Worst Attorney General

Greg Sargent at Washington Post on why Barr is such a dangerous jerk (short version - he buys into the Right's decades' long, culture war inspired, escalation of anything to the left of them as the absolute evil enemy of everything good in the world) :

Barr gave a shocking interview to CNN late Wednesday that left zero doubt about his intentions. Barr refused to denounce Trump’s suggestion that people should try to illegally vote twice (by mail and in person), supposedly to test vote-by-mail’s validity. Trump brazenly repeated this on Thursday.

Barr also repeated his frequent claims that vote-by-mail elections have been riddled with fraud and that a foreign power could fabricate thousands of mail ballots. Both are utter nonsense. But in saying them, Barr is telegraphing his willingness to legitimize Trump’s eventual effort to try to invalidate untold numbers of mail ballots, which Trump has already told us is coming.

Meanwhile, Barr is party to another extraordinary move: Trump just approved a memo declaring the intention to restrict federal funding to Democratic-led cities designated as “anarchist jurisdictions.” Barr will determine which cities earn this label.

This is being widely denounced as illegal, and it may go nowhere. But let’s focus on its stated rationale: A city will be designated as such if it has “permitted violence and the destruction of property” and “forbids the police force from intervening to restore order.”

The idea that these officials have deliberately allowed violence and restrained police from restoring order is crucial. In reality, officials are working amid extremely complex, fast-moving conditions to balance the restoration of order and public safety with respect for civil liberties and peaceful assembly, while (ideally) avoiding abuse of the awesome powers of state violence....

Here's the more general point:

Trump’s reelection case is premised on not just on the idea that Joe Biden and Democrats are too weak to control leftist violence. It’s also that they are willingly allowing those forces to run rampant, in the full knowledge that they are out to destroy the very possibility of civil society itself.

Both Trump and Barr have delivered major speeches spelling out this worldview. Commemorating Independence Day, Trump likened his own struggle against “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists” to the struggle to defeat fascism in World War II.

Trump is at war with the left, to rescue civil society itself. He recently declared: “We’re saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.”

For his part, Barr, speaking to the Federalist Society last November, infamously declared that “it is the left” that poses the true threat to the “rule of law,” through a “scorched earth, no-holds barred” war against Trump.

Barr also voiced support for a strong executive, unshackled by oversight and legal nitpicking, declaring that it has delivered glory at moments of great national struggle against fascism, communism and “Islamic fascism,” which elevates the war on terror into an epic civilizational showdown. As Laura Field details, Barr belongs to a movement of “reocons,” or authoritarian reactionary conservatives.

Indeed, Barr is drawing on a long tradition of “anti-liberalism,” which is hostile to liberal democracy in part precisely because it doesn’t cast politics as a perpetual emergency struggle against an overarching enemy, and instead values proceduralism and compromise, which sap the moral will and decisiveness of the polity.

Barr did not explicitly declare the war against the left akin to the war with fascism. But Trump has. And by labeling the left an existential threat to the rule of law alongside a paean to the glory of the executive unfettered at times of crisis, he creeps right up to the precipice of this claim....

 Barr’s grotesque exaggerations of the leftist threat help give Trump justification for urging right-wing vigilantes to take matters into their own hands, lawlessly.

Good analysis.