How do democratic countries get to the point where they give up on self-rule? Under what circumstances do demagogues capture large audiences through irrational, emotional appeals unmoored from fact, logic or morality? When do politicians responsible for maintaining a democratic system surrender to dictators? These questions are more pertinent to us in the early 21st century than we would wish. During the 1990s, democracy was thought to be on the march. Now, we worry that the international tide is turning toward autocracy and authoritarianism. This is why Benjamin Carter Hett’s “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” should join your summer reading list. Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He joins the company of distinguished scholars, notably Richard J. Evans and Ian Kershaw, who have shed light on the social and political forces that brought a murderous regime to life through a democratic system.
But if this is an oft-told tragic tale, Hett’s brisk and lucid study offers compelling new perspectives inspired by current threats to free societies around the world. “In each era, we see the past differently, according to how we see ourselves and our own experiences,” Hett writes. “One era will notice things about the past that another will not. This is one reason why history is, and has to be, constantly rewritten.” It is both eerie and enlightening how much of Hett’s account rings true in our time. Consider this declaration from Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist: “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.” There is this dolorous observation from the socialist Ernst Toller: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done for us in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.”
As Hett notes, “The key to understanding why many Germans supported [Hitler] lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world. . . . Hitler could give voice to this flight from reality as could no other German politician of his time.” The larger story he tells resonates, too. Hett argues the Nazi movement was “a response to an overwhelming triumph of global liberal capitalism at the end of the Great War” and that the logic of a chaotic moment “pushed opponents of austerity to become opponents of liberal democracy as well.” The Nazi movement was rooted in anti-Semitism, bigotry and exclusion. But it also exploited economic discontent bred by orthodox economic policies that deepened the pain of the Depression. Conservatives everywhere should ponder the choices made by the German establishment, including big business, the military, culturally traditional Protestants and big landowners. They all helped bring Hitler to power because they hated the left — including the moderate Social Democrats, the backbone of the Weimar Republic — more than they loved republican government and political freedom.
Hett writes that members of “the conservative establishment . . . could have stopped Hitler in his tracks. Instead, they chose to use him, although the Nazi-conservative alliance was always an awkward one.” He notes at another point: “Democracy was not working for them precisely because their interests could not attract the support of a majority, even a large plurality, of voters.” The politicians and power brokers who helped Hitler become chancellor believed they could deploy him to destroy the left, but also keep him under control. They achieved the first, but not the second. The consequences were catastrophic to those slaughtered in Hitler’s genocide, and to Germany as a whole. German conservatives had no desire to see their country pulverized by war and shrunken in size afterward. But their choices during the 1930s brought about exactly this outcome. There is a reluctance to draw lessons from the Nazi experience because personal comparisons between contemporary politicians and Hitler are always a mistake. Hitler’s crimes are in a category of horror all their own.
But this should not stop us from heeding the warnings of a political era that led to the collapse of freedom in Germany. Seeing it “as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality . . . strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers.” Hett adds: “Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” It does, and our task is to prevent this “whole thing” from ever happening again.
Consider the 43%! That number should stun & terrify us!
Keep this statement in mind we saw at the top of that last article: irrational, emotional appeals unmoored from fact, logic or morality. Those words can certainly apply to the 43%. So who am I referring to when I say 43%? Click on ipsos-poll-republicans-
I’m not looking to sound overly dramatic. But by examining the evidence in several articles posted here today, we see eerie similarities between what has become our modern-day GOP, with the lying tribal deception that happened in Germany nearly a century ago, escalating into unspeakable evil & unthinkable genocide. This current GOP is not the traditional conservative ideology & Republican Party I’ve always supported, as this looks to have now become a cult possessed of an evil mindset. I ask you please spread the message to help sound the alarms, helping inform our fellow Americans before whatever movement this new GOP represents spirals out of control, stopping it so we don’t have a fascist party problem on our hands. I’ve often said, don’t think it could never happen here!
Freedom of the press may be guaranteed in the Constitution. But a plurality of Republicans want to give President Trump the authority to close down certain news outlets, according to a new public opinion survey conducted Ipsos and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast. The findings present a sobering picture for the fourth estate, with respondents showing diminished trust in the media and increased support for punitive measures against its members. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump’s anti-press drumbeat has shaped public opinion about the role the media plays in covering his administration. All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23%) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.
Forty-three percent of Republicans hold the flatly unconstitutional view that the president should be able to shut down media outlets he doesn’t like, according to a new poll from Ipsos, while just 36 percent disagree with the statement that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” But many Republicans are apparently somewhat confused, since 83 percent of them also said that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy.” Not only that, but 39 percent of Republicans said the press is “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest.” (No word on what percent of that 39 percent doesn’t want Trump kept honest.) It could be that 43 percent of Republicans think Trump has the right to demand their first-born, so thinking he should be able to shut down media outlets doesn’t feel like such a big deal to them. But to the rest of us, knowing that a plurality of people in one of the major political parties believe the president should be able to violate the Constitution—right at the moment in time when the occupant of the White House appears to want to do just that—should be a scary prospect indeed.
43% of Republicans — compared to 21% of independents and 12% of Democrats — believe that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” according to a new Ipsos poll provided to The Daily Beast. The big picture: The results starkly illustrate a growing partisan divide in support for press freedom and faith in fair reporting, but still suggests that measurable skepticism about the media’s motives exists on all sides of the political spectrum. By the numbers: 48% of Republicans agree that “the news media is the enemy of the American people.” 26% of independents and 12% of Democrats also agreed.
The disintegration of American democracy continues as the Republican Party under Donald Trump embraces the politics of totalitarian dictatorships. It’s consistent with their worshipful supplication to everything that Trump does and says. Any dissent is regarded as betrayal and party members are held to strict oaths of unbending loyalty. In addition to rallying behind Trump’s Stalinist rant that the media is “the enemy of the American people,” a new Ipsos poll shows that a plurality of Republicans (43%) believe that he should be able to shut down any media company that he deems is behaving badly. For the record, anyone can already sue a reporter or news outlet that knowingly publishes false information. The problem that Trump and his cult following have is when reporters publish truthful and fact-checked information that exposes their lies and the damage they are doing to the country. Their attacks on the press are not intended to produce either fairness or balance. They are intended to intimidate journalists and to poison the minds of the Deplorables so that they trust no other source than Dear Leader.
This strategy is also seen in Trump’s determined efforts to threaten reporters with banishment from White House events and the revocation of their licenses. And his relentless castigation of the media as “sleazy,” “disgraceful,” “horrendous”, “liars,” is bound to lead to violence. Meanwhile, his communications office has made the daily press briefings irrelevant. For one thing, they are hardly daily. There were five briefings in June and only three in July. And when they are held the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, spends most the time evading questions, haranguing reporters, and exalting Trump. The good news is that, despite the worst efforts of Trump and the GOP to denigrate the press, the American people consistently say that they trust the media more than they trust the President. Perhaps the fact that Trump is the most documented pathological liar that’s ever occupied the White House has something to do with that opinion.
We must adhere to the Constitution, before our current president, congressional accomplices, echo apologists & millions of worshipful followers commit lawlessness so egregious, we’ll no longer have a free society to avail ourselves of: the-44th-anniversary-of-
To those of us in the reality-based community, after all, it’s self-evident that Trump has been building Robert Mueller’s obstruction case for him from the moment he gave self-contradictory explanations for his firing of James Comey. He’s only upped the ante since. Just a week ago, the president called for his own attorney general to shut down Mueller’s inquiry “right now.” Obstruction hardly gets balder than that. Trump would argue that what we call self-incrimination he calls “fighting back,” just as what we call a criminal investigation he calls a “witch hunt.” It’s in this same Orwellian vein that he and his brilliant counsel, Rudy Giuliani, have also taken to declaring that “collusion” is not a crime (even as the president incessantly pleads innocent to this non-crime), and that both men keep maintaining a semantical charade about the ground rules under which Trump will sit voluntarily for an interview with the special counsel.
But in a way these legal issues are beside the point in understanding Trump’s modus operandi. He doesn’t mind making himself vulnerable to punishment under the law because he doesn’t believe the law is legitimate or as powerful as he is. To him, jurisprudence is just another adversary to be bullied and mowed down like Little Marco or Crooked Hillary. That’s why the possibility of implicating himself in an obstruction case doesn’t really concern him. His plan is to destroy the rule of law before any case gets far enough to put him in legal jeopardy. His goal is not to prove his innocence in a court of law but to discredit the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and, of course, the special counsel before he ever gets to court. On a parallel track he’s out to destroy the news media that report on his flagrant lawlessness. He’s even persuaded 43 percent of Republicans, according to an Ipsos poll provided to the Daily Beast, that he should have the power to “close down news outlets” if he chooses. After Nixon’s demise — brought about by his own vehicle for self-incrimination, the White House tapes — the consensus had it that the system worked. This time the system is being burned down before our eyes by its own chief executive. Given the complete and utter moral collapse of the Vichy Republicans in Washington, the only hope for rescuing it is for the Democrats to gain control of either or both chambers of Congress.
In his public post, Powell did not reveal why he had left, but an individual familiar with the matter told TheWrap that he was “uncomfortable with the direction of the news organization in recent months. Fewer news shows. More opinion shows. Less resources for reporters to report.” The individual added, “Lots of reporters are very unhappy with directions of FNC right now.” It’s not the first time Fox News has faced personnel issues in its Jerusalem bureau. In October 2017, the network also parted ways with John Huddy after his sister, Juliet, spoke out against the network’s former star Bill O’Reilly. In a statement to TheWrap at the time, Huddy trashed his former employers and suggested he was fired as retribution over his sister’s commentary. “In my experience at FNC and to my knowledge I have never seen someone summarily fired the way I was,” said John Huddy “What I have seen is Fox renewing the contracts of people accused of sexual harassment, assault, lewd behavior and fabricating stories.” Fox maintained at the time that John Huddy was terminated because of an unspecified “altercation” at the Barcelona airport. Huddy threatened at the time to sue the network and said no such altercation as described ever took place and called the network “a company that specializes in deceit.”
Congress Corruption Contest
Imagine waking up one morning to discover that your Congressman is none other than Jim Jordan. That’s what happened five years ago to me and tens of thousands of residents living in Oberlin, Elyria, Norwalk, Bellevue, and Fremont: cities which politically range from progressive to middle of the road. How did Jordan, an ultra-conservative, flame-throwing obstructionist, and conspiracy promoter, get dumped on us? Gerrymandering. That age-old political trick was employed as an advanced art form in Ohio’s Fourth District. Governor Gerry is undoubtedly grinning at us from the depths of the underworld for giving our district’s map the likeness of Wile E. Coyote, with Oberlin, Ohio capping the coyote’s snout and the City of Celina dotting his tail. I can’t blame Jordan for the gerrymandering, as he didn’t draw the map, though his Republican cousins did. But I can opine that Jordan has no business being in Congress, as he is simply clueless on what it means to be a legislator.
The voters in Ohio’s Fourth crave a government that works! They want their representatives to maintain our infrastructure, solve the opioid epidemic, and come up with a fair and just solution to immigration, environmental, and health care issues. But, to get things done in Congress you first must want to solve the problems, then be able to work with members of your own party, and ultimately make some friends on the other side of the aisle. You have to be civil; you have to look at the problem from multiple angles and be willing to compromise. Jordan is incapable of doing any of this. Jordan doesn’t want to come up with reasonable solutions to problems; he doesn’t want to solve anything. Jordan is a guy who gets off throwing a wrench into the works. In the Nov/Dec 2017 edition of Politico Magazine, former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner referred to Jordan as “ a legislative terrorist.” Proof of that is his recent effort to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is just doing his job. Needless to say, this impeachment effort has no legs among the vast majority of House Republicans. However, none of this matters to Jordan who creates chaos by dragging in red herrings and setting off smoke screens at every turn in the Capitol Building, trying to get his name into the news cycle.
If Trump declines an interview, Mueller will probably hit him with a subpoena to appear before the grand jury, as he has privately threatened to do. But on ABC’s “This Week,” another Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow, flatly stated that if this happened, Trump’s team will fight it all the way to the top. “It would go to the Supreme Court,” Sekulow said, adding that “a subpoena for live testimony has never been tested in court as to a president of the United States.” Translation: If Trump decides against a Mueller interview, we are going to test this. What this means is that, in advance of Kavanaugh’s hearing, we may already know that Kavanaugh could end up being the deciding vote on the question of whether a president (Trump) can be compelled to testify to a grand jury.
Kavanaugh’s expansive views of executive power and privilege have been widely debated. Kavanaugh argued in 2009 that “we should not burden a sitting president” with “criminal investigations.” If we learn that Trump is being subpoenaed for an interview against his will, this would suddenly invest the question of what Kavanaugh really believes on these issues — and whether Kavanaugh will recuse himself — with practical urgency and immediacy. We will know before Kavanaugh’s hearing that he may soon be ruling on such a matter — in particular, the question of whether Trump can be compelled to testify. So we may soon face a situation in which a president whose campaign is under investigation for collaboration with a hostile foreign power’s sabotaging of our democracy — and who has gone to enormous lengths to both scuttle that investigation and to publicly vindicate that foreign power — is seeking to avoid questioning on these matters, with the help of the justice he just appointed, possibly (given what we know about Trump) in part for this very reason.
Recent Comments