As Heather Cox Richardson notes in her Letters from an American post on Substack this morning:
A new poll out today from the New York Times and Siena University shows that nearly two thirds of Americans, 63%, disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, while only 36% approve. Even among white Americans, 57% disapprove, while only 42% approve. Sixty-one percent of Americans, including 19% of Republicans, think that ICE agents have gone too far.
She is undoubtedly right to draw attention to this. My question is, will it matter? After all, what chance is there of an election where these opinions might be expressed on vatong papers dropped into a ballot box, or registered on a voting machine, US style?
Let's be serious about this. When Trump can justify almost any action by declaring a national emergency, all of which exists only in his mind, and those of the acolytes who are using him to advance their fascist agenda, why won't there be an emergency this autumn sufficient for him to at least attempt to cancel the mid-term elections?
And woe betide any state that decides to hold them anyway. The cost in terms of withdrawn Federal subsidies will be very high. This is another of those previously unknown weapons that Trump has now made his own by choice.
Opinion in the USA matters, of course. The challenge it now faces is how to relate that opinion to a change in political incumbents, as it now seems very likely that its democracy is already being consigned to its past.
And we should take note. Opinion here is rarely reflected in election outcomes, which always exaggerate results, both for good and for bad. Before we sneer at the States and pretend it is another country with problems all its own, what are we going to do to deliver effective democracy?
Might this be amongst the greatetst challenge of our times? How can we ensure that people get their say when right now that appears to be one of the hardest political goals to achieve?
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‘Might this be amongst the greatest challenge of our times?’.
I think so – from addressing it flows the solutions to a lot of problems we are facing right now and in the future which are being ignored by those at the top.
I think that the situation is actually quite dangerous – I thought I saw another one of those polls where even the rich have said that they should be paying higher taxes – if this was bona fide, is it because they are worried about the pitchforks coming? Who are the billionaires who don’t believe in taxation at all? Who is actually pushing and corrupting politics into the wrong direction?
Many of these mega rich don’t even answer to the label of ‘citizen’ – that definition is far too ‘ordinary’ for them. The recent Wes Anderson film ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ (2025) has a magnate character in it named ‘Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda’ who sums up his pleonexia in a soliloquy:
‘I don’t have a passport. Normal people want the basic human rights that accompany citizenship in any sovereign nation. I don’t. My legal residence is a shack in Portugal. My official domicile is a hut on the Black Sea. My certificate of abode is a lodge perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sub-Saharan rainforest, accessible only by goat path. I don’t live anywhere. I’m not a citizen at all. I don’t need my human rights.’
No, people like Korda don’t need their human rights because they have money instead. Money works – it supplants rights – those of the monied and especially those of the not so monied.
We have allowed this to happen on the basis of the dream that democracy was all about all of us having the chance to catch pleonexia. For me, the answer is that only taxation cures pleonexia and helps protect us from developing the condition – a condition that removes the need to socialise to survive because human existence is actually based on sharing and reciprocity.
As you suggest, we have yet to wake up from this dreamworld. It looks as those we are heading for a rude awakening I’m afraid.
You may be right.
I am hoping you aren’t. I don’t like people getting hurt.
The things is Richard, is that the rapidly warming planet we live on can hurt people. It is doing so on an almost daily basis because of our refusal to stop taking it for granted. It is not just a ‘people on people’ rude awakening I am suggesting at all, to be clear.
The poll was conducted among 1625 registered voters.
You’d think that a country with 5 times the UK population could rustle up a poll with bigger numbers.
Moreover there will be ‘don’t knows’ and ‘didn’t answers’ in the polls and frankly anyone even taking part in a poll which includes a question “Are you white?” needs to have a good long look at themselves.
I would urge anyone in the UK to refuse to take part in any polling which collects skin colour information. It will only be used to discriminate and move us further away from the dreams of Martin Luther King.
A tangential topic, I know: How can we ensure that people get their say about … water company ownership?
Clive Lewis sent me the following email about a White Paper on the future of water companies. Lewis claims that 82% of the public want public ownership but that the Government appears to want the current system to continue (with a few tweaks).
Have you time, Richard, to set out the arguments in more detail for us?
Heading: They’re trying to stitch this up… again. ActionNetwork.org. Clive Lewis MPteam@clivelewis.org
The Government is planning to lock us into decades more of failed privatised water without listening to the public. Their new plan to “fix” our water – that doesn’t even mention ownership – is paving the way for major legislation without a public consultation. We need to act fast to make sure that doesn’t happen.
This week, the Government launched its Water White Paper, a strong indication of what new legislation will look like. There was no mention of challenging current ownership, just more regulatory tweaks to a model that has given us leaking pipes, sewage in our rivers and extortionate bills. That’s why I asked the Environment Minister in Parliament if she would meet with campaigners and I, and whether the public – 82% of whom support public ownership – would be consulted on these new plans. She said no.
So here’s my question: why shut the public out from scrutinising your legislation?
Not only is this a democratic failure, but not listening to the public is bound to create more of the same problems people are already living with. This feels like déjà vu. Last year, over 20,000 of you helped expose the Government’s so-called “Independent” review of water, which was banned from even considering public ownership. Thousands of people responded to that consultation, asking for public ownership to be considered. We were ignored. Meanwhile, campaigners showed how regulators, investors and water companies dominated what little consultation took place. Now the Environment Secretary is using that same stitched-up review to justify cutting the public out all over again. [Ends with request to sign a petition]
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You need to read yesterdays Byline Times to be truly terrified and despondent