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Today marks a decade since WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs, the most comprehensive exposure of imperialist criminality and neo-colonial banditry since the Pentagon Papers of the 1970s revealed the scale of American military activities in Vietnam, and perhaps of all time.

In minute detail, the logs exposed all of the lies used to justify the occupation of Iraq, revealing it to be a brutal operation involving the daily murder of civilians, torture, innumerable acts of imperialist thuggery targeting an oppressed population, and cover-ups extending to the top of the US and allied military commands.

The material was painstakingly reviewed, contextualised, and its political implications explained, above all by Julian Assange and his small team of journalistic colleagues at WikiLeaks.

The logs were one of the most powerful applications of the WikiLeaks model that Assange had developed when he founded the organisation in 2006. The publication of leaked documents, kept hidden by the powers-that-be, would expose to the population the real military, economic and political relations, and the daily intrigues of governments that shaped world politics and so much of their lives. Only by knowing what was really occurring, could ordinary people take informed political action, including in the fight to end war.

Assange and WikiLeaks have never been forgiven by the US ruling elite, or its allies in Britain, Australia and internationally, for taking these Enlightenment ideals seriously and acting on them. Behind all of the lies and slanders used to undermine support for Assange, the real watchword of the campaign against the WikiLeaks founder is: He exposed our crimes, so we will destroy him.

Ten years after he revealed war crimes, of a scale and intensity not seen since the horrors of the Nazi regime, Assange is alone in a cell at Londons maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, a facility designed to detain terrorists and murderers. He faces extradition to the US, prosecution under the Espionage Act for publishing the truth, including the Iraq War Logs, and 175 years in a supermax prison.

Chelsea Manning, the courageous whistleblower who released the material, has been subjected to a decade-long nightmare involving imprisonment, what the United Nations deemed to be state torture and attempts to coerce her into giving false testimony against Assange, which she has heroically resisted.

But the gangsters who orchestrated the rape of Iraq remain free. George W. Bush has been politically rehabilitated, above all by the US Democrats and the corrupt liberal press, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is still up to his neck in imperialist intrigues in the Middle East and his Australian counterpart John Howard is enjoying a quiet retirement.

This operation has above all relied upon the same pliant, corporate media that promoted the illegal invasion of Iraq, based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, and then embedded itself in the occupation forces that pillaged the country and looted its oil. Their complicity today is summed up by the fact that not a single major publication in the US, Britain or Australia has even taken note of the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq War Logs.

The significance of the logs, and the explosive impact they had on popular consciousness, however, must be recalled.

The publication comprised 391,832 field reports by the US army, from 2004 to 2009, making it the largest leak in the history of the American military. They recorded 109,000 Iraqi deaths.

At least 66,081 were described by the US army as civilians. This included some 15,000 fatalities that had been completely covered up by the US and its allies, who prior to the publication, claimed that they did not have a record of civilian deaths. Without WikiLeaks and Assange, the murders of these workers, students, young people and senior citizens, equivalent to the population of a small town, would never have been known.

The logs showed that the US military routinely described those it killed as insurgents, when they were known to be civilians. Such was the case in the infamous 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, documented in WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video, which involved the slaughter of up to 19 civilians, including two Reuters journalists. A US army press release at the time had described a fictitious firefight with insurgents.

The war logs revealed that some 700 civilians had been gunned-down by US and allied troops for coming too close to a military checkpoint. They included children and the mentally-ill. On at least six occasions, the victims were rushing their pregnant wives to hospital to give birth.

The carnage was also perpetrated by the private contractors who operated as shock troops of the US occupation. One report described Blackwater employees firing indiscriminately into a crowd after an IED explosion. Another said US soldiers observed a Blackwater PSD shoot up a civ vehicle in Baghdad. The May, 2005 attack killed an innocent man and maimed his wife and daughter.

The logs showed that the US routinely handed over detainees to their puppet Iraqi security forces for torture. One report noted the presence of a hand cranked generator with wire clamps in a Baghdad police station, used to electrocute prisoners. The official policy of the Coalition troops, as revealed in the logs, was not to investigate such incidents.

Taken together, the revelations painted an undeniable picture of systemic criminality, involving the most powerful governments in the world, their militaries and proxies.

Testifying at British show-trial hearings for Assanges extradition last month, Professor John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, stated that the logs had brought the killings of Iraqi civilians to the largest global audience of any single release All of [the recorded civilian deaths] which were unique to the Logs in 2010 are still unique the Iraq War Logs remain the only source of those incidents.

Their significance is even starker when placed in a broader political context. In 2003, millions of people joined demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, in the largest anti-war movement in human history.

The pseudo-left, Green and trade union forces that politically dominated the protests did everything they could to subordinate this movement to pro-war organisations, such as the Democratic Party in the US and the Labor Party in Australia, as well as impotent appeals to the United Nations. In 2008, they supported the election of US President Barack Obama, proclaiming that representative of Wall Street, who would be at war his entire eight years in office, as the bringer of peace.

WikiLeaks publication of the war logs cut through this suppression of the anti-war movement, raising the urgency of a renewed fight against imperialist militarism. In the process, young people around the world became aware, in many cases for the first time, of the horrors being perpetrated in Iraq, and were politically activated.

The New York Times and the Guardian partnered with WikiLeaks on the war logs. Their aim was to control the narrative and land a scoop. But as it became clear that the publications were contributing to a political radicalisation of workers and young people, and that WikiLeaks was facing the full force of the US state, they began to denounce Assange in the most slanderous terms.

Such is the basic reason for the venomous hostility of the entire political and media establishment towards Assange in every country, especially its pseudo-left and liberal contingents. He and WikiLeaks rocked the boat upon which their own privileged and selfish upper-middle class existence depends. The wars, moreover, had not been at all bad for their stock portfolios, contributing to the open support of this milieu for the imperialist attacks on Libya and Syria.

But the publication of the war logs was an imperishable contribution to humanity and the fight against imperialist war, for which Assange is rightly viewed as a hero by millions of workers and young people. Now, it is up to the international working class to spearhead the fight for Assanges freedom, the defence of all WikiLeaks staff and of democratic rights as a whole.

This is inseparable from the struggle against the escalating drive to war, including US threats of war against China and Russia, and the fight to put an end to the capitalist order that is responsible for imperialist violence and authoritarianism.

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Ten years since WikiLeaks and Julian Assange published the Iraq War Logs - WSWS

Military working dog handlers in Iraq have set up a walking blood bank for their four-legged partners who help secure bases, hunt explosives and assist in combat missions such as the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last year.

The bank will allow for rapid treatment of injured working dogs, Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led coalition battling ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said on Twitter Wednesday.

Boni, Bubo and Rexo, all patrol explosive detector dogs at Al Asad Air Base, were among the pups who had their blood drawn and tested earlier this month to identify their blood types, online photos show.

This is the first time [Operation Inherent Resolve] has established a mobile blood bank for military working dogs ... and multi-purpose canines, said Army Col. Wayne Marotto, a coalition military spokesman.

The canine blood bank was started in response to a policy the Army Medical Command surgeon generals office issued that requires the services veterinarians to record blood types for all working dogs, Marotto said. For human casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has long relied on walking blood banks in which prescreened donors can be called up to give blood at a medical facility in case of a mass casualty event or a trauma patient in need of numerous transfusions.

Blood loss is one of the top preventable causes of combat death. Earlier this year, the Marine Corps also began testing a program in the Middle East modeled on one used by Army Rangers in Afghanistan last year that enables lifesaving transfusions on the battlefield.

The 994th Medical Detachment Veterinary Services Support and medical personnel has set up emergency response capabilities and trained health care providers to ensure the animals receive the highest level of emergency care, Marotto said.

Inherent Resolve did not have military canine casualty data, he said. But at least two working dogs in the U.S. Central Command area of operations were medically evacuated following injuries this year, including one from Iraq that suffered cardiac arrest, according to military statements.

Military working dogs like Conan, a Belgian Malinois who was wounded during the mission that killed ISIS leader Baghdadi last October, are critical members of our forces, U.S. Central Command boss Gen. Frank McKenzie said last year. Conan had accompanied special operations troops on some 50 missions.

In hot Middle Eastern weather, the availability of donor blood also can be critical for canines off the battlefield. In June, an Air Force pup named Cvoky was rushed by helicopter from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia to Kuwaits Camp Arifjan after its body temperature reached nearly 110 degrees.

At 104 degrees, dogs begin suffering heat stroke, the Humane Society of the United States website says. Heat injuries can cause internal organ damage and hemorrhage, and few dogs survive if they reach as high a body temperature as Cvoky, a military veterinarian said in a statement after the incident.

But in that case, a pint of blood from a Navy dog named Army helped save his life, the statement said.

We got the call that my dog, Army, might be a match, it quoted dog handler Petty Officer 2nd Class Sera Tamez as saying. It feels really good to help one of our own!

garland.chad@stripes.comTwitter: @chadgarland

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Michael Jorgensen, right, a veterinarian technician with the 994th Medical Detachment Veterinary Service, shows how to identify the cephalic vein on a dog to Spc. Mezghan Akbar, left, a medical laboratory specialist with the 466th Medical Company, Area Support, New York National Guard, before she draws blood from Boni, a patrol explosive detector dog assigned to the K9 Task Force at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, Oct. 7, 2020. Boni, a German Shepherd, was scheduled to have blood drawn so that the veterinary clinic can identify her blood type and initiate a walking blood bank for military working dogsARMANDO VASQUEZ/U.S. ARMY

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Military working dogs in Iraq get a blood bank like their humans have - Stars and Stripes

Many people also generally imagine the work of international NGOs like MSF, in Iraq and throughout the region, being done by foreigners, which sometimes raises suspicion. Suhaibs colleague Yasmine Mohammed, who works as a watchwoman in the centre, explains that the acceptance of humanitarian organisations was not very high when they started working in Mosul after the battle to retake the city from Islamic State group.

It wasnt very favourable for Iraqis to work with organisations at first. The community did not welcome the idea of us working with foreigners, considering the events Iraq has witnessed for more than a decade, Yasmine says. But the perception changed when these organisations started providing much needed services; Mosul wouldnt have started recovering if it wasnt for that.

Over time, people coming in for services could also witness that, just like Yasmine or Suhaib, most of the organisations employees were actually Iraqis.

In fact, Iraqis make up for more than 90 per cent of the 1,700 people who work for MSF in Iraq. Their roles are diverse, from driver to doctor, from cleaner to biomedical technician, from pharmacist to supply officer, and many more.

Yet each persons role is considered vital for the functioning of the project. Everyone works very hard to accomplish their tasks, and these efforts form a butterfly effect that has a great impact when it comes to the bigger picture. Without the Iraqi staff, MSFs activities wouldnt come to life and stay alive.

For Yasmine, the contribution consists in searching female staff, patients, and visitors before they enter the facility, for the security of all. When doing so, she generally also asks them how theyre doing and welcomes them with great warmth. She loves her job because it gives her a chance to boost peoples morale, people who might be looking for positive energy every now and then.

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Humanitarians behind the scenes in Iraq - Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) International

WASHINGTON - Iraqi officials say they have found a new mass grave that contains the remains of several dozen people who appear to have been executed on the spot by Islamic State in the disputed northern province of Kirkuk.

Yehia Rasool, military spokesperson for Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, announced Tuesday on Twitter that Iraqi forces found the corpses of more than 50 people by chance as they were pursuing the IS remnants in the Dawud Aluka village in Riyadh subdistrict.

They were executed by Daesh terror gangs during their rein over the village, he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. Rasool didnt provide further details on the identities of the victims.

Thousands of Iraqis have gone missing since 2014 when IS took control of Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city, along with a large swath of territory in other parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Missing peshmerga soldiers

Among the missing in Kirkuk are several dozen Kurdish peshmerga fighters who were last seen in an IS propaganda video in 2015. The footage showed the soldiers in orange jumpsuits atop the beds of pickup trucks in a parade through the streets of Kirkuks Hawijah district.

Months after the videos release, Kurdish authorities requested U.S. assistance for a joint commando raid on an IS prison where the peshmerga fighters were believed to be held.

Though they didnt find any of the peshmerga fighters in that facility, the rare joint operation freed dozens of Iraqi army soldiers and civilians. A 39-year-old American officer, Joshua L. Wheeler, was killed in the operation after he voluntarily assisted his Iraqi partners who had come under enemy fire, according to the Pentagon.

Kurds are now looking to see if any of the newly found remains match the identities of their missing loved ones.

Its possible that peshmerga remains are among those found in the mass grave, GeneralMohammed Regr, a Kurdish commander in Kirkuk, told VOA.

More mass graves

Those desperate for news about the fate of their loved ones in Iraq may never know what happened to them, according to human rights groups that have criticized the way Iraqi authorities handle exhumations.

In my experience over the last few years in Iraq, the government has failed in most instances when they discover mass graves to properly manage the site by marking it off and then proceeding with exhumations carrying out the forensic work needed to identify the remains and returning the remains to family members, Belkis Wille, a senior crisis and conflict researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told VOA.

In November 2018, the United Nations published a report that documented the existence of 202 mass graves containing as many as 12,000 victims in IS territories across the provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Anbar. The report cited myriad challenges facing the Iraqi governments attempts to dig up mass graves, including a lack of resources, security issues and a lack of technical expertise.

The majority of these sites, the U.N. report said, have not yet been excavated. Some are secured by the presence of Iraqi armed forces. Some have been enclosed by fencing. And some are contaminated by the presence of explosive devices.

The report urged the international community to assist Iraq in the exhumation process to ensure the realization of a meaningful truth and justice.

With the help of the U.S.-led international coalition against IS, Iraqi and Syrian forces have captured most of the territory that IS once held under its so-called caliphate. They are now engaged in what they call the clearing phase against IS remnants.

The group continues to mount surprise hit-and-run attacks and plant explosive devices targeting security forces and civilians in both Iraq and Syria.

In areas disputed between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan region, such as Kirkuk, experts say the IS threat remains serious.

VOA Kurdish Services Dilshad Anwar contributed to this report from Kirkuk, Iraq.

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Iraq Discovers Remains of More Than 50 IS Victims in Mass Grave - Voice of America

As Trump has outsourced economic policy to the establishment, he has outsourced social policy to the evangelicals. Years before he launched his Presidential campaign, some instinct led him to create an alliance with the religious wing of the Republican Party. Nearly twenty years ago, he formed a public relationship with Paula White, a popular televangelist who preaches the prosperity Gospel, and who has said that she guided Trump toward active Christianity. Since at least 2011, Trump has been appearing at the American Conservative Unions annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a large gathering of activists from the Party base. In 2016 and 2017, Trump released lists of potential Supreme Court Justices, all of them demonstrably acceptable to both wings of the Republican Party, the evangelicals and the libertarians, and then made appointments only from those lists. (He released a second-term list this year.) He selected Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian who had strong support from the Koch brothers and from other major Republican donors, as his Vice-President. As President, Trump has issued a number of executive orders that evangelicals approve of, such as one that rescinded a provision of the Affordable Care Act which required health-care providers to offer birth control. He actually did what he said hed do, Albert Mohler told me. Its the oddest thing.

Leaders of organizations with strong connections to the Republican base have found themselves being courted by Trump. Norquist may have failed to get Trump to sign his no-tax pledge during the campaign, but he still feels attended to. Id run into him, and hed say, You like my tax cut? You like my tax cut? he said. He flipped on abortion. He came down hard on the Second Amendment. (Trump has said he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.) Norquist told me that the day after Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court he invited a group of conservatives to the White House, including Norquist, Paula White, and the leaders of the N.R.A., the Federalist Society, and the National Right to Life organization. He said, Grover likes me because I cut taxes. He didnt say, I like Grover. He said, Grover likes me. Usually, you want the President to like you.

Steven Hayward, a well-connected conservative who has written the two-volume history The Age of Reagan, told me, The biggest surprise about Trump is that he has turned out to govern as a conservative, even more than Reagan did. When GeorgeW. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto accords, he sent a letter. When Trump withdrew from the Paris accords, he had a big announcement in the Rose Garden. And he doesnt know Friedrich Hayek from Salma Hayek. He sold outto us!

This is likely to be Trumps last campaign. In talking to dozens of conservatives over the past few months, I didnt find anybody who likes or admires him in any conventional way. The Republican officeholders who opposed his nomination but dont stand up to him are displaying either party loyalty or fear: he remains extraordinarily popular with Republican voters, especially in red states, and he is so vengeful that to displease him is to risk political death. Jeff Sessions experienced this firsthand during his run, earlier this year, for the Republican Senate nomination in Alabama. Sessions had a long, successful history in politics in Alabama and in the Senate, and a record of Trump-like views on immigration. He incurred Trumps wrath when, as Attorney General, he recused himself from any investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as the special counsel. For months, Trump relentlessly mocked and attacked Sessions on Twitter before firing him, in November, 2018. This year, he endorsed Sessionss Republican opponent, Tommy Tuberville, a former football coach making his first run for political office. Trump tweeted that Tuberville was a REAL LEADER. Sessions lost the primary.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who during the 2016 primary season declared that Trump was not fit to be President of the United States, quickly became one of his most abject loyalists, expecting that the Presidents support would guarantee his relection to the Senate in 2020. Lindsey was scared of being primaried, a veteran South Carolina Republican consultant told me. Republicans in South Carolina didnt like himbut hes getting cheered by Republicans now. Grahams strategy may have worked with Republicans in his home state, but he is paying a price for it. His Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, who has raised more money in one quarter than any previous candidate for the Senate, has drawn close to Graham in some polls.

Donald Trump is far too bizarre to be precisely replicable as a model for the generic Republican of the future. That raises the question of where the Republican Party will go after he leaves office. The jockeying for the 2024 Republican nomination is already well under way. Did Trumps ascension represent a significant change in the Partys orientation, and, if so, will the change be temporary or lasting?

Among the Republicans I spoke to, some of whom will vote for Trump and some of whom wont, there are three competing predictions about the future of the Party over the coming years. Lets call them the Remnant, Restoration, and Reversal scenarios.

Most of the 2016 Republican Presidential candidates accepted the post-2012-autopsy argument that the Party, with its overwhelming lack of appeal to nonwhite voters, was in a demographic death spiral. Trump ran a campaign that seemed designed to appeal only to whitesindeed, only to whites who didnt like nonwhites. That worked well in the Republican primaries, and well enough in the general election for Trump to eke out a victory that would have been impossible without the Electoral College system. He also did slightly better with minority voters than Romney had, though minority turnout was significantly lower than it had been in the two elections when Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee.

Could somebody else use the Trump playbook to win a Presidential election? Those who believe in the Remnant scenario think so. It would require extremely high motivation among Trumps basemainly exurban or rural, actively religious, and not highly educatedalong with a strong appeal to affluent whites, continued modest inroads with minority voters, and a low turnout among Democrats. If a politician were able to tap into the deep antipathy toward lites in the Trump heartland, he could compensate, at least in part, for the demographic decline of white voters. In the years between the elections of 1996 and 2016, the Democratic Party lost its voting majority in about a thousand of the three thousand counties in the United Statesnone in major population centers. Trump carried eighty-four per cent of the counties.

Stalwart Trump fans talk about a looming liberal takeover of all aspects of American life, including religious life, and a domination of the middle of the country by sophisticated, prosperous, snobbish, ruthless people. The ur-text for this viewpoint is The Flight 93 Election, an essay published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016. Its author, Michael Anton, who worked briefly at the National Security Council in the Trump Administration, has just published a book called The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, in which he warns that red America might quietlyat first spontaneously, but later perhaps through more explicit cooperationstart to make federal operations on their turf more difficult.

The Remnant strategy entails relentless attacks. It rests on the idea of an outpowered cohort of traditional Americans who see themselves as courageously defending their values. The obvious candidate to carry out a high Trumpist strategy in 2024 would be Donald Trump, Jr., who is an active speaker in Trump-admiring circles and in the past two years has published two books that excoriate liberals. Several other potential Republican candidates, most notably Senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and Josh Hawley, of Missouri, have demonstrated that they see Trumps success as instructive. Between them, Cotton and Hawley have two degrees from Harvard, one from Yale, and one from Stanford, but both have been steadily propounding populist and nationalist themes. The forty-year-old Hawley, who is only two years into his first term and is the youngest member of the Senate, is a relentless Twitter user, frequently targeting China, Silicon Valley, and liberals who are hostile to religion. Like Trump in 2016, he almost never argues for less government, and often calls for programs to help working people. In the summer of 2019, he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference denouncing a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities, which, he implied, had gained control of both parties. There is also Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, who, like Trump in 2016, has no political experience and a large television audience. He offers up ferocious attacks on lites almost nightly. Charles Kesler told me that, no matter who wins, the Claremont Institute, which publishes the Claremont Review of Books, is going to start a Washington branch after the election, to devise Trumpian policies: socially conservative, economically nationalist.

Under the Restoration scenario, if Trump loses, Republicans, as if waking from a bad dream, could recapture their essential identity for the past hundred years as the party of business. They could revive a Reagan-like optimistic rhetoric of freedom and enterprise; resume an internationalist, alliance-oriented foreign policy; and embrace, at least notionally, diversity and immigration. One veteran Republican campaigner with Restorationist leanings says that, if Trump wins, itll blow up the Republican Party. In the 2022 election, well have an epic disastera wipeout of epic proportions. Instead of Trumpism, economic growth with an emphasis on character, and treating the Democrats as opponents and not as the enemy, is a way forward for the Party. Many Never Trumpers would feel comfortable again in a Restorationist Republican Party. Restoration could entail a conventionally positioned Presidential candidate, such as Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, if its possible for them to shake off their close association with Trump. But the most discussed Restorationist candidate is Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former U.N. ambassador. Haley is the child of immigrants from India (one a professor at Voorhees College, a historically Black college, the other a schoolteacher who started a successful business selling clothing and accessories from around the world) and the sister of a military veteran. She achieved the rare feat of serving in the Trump Administration without either going full Trumpist or falling out with the President. She left, evidently on good terms with Trump, shortly after it emerged that she had accepted rides on private planes from businessmen in South Carolina. She was given a starring role at Trumps renomination convention, this past August.

Some Republicans who are vociferously pro-Trump sound, in conversations about the Partys future, more like Restorationists who regard him as a temporary jolt of shock therapy. During the 2016 campaign, Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio star, hosted Trump on his show sixteen times. He applauds Trumps tax cuts and his increases in the military budget. Hewitt, who was sitting in front of a poster-size photograph of Abraham Lincoln when we spoke over Zoom, told me, Trump introduced a combativeness and aggressiveness on the Republican side. We played by country-club rules. They didnt. Theres a certain roughness to him. He was cruel occasionally. He wakes up ready to fight every day, and you dont need to fight every day. After Trump, the Party will revert to the norm.

Karl Rove, GeorgeW. Bushs chief strategist, also struck a Restorationist note. One of Roves recent projects was a book about William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President. He regards McKinley, who defeated a populist opponent, William Jennings Bryan, in the 1896 Presidential election, as the first modern Republican politician. Rove doesnt see populism, or division, as a winning stance for the Republicans. Biden has the better hand in this election, he told me, meaning that Biden could be runningto use one of Bushs favorite termsas the uniter. But, according to Rove, Biden wont play it. Rove offered up an impromptu speech that he thought Biden should have made about the unrest in Portland: The murder of George Floyd tears at every beating heart in America. But nothing justifies the violence we see on the streets of Portland.

The Reversal scenario, though perhaps the least plausible, is the most threatening to the Democratic Party. The parties would essentially switch the roles they have had for the past century: the Republicans would replace the Democrats as the party of the people, the one with a greater emphasis on progressive economic policies for ordinary families. Some Reversalists have praised Elizabeth Warren; criticizing Wall Street and free trade is pretty much a membership requirement. Michael Podhorzer, who works at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., sent me a chart he had made that showed the vote in congressional districts, ranked by median income, from 1960 to today. For most of that time, districts in the bottom forty per cent of income were far more likely to vote Democratic. But by 2010 the lines had crossedperhaps because of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, perhaps because of the Presidency of Barack Obamaand today poorer districts are far more likely to vote Republican and richer districts are far more likely to vote Democratic. The ten richest congressional districts in the country, and forty-four of the richest fifty, are represented by Democrats. The French economist Thomas Piketty has produced a chart showing that for highly educated voters, who were once mainly Republican, the lines started crossing back in 1968. In 2016, Trump carried non-college-educated whites by thirty-six points, and Hillary Clinton carried college-educated whites by seventeen points. Could Republicans become the working-class party, and Democrats the party of the prosperous? That would bode well for Republicans because, especially in a time of rising inequality, there arent enough prosperous people to make up a reliable voting majority.

The Democratic Party appears confident that it has the abiding loyalty of minority voters at all income and education levels, and that it dominates the metropolitan areas where a growing majority of Americans live. The coming majority-minority, decreasingly rural country will be naturally Democratic over the long term. But there are holes in this argument. Because minorities are younger than whites and are also less likely to be U.S. citizens, the electorate could remain white-majority for decades. Richard Alba, a sociologist who has written a book called The Great Demographic Illusion, which challenges the idea of a rapidly arriving majority-minority America, estimates that in 2060, which is as far into the future as the Census Bureau projects, the electorate will still be fifty-five per cent white. (It was seventy-three per cent white in 2018). And minority votersespecially Latinos, who will be the largest group of minority voters in the 2020 electionmay not remain as loyally Democratic as they have been in recent elections, especially if the Republican Party has a leader who doesnt race-bait. Black and Latino Democratic voters are substantially less likely to identify as liberal than white Democratic voters are. They are also more likely to be actively religious, and to pursue Republican-leaning careers such as military service and law enforcement.

Whats more, the practical definitions of whos white and whos a minority are fluid. During the past hundred years, many Americans who werent originally considered white, including the descendants of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, were assimilated into whiteness. In the future, others who arent now considered white may do so, too. Latinos have a high intermarriage rateclose to fifty per cent for the college educatedand twenty per cent of U.S.-born Latinos have a non-Hispanic white parent. Latinos are also increasingly likely to live in integrated neighborhoods. Reversalists dream of many Latino voters going Republican because they have become uncomfortable with the prevailing political stance (more liberal on social issues, less liberal on economic issues) among college-educated white Democratic voters. In the 2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders easily defeated Biden in California and Nevada because he did far better among Latino voters, who presumably preferred his farther-left economic program, elements of which the Reversalists would like to appropriate for themselves, without usingthe term socialism.

Black voters are far more loyal to the Democratic Party, and more likely to emphasize racism as a significant problem in their lives, but Trump has made some inroads, especially with younger Black men. Terrance Woodbury, a leading pollster, said, This has been pretty concerning to me. Trump is picking up among young voters of color. He has a thirty-three-per-cent approval rating among Black men under fifty. Since Obama left, Black men have dropped in their Democratic support. Why? What is it? He mentioned the Trump campaigns Super Bowl ad featuring a Black woman whose prison sentence had been commuted by Trump, and a Trump advertising campaign on Facebook, which aired last December and went unanswered by Biden until August, touting the First Step Act, a criminal-justice measure that he signed in 2018. Woodbury went on, I asked a focus group, How could you consider supporting Donald Trump, whos blatantly racist? One young man said, I dont care. Theyre all racist. At least he tells me what he is. Something about the transparency of the vitriol is trust-inducing to them.

The Reversalists believe that the Democrats embrace of market economics, and their establishment of a powerful business wing of the Democratic Party, especially in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, has left them vulnerable to an attack from a new, socially conservative and economically liberal strain of Republicanism. Reversalists oppose the Republican donor class. Several have abandoned donor-funded libertarian and neoconservative think tanks like Cato and the American Enterprise Institute, disillusioned with the Partys indifference to the concerns of middle-class and working-class voters. Oren Cass, one of the leading Reversalists, has founded an organization called American Compass, which is trying to formulate policies that would appeal to members of the base of both parties. What were talking about is actual conservatism, he told me. What we have called conservatism just outsourced economic policy thinking away from conservatives to a small niche group of libertarians. Culturally, Reversalists present themselves as champions of provincialism, faith, and work, but they aim to promote these things through unusually interventionist (at least for Republicans, and for centrist Democrats since the nineties) economic policies. Steven Hayward, who calls himself a reluctant Trump supporter, said, Its amazing to me the number of conservatives who are talking about, essentially, Walter Mondales industrial policy from 1984. The right and the left suddenly agree. Reagan was very popular with younger voters. Younger people then had come of age seeing government failure. Now young people have come of age seeing market failure.

It can be a little surreal talking to Reversalistsare you at a seminar at the high-theory, market-skeptical Institut fr die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, in Vienna, or with a group of Republican Party strategists? People in this camp talk about the failures of neoliberalism, financialization, and market fundamentalism, and condemn zombie Reaganism. A manifesto of the Reversalists, and of young conservatives generally, is the 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen, a political-science professor at Notre Dame, which carries a back-cover endorsement from Barack Obama and extolls such writers as RobertB. Reich, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Putnam, none of whom is considered conservative.

The favored Presidential candidate for 2024 among the Reversalists is Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, one of the promising Republicans whom Trump vanquished in 2016. In 2018, Rubio hired Mike Needham, a former employee of an organization affiliated with the Heritage Foundation who had converted to Reversalism, as his chief of staff. Needham is on the board of American Compass. Rubio has recently been making speeches that call for common-good capitalism, which would entail a strong government role in managing the economy and would attempt to attract religious and minority voters. Rubio has also been strongly critical of China, so much so that he has been banned from traveling there. This has the potential of alienating the business wing of the Party, which regards China as an important trading partner. Rubio gave a speech last year accusing policy lites across the political spectrum of ignoring the growing threat that China represents. Nikki Haley recently gave a speech that didnt name Rubio but clearly had him in mind as one of a new species of Republican critics of capitalism, who differ from the socialists only in degree.

When I spoke with Rubio a few weeks ago, I asked him to explain what he meant by common-good capitalism. It begins with the understanding that the market is a means to an end, not the end itself, he said. The purpose of the economy is to serve people. Its possible to have an economy thats performing well in the macro sense, but its benefits are distributed in a way that do not benefit the common good. Rubio told me that this position came together when he was running for President, as he visited communities outside Florida which were less vibrant than they had been a generation ago, and were now hollowed out. We thought people would be out of work when the factory leaves, but a new job would replace the old one, he said. But, he went on, it doesnt work that way in real life. What ends up happening is that additional job isnt created. And the people who are left without a job arent going to be able to make that transition. Interacting with that, hearing those storiesits something you have to grapple with.

I asked him what could be done. Its tough, he said. We have a twenty-five-year orthodoxy in the Republican Party centered around market fundamentalism. Sometimes the most efficient outcome isnt the best one for the country. Right now, we live in a very binary age, where youre either one thing or youre the other. Some people want to call it socialismwhich I abhor. Or, if it isnt socialism, the other side wants to call it market fundamentalism. America needs to take a hard look at its future. Trump, he said, has certainly revealed these fracture points. His election caused everybody to go back and ask, Why? Why did people who were not part of the Republican Party decide to vote for him? He said that the next step was to build the intellectual base for this kind of work: This is not a four-year project. This is a generational goal. And it could lead to a new political coalition.

What would the new coalition be? For the past twenty years, Rubio said, the left has argued that coalitions tend to form around race, gender, and ethnicity: I lived in a minority community. I dont think wed wake up in the morning and the first thing wed realize is Im a Hispanic. The first thing that comes to mind for people every single day is not your ethnicity, its the fact that youre a husband or a wife, a father or a mother, an employee, a volunteer or a coachsomebody who has a role to play. He continued, They want to have a job that allows them to have children, to raise that family in a safe neighborhood, with a house thats safe, that the kids get to go to school, and that, when the time comes, lets them retire. You can find that identity in every community in America.

He said he recoiled a bit at the tendency to judge the well-being of the economy by how the stock market is performing. For the past six months, the stock market has had some really good daysand that in no way aligns with what everybody else in the country is going through. It is possible to have a roaring stock market, and you have millions of people who arent just unemployed, they may be permanently unemployed. He talked about the inevitable disruptions caused by technological change: And then it takes policy a decade, two decades, to adjust. In the interim, theres resentment, anger, displacementall sorts of social consequences. We are now seeing another wave of technological advancement, combined with globalization, accelerated by the pandemic. Its going to produce new coalitions that dont look like the ones were used to.

Many Democrats will surely see this vision of the future of the Republican Party as fanciful. Isnt the Party controlled by ferociously right-wing billionaires? Arent Republican-base voters irredeemable white supremacists who have been bamboozled by Fox News and televangelists? But the Democrats coalition is no less unnatural than the Republicans. A political system with only two parties produces parties with internal contradictions. The five most valuable corporations in America are all West Coast tech companiesenemy territory, in todays Republican rhetoric. The head of the countrys biggest bank, Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, is a Democrat and a Trump critic. There was a stir in Republican circles in 2018, when a conservative journalist eavesdropped, on an Amtrak train, on a long phone conversation that Representative Jerry Nadler, of the Upper West Side, was having. Nadler complained that Democrats were attracting voters who were like the old Rockefeller Republicansliberal on social issues, conservative on economics. Thats who lives in a lot of the wealthy older suburbsformerly Republican areas that are now Democratic. And the Democrats minority voters differ enough on measures such as income, education, ideology, and religion that some of them could potentially be tempted to join a Republican Party that wasnt headed by Trump.

Trump has already changed the Republican Party. Its most hawkish elementhawkish in the Iraq War sensehas gone underground, if it still exists. The same goes for publicly stated Republican skepticism about Social Security and Medicare. One must be hostile to China, and skeptical, to some degree, of free trade. Especially since the arrival of the pandemic, its hard to find a true libertarian in the Partyat least among those who have to run for office. In the future, according to Donald Critchlow, a historian of conservatism who teaches at Arizona State University, the advantage would go to a candidate who is Trump without the Trump caricature. An old-fashioned Chamber of Commerce candidate would not do well. Were in a new situation, in both parties. Everythings up for grabs. A senior Republican staffer who has Reversalist sympathies says, Trump isnt good at a twenty-first-century policy agenda, but that work can go on without him. If he loses, well have a massive argument in the Republican Party. Some will say, Hes a black swan. To me, the lesson is: he correctly diagnosed what was going on. Lets apply that to conservative economic policy.To me, whats up for grabs is the working-class vote. Not just working-class whiteworking-class. Does what the President tapped into have to be racial? Can it be about what neoliberalism has done to the country?

Trumps genius is to command attention, including the attention of people who dislike him. That makes it tempting to think that, when hes gone, everything he stands for will go with him. It probably wont; elements of Trumpism will likely be with us for a long time. Which elements, taking what form, in the possession of which party? Such questions will be just as pressing after Trump as they are now.

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The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump - The New Yorker