Dean Heller’s studiously ineffective protest of family destruction makes him a doormat for fascism

Nevada Senator Dean Heller recently offered a statement highlighting his opposition on paper to the Trump administration's most recent methods of barbarism: the deliberate policy of abusing children and destroying families on our southern border.

Trump has repeatedly and shamelessly lied by blaming Democrats and former president Obama for the origins of this policy. Trump has openly admitted that family separations are a strategy to instill terror and bring his critics to the negotiating table. And Trump has been defended by a series of morally depraved conservative allies. His Homeland Security secretary has also lied openly about the origins and rationale of the policy.

Dean Heller's statement, signed along with other Republican senators, acknowledges that enforcement of immigration policy should be "consistent with our values and ordinary human decency." While it sought to spread the blame to courts, it was also fairly clear in identifying Trump's "zero tolerance" policy as the source of the decision to abuse children, violate their human rights, and rip families apart.

The Republican senators' letter was addressed to the Attorney General. It steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the role of the president in calling for and defending these moral abominations and human rights abuses. The Republican senators declined to acknowledge that it is the president who sees the destruction of families as a negotiating ploy, a moral necessity, a fulfillment of his central campaign promises backed by his party, and a tool with which to discipline migrants.

On June 23, Trump will appear alongside Dean Heller to raise money for his re-election. The juxtaposition of Heller's weak but critical letter with his embrace of and by Donald Trump, is typical of how Nevada's Republican senator has dealt with the fascism menacing our country.

Time and again Heller has offered tepid criticism of Trump's actions--the assault on Americans' healthcare; the nomination of unqualified, corrupt, and malicious cabinet secretaries; gross violations of human rights. Heller has tantalized the media and Nevadans with threats to take bold action, before folding in the most complete and humiliating fashion. Time and again, Heller's brief time on his high horse has been followed by the utter collapse of his spinal column as he dismounts, and slithers off to do the President's bidding, whether that involves plunging our healthcare structures into chaos, passing a gargantuan tax giveaway to the wealthy, backing corrupt plutocrats for appointed office, or backing violent criminals to head government agencies.

These gross moral failures on the part of Dean Heller are not only nauseating in their own right. They represent one of two things. One possibility is that they are a carefully calibrated strategy that has so far managed to fool many Nevadans into thinking that Heller is a thoughtful moderate, when instead he is a powerful and enthusiastic supporter of the Trump agenda. The second possibility is that Heller is actually stupid enough to believe that a letter like the one he issued, in the context in which it was issued, represents a way of influencing the Trump administration.

Either scenario should be chilling for Nevadans. The Trump administration, and the bulk of the Republican Party, are mounting an assault on our country and many of its citizens that possesses all the hallmarks of fascism: palingenetic ethnic-ultranationalism; contempt for workers' organization; hostility toward internationalism; assaults on civil and human rights; scapegoating vulnerable minorities; the introduction of violence into political discourse and practice; a populist economic veneer over the promotion of profound economic inequality; destructive militarism; contempt for constitutional democracy; hostility toward the media; an authoritarianism which demands subservience from citizens, etc.

Whatever happens, our country will remain deeply marked by our experimentation with this fascism. But if the administration’s fascism continues to be strengthened, either by active proponents or foolishly misguided enablers, we are unlikely to survive as a society. In a global context where the United States joins other powerful authoritarians in seeking to export their model, the ascent of democracy as a global model will look like a blip on the historical radar.

Dean Heller might not realize how grave is the threat faced by our country. But he clearly recognizes that there are problematic features of Trump's program--the joint Republican statement implies a belief that Trump's immigration policy is immoral and indecent. Given that recognition, how can Heller and others believe that a letter to an Attorney General will influence Trump? How do they believe they can discipline this administration when they vote for its nominees, pass its favored legislation, and appear alongside its megalomaniac head at fundraisers? Their words might offer criticism, but their every action confirms that they are all bark and no bite. Their actions amount to a wink and a nod, a message to the fascist administration that they have its back, even if that sometimes means pretending to their constituents that they are troubled by its actions.

Nevada Senator Dean Heller is happiest when sitting astride a fence. Perhaps he enjoys the view, but it’s more like that it serves as his safe space, out of reach of the jack-booted racists and economic fundamentalists on the right, and removed from Nevada’s wider population which is suffering as a result of the crushing assault on civil, political, social, and economic rights mounted by the Trump administration with Heller’s assistance.

For the past few years Heller has paid lip service to decency, tolerance, reason, and other important values that hold our society together. And as he has mouthed his commitment to those values, he has steadily undermined them with a set of votes that have enabled an administration that makes profound appeals to people’s worst instincts by embracing bigotry, generating economic inequality, enshrining civic inequities, pedaling hate, and seeking to bring the same kind of savage disorder it is sewing in our own country to the international sphere.

The vicious assault on children and families on our southern border is the latest example of Heller’s spinelessness. No letters and no media statements will halt the depravity enacted there by the Trump administration and its Republican backers. That will require Republican senators rejecting each and every piece of Trump-backed legislation, turning down each and every Trump nominee, avoiding any Trump-associated fundraisers, and taking every opportunity to assail Trump’s administration in public. Otherwise, they are doormats and doormen at best, and enthusiastic allies at worst, for an administration that is taking our country and our world to the brink.

Chris Giunchigliani has my vote for Nevada governor

This fall, the nation’s eyes will be on Nevada’s senate race, where incumbent Republican Dean Heller has staked his career on enabling a dangerous ethno-nationalist administration dedicated to increasing both inequality before the law, and socio-economic inequality, while undermining the norms-based international order created after the Second World War.

But as Nevadans begin early voting in this summer’s primary, another race, with even more immediate implications for the state’s future, looms large. Nevada’s next governor will have a great deal to say about the future of a state that remains underdeveloped in its social and physical infrastructure. The two Democrats vying for their party’s nomination offer some important contrasts, and Nevadans would do well to look closely at this race.

Both nominees are Clark County commissioners, but Chris Giunchigliani, the more left leaning of the two, also has experience as a state legislator. She and Steve Sisolak have spent a primary campaign debating education policy, the nature and desirability of growth, different models for development in Nevada, gun control, and environmental protection. Either of them would be much preferable to social and economic fundamentalist Adam Laxalt who looks likely to win the Republican nomination.

However, I believe that Chris Giunchigliani would be most likely to work on making Nevada a place that those of us who live here--as opposed to people who come to Reno or Las Vegas for a week-end--can imagine as truly being our home as well as our zip code.

Steve Sisolak has moved to the left to woo primary voters, but many of his conversions--and to be fair, he is now asked to comment on broader issues than fell under the remit of a county commissioner--are open to question. My guess is that the fairly conservative Sisolak would draw on his basic “fiscal conservatism” to build some kind of an informal alliance with legislative Republicans to arrest the greater ambitions of Democrats in the legislature. It’s a model that has served a conservative Democratic governor well in California, and has stymied efforts in that state to address the long-term effects of the recession or to make public institutions more public and accessible.

The question of whether Sisolak would hold to some of his better primary positions is neither trivial nor, as some conservative Democrats like to suggest, a “purity test.” Rather, it is a legitimate concern about the degree to which we can expect real movement toward a state political economy that puts Nevadan families and communities at the heart of the model for the state’s future.

At the heart of the difference between Sisolak and Giunchigliani--who has declared that she will serve as the “education governor”--are two different visions of development for Nevada.

Sisolak’s model for development revolves around the idea that continued growth--in a fragile ecosystem and political economy--is the future, now and forever, for Nevada. It also relies on the serially irresponsible idea that the way to improve our social environment and livelihoods is to always ask outsiders to pay the bill. Sooner or later, Nevadans alike will have to come to grips with the reality that if they want a better life, they can’t rely on tourists to provide ever-new subsidies.

Much has been made about Giunchigliani and Sisolak’s different views about the public subsidy to the football stadium--she opposed it, he favored it. But this seemingly small issue demonstrates a great deal about their respective views about development. In my view, much else of substance--related to education, housing, the environment, etc--flows from these philosophies of development.

Sisolak opted for a public subsidy for the big ticket item which offers little to Nevadans aside from the possibility--experts say that stadiums seldom live up to the economic hype--of trickle-down development. Giunchigliani suggested that the funds for the stadium could have been devoted to improving the state’s mangled education system. Sisolak replied that Nevadans weren’t paying for the stadium--rather, the funds came from a room tax that would be paid by visitors. This point in no way negated Giunchigliani’s argument that a stadium was a less important feature of development than new educational infrastructure, something that like the stadium could simultaneously generate jobs while offering something far more substantial and enduring to Nevada’s children than the faraway glimmer of an entertainment venue.

Diverging views about sites for investment aside, Sisolak’s constant crowing about getting outsiders to pay for the stadium also masks a deep problem. Tourist dollars impose both a vulnerable and decidedly limited ceiling on Nevadans’ ambitions, and one which works to the disadvantage of most Nevadans and their needs.. The state’s constitution and tax code are riddled with limits (no state income tax, limited property taxes, protections for the powerful mining sector) on the state’s ability to draw on a broad and predictable range of revenue. As a result, the state relies on the limited indulgence of its poorest citizens for regressive taxes that cut more deeply into their earnings than those of their wealthy neighbors.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the big ticket item, stadium model of development. As Las Vegas races outward, it leaves far too many of its citizens behind. Families struggle to make ends meet, children fall through the cracks at straining schools, high rents and a threadbare safety net drive people to homelessness, and the transit infrastructure on which poorer Nevadans depend stagnates. New proposals to push the city further into the desert miss both ecological limits and social needs, while failing to embrace an opportunity to build inward and upward--the future of global cities.

Sisolak’s attacks on Chris Giunchigliani amount to ‘why, as a single member of the legislature, were you not able to pull our state out of a hole?” ignoring that the hole is dug by a mangled state constitution and system of governance, a deep set but changing libertarian political culture, and a lengthy period of Republican dominance at the gubernatorial level.

Giunchigliani appears to better understand that the traditional trickle-down model of development isn’t working for Nevada’s communities. Trickle down development is the equivalent of offering ‘thoughts and prayers’ after a shooting, in that it turns over responsibility for a public policy problem to a faith-based initiative: divine intervention in the one case, and the fantasy of a market that doesn’t actually exist as a thing except in the fevered dreams of Laxalt’s libertarianism. Markets are collections of relationships and interests. They don’t do public policy, although the manner in which they are or aren’t regulated has implications for public policy. Governments, in contrast do public policy, and that is why they are better placed to ensure that resources reach the people who need them before affluent interests have taken their pound of flesh.

At a series of debates, Sisolak appeared to attack Giunchigliani for spending a career fighting for lost causes rather than “getting things done.” But her battles, even if sometimes lost, were for our state’s forgotten children, beleaguered families, battered workforce, and fragile institutions, and it is precisely because people like Giunchigliani fought them before there was a consensus about the need to do so, that the conversation has changed, forcing even conservative Democrats like Sisolak to talk the talk. The wellbeing of those constituencies are not lost causes.

As a new Nevadan, I’d love to live in a state with uniformly-excellent public schools, well-funded public universities, great public transit, protected public lands, clean air, affordable healthcare, generous support for those who fall on hard times, in which people, rather than commercial entities, are recognized as the source of a state community’s wellbeing.

Based on the respective philosophies of development articulated by Nevada’s two Democratic contenders for the governorship, Chris Giunchigliani will get my vote. Hers is a pro-active, human-oriented approach to public policy, that asks Nevadans to assert control over their own destinies, eschewing the trickle down model of development that has served the state rather poorly in the past.