacefully and to speak out in favor of substantive democratic reform?

The alternative is more of the same.

@Nick_Goldberg

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Read more:
Column: America's democracy seems to need radical changes. But what are the chances, really? - Yahoo News

Sitting on a shelf in my sunlit study are two massive works of history by the late, great scholar Zara Steiner, each dealing with the international politics of the 1920s and 30s. The first volume is The Lights That Failed; the second is The Triumph of the Dark. They came particularly to mind when I learned of the latest poll results from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in which about three-quarters of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters say that representatives of the opposing party are a clear and present danger to American democracy, and that censorship should be introduced, the First Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding.

Grim stuff, as the journalists David French and Robert Kagan both have argued in powerful essays that raise the specter of civil war and the collapse of American democracy. The available data tend to support their views, although arguably these essays underplay the resilience of the American political system. But there is enough going on in the United States and abroad to make one think of the interwar period, when, as Yeats wrote in his famous Second Coming, The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

What Steiner has to teach us is that the issue goes beyond the United States. All historical analogies are suspect, and the argument ad Hitlerum is, as has often been pointed out, a polemicists mark of desperation. Let us stipulate, therefore, that at the moment, no Hitlers or Stalins are on the prowl in the world. But that is not the point of analogizing the present to the interwar years. There are thuggish regimes and ruthless dictators, to be sure, and they are armed with tools of repression that the totalitarians of almost a century ago could only dream about. It is, however, the rot of democracies that is more troubling, and in this respect the interwar period still has its lessons.

Anne Applebaum: Liberal democracy is worth a fight

In that time, whose living memory has vanished with the passing of the older generation, cancel culture was real; George Orwell, among others, felt it. On one side, intellectuals infatuated with communism, or who were simply following the dictum that there are no enemies on ones left, felt comfortable preventing critics from being able to publish or even getting jobs. On the other side, a minority, now somewhat forgotten but important at the time, became infatuated with toxic forms of nationalism, and not only among the future Axis powers.

Internal, politically driven violence was rife; in France it culminated in a riot in Paris on February 6, 1934, launched by an array of right-wing groups. (Many of their leaders subsequently found a home in the collaborationist Vichy regime.) More insidious, however, was the spreading belief that parliamentary democracy could not handle the challenges of the fractured postWorld War I landscape. James Burnham, later an American conservative, declared that the managers would and should take over, because representative governments could not manage their countries. Plenty of reasonable people agreed that democracy could not cope with the eras economics; even Winston Churchill had some doubts.

In a world racked by economic dislocation, demagogues flourished, and not just in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the Kingfish, Louisiana Governor Huey Long, the most dangerous man in America. The shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, globalization, and the proliferation of information technologies are not yet equal to the Great Depression in human impact. But they have destroyed many jobs and deprived others (truck drivers, for example) of autonomy, and with it a kind of workers dignity. They have, in their own way, contributed to the radical discontent that has fueled Trumpism in the United States and its equivalents elsewhere.

In America, the 1930s were also the apogee of isolationism that had been born in part from disgustexcessive and ill-informed, but powerful nonethelessover the conduct and outcome of the First World War. No surprise then that students at elite institutions such as Yale flocked to the original America First movement, vowing to keep the United States out of the Old Worlds wars. Here, too, are echoes that we can yet hear today.

These phenomena were all understandable, and all products of a disjointed but interconnected world. And yet it was not nearly as interconnected a world as ours is today, when a group of South Asia scholars in the United States who criticize the government of India and some manifestations of Hindu nationalism can suddenly find themselves receiving hate emails and death threats. Worse, as Freedom House has recently documented, authoritarian governments can and do reach across international borders to punish, coerce, or even kill opponents of their domestic policies. And more and more, they have done so with impunity.

In short, liberal democracy feels as though its in a pretty bad way, and in many places, it is. No competing advanced ideologies as comprehensive and lethal as Nazism or communism are on offer, although that could conceivably change. What is certain is that dictators, whether Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, have at their disposal devastating weapons of precision repression and murder. The repeated and generally successful crushing of dissident individuals and movements in their countries and elsewhere is remarkable. Even a profoundly corrupt and incompetent regime, such as that of Nicols Maduro of Venezuela, can hang on despite multiple internal and external pressures, partly with the transnational assistance of governments and corporations eager to help.

It could get worse. We have yet to see where new technologiestargeted biological weapons, ubiquitous surveillance, drones of every type and kindwill take us. We have yet to experience the full external shocks of climate change, and we have yet, for that matter, to see what will happen when someone again lights off a nuclear weapon in anger. It was not without reason that Churchill spoke of the possibility of the world sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. It all could happen, and if the first half of the 20th century has anything to teach us, it is that calamitous misfortune and horrifying deeds can occur, a lesson viscerally absorbed by the statesmen who attempted to piece the world back together in the first decade after World War II.

Read: It could happen here

Perhaps the biggest difference between that era and this one, however, lies in the United States role. It is no coincidence that at one of the bleakest moments in 1940, when Britain looked as though it might very well succumb to Nazi invasion, Churchill could speak of the New World, with all its power and might stepping forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.

Churchill could pin his hopes on the worlds biggest economy and its liveliest (if turbulent) democracy, the United States. The problem today is that there is no United States behind the United States. If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble. The reverberations can already be felt: When the senior foreign-policy official of the United Arab Emirates, a close American ally, explains his countrys preliminary efforts to reach accommodations with an illiberal Turkey and an imperial Iran in terms of uncertainty about American purposeAfghanistan is definitely a test and to be honest it is a very worrying testthere is reason for concern.

The temptation for Americans today is to fight our internal fights and retreat, if not into isolation then into self-absorption. Many think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way an earlier generation thought about World War I, despite the differences in scale. And even more see in globalized trade and commerce only the current reality of fractured supply chains and lost manufacturing jobs. This is a danger not just for Americans but for a wider world, because without American musclefinancial, cultural, and militarypolitics defined by the rule of law, civil and religious liberty, and free and fair elections will come under strain. We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponentsincluding their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkieunderstood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.

Zara Steiner diagnosed a significant part of the tragedy of the 1930s in the atomization of the international system. States began to follow their own independent trajectories as they struggled to find their place in a weakened international order, she wrote. Her account is more bloodless, but also yields more insight than those that focus exclusively on the rise of the great tyrants of the 1930s. An America consumed by internal strife will be a difficult enough place. Should it lead to a world in which an internally divided America does not or cannot exert global influence and pressure to sustain basic norms of decent behavior and governance, our lot will be immeasurably worse.

Read more here:
The Last Best Hope - The Atlantic

Thomas Nozkowski (19442019) never hedged his bets. One bet was that abstract painting did not have to be elitist; it could be as open to subject matter as Andy Warhol supposedly was. The difference is that Nozkowski was not interested in the second-hand experiences we all supposedly share. He believed that each persons experience of the everyday was fundamentally unique and set out to honor that in his work.

By 1974, when making large-scale paintings had become commonplace, and subject matter had largely been banished from abstraction in favor of paint-as-paint, he had formulated an alternative approach based on two conclusions. First, he decided to work on a 16-by-20-inch format using prepared canvas boards, which are available in any art supply store, implicitly rejecting the masterpiece tradition and the belief in the artist as a heroic figure. Second, every painting he did would come from a personal experience, which he defined in the broadest possible terms. This is how he defined it in an interview we did in The Brooklyn Rail (November 2010):

Events, things, ideas anything. Objects and places in the visual continuum, sure, but also from other arts and abstract systems.

In this merging of intimate scale and personal experience, Nozkowski established links between art and life that challenged a number of presumptions regarding abstract painting and its relationship to the viewer. Are you making art for the wealthy class or for ordinary individuals when you work on a monumental scale? Can you make a painting that honors the basic enigmatic nature of being human without aligning yourself with any philosophical, religious, or aesthetic doctrine? Can you see things in abstraction without those things becoming symbolic?

As I see it, these questions lead to further inquiry, including whether or not you could stay in touch with the material nature of your existence and not take refuge in the idea of transcendence. Finally, can you make a painting that is subtle, nuanced, and complex while also being visually immediate? Can you proceed with painting while rejecting gesture and accepted solutions such as the grid and hard-edged forms? Could you make a painting that did not rely on a formula? That Nozkowski attained what he set out to do is one of the great and inspiring achievements in postwar art.

These were some of the thoughts I had when I went to see Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings at Pace Gallery (September 10October 23, 2021). I was also apprehensive, as I remembered Nozkowski talking to me about these paintings shortly before Susan Dunne, who was then working for Pace Gallery, came to see them at his studio, and I saw them for the first time on the day of his funeral. I was concerned because I knew I had seen them but not really looked at them and I wondered if I could actually ponder what was there.

The exhibition includes 15 paintings dated between 2015 and 2019. All but one measure 22 by 28 inches, a scale he began working with after more than 20 years of using the 16-by-20-inch format. Nozkowski also switched to painting on linen on panels, which gave him the resilient surface he wanted, as he often scraped down his paintings and started over.

The exhibitions outlier is Untitled (9-27) (Pulpit Rock) (oil on linen, 30 by 40 inches, 2018), which I believe is the last painting in a series of 10 done on this scale. Conceived of in the late 1990s, each painting in the series was inspired by a specific place in the Shawangunk Mountains, which Nozkowski began hiking as a teenager, and to which he and his wife, the artist Joyce Robins, and their son, Casimir, moved near in 1994, when they left Manhattans Lower East Side. Pulpit Rock is named for a unique rock formation in the Sams Point Preserve near Cragsmoor, NY that once served as an outdoor podium from which itinerant clergy preached to the local residents, all of which Nozkowski knew, but the viewer need not know when looking at the painting.

Nozkowskis paintings openly invite you to contemplate a complex visual configuration that is brimming with color, myriad shapes and lines, and unexpected shifts in vocabulary and color, with neither painterly flourishes nor signature gestures; this is what I find powerful and compelling about them. It takes a supremely confident and ambitious artist to work this way. The only comparison that I can think of is the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who could sight read and play a complex piece that he had never played before, and who never showed off while playing.

I was struck by the fact that there is never a hurried moment in these paintings, which were done when Nozkowski was well aware that he had a fatal disease. At no point does he call overt attention to his personal circumstances in these last works. Knowing that he was dying did not make him change his patient and devoted approach to making a beautiful and mysterious painting that he felt was true to a specific experience. If anything, he seemed intent on slowing time down and making paintings that are full of different kinds of lines, from delicate to sturdy, and unique shapes that never become eccentric or private signs. Is it possible to celebrate the innate wild beauty of the indifferent universe while acknowledging ones inevitable disappearance? Nozkowskis paintings convince me that it can be done.

Completed in 2019 Nozkowski died on May 9 of that year Untitled (9-63) and Untitled (9-69) convey the way he faced his impending mortality. In both paintings, there is a sense of tension between what is contained within the paintings physical boundaries and what extends beyond. This tension speaks to so many things about living in the world that I dont think the artists mortality is the sole subject. At a point when ones focus could understandably be narrowing, Nozkowski directs the viewers attention to that which is beyond the individuals sight.

In Untitled (9-69) Nozkowski surrounds a large, irregular, egg-yolk-yellow circle with two distinct bands composed of various shapes, against a scumbled ground in which tracesof blue and other colors can be seen. Parts of both bands are cut off by the paintings physical edges. For the inner band, Nozkowski painted different black shapes (rectangles, circles, trapezoids, triangles), against the yellow ground but forming a separate entity. As he worked his way around the inside of the circle, he would develop a particular pattern of related black shapes before changing from small, solidly colored black rectangles to a group of larger black circles to a group of yellow circles with thick black circumferences.

The incrementally painted black shapes reminded me of mosaics, each one unique. The changes from one kind of shape to another underscore the passage of time. An outer band is made of interlocking, softly colored forms. At different points, the density of the colors shift from muted to solid, though these shifts follow no distinct pattern.

In Untitled (9-63), a turquoise, jigsaw-puzzle-like shape outlined in black occupies a large part of the paintings upper left-hand corner, while a three-colored, irregular triangular shape with a black edge extends in diagonally from the paintings right side, from below the upper right edge to the bottom edge. These two distinct flat shapes are joined together by a thin, multi-sectioned band that traverses the painting below the middle. The sections of the joining band change color from turquoise to green without recalling the spectrum or any other logical shift, while, at the same time, not appearing arbitrary.

Between these two shapes, the black line defining their edges and separating the oneon the right into three different-colored sections divides the off-white plane into interlocking sections with round and slightly curved edges. The solidly colored shapes extend beyond the paintings physical edges, while a uniform black line defines shapes that fit together, but are not standardized.

As in Untitled (9-69), Nozkowski establishes a tension between what is within the paintings rectangle and what extends beyond its physical edges. At no point does anything he makes come across as short hand for something else; line, shape, and color are always what they are, even as their juxtapositions and shifts stir up associations by the viewer.

Employing the basic elements of painting, from drawing in paint to planar shapes ranging from the solid to the semi-transparent, to different palettes of color, to scumbled and watery surfaces, Nozkowski never became formulaic. If, earlier in his career, he made what the poet and critic Marjorie Welish called a vexed shape in an abstract field, he moved beyond that to acknowledging the paintings edges. Knowing the end was fast approaching, he opened up the focus of his paintings and extended the forms beyond what he could see, recognizing that there was a continuum between the individual and infinity which he not only accepted, but praised. He realized that everything he saw and experienced, whether while hiking or visiting a museum, possessed a complexity that he wanted to, and did, honor. The art world has yet to grasp the depth of his greatness and grace.

Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings continues at Pace Gallery (540 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 23.

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The Democracy of Abstraction - Hyperallergic

Watch the video for the monologue, plus an interview with Washington Free Beacon Senior Editor Billy McMorris on the corruption in our system, and why hes optimistic.

Canada held an election a few weeks ago. Dont worry that you missed it; you wouldnt have heard much of anything in American media. Why not? Because it all went to plan, thats why.

To catch up on the northern contest, the Conservative Party got the most votes, 5.7 million, compared to just 5.5 million for Justin Trudeaus ruling Liberal Party but Trudeaus Party got more seats in the House of Commons. A lot more, in fact: 159 seats to just 119. Why? Canada uses the same system as the United Kingdom, or our own House of Representatives: Its first-past-the-post in 338 single-member districts.

By the way, thats the second time in a row this has happened. The Liberal Party lost the popular vote last time too, and still they got the most seats.

The point here isnt to complain. This is the system Canada uses; every party understands it, and there isnt anything innately unfair about using single-member districts and the regional representation they bring.

But notice something that hasnt happened: Nobody has gone on TV, either in Canada or here in the United States, to moan about Justin Trudeau being a threat to democracy. There arent any left-wing non-profits producing reports about Canada being a flawed democracy or a failing democracy or partly democratic or a democratic dictatorship.

By the way, there are countries they say that about. Countries like this one. Remember all the wailing when Donald Trump won in 2016? People were literally screeching in the streets. Trump isnt the president hes illegitimate!

They kept this lie up for four whole years. They made that lie the focal point of their mission to paralyze actual democratic government, using any means necessary from unelected judges to unelected spies to get their way, and all in the name of democracy.

In 2020, Foreign Policy magazine ran an article with 10 reasons President Trump was becoming a dictator. Reason number 3? Politicizing the civil service, military, National Guard, or the domestic security agencies. Author Stephen Walts example of Trump doing that was that he held a photo-op in a church that rioters set on fire, and that he appointed William Barr, a former attorney general, as his attorney general.

Reason number 4 was, Using government surveillance against domestic political opponents. His evidence was that Trump wanted to call Antifa a terrorist organization, which might have caused the FBI to monitor them.

Reason 6? Appointing justices to the Supreme Court when there were vacancies.

Now, if you go and check Walts Foreign Policy articles this year, youll notice there havent been any about the looming Biden dictatorship even though hes actually politicizing the military by using it to teach critical race theory and conducting an ideological witch hunt for extremists.

And if its bad for Trump to appoint justices to the Supreme Court for normal vacancies, what does it mean that Democrats are loudly calling to pack the Supreme Court and the Biden administration has openly considered the possibility?

If you want answers to those questions, you wont get them from Professor Walt hes back to writing about U.S. foreign policy debacles. No shortage of material there, professor.

But you know whats really going on here. You know why Professor Walt and so many others were freaking out about democracy last year and every year since 2016, but dont seem to care about it this year, be it in Canada or the United States: Its because they dont care about democracy. At least not the way you might.

To most Americans throughout most of American history, democracy meant a system of government where we hold elections, cast votes, and choose lawmakers and leaders. For the left, however, democracy means something different. To them, democracy just means the Democratic Party.

Remember when Gov. Scott Walker survived a recall attempt back in 2012? The night that happened, a Democratic voter appeared on CNN and said, This is the end of democracy. The end of the U.S. as we know it just happened. This is it. Democracys dead. At the time, he meant it: A Republican was governor of Wisconsin and might do Republican things instead of Democrat things. We all know thats not democracy.

When Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin decide to represent their own constituents and say theyre not happy with a three-and-a-half trillion-dollar spending bill to remake the American social contract, thats not democracy either, because true democracy is just Joe Biden doing whatever he wants when he wants to. To many on the left, democracy simply means neoliberalism. Right now, democracy also means the Deep State so long as the Deep State is on their side; the side of democracy.

In the Arizona Republic, op-ed writer E.J. Montini complained Sinema is going to squander her chance to save democracy. After Democratic activists stalked Sinema into a bathroom to harass her, one climate activist remarked, Not being able to pee in peace is a reasonable consequence for betraying democracy.I suppose it beats tarring and feathering.

Id note, MSNBCs Medhi Hassan bravely tweeted, that democracy continues to hang in the balance while we argue over the rights and wrongs of bathroom protests. So brave, Medhi; so meta.

Or how about this: They call themselves Democrats and they will be the ruination of this nation, The Views Joy Behar declared. Manchin and Sinema must be brought to task; they are the enemies right now of the democracy.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Arizona Democrats unfathomable opposition to progress is a win for her hedge-fund, Big Pharma donors, and a huge loss for democracy.Oh, and she and Manchin are essentially political suicide bombers waging a jihad for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.Not demented at all.

According to someone named John of the Young Turks, the minimum bars for a functioning democracy include 1) not electing Donald Trump, and 2) not electing someone like Kyrsten Sinema. He could have added 3) Doing what John says to do.

Of course, nothing Sinema is doing is betraying democracy in any way whatsoever; what shes doing is betraying the Democratic Partys priorities. But of course thats enough, isnt it?

Sinema and Manchin join a long and distinguished line of enemies of democracy, stretching from President John Adams to Sen. Barry Goldwater, and of course stopping over President George W. Bush (who now opposes Trump so is once again a friend of democracy).

Theyre joined on this list by every single person who ever attended a Tea Party rally, and the 74 million Americans who voted against democracy in the last election. In fact, it might be that a majority of Americans voted against democracy last year, but good luck finding the full truth: Its only OK to question elections when the democracy loses.

But its not just democracy, of course; for the left, its any system. Take schools: Our generation churns out multiple generations of graduates unprepared for work and incapable of functional literacy. So is the system broken? Not at all. That system is only broken if the students come out conservative or religious, or if parents are given any semblance of choice about what their children learn. If any of those things happened, that would be un-American. Probably anti-democratic too.

Democracy means parents dont get a say in what schools teach. Them theres the rules.

Or how about the courts? The courts are great when theyre used to paralyze a White House simply trying to defend its borders and control who enters the country. Those are working courts; very democratic. But what if the courts rule against the left?

What if the Supreme Court says that we have a border? What if they say that affirmative action is illegal racial discrimination? What if the Supreme Court finally notices that, wait a minute, abortion is never mentioned in the Bill of Rights and calling it a constitutional right is absurd? Well, that would mean the system is broken and disgustingly undemocratic. Court-packing is back on the menu, boys!

Lets not forget the Electoral College or its northern kin, Canadas system of parliamentary representation. Prime Minister Trudeau is the result of a beautiful system; a fully functioning democracy. President Donald Trump? Well, then you get into another area.

Know this: Your role in this democracy is not actual opposition, but managed opposition. Most professional D.C. Republicans get that. If the Democrats, for example, want to pass a bill that completely remakes the governments involvement with the citizenry from before birth until death, the GOP just asks them to cut back on the cost a little; make it cheaper. Managed opposition. Know your role, sort of thing.

Ronald Reagan didnt know his place; Trump certainly wouldnt play his part either and they hated them for it. Dont let any historic revisionism ever hide that: They treated Reagan with contempt, and called him a dangerous and psychotic dullard too.

We can go on and on, but you get the point: The system works when it works for the left, and only when it works for the left. You get the point and so do they. Now its just time to stop playing the part youve been assigned.

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The Left Doesn't Care About 'Democracy,' They Just Want Their Way - The Federalist