I am currently reading the John Conway translation of The Path to Dictatorship, a collection of ten essays by German historians written shortly after the end of WW2. There are many parallels between the US today and the situation in Germany during the rise of the Nazis from risible lunatic fringe group to Hitler being named Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and the Nazis shortly thereafter attaining complete political control and suspending all democratic mechanisms. I would like to concentrate on just one essay, “The Technique of the National Socialist Seizure of Power” by Karl Dietrich Bracher. Aspects of the Nazis’ successful strategy for attaining power give valuable insights for dealing with the rise of authoritarianism under the Republicans broadly and Trump particularly. History does not repeat, but it rhymes.
I’m not trying to press the analogy of Trump with Hitler or the Trumpies and Nazis. What I would like to point out is IF a radical right wing faction was attempting to use our democratic institutions to subvert those very institutions, and IF they were looking back at the history of other right wing factions that were able to topple democratic regimes and install totalitarian regimes for cheat codes, it might look a lot like what we’re seeing right now in DC. None of this changes what we have to do: organize, recruit, expose, vote. But it does add just a bit to an understanding of the stakes. Because there is absolutely no reason why it can’t happen here.
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright characterized President Trump on Sunday as “the most undemocratic president in modern American history” but stopped short of labeling him a fascist during a television show broadcast from London. “And by the way, it’s not easy as a former diplomat to be in a foreign country and criticize one’s own president,” Albright added. “But I am concerned.” Albright, who noted that she was born in Czechoslovakia two years before German dictator Adolf Hitler took over the country, said she wrote her book as a warning about various “things that are happening, not only in the United States but around the world.” “Fascism is hard to define, by the way,” she told Marr, “but a fascist leader is somebody who identifies himself with one group, tribal of some kind, in order to really isolate and insulate the people that are disagreed with. Ultimately a fascist leader is somebody who uses violence to achieve what he wants.” “So I do not think that Trump is a fascist leader,” Albright continued, “but I think his attitude towards freedom of speech and the role of the media and his disregard for institutions worries me.”
Many scholars have argued that democracy — particularly in the United States — is under threat. Examples include Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s anaylysis of democratic backsliding and Yascha Mounk’s stringent critique of whether American democracy truly represents its citizens. Our newly released 2018 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project report rates the state of democracy across 178 countries, offering the most updated, comprehensive assessment of where things stand. A year ago, in 2017, we found that democracy was on the decline — but not as much as many pundits believed. Today, we are less optimistic than we were a year ago. Our new report shows that democracy’s decline is gaining momentum: One-third of the world’s population lives in a backsliding democracy.
At the end of 2017, most people in the world lived in democracies. But since then, one-third of the world’s population — or 2.5 billion people — have lived through “autocratization,” in which a leader or group of leaders began to limit those democratic attributes and to rule more unilaterally. The current autocratization trend is visible across the world — and affects Europe and the whole American continent. Only sub-Saharan Africa shows some democratic improvements on average.
And for the first time since 1979, the same number of countries (24 in total) are backsliding on democracy as are advancing. In the United States, weakening constraints on the executive branch have resulted in a significant decline of liberal democracy.
What’s more, only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where everyone, regardless of gender or socioeconomic status, has roughly equal access to political power. Women enjoy at least somewhat — but not fully — equal access to political power in most Western countries, including the United States, as well as other countries such as Costa Rica, Rwanda, Ghana and Benin. People with average levels of income have almost as much influence on politics as rich people in many Western countries — but not in the United States. On this indicator, the United States scores lowest among all Western countries, ranking 75th globally. One in four people, or almost 2 billion people, live in countries where the more economically well-off have gained more political power in the past 10 years.
The United States fell 24 places in the country ranking on liberal democracy over the past two years, from seventh in 2015 to 31st in 2017. When we compare the United States’ score in 2017 with its average score over the past 10 years, the drop is precipitous and unprecedented. Experts lowered their estimates of democracy in the United States because they began to be skeptical that the U.S. Congress will rein in executive overreach. Similarly, experts lost faith that the opposition party can contribute to overseeing, investigating or otherwise checking the majority party. The U.S. executive branch was assessed as showing less respect for the Constitution and compliance with the judiciary, two indicators that the judicial branch can restrain the executive. For all four indicators, the score for the United States declined. The downward trend in the United States is much worse than in other countries. In terms of government compliance with decisions of the Supreme Court, the United States used to rank among the top countries of the world — but has now declined to No. 48.
The non-partisan organization Protect Democracy, appropriate to Independence Day, on Wednesday put out an ambitious proposal entitled, Roadmap for Renewal: A Legislative Blueprint for Protecting our Democracy. It might as well have been titled “What We Do to Fix Trump’s Mess,” for it posits that the grave damage President Trump has done to our democratic norms and institutions won’t be solved by his departure or by voting out the Republican majorities that have enabled him. “The rise of a U.S. president who fashions himself a strongman in the model of autocrats around the world has been a wakeup call that the guardrails of our democracy may not be as strong as we’d assumed,” Protect Democracy’s executive director Ian Bassin tells me. “America has never had a perfect democracy, but our story has been an ongoing process of perfecting it, and if we want that to continue we’re going to have to learn lessons from this moment and reinforce the guardrails to ensure our republic remains healthy for the next generation.”
“Americans of all political stripes who care about our democracy recognize that it has been eroding — that started before Trump, but Trump is exacerbating it. Our democracy will not protect itself,” Bassin argues. “We as citizens need to do our jobs, including by ensuring that our representatives in Congress take this challenge seriously and reinvest in the core principles that animate our Constitution and have made America great for generations.” If the scourge of Trump sets off a period of intense reform and dramatic renewal of our democracy, it will, we pray, make Trump into a blip in American history, not the beginning of our decline as the world’s leading democracy.
Abuse Of Power
“We are rapidly approaching the moment when we should stop referring to the American government and start referring to the Trump regime.” That single sentence posted on Twitter last Thursday resonated far and wide. Propelled by the first shock wave after the announced resignation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, it was liked and retweeted thousands of times, with hundreds and hundreds of replies. Most of them were of the “sad but true” and “we’re long past that” variety. One French friend reminded me that “regime” is the word Americans use to describe a foreign government they are about to overthrow. That’s something to think about. Right now, there are effectively no checks or balances remaining in the carefully constructed edifice of the American Republic. Donald J. Trump, his family and his cronies have absolute control over the executive branch of government. The Supreme Court will soon be the Supine Court, bending to Trump’s will on every important issue. The feckless Republican Congress has proved itself to be wildly hypocritical and deeply venal, with no moral compass whatsoever.
In its fundamental drive to make the rich richer, the GOP has embraced and enabled Trump’s fascist-style fear mongering. It has excused, even applauded, when he’s insulted allies and been suckered by tyrants. It ignores his unctuous dictator envy, whether he is talking about Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, or the Salmans of Saudi Arabia. We’ve seen many times the way fragile democratic institutions can be used to destroy democracy. History is full of precedents. Both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini first came to power through the electoral process. But we don’t have to grasp at such old and extreme examples. There are cautionary ones all around us in the present. From Venezuela and Nicaragua to Turkey and Egypt to Russia and the Philippines we’ve seen presidents use their initial popularity to tear apart the institutions that might have checked their power. Already we see concerted efforts to disenfranchise Trump’s likely political opponents, and his own direct attack on due process of law. Obviously the American republic is more mature and durable than the Russian or Venezuelan versions, and with the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, we’d do well to remember that. But what we’ve learned by default under Trump is that the real strength of the United States for most of these last 242 years lay in certain common assumptions, truths that the authors of the declaration held to be self-evident and Trump essentially disregards.
At present, America feels like a broken country. Democrats and Republicans do not live in the same neighborhoods or communities. Nor do Democrats and Republicans communicate with each other in meaningful and personal ways. Liberals and conservatives have little overlap in their fundamental beliefs about the common good and what it means to live in a just and democratic society. Even the ability to find common ground on the basic nature of empirical reality and the facts seems impossible across divides of party and political belief. In total, Donald Trump did not create these deep fissures in American society. He and his movement put dynamite in them, lit the fuse, walked away, and laughed at the destruction and chaos which resulted — destruction which they would in turn use to advance their goals.
America is in a moment when prominent voices on both the left and the right — and often motivated by very different concerns — have begun to publicly sound the alarm about the possibility of a second civil war in the United States. On Sunday, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on his “Infowars” show that “Democrats plan to launch civil war on July 4.” This is a nonsense claim. But could such an outcome actually take place? What would be the social divisions which would encourage Americans to turn against one another? How does American Exceptionalism blind and complicate how the country’s citizens and elites think about conflict? In what ways has the rise of Donald Trump increased the possibility of a second civil war?
Here in this next link, we see how wacky people from Fox & echo-conspiracists enjoy hanging together, probably devising their next devilish plot: guilflyle-photographed-
This interview is what it sounds like when the real news accurately calls out the fake news: what-jim-acosta-has-learned-
“As the commander-in-chief, as the president of this great country, what can you do to bring us together?” she asked. This is Bartiromo prodding Trump to utter some dignified-sounding banalities about American unity in order to promote the fiction that he is above the level of his cherry-picked opponents. Trump failed to pick up on the cue. “Our people are so incredible,” he replied, in what could have developed into some acceptable pabulum about the great American people, but which Trump immediately made clear was a reference limited to the people who voted for him: “Do you know, there’s probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base. I hope the other side realizes that they better just take it easy.” Trump no longer does interviews with real journalists, because he can’t answer their questions without revealing a total ignorance of the subject matter, incriminating himself, or both. But sometimes even the interviews with his own allies and advisers from Fox News founder on his inability to follow the obvious stage instructions. Trump is being invited to cast himself as the president of the entire country, but he is so ingrained in his gut-level partisanship, he can’t manage to utter the required bromides.
Republicans are closer than ever to achieving a U.S. Supreme Court majority to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling, but getting there carries a hidden risk for the party. A nominee who appears ready to cast the decisive vote against Roe could rally the majority of Americans who back legal abortion to turn out for Democrats in the November election, where Republicans are trying to keep control of the House and Senate. “Now they’re the dog that caught the car,” said Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver and author of the 2016 book “The New States of Abortion Politics.” “Here’s the opportunity to do the thing that anti-abortion advocates have wanted to do for decades. And it’s really risky because their base really wants this but the majority of Americans don’t. So this could really mobilize Democratic voters.”
President Donald Trump said Friday he’ll announce his nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on July 9, and he’s narrowed the search to about five finalists, including two women. For three decades, Republicans have successfully used the abortion issue to mobilize the religious right, whose support proved critical in Trump’s 2016 election. The president — who in 2016 promised to pick justices who would overturn Roe — has a historic opportunity to alter the court’s ideological balance with a more conservative nominee. But Trump may keep in mind where broader public opinion lies, ahead of an election where a surge of voter enthusiasm among women is endangering his party’s grip on Congress.
The sound of scared and distraught migrant children crying for their parents, the pictures of them in cages and covered by thin sheets of mylar – those enduring impressions of the Trump administration’s family separation policy could be the Republican Party’s undoing at the ballot box this November, even if the president is trying to distance himself from it. This “zero-tolerance policy,” which has caused the family separations, and which the administration still defends, is winning no one over. It has torn more than 2,300 children from their parents – some as young as eight months old – and has been roundly condemned, with critics from across the ideological spectrum, uniting faith and business leaders, GOP and Democratic members of Congress, and public figures. Former first lady Laura Bush in a rare op-ed, called the policy “immoral,” and in fact, every living first lady, including the present one, has rejected the policy.
The conservative writer George Will, a frequent Trump critic, is making the case that Americans should “Vote against the GOP this November.” Will left the Republican Party over Trump in 2016, and now, he’s arguing the “family-shredding policy along the southern border” is reason to oppose not only the president, but the entire Republican conference. As Will put it, “[T]o vote against [Trump’s] party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.” Trump knows that immigration is red meat for his base – his campaign was founded on a rallying cry of “build that wall,” and it’s a slogan that still resonates with his supporters. They chanted it at his recent rally in South Carolina. Conservative voters have always ranked border security high among their priorities, and Republicans typically care more about immigration than either Democrats or Independents. But family separation muddies the issue.
Despite the statements by the administration that families are being reunited, this problem isn’t going away for Trump and the GOP. Protests at the White House and more than 700 events around the country over the weekend indicated the administration’s crisis of its own making is far from over. These actions alone drew hundreds of thousands of protesters nationwide – and the groups organizing them have no incentive to ratchet down their efforts.
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