Adam Laxalt's silly surveys represent dishonest and anti-democratic tendencies

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Perhaps realizing that he will fare poorly against any Democratic challenger if he runs on his serially irresponsible and inconsistent platform for mauling Nevada’s public institutions, public lands, and public welfare, Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt is instead turning to the most powerful weapon in any Republican’s arsenal.  How better to distract Republican citizens from the wreckage he wants to make of the schools, healthcare, landscape, and civic infrastructure they share with their Democratic neighbors, than to huff and puff and blow on the dog-whistle?

Laxalt’s tune of choice involves bombarding people on his e-mail list with comically loaded survey questions, asking them if they oppose the federal government killing all babies (I exaggerate, but just barely).  His most recent survey question involves an issue surely weighing on the minds of all Nevadans: NFL players and the First Amendment.  

The question itself asked voters whether they “agree that NFL players should stand for our National Anthem?”  The accompanying text declared that “While the first amendment guarantees our right to free speech, NLF players’ protest is disrespectful to our flag and those who have fought and died to defend our nation.”

I can’t help but think that for most Nevadans, healthcare, education, transit, public services, public lands, and other questions around political-economy probably loom largest in their minds.  But Laxalt’s decision to run this survey question does offer a useful window into his thinking and his campaign.

Laxalt’s basic argument is that NFL players’ protest is offensive to our military.  That claim demonstrates one of two things.  Either Laxalt is seriously dumb (doubtful given his accomplishments) or he is fundamentally dishonest.

As players’ own words, never mind the tens of thousands of words of reporting about their actions have made clear, they are not protesting the U.S. military.  Rather, they are protesting systemic inequalities in the way that police in our country behave toward citizens in our country.  They are protesting how a justice system, far from being blind, sees very vividly in color, a legacy not just of hundreds of years of institutionalized racism, but of denial of the same over the past several decades.

The insistence on maintaining that athletes’ protests are there somehow an insult to the military tells us some things.  It firstly indicates that there is a deep disinclination of both citizens and public figures to listen to protesters to understand their cause.  That Laxalt--deliberately or through ignorance, and unless he is a literal troglodyte it’s certainly the former--chooses to ignore their well-substantiated claims speaks particularly poorly of him, because as state Attorney General it is his responsibility to think long and hard about how law functions and is implemented and experienced by the state’s citizens.

The insistence on lying in this particular way about the basis for athletes’ protests--claiming that they are trying to insult the military--also suggests a toxic mindset about nationalism, patriotism, and the military in our country.  There is a long and pathetic tradition in our country of urging people to “rally ‘round the flag” as a way of distracting from other issues or shutting down other conversations.

There is an equally sordid tradition of trying to claim that the military maintains some kind of monopoly on national symbols and discourse.  The military, like other public institutions, exists to serve the citizens, and any suggestion that we should, voluntarily or otherwise, subordinate our claims on rights to an institution that is for better or worse about coercion, is extremely dangerous and undemocratic.  Flags, anthems, and other symbols of our nation, along with the rights they are supposed to represent, belong first and foremost to citizens, and not to any particular category of people.

The reality is that since 1945 the U.S. military has almost never been deployed in conflict to defend the public interest of the U.S.  Rather, it has been deployed to defend often deeply-flawed national security nostrums, or the power and profits of American companies.  It has been deployed to defend or augment American hegemony, which far from serving the public interest, is often self-defeating and destructive.  These realities do not lessen the individual sacrifices that members of the military have made, but they should caution the public about accepting the claim that the military is wielded in order to defend our rights.  The suggestion that this is true ranks with the disingenuous claim, “They hate us for our freedoms,” a blanket assertion designed to sweep away a century of politics and relationships and entanglements.  

Even if the military did regularly work to protect Americans’ rights, that does not give it and its “supporters” the ability to invoke their work and sacrifice to shut down other conversations.  This is what military officials and the Bush administration sought to do in order to quiet critics as they dispatched American soldiers to kill and be killed in a fruitless, illegal war in Iraq.  If anything demonstrates disrespect for sacrifice, it was and is the decision by these powerful men and women, and others like them, to hide behind the bodies of dead American soldiers to avoid being called to account for their crimes.

So when Adam Laxalt first lies about the purpose of athletes’ protests, and then invokes the military to shut down discussion about the actual reason for those protests, he is showing us that he is fully prepared to participate in a nasty and dangerous tradition that has been used to silence debate, redirect scrutiny, and foreclose opportunities to make our country more just and equal.  It also indicates that as governor he would not take inequities in law enforcement and the law itself seriously, and that he is perfectly happy to subordinate fundamental rights to the basest of political ends.

Nevada politicians support Trump's dangerous Middle East move

Nevada’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, has joined the chorus praising Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and commit to moving the U.S. embassy to that city.  Trump made this announcement in spite of pleas from Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and European leaders who understand that it represents a needless provocation and a dangerous impediment to a just settlement in the region.

Jerusalem is deeply contested territory, and a key part of negotiations between the Israeli colonial state and Palestinian subjects who seek their own independent state.  The U.S. has always played an awkward role as mediator between Israel and its occupied territories given its fulsome support for Israeli colonialism and its willingness to undercut its own negotiating ability by writing blank checks to the Israeli state, thereby offering few incentives for that state to participate in good-faith negotiations.  

Nevada’s senate race should and shall focus largely on where the candidates stand in relation to healthcare, taxation, the basic relationships between citizens and government, and their approach to matters of justice and political-economy.  However, senators also have opportunities to weigh in on and influence international policy, a role that is particularly important given the dysfunction, incompetence, and malice that drive the Trump administration’s approach to the wider world.

In this particular piece of unbridled stupidity, Dean Heller is joined by his would-be Democratic replacement, Congresswoman Jacky Rosen, who has a history of supporting this signally bad policy.  It is incumbent on Heller and Rosen to do what Trump declined to do, and explain how this move makes the slightest strategic, moral, diplomatic, or security sense.  

They should explain how Trump’s decision to offer a calculated slight to Palestinians and their allies in the Middle East is in our public interest.  Allying the U.S. so transparently with one side of a struggle makes us a party to the violence and inequality that has flown from Israel’s colonialism, and will likely imperil American lives.

While recognizing Jerusalem’s status might serve the short-term interests of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ethno-religious nationalism as his scandal-ridden premiership reels at home, this alteration of U.S. policy is unlikely to enhance the long-term security prospects of Israeli citizens.  In fact, because it is such a deliberate provocation, it is likely to do the reverse, giving the lie to the protestations of those in the U.S. who claim that this is about Israel’s best interests.

Finally, rewarding Israel’s bad behavior--colonial policing, the construction of illegal settlements, embracing ethno-religious nationalism--will embolden Israeli securocrats, who are likely to read this move by the Trump administration as an endorsement of their violent excesses.  If they react accordingly, they are likely to further escalate conflict between their state and their occupied territories.  The result will be further insecurity for Israeli citizens and greater violence and deprivation for their colonial subjects, the Palestinians.  Escalation of every kind diminishes the opportunities for a just settlement.  

So Nevada’s incumbent senator and his rival are both demonstrating a signal inability to adopt a reasoned, long-term view about U.S. interests, international peace, and conflict resolution by backing a decision by the Trump administration which runs counter to public interest in the U.S., which will make Israelis less secure, and which will degrade the lives of Palestinians.  

The United States gained its own independence from colonial rule in the eighteenth century.  And while our country has a history of imposing its own rule on indigenous subjects and hemispheric neighbors, its independence struggle nevertheless helped to inspire a wave of anti-colonial nationalist movements in the coming centuries: in Latin America and parts of Europe during the nineteenth century, and in Africa and Asia during the twentieth century.  

Now, in the twenty-first century, colonial rule is largely accepted as a self-evidently unjust and malicious enterprise, generating destruction for the colonized and internal corrosion for the colonizer.  The U.S. government and our representatives do no one any good by defending the indefensible, and this ill-advised decision to appease the Israeli government does nothing more than endanger the prospects of peace, and make the citizens of all parties to negotiation less safe because of the climate of mistrust and injustice it fuels.