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Myanmars rocky democratic transition ended abruptly in a military coup on February 1, 2021. Yet, the generals have kicked a hornets nest. The countrys Bamar majority has long dominated Myanmar, but an assortment of over 20 ethnic armed organizations have contested this situation for decades, and some have taken up arms once more to oppose the coup. Most crucially, faced with junta gunfire, the largely Bamar-dominated pro-democracy movement also made the grim decision to arm itself and fight the military.

The story of post-coup Myanmar is now one of a dedicated popular democratic resistance gaining momentum against a powerful military machine armed with Chinese and Russian equipment. This resistance is largely led by the predominantly Bamar National Unity Government in a loose coalition with some ethnic armed groups, ousted parliamentarians, and activists. They have shaken the junta to its core, successfully seized rural areas across the country, and enjoined several of the countrys ethnic armed groups to directly support them in the fight.

Yet, the odds against them remain steep. The National Unity Government lacks significant Western support most notably in the form of arms and still struggles to bring distrustful ethnic armed groups into a consolidated resistance movement. Currently operating as a diffuse and underequipped insurgency fighting what amounts to at least seven discrete conflicts, anti-junta forces lack strategic-level unity as well. While remarkably effective in numerous tactical skirmishes, the poorly equipped National Unity Governments long-term prospects are, therefore, less than ideal. The juntas military, known as the Sit-Tat, is suffering from overstretch and low morale, but still holds key cities and strategic locations with its superior airpower, armor, and artillery.

Nonetheless, the revolution can achieve victory. Resolving the fundamental distrust between the National Unity Government and ethnic armed organizations may be enough to overcome political and military roadblocks. This will require developing a shared political objective and an effective coalitional military strategy. It will also require persuading non-aligned ethnic armies as well as the Chinese government to increase the flow of arms, so anti-junta forces can launch coordinated offensives to take and hold territory. These steps could prompt the Sit-Tats collapse, or at least compel the junta to allow a return to democratic rule.

The Current Situation

Over the past few months, the National Unity Governments military momentum has slowed as the junta deployed its air power and heavy weapons, locking down cities and preventing the rebels from consolidating their gains. In places like Mindat, Chin State, and Lay Kay Kaw, Karen State, the juntas troops ousted poorly equipped Peoples Defense Forces. In classic authoritarian counterinsurgency fashion, the junta continues to use unanswered firepower to displace lightly equipped units with little concern for escalating civilian casualties.

Peoples Defense Forces and newly founded autonomous defense forces were successful in recruiting roughly 100,000 personnel, but only about 40 percent of them have any small arms whatsoever. Many of these weapons are rudimentary, either locally produced, cast off by the junta, or obtained on the black market from China and Thailand. Stealing weapons is not viable at scale. And while Chinese-supported ethnic armed groups have weapons like FN-6 man-portable air-defense systems that could dent the juntas air and armor, they are reluctant to share them.

Politically, the incredibly diverse ethnic landscape in Myanmar has provided the National Unity Government with a number of potential armed allies, but it has also hampered anti-junta unity. Many ethnic groups have historical grievances and legitimate concerns with a Bamar-dominated pro-democracy movement, which results in limited cooperation beyond the tactical and operational levels. Some groups, such as the powerful United Wa State Army, seek to preserve their own interests regardless of the wider movements fate especially if the National Unity Governments odds of victory remain low.

Yet despite its problems, the National Unity Government and the wider pro-democracy movement cannot easily be crushed and show little intention of surrender. The junta has failed to cow the populace into submission, retake rural areas, or persuade the ethnic armies to join its side. While Myanmar has experienced numerous unsuccessful anti-government conflicts, and the Sit-Tat is often described as a formidable force, this time is different. As shown most recently during its 2019-20 fighting with the Arakan Army, the junta has struggled to defeat popular insurgencies. In the current round of conflict, the Sit-Tat has not only failed to prevail, in several places it cannot venture out into rural areas without suffering serious losses due to small-unit tactical failures. Moreover, the Bamar majority is now actively challenging the junta in a manner unseen since the 1980s, and fighting has spread throughout the country.

This leaves the Sit-Tat overstretched, overburdened, and short on morale. A total military victory for the pro-democracy forces led by the National Unity Government will still be difficult to achieve, but it is likelier now than it has been in decades. To date, the junta has made clear that it will not negotiate with the National Unity Government. Thus, while military victory is a long shot, the pro-democracy movement has no other option but to ramp up military pressure to either overthrow the junta or compel it to hand power to a civilian government.

The Need for Unity

Despite conducting a series of negotiations, the Bamar-dominated National Unity Government is struggling to find common ground with the ethnic armed organizations to build a mutually acceptable democratic federal state. Some dominant pro-democracy political entities still hold the dismissive views of ethnic actors that marked the National League for Democracys rule after 2015. Meanwhile, many ethnic armed groups pursue their own parochial interests. In addition to a few smaller outfits, the most powerful ethnic armed organizations on the National Unity Governments side are the Kachin Independence Army in the north and the Karen National Union to the east. Both have supported the resistance movement since its inception and frequently launch offensives within their own territories, but they are hesitant to invest scarce resources in battlefields beyond their control.

Beyond the ethnic armed groups, only about 60 percent of the Peoples Defense Forces and smaller Local Defense Forces are actually under the National Unity Governments direct operational command. Moreover, the long hoped-for federal army capable of uniting the disparate ethnic armies and the Peoples Defense Forces remains out of reach. While many of the ethnic armed groups reject peace talks with the military, they appear reluctant to wholeheartedly back the pro-democracy forces and some are open to junta outreach. This essentially splits the conflict into seven separate theaters with little overlap. It also allows the junta to divide and conquer and concentrate mass against isolated resistance pockets, as they have successfully done throughout their history.

The National Unity Governments Peoples Defense Forces have rapidly and effectively established themselves in the form of a cellular, horizontally networked guerilla force. Now the groups aiming to overthrow the junta need to undergo a sequential transition from a loosely organized movement to a more structured and centralized force. Martin C. Libicki and Ben Connable claim that networked armed movements have lost significantly more often than they have won, while hierarchically organized insurgencies have a better record. As Rgis Debray, an associate of Che Guevara, claimed: The lack of a single command puts the revolutionary forces in the situation of an artillery gunner who has not been told in which direction to fire. Centralized command and control is necessary to field a force capable of taking urban settlements and strategic hard points.

Thus, the National Unity Government needs to consolidate its own chain of command and convince the fiercely independent ethnic armed organizations to accept a shared military strategy. It has attempted to do so through the establishment of a Central Command and Coordination Committee, but the ethnic armed groups have been loath to subordinate themselves to National Unity Government control. To overcome this, the National Unity Government will need to form a coalition around mutual goals in order to reach a consensus on an overarching strategy. This means forging a shared political objective before effective strategic military cooperation can occur.

Currently, the National Unity Governments goal is to seize the central state apparatus, while the ethnic armed groups largely aim to consolidate their own autonomy. Persuading the ethnic armed organizations that it is in their interest to overthrow the Sit-Tat will require real inclusion and commitments to giving up some central authority in a federal democratic future. It would also be a real departure from Aung San Suu Kyis practices and likely would require moving beyond her legacy to build a more inclusive one. Any political arrangement must be conducive to genuine cooperation between the pro-democratic political forces and the ethnic armed groups. Most importantly, the National Unity Government must make the case to the ethnic armed organizations that the autonomy they seek can only happen under a democratic federal structure.

To be sure, the pro-democracy resistance movement has taken the right steps to advance this unity. It has created a National Unity Consultative Council, which could be a genuine political platform bringing together the countrys diverse stakeholders. Likewise, the Central Command and Coordinating Committee could create a military command structure that would improve collaboration. If the National Unity Government can demonstrate its practical cooperation with the ethnic armed groups, and the National Unity Consultative Council forges a strong alliance around a federal democratic future, they would be a strong magnet for uncommitted ethnic armies. This would also undermine the juntas own efforts to co-opt ethnic armed groups. Just recently, the National Unity Government met with the currently uncommitted Arakan Army of Rakhine State in a move that is sure to turn heads in Naypyidaw.

If and once the National Unity Government persuades the ethnic armies to buy into a shared political objective, it can formulate a more effective military strategy and launch operations to take further territory. Based on her study of recent U.S. coalitions, Patricia A. Weitsman argues that even in the absence of a unified chain of command, effective staff integration is possible. Considering the reluctance of ethnic armed groups to embrace a federal army or fully cooperate with the National Unity Government, pro-democracy forces should at least work on shoring up the Central Command and Coordinating Committee and integrating high-level officers from its constituent coalition members within both itself and aligned ethnic armed organizations to formulate strategy and conduct operations across all seven theaters in Myanmar. This does not necessarily require subordination, but rather compromises and a shared understanding of national-level strategy. Without this, the movement will remain susceptible to the juntas efforts to divide and conquer it.

Tackling the Military Problem

The other problem facing the National Unity Government is its ongoing lack of arms and equipment. The problem is particularly acute for Peoples Defense Forces located outside territory held by ethnic armed organizations, or in regions such as Sagaing and Magway that are distant from Myanmars porous borders. In the early days of the conflict, homemade rifles and ancestral hunting weapons were enough to drive back the juntas demoralized troops. But now, with the Sit-Tats forces supported by air power, modern small arms, light armored vehicles, and artillery, the sheer firepower brought to bear on the Peoples Defense Forces is causing them to scatter to avoid direct confrontations. Thus, while they have no lack of enthusiastic recruits, they have been unable to move beyond rural guerilla tactics. The ethnic armies, with their better equipment and more reliable access to arms have performed somewhat better against junta offensives. For example, the Kachin Independence Army took the strategic Alaw Bum hill soon after widespread fighting broke out in early 2021, and has held the area against ferocious efforts to retake it with air power and artillery.

Once greater political unity is established, the Peoples Defense Forces lack of equipment can be mitigated somewhat through cooperation with ethnic armed groups. Many of the ethnic armies, especially those along the Chinese border or aligned with the United Wa State Army, receive Chinese weapons and equipment, including anti-air systems. Other ethnic armies take advantage of longstanding ties to smugglers in Thailand and China to obtain black market weapons or have significant arms-making industrial capacity of their own. However, persuading the China-backed ethnic armies to sell more weapons directly to the pro-democracy resistance likely means getting Beijing on board as well. Given Chinas growing support of the junta, this is no easy task. Yet, China is not the completely unitary actor that it is sometimes assumed to be, and Beijing also has a history of hedging in Myanmar. If the National Unity Government can win over the ethnic armed groups, demonstrate its capacity to govern territory, and, crucially, avoid angering China, then a pragmatic Beijing or local officials in Chinas bordering Yunnan Province could acquiesce to a livelier arms trade. Given Western reticence towards arming the Peoples Defense Forces, this may be their only option.

The End of the War?

The pro-democracy movements political and military problems may be pressing, but they are not insurmountable. The National Unity Government can rest assured of its main strengths: public support, strong commitment from allied ethnic armies, and quiet cooperation from the unaligned ethnic armed organizations. From this base, it should first unite the collective efforts of all anti-junta forces in pursuit of a genuine federal democracy, then craft a joint military strategy. In newly liberated regions, the National Unity Government and ethnic armed organizations should collaborate to establish effective parallel governance mechanisms to raise funds, ensure humanitarian aid and deliver stability. This will demonstrate to the international community that the pro-democracy movement is the peoples government that it claims to be. From there, military victory or the return of civilian rule may be possible.

Ye Myo Hein is the executive director of the Tagaung Institute of Political Studies and a public policy fellow with the Wilson Center. His research interests include civil-military relations in Myanmar, the countrys armed conflict, and its politics. The views expressed are the authors alone, and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government or the Wilson Center.

Lucas Myers is a program coordinator and associate for Southeast Asia at the Wilson Center. His work focuses on Southeast Asian geopolitics, Chinese foreign policy, and Indo-Pacific security issues. The views expressed are the authors alone, and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government or the Wilson Center.

Image: Karen National Union

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A More United, Better-Armed Opposition Can Bring Democracy to Myanmar - War on the Rocks

Ever since CNNs new overlords at Warner Bros. Discovery chose to replace the corrupt, dishonest Jeff Zucker with the former talk show producer Chris Licht in its top job, the network has pushed the story line, begun by its principal investor, John Malone, that it is moving back to the center and away, as this overly gullible Guardian article argues, from its alleged leftist orientation. Its author quotes Licht saying, We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers.

Among the myriad problems with this viewpoint is the fact that the truth these days is in itself decidedly alarming, as one of Americas two major parties is seeking to destroy democracy and replace it with the leader of a fascist cult. Licht and Malone seek to move CNN closer to the center between one party that is a coalition of liberals, moderates, and few conservativesand is therefore more conservative across the board than any other allegedly left-of-center party among industrial democraciesand one that has remade itself into a politically empowered lunatic asylum.

There are two primary reasons for this PR push. The first, as always, is money. According to The Guardian, CNN earned $1.8 billion last year. Meanwhile, Fox News enjoyed revenues of $12.3 billion during the same period. Warner Bros. Discovery is carrying about $59 billion in debt and is accordingly desperate to boost CNNs audience with prejudiced people who like to be lied tothat is, Fox viewers. The Guardian notes, Rumors have been circulating this week that more outspoken left-leaning anchors and contributors at CNN could soon be dropped. By left-leaning, we can assume that the new bosses mean pundits who embrace only some crazy conspiracy theories, rather than all of them. Those who stick explicitly to reality are likely those on the alleged left-wing extreme whom Licht was criticizing to potential advertisers. (It is not remotely true, as this Times headline would have it, that the GOP is a party torn between truth and Trump. It is a party where truth-tellers are banished to the political equivalent of Siberia.)

It should come as no surprise that the fellow who is driving this effort by CNN, John Malone, is both a billionaire and a right-wing ideologue. (He may also be the largest landowner in America.) Hes on the board of directors of the Cato Institute and not only donated $250,000 to Donald Trumps inauguration, but his companies donated another $250,000. He told an interviewer: Look, I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to doidentifying problems and trying to solve themhas been great, though he voiced skepticism as to whether Trump was the right guy to do it. This position tracks closely with that of Elon Musk, who, poised to take over Twitter, and vastly overpaying for the privilege, recently said that he was leaning toward supporting Floridas Gov. Ron DeSantis for president; a politician who, as a Republican consultant quoted by the Journal puts it, has all the benefits of Trump without the baggage. Musk, according to the Journal, explained that his support for Republicans was based on the scrutiny from some Democrats against him and his companies, Tesla and rocket company SpaceX.

Read more Altercation

Malones closest competition as Americas biggest landowner business is Jeff Bezos, the rabidly anti-union owner of The Washington Post, who is, coincidentally, also in competition with Musk for the crown of wealthiest guy in the world. Having a bad year but still active in the mega-billionaire posse is Mark Zuckerberg, principal owner of Facebook, who has also made repeatedly clear his fealty to pro-Trump Republicans and his reliance on the likes of billionaire pro-Trump right-wing ideologue Peter Thiel. And lets not forget Rupert Murdoch, yet another rapacious billionaire who is possibly more responsible than any other person on the planet for purveying the baseless conspiracy theories that continue to poison not just our politics but those of the U.K., Australia, and many other nations (and who, if justice is to be done, might just be forced to pay for a tiny part of it). And, oh, great news, theres this TikTok guy, too, who apparently fits the mold perfectly.

Do you think we can expect that a mainstream media largely owned and operated by right-wing billionaires is going to save our democracy from the people who pursue the policies that ensure that they remain billionaires and pay virtually no taxes in doing so?

I dont. My guess is that the properties they own will keep talking about the center as they move that center further and further into territory where someone like DeSantis begins to sound relatively reasonable. Just look at the MSM hero worship for hero and proud admirer of the man who cheered his proposed hanging, but with whom he nevertheless parted amicably, Mike Pence. And not to alarm anyone, but the media is awash in Trump coverageagainso we can expect more straight reporting of lies, conspiracy theories, violent incitement, sexism, racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, with CNN and company striving to cover both sides of these pressing questions. Remember what exCBS chair Les Moonves (like Trump, a credibly accused serial sexual assaulter) said about Trumps 2016 campaign: It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS.

The Gannett Company has announced that it is getting rid of editorial pages in its newspaper chain, including the flagship, USA Today, and cutting back opinion pages to a few days a week while refocusing what opinion is still published to community dialogue. This is a move to address a real problem but probably not the right one to make. I have long campaigned against newspaper editorial endorsements. Sure, they make the people who get to give them feel important, and in some cases, they can sway local races. But survey after survey has demonstrated that few people are aware of any distinction between news and editorial in their newspapers (or newspaper websites). What they do know is that Democrats tend to get presidential endorsements more than Republicans because newspapers care (at least a little) about truth, while to be successful in the modern (even pre-Trump) Republican Party, one has to constantly lie. They therefore equate these endorsements with the dreaded liberal bias they mistakenly believe to be afflicting the entire MSM. What would be ideal is if everybody just published (or spoke) what they understood to be the truth and offered their accompanying evidence, adding, whenever possible, why alleged alternative views were not as compelling. That would mean doing away entirely with the distinction between straight news and opinion. Good luck to me, however, on that

Henry Kissinger has a new book out. The dude is 99 years old, so good for him. On the other hand, literally millions of people never got to grow old thanks in significant measure to his actions. Fortunately, this review does a fine job of avoiding that pitfall and walks the reader through a bunch of them. Here is one more drawn from my 2020 book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lieand Why Trump Is Worse:

Nixons original hope had been to withdraw all US troops by the end of 1971. Kissinger, however, warned that doing so could result in a period of instability (or worse) in Saigon right around the time of the 1972 presidential election. He therefore recommended that they delay the withdrawal until at least the autumn of 1972so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election. Nixon and Kissinger required a fairly reasonable interval, as Kissinger explained it to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, between the time the United States withdrew its troops and North Vietnam overran South Vietnam. This cynical strategy, presidential biographer Robert Dallek sardonically noted, had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost in the service of Nixons reelection, or about the American prisoners of war who would continue their needless suffering if they prolonged the war. Its goal was merely to allow Nixon and Kissinger to evade responsibility for losing the war once the North finally conquered the South. Naturally, Kissinger lied about this when asked by a journalist, insisting that there is no hidden agreement with North Vietnam for any specific interval after which we would no longer care if they marched in and took over South Vietnam. Nixon termed Kissingers handling of the Paris Accords to be a brilliant game we are playing, as Henry really bamboozled the bastards. In this case, the bastards were those Americans who believed their president when he said he was honestly seeking to end the war.

Oh, and I always like this quote of David Halberstams from his otherwise not-so-great 2001 book, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals: The singular strength of Kissinger was not just his skill at dissembling when necessary, his unusual ability to tell ten different people ten completely different stories about what he was doing on a given issueand remember which version of the story he had told to which person.

One last Kissinger quote, from my forthcoming We Are Not One: A History of Americas Fight Over Israel. Here, he explains his sympathy for antisemitism: Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.

Do you ever get a little bit sad for no reason? I do. Here is part one and here is part two of the best pick-me-up I know, and one of the greatest performances of any kind Ive ever seen.

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Altercation: Will the Oligarchs Who Own the U.S. Media Save Democracy? Don't Bet on It. - The American Prospect

A video of Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) plays at the fifth day of hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 2022.Jason Andrew/The New York Times News Service

The five hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurgency thus far have revealed an enormous amount about the Trump White House and its various scheming, rioting and fantasizing adherents. Historians may conclude that it told us even more about the contemporary United States.

The hearings laid bare the efforts of Donald J. Trump to hold onto power in defiance of the power of the countrys voters, courts and state officials.

The hearings also laid bare the fragility of the tendons of nationhood that are being strained in the country today. The first threat to democracy ended with the confirmation of Joe Bidens election. The second threat to democracy persists.

After more than two weeks, two major themes emerged from the sessions.

The intended consequence is the portrayal largely a Democratic effort, aided by two Republican apostates horrified by the former presidents comportment of Mr. Trump as a despot-in-the-making, not so much clinging to power as attempting to grasp power after all the institutions and conventions of American civic life made it clear that his time as president, like that of his 43 predecessors, was finite. It was, as Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger put it in Thursdays hearing, an offensive to sacrifice our republic to prolong his presidency.

But the unintended consequence may be of even more significance. This crisis of political succession comes at a time of racial reckoning and reconsideration and amid fresh appraisals of slavery and the near eradication of Indigenous peoples. As a result, it recasts all of American history, transforming it from a march of national purpose and national progress to an arena of constant national contention and national conflict.

And at the same time the visage of national unity has been shattered.

This occurred, of course, during the period leading up to the Civil War and continuing through Reconstruction after the 1861-1865 conflict, and it occurred during the Vietnam/Watergate period from about 1966 to 1975. Those were periods when Americans took different sides in debates that were both political and moral.

We were divided along party lines in Watergate, William Cohen, a first-term Republican congressman from Maine who in 1974 sat on the Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach GOP president Richard Nixon, said in an interview. Many Republicans thought the Democrats were trying to overturn the election. But there was a group of Republicans who were reasonable people who believed Nixon had to go. There were people in Congress open to persuasion on what the truth was.

This period is different. It includes, to be sure, different points of view whether, for example, a wall is needed at the southern border, or whether guns should be controlled, or whether abortion is tantamount to murder. Americans disagree on those things, just as they disagree on myriad other issues.

But this period involves something absent from the two earlier eras: clashing perceptions of what occurred at a discrete moment of time, both in the 2020 election and in the 2021 insurrection that followed.

The other issues are subject to compromise, though finding common ground on immigration, guns and abortion is exceedingly difficult. Those are issues and the purview of the political world. It is impossible to find common ground to reach a compromise on whether the rampage at the Capitol was simply the fanciful actions of a handful of misguided tourists; or whether the rioters were really leftists hoping to cast Mr. Trumps supporters in a harsh light; or whether it was a grave threat to democratic rule and the peaceful transfer of power.

One view is neatly summarized by former Democratic senator Gary Hart of Colorado, twice a presidential candidate. The country is going through some things that I could have sworn could never happen and I am seeing people saying things I could have sworn I never thought I would hear, he said in an interview. I see people almost glorying in the destruction of the symbols of our democracy.

Today Mr. Hart who when he departed the Senate often reflected on how much he, even as an insurgent who rebelled against the conventions of American politics, revered the Senate could be regarded as a hopeless romantic.

A conflicting view is represented by Ron Kaufman, a veteran GOP activist and operative. The country knows pretty much what happened on January 6th, and that it was a bad thing for the country, he said. As bad as it was, it wasnt the Civil War, or the divisions on Vietnam. In recent years Mr. Kaufman, a member of the Republican National Committee from Massachusetts, has been castigated for being too much of an establishment figure. The views of some of the Trump supporters are even stronger.

In the recent past say, a dozen years ago the Civil War and the Vietnam/Watergate period stood out and apart, dangerous crises in the American passage. Today those two episodes seem more to be part of a national continuum of crisis, threat after threat to unity and national survival. In the recent past, the movement of Loyalists to Canada during the years of the American Revolution was regarded as a colourful side show of a more powerful, more glorious, narrative. Today, that flood of migrants appears as an early indicator of persistent dissent.

Three years before his death, in 1832, chief justice John Marshall writing just after the era known, ironically, as the Early National Period worried, The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue. That was not an isolated view. In his 2021 American Republics, the University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor identified significant tensions in the American Revolution period. A Revolution in the name of liberty demanded unity, sacrifice and discipline, he wrote, but most citizens defined liberty as the pursuit of individual gains.

That tension is at the heart of much of the Trump upheaval. It is visible in mask mandates, struggles over whether businesses should be shuttered during the pandemic, and fights over whether vaccine passports are required. Were the restrictions during the early months of COVID-19 a responsible governmental response to a deadly health crisis? Or were they yet another restriction on the personal liberty of Americans by a permanent governmental class?

There is not a giant leap from that conflict to this one: Was the Trump insurrection mounted by what committee chairman Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, Thursday called the mob and their vile threats an un-American threat to democratic values? Or was it precisely the sort of rebellion that took its form in the rebellion against the tyranny of George III and that Thomas Jefferson himself endorsed when he wrote in 1787 that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

All American schoolchildren encounter that quote in Grade 5. What they do not encounter is what appears four sentences earlier in Jeffersons letter to William Smith, when he asked, what country can preserve its [sic] liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

The question the United States must face today is whether the contemporary equivalent of the warning that Jefferson spoke of was the Capitol rebellion or whether the warning was the hearing that portrayed that rebellion as a crime against democratic rule? On the answer to that question the future of the country depends.

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What the Jan. 6 hearings have revealed about the state of democracy in America so far - The Globe and Mail

WASHINGTON Fifty years ago today, President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX, which sought to end sexual discrimination against women in education, particularly athletics.

The bill was pushed through Congress by U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink, of Hawaii, and has since become a lasting part of her legacy while touching the lives of millions of women throughout the U.S.

Mink, who was the first woman of color elected to Congress, died in office in 2002 at the age of 74. In 2014, Minks daughter, Gwendolyn, accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of her mother from President Barack Obama, who said that the Hawaii congresswoman represented the best of public service and the Aloha spirit.

Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent - including Michelle and myself - who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink, Obama said. I am particularly grateful because she was my congresswoman for a long time.

Gwendolyn Mink has since published, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress, a book about her mothers life in politics with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Mink herself was a professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a professor of women and gender studies at Smith College in Massachusetts.

In an interview with Civil Beat, Mink described the many struggles her mother faced while navigating a political world dominated by men and the ways she worked to overcome those obstacles to become one of the nations most iconic if not always well known politicians.

She said that although Title IX is being celebrated today, it could face challenges in the future, particularly from those on the right who have been successful in attacking other bedrocks in womens rights, namely Roe v. Wade.

We always have to be on guard about Title IX, Mink said. It was never a one and done kind of situation. Title IX can always be reversed.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What compelled you to write a book about your mother?

I think my mother decided shortly after I published my first book, which was an academic book, that I would be a good person to write her biography. So for 20 years or so I kind of knew in the back of my mind that that was going to be a project that I would eventually take on, although not necessarily to write it but to make sure that it got written.

She was particularly concerned that a lot of the struggles that she had witnessed, that she had participated in, would be forgotten by history, not so much that she would be forgotten, but the struggle would be forgotten. It was very important to keep that storytelling alive, not only because its a track record of what has been tried before, but because it also could be inspiration to future generations about how to proceed towards the kinds of goals that she cared about, like peace and social justice and inclusion and equality.

When she passed away, my father and I were approached by the Library of Congress to donate her papers, which we did. It took them several years to process the papers and once that whole situation had shaken out there was an organized series of a million documents basically 2,700 boxes worth of material that I could start going through. It became clear to me that there was certainly a book length biography to be written. But I had a hard time sort of coming to a decision about how I would do that myself.

On the one hand, one of the benefits of having somebody who knew her so well write the biography is that you have this first person voice. But on the other hand, Im a trained scholar, and I write in the third person, and I write with a sort of distance and dispassion.

Melding those two contradictory impulses was a challenge, and fortunately along the way as I was dealing with that sort of push and pull of memoir-ish versus scholarly writing, I met the person who would become my co-author, a historian who I did not know before this, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. She independently had developed a plan to write a biography on my mother and we connected and decided to collaborate.

Q: Your mother is well known for her work passing Title IX, but what were some of the other struggles your mother didnt want people to forget?

We had a word count, so we couldnt write about everything that we wanted to write about. Theres a chapter on her anti war activities during Vietnam, and theres a chapter on her participation in the emergent womens rights movement in the 1960s and 70s, and theres a chapter on her work on the environment. Those are all spheres of struggle that she witnessed or participated in that she did not want lost to history.

The nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1950s, the struggles against that and the coercive power of the government in trying to suppress those protests. She didnt want that to be erased.

The ways in which multiple actors in different corners of the polity articulated their opposition to the war in Vietnam, she didnt want that to be forgotten. She didnt want it to be just a military history or just a protest in the street history. She thought it was incredibly more richly textured than that, and she wanted those struggles to be documented.

Similarly, the activism that she was part of with respect to womens equality and with respect to social policy innovations that recognized women both as public citizens but also as the bearers of the second day, the domestic work and so forth, that crystallized in her promotion of early childhood education and day care, which she began to work on in the late 1960s and almost succeeded in accomplishing except that Richard Nixon vetoed legislation in December of 1971.

She just didnt want the vantage point of the people who were central in the struggle to be lost in history. She didnt want those moments of a policy imagination and political imagination to be lost to future generations.

Q: Did you learn anything new or surprising during your research for the book?

I get asked that question all the time and I really dont have a satisfying answer that satisfies the person who asks the question.

I think its partly a reflection of the fact that Ive been working in the materials for so long that everything is familiar. But also as I try to think back on any sort of moments of revelation or surprise that I experienced along the way, I really honestly have to say not really except in the period of her life in which I was preconscious.

There was the stuff that went on about her inability to initially get a law license, because she was married to a haole from Pennsylvania. The granular detail and, really, horror of that particular struggle was a little bit new to me, but not totally new. That happened in 1953 when I was not even 1 year old. But once we got to a point where I can remember anything, you know, from a bus ride to a political rally, I had a sense of everything that went on and so nothing in a big way surprised me.

We talked about everything as it was happening. Also, I was an extremely nosy child. When I heard my mother and father talking I would eavesdrop on their conversations, process the information and then participate the next time the subject came up. So the combination of being nosy, being wired for politics myself and being an only child meant that I witnessed or discussed almost everything that was going on.

Q: Title IX is now 50 years old. How should we look at the law today?

I dont think that the forces of support and advocacy for Title IX could have predicted in 1972 the scale of change and the impact that Title IX would have on society as a whole and in opening opportunities for women and girls. But they knew that they were creating an important lever for girls and women who underwent discrimination or had doors shut before them because they were female.

Title IX would provide a lever for them to challenge that discrimination and subordination.

Most of the advocates were intent on making sure that the equality language the 37 words that ban discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions that receive federal funds would be as comprehensive as possible, that there wouldnt be ways to fashion loopholes or exit strategies for bastions of male power and activity in educational institutions. So that was a powerful motivating force.

I have to say Title IX was enacted without too much controversy. The initial controversy erupted after it was enacted, when pockets of male privilege discovered that they would be affected by this new promise of equity by the federal government, and the principal bastion of that male privilege was mens athletics.

Q: So do you think we need to worry about Title IX today? Are there any ways in which it is being undermined that concern you?

Title IX has been attacked throughout its history. In the 1980s, it was attacked. In fact, it had to be reaffirmed by legislative action in the late 1980s after the Supreme Court pretty much gutted Title IX in a case called Grove City College v. Bell.

In that situation, the issue was whether discrimination in one corner of an educational institution would impair access to federal funds for the entire institution. Obviously, if you localize the punishment to the one corner of the university in which the discrimination has been found, and the rest of the institution goes scot free it significantly weakens the promise of equality to only those pockets where women have been able to mount challenges that have been validated by higher authorities.

The court kneecapped Title IX in the Grove City College v. Bell case and a couple years later the Congress had to enact the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which made it clear that Title IX applied to whole institutions, that no part of an institution was the sole bearer of responsibility for equality, that whole institutions were being held accountable.

In the 1990s, there were all kinds of challenges about athletics. The myth began in the 1990s that mens sports were losing out because of Title IX so you had to fight against that.

When George Bush became president there were all sorts of efforts to change the way in which the athletic equity rights of girls and women would be calculated. Theres too much detail to go into, but there were big fights about that too.

And then of course with Donald Trump we had the rewriting of regulations with respect to sexual harassment and sexual assault, especially that undercut all the advances that had been made toward giving sexual assault and sexual harassment victims, mostly female, the right to vindication when they were victimized inside education institutions.

So, yes, we always have to be on guard about Title IX. It was never a one and done kind of situation. Title IX can always be reversed. I have no doubt in my mind that if U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, was in charge of the world, he would repeal Title IX. You always have to be on guard about that possibility just like you have to be on guard about the reversal of Roe v. Wade with respect to abortion rights.

Q: Your mother has been credited with helping pave the path for Roe v. Wade when she opposed the nomination of Harold Carswell to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, being appointed instead. If she were alive today, what would she think of the courts draft decision overturning Roe?

Im sort of uncomfortable speaking for her in contexts that she did not live through. However, I can say that with every appointment of a woman justice, my mother was very pleased. She was thrilled when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the court.

What would she think of the draft opinion? I think that she would be horrified. I mean, Im violating my own policy of not reading her views into contemporary issues, but I think that we sort of knew all along what the arguments were going to be against Roe, that were chipping away at Roe all along since 1973.

We saw the trajectory culminate in an extremely dangerous supreme court challenge in 1992 when the court ultimately upheld Roe v. Wade but seriously weakened it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

When were talking about what the judges are doing now, they are really pulling the rug out from under Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which in turn, while reaffirming Roe, circumscribed the rights that were available to women by changing the trimester system to really a pre- and post-liability system.

All of those things were part of struggles that she lived through and that, in retrospect, we can see as part of an onward march of anti-choice opposition up to this moment where they think theyre going to be able to celebrate the undoing of womens bodily sovereignty.

Q: Do you feel that your mothers legacy gets the attention it deserves?

She doesnt get the attention she deserves, but you cant force feed people somebody elses legacy. I can only hope that when people are talking about her, when there are books and documentaries and so forth out there in circulation for people to watch, that it will light a flashbulb in some peoples minds about what they can aspire to, or how to think about politics or what a socially just agenda would look like and that theyll build consciousness.

But I dont want to get into the business of saying so and so didnt pay enough attention to her.

Part of the challenge of teaching history the right way which is being attacked by so many people on the other side of the political spectrum is to get the stories out there of the heroic work of people of color, of women, of anybody whos been on the margin, to tell those stories so that they are in wide circulation so that people have this treasure trove of human courage to dig from, to plot their own contributions for humanity going forward.

Q: What do you think your mother would think of todays political landscape and, if she were alive and in Congress today, how do you think she would respond to whats happening in our country?

I think shed be doing more of the same. The attack on democracy in our current moment is over the top and probably nothing she had ever before seen.

But there were experiences in the 60s and early 70s in which people were encouraged to stand up and to decide what the framework for defending democracy needed to be and she was there for those struggles. Im sure that she would transpose many of those efforts into the current moment.

They are the same things that people are talking about now: the rule of law, the necessity of defending a constitutional structure, the importance of affirming Congresss right to ask questions to oversee other aspects of the government, the importance of strengthening voting rights to guarantee participation in the process.

The dynamics of the contemporary situation are somewhat different in that were living in a technological age where people can be vituperative in public in a way that they were less able to in the olden days.

And we live in a time where its hard to consistently count on political courage. I think that she would be pulling for people to stand up and stand firm as the Jan. 6 committee seems to be doing.

Q: So then what do you think of the state of the union?

Oh, gosh. I think that the state of the union is fragile. I think that were very vulnerable. Our institutions are vulnerable. The effectiveness of our Constitution is vulnerable to all kinds of forces of division and corrupt intent. On the other hand, theres also a lot of political energy out there that is being harnessed by different forces over different issues, whether its the climate or gun regulation or womens rights and the like.

That gives me hope that mobilizations of the people who are the target of the anti-Democrats will ultimately prevail. But it will be a long struggle and everybody needs to keep on keeping on in the course of that struggle.

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Title IX And The Future of Democracy: A Conversation With Wendy Mink - Honolulu Civil Beat

Theres been deserved praise for the House Jan. 6 committees production values, yet the two leading players in these hearings are just as riveting: one descended from enslaved Black people, the other from a Puritan property owner in 1640 Massachusetts. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) each have centuries of wildly divergent family history in the United States, which makes them the most inspirational of partners.

Last fall I watched Cheney speak in Manchester, N.H. She is a lawyer with a crisp delivery and the job shes contemplated since she was an undergrad at Colorado College: representing Wyoming in the House like her father, who later became vice president. Cheneys political career was, and is, in peril, but on this day, she wanted to discuss her visit to the Eliot Burying Ground in Bostons Roxbury neighborhood, which dates to 1630. Fifteen Cheneys are buried there.

William Cheney, the 1640 property owner and Liz Cheneys ancestor, was an Englishman in search of religious freedom. Her great-great grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney enlisted with Gen. William T. Shermans army in 1861 and spent four years fighting for the Union, including Shermans 60,000-soldier March to the Sea in 1864. They knew the price of freedom, Cheney said. They knew that it had to be fought for and defended. And they knew that they were the ones who had to do it.

She was talking about the troops on that 285-mile march, but also about herself and others defending the union today. I can tell you without a doubt that the task for which so many generations have fought and have sacrificed now falls to us, Cheney said.

Thompson, 74, may have family roots that reach as far back as Cheneys, but they are tough to trace. His office did confirm that one of his great-grandparents was born to enslaved parents in Alabama in 1862. His mother was a teacher, his father an auto mechanic who died when he was a teenager. In a 1989 event at the University of Mississippi. Thompson reflected on growing up in Bolton, Miss., where he still lives. The public playground and pool were for whites only; the first new textbook he ever got was in 10th grade, and he had to travel 51 miles from his home, past two white high schools, to get to the Black high school.

At historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Thompson studied political science, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and organized voter registration drives for African Americans. He became a high school civics teacher, but politics was his calling. As he put it dryly at the committees second hearing, he is someone whos run for office a few times. Make that a few dozen times. He was an alderman at 21, a mayor at 25, a county supervisor at 32, a congressman at 45 and ever since.

The path was challenging from the start: It took the Voting Rights Act and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to resolve that he and two other Black candidates a majority on the five-member board of aldermen had legitimately won their seats. It took eight lawsuits and six months for him to be installed as mayor, Mother Jones reported of that 1973 race.

The person Thompson beat for mayor had an eighth-grade education and Thompson had a masters degree, he recalled in 1989, but there was still some question in the community as to if I was qualified to run. What else stuck in his mind? The budget for Mississippi State Universitys veterinary school, with less than 100 students, was bigger than the budget for the entire student body of over 2,000 at historically Black Mississippi Valley State University. And his mother, a schoolteacher, was told she didnt know enough about the Constitution to vote. She finally was able to register at age 46.

One way or another, Thompson has been dealing with great replacement paranoia since the day he registered his first Black voter, the day he ran for his first office, the day the first white candidates insisting theyd been robbed sued him and his fellow Black winners. More than 50 years later, as America confronts white supremacist extremism, he chairs both the Homeland Security Committee and the committee investigating the unprecedented attempt to keep a losing president in power a revolution within a constitutional crisis, as conservative Judge Michael Luttig put it last week.

All Thompsons life, he has been up against white people trying to hold on to their power. Leading this investigation is the capstone of a pioneering career.

By contrast, Cheneys vote to impeach Donald Trump and her decision to serve on the Jan. 6 committee likely will end her congressional career. Though she is as conservative as her deep-red state, polls ahead of Wyomings Aug. 16 Republican primary show her losing badly to Harriet Hageman, a former Cheney supporter who has been endorsed by Trump.

Cheney will speak June 29 in Simi Valley as part of a Ronald Reagan library series on what the GOP should stand for. To understate the case, Cheneys vision is not ascendant nationally these days. Roughly seven in 10 Republicans say President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected Will that ever change? Cheney is only 55. She has time on her side, and seriousness of purpose.

Thats something she and Thompson have in common, despite their stark political differences. Their hearings are not merely a competition between truth and lies, the Constitution and some crackpot interpretation of it. Our democracy is at stake, just as it was in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Thankfully, Cheney and Thompson understand this to their bones.

Jill Lawrence is a writer, an editor and the author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock. @JillDLawrence

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Op-Ed: Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney understand the stakes of democracy - Los Angeles Times