Political issues – Page 15

In the end, what did they gain?

These photos were lifted from Facebook, sources unknown.

There are, I would say, five classes of Trumpers:

1. The Trumps themselves

2. Elites, such as U.S. senators, who enabled and shielded Trump

3. Those who voted for Trump in 2016

4. Those who are voting for Trump again in 2020

5. The super-rich, who got the tax breaks

What did each group gain, from four years spent ripping America apart so that the Republican Party could lie its way through one last election before ending up on the trash heap of history?

1. The Trumps: They got to indulge their narcissism and talk their trash in the spotlights and on television, living free in the White House at taxpayer expense. They got to act out their delusions of grandeur among the elites of Europe, too crass and too dull to grasp that they were making fools of themselves and were being laughed at. The Trump children cut some good deals in global markets and put millions of dollars in their pockets. Trump, broke and deeply in debt, reduced to having to grub for a measly thousand here and million there, was able to hold off his final (and seventh and most spectacular) backruptcy, not to mention holding off the law and the courts, for four more years.

But thus passes the glory of the world. Because when this vile family is at last ejected from the White House, they will quickly become a family in tatters and ruins. Not to mention in prison. No wonder Trump has started to joke at his rallies about leaving the country. Yesterday, at a rally in Georgia, he said: “Could you imagine if I lose?… I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”

That would be the wise course for the Trump family, if they can borrow enough gas money to fly the Trump 747 to Russia before it’s repossessed. Why did they wait so long? Why didn’t they cut a deal when they could have gotten better terms than prison?

2. Elites and senators: It’s less than three weeks before the election, for heaven’s sake. Why now, when what Trump is has been clear for years? Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, in a “town hall” conference call on Oct. 16, expressed the new senatorial wisdom brilliantly:

“The way he kisses dictators’ butts…. The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership. The way he treats women and spends like a drunken sailor…. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists…. If young people become permanent Democrats because they’ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics, or if women who were willing to still vote with the Republican Party on 2016 decide that they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future, the debate is not going to be — you know, Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump? It’s going to be, what the heck were any of us thinking that selling a TV-obsessed narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea? It is not a good idea….”

So, senators, what do you have to show for it? You are within an inch of destroying the American democracy. You’ve helped to drive a stake through the heart of the Republican Party. You’re probably going to lose the Senate. Some of you will lose your seats. And you’ve all lost your souls, though most of you no doubt are richer than you were four years ago. Why didn’t you cut a deal months ago to get Trump to go away, when you still had time to put up a half-decent candidate?

3. Those who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020: Some of us have known all along what you are — your gullibility, your meanness, your sorry religion, your ignorance of the world and your ignorance even of the causes of your own squalid cirumstances. Now the whole world knows, because you put yourselves on display. If the election on Nov. 3 buries you in a landslide, then you will only have gotten what you deserve and brought upon yourselves. May you savor the aftertaste of your years of gloating, because that’s all you’ve gained. Are you better off? Other than doing your bullying and trash-talking for you, what has Trump done for you? What in the world ever made you think that a narcissistic New York City crime lord and con man gives a blip about you or would ever let the likes of you into places like Mar-a-Lago?

4. Those who voted for Trump in 2016 but not in 2020: There is some hope for you, if you reflect long and hard on how you were deceived and misled, and if you learn how not to let such a thing happen to you again. But look what you brought upon yourselves and your country. You share the responsibility for that. Can you find ways to make amends? Start by turning your back on the Republican Party and never voting for any Republican ever again.

5. The super-rich, who got the tax breaks. Congratulations. Your plan worked. You raked in more and more billions and paid no tax on it for four more years. You continued to manipulate democracy, but you revealed that your intent is to kill it. If you can’t find a new way for a minority of easily deceived voters to hold both the Senate and the White House, and whole new lines of lies and propaganda that can enrage and deceive 45 percent of the population (which is all you need since you have gerrymandering and the electoral college working for you), then you’re done. And, thanks to the last four years, millions of people who previously weren’t paying attention now realize who truly owns, and runs, the country, and who is eating their lunch. They’ll be beating down the doors of their representatives in Washington, demanding that you be taxed out of existence.

Four precious years have been lost. We’ve been backsliding, making no progress against the true existential threats of our age — inequality and environmental catastrophe. Progress will be harder now, because Trump and Trumpers have stacked the courts with theocrats and autocrats corrupt enough to cut a deal. Those who have held us back have shown us — in fact they have rubbed it in our faces — what they are and what they want to do. They deserve to be left behind, given only the barest minimum of the goods that law and fairness and decency require — goods of which they actively and ruthlessly deprive others. They deserve hardball now, at the other end of the stick. They’ve forfeited any claim for being heard hereafter, because we’ve heard enough.

Yours too, buddy.

Authoritarian governments

Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Erica Frantz, Oxford University Press, 2018. 200 pages.

My expectations for this book probably were a bit off. What I wanted was a kind of theoretical understanding of authoritarianism, or a kind of model from which predictions could be made. This book, though, is more a statistical study of authoritarian governments.

The format of the book is clear enough. The book first sets up a number of categories, such as the types of authoritarian governments. Some examples in this category are: a single strongman leader, a dominant party, or military. The book then poses a series of questions, then answers the questions with statistical frequencies.

For example: How do authoritarian leaders leave power? Answer:

“From 1950 to 2012, there were 473 authoritarian leaders who left power. Regime insiders were responsible for the majority (65 percent) of these exists, with coups and ‘regular’ removals from office each accounting for about a third of all leader exits. Twenty percent of authoritarian leaders died in office, and only 10 percent were kicked out at the hands of the masses.”

So then, after you’ve read many dozens of questions and answers, you become acquainted with the history of authoritarianism. Other than that, I can’t say that I learned anything very profound from this book.

The big question right now, of course, is where the United States stands with Donald Trump. There is nothing about Trump in this book, and there is almost nothing about the United States. The cutoff for the research in the book was 2015 or so, I believe. However, the author, Erica Franz, has written some articles about Trump, and she has been interviewed about Trump. You can find this by Googling for her name plus Trump.

But yes. It would seem clear enough to me that Trump is on a clear course for the “authoritarianization” of American democracy using common authoritarian tactics — seizing additional power wherever and however he can, co-opting institutions to serve his own ends, defying norms, flouting the law, installing unqualified loyalists while demonizing expertise, attacking the media while pushing propaganda, using multiple methods of corrupting elections to prevent a fair vote, lining his own pockets while directing spoils to insiders, and so on.

We should know before long what Trump’s fate is going to be. Personally I think he is doomed, though the next three or four months probably are not going to be easy. Americans — at least those Americans who are on the side of law and democracy — have learned something very important from the past four years, though. That’s that it can happen here, which begs the question: What are we going to do to make sure that it never happens again?

Let’s go there: Worst-case scenarios

This gun-cleaning mat sent out as a freebie to gun-supply customers is pretty clear about how the Republican Party retails Trumpian meanness to its base. Source: Reddit

We are being terrorized, aren’t we? Yet again yesterday, in a press conference, Trump said that any election he loses would be fraudulent and that he won’t commit to leaving office. This terrorism by Trump and the Republican Party is not likely to let up, even after Nov. 3. They want us to be demoralized and just give up.

In 2020, I think that there are reasons for optimism, though. During the 2016 election, the media and the commentariat largely were bamboozled by Trump and fell for Trump’s shtick, taking refuge in centrism and notions of objectivity, thus giving Trump a free ride and suppressing the story of what Trump really is. The New York Times, actually, is still trying to cling to what it sees as journalistic principles and still tries to write about Trump as though the American political situation is still normal. But mostly the media now get it. (I am excluding, of course, right-wing propaganda machinery such as Fox News.) Just in the past few days, there have been several important pieces describing with great clarity just where we stand and how much danger we are in. All these are must-reads:

• The most important of these pieces is in the Atlantic: The Election That Could Break America: If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?

• Vox has a very good piece on just how abnormal the Republican Party has become: The Republican Party Is an Authoritarian Outlier

• At Politico: Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans.

• A piece at Time describes the economic background on what’s really behind the Republican Party’s desperation to stay in power. It’s to hold on to the system of gross inequality that allows the super-rich to keep getting richer: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.

In the past four years of Trump, book after book and article after article have analyzed and accurately described just where America stands today. To try to put it as briefly as possible: A minority party (the Republican Party), desperate to cling to power even though its agenda is regressive and unpopular, is willing to compromise American democracy to stay in power. The Republican Party’s intent is to eliminate real opposition by any means it can get away with (though with a pretense of legality if possible) and to entrench itself as an unchallengeable ruling party with a strongman authoritarian leader: Trump. The party is controlled by the agenda of the 1 percent, but the party has strong (but minority) populist support from the most disaffected and manipulable element of the population. There is nothing new here. If the Republican Party succeeds in subverting the American democracy, it won’t be the first time that a democracy has been lost. The Republican Party has many examples to work with on how to go about putting down a democracy, and they are indeed following a well-studied playbook. (I am at present reading a book on this subject: Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know. I’ll have a review of it soon.)

We have a huge body of work from academics, journalists, and government experts on where we now stand and what Trump might do. But, as far as I know, no one has yet written about how we get rid of Trump if he steals the election.

So, as a thought experiment, let’s think about the worst case. What if Trump actually succeeds in stealing the election and manages to stay in office after inauguration day on Jan. 20? Let’s try to game it out.

If there is a Trump-Republican takeover, then I can’t imagine that a Trump regime would be able to achieve anything resembling stability. Trump would find himself surrounded by powerful forces working day and night within the tatters of democracy to take him down. Trump has never had majority support. If current polls are valid, he will lose the popular vote in this election by 8 to 10 percent. Except to Trump’s base, who believe what they’re told, the treachery of Trump and the Republican Party would be unmasked. A majority of Americans would be enraged and would demand a restoration of democracy. The Trump regime does not have the machinery in place to impose the level of repression that would be required. They might resort to terror by making examples of some who resist, but I suspect that that would only make things less secure for Trump by further enraging the opposition. It would be difficult or impossible to make a takeover look legal — though of course they will try, claiming as a last resort that it was for the good of the country. Civil servants would resign en masse. Even though Trump has installed incompetent loyalists in government departments (though William Barr at the Justice Department has shown considerable competence at twisting the law) there just would not be enough low-level loyalists to keep the wheels of government turning. Any who’d be willing to try would be unqualified and incompetent and in it for what they could steal. The incompetence and churn and corruption would cripple government services, and people would soon notice (as they already noticed with the U.S. Postal Service). If the Social Security checks ever got held up, the music would stop. Corporate America would look for ways to get involved. Corporate America doesn’t want to be taxed, but business depends on stability and predictability.

American instability would lead to turmoil in global financial markets and the global economy. America’s allies and even barely friendly economic partners such as China would act not only to protect their own economies and their own interests, but also to impose sanctions against the United States. If there is anything that authoritarian governments hate, it’s economic sanctions (ask Vladimir Putin). If domestic turmoil alone didn’t crush the American economy, then international sanctions would. Trump in his foolishness seems to have lost the confidence of the American military. After a coup or takeover, one of the tests of who is in control is whom the military will take orders from. I seriously doubt that Trump and the Republican Party would be able to cow or to even buy off the American military. Some authoritarian governments are highly competent — Russia’s and China’s, for example. But no amount of help from Vladimir Putin would be sufficient to make up for the incompetence of the Trump regime or of Trump’s loyalists in the U.S. House and Senate. They would bungle everything. There certainly would be disorder in the streets, and that disorder could start to look like civil war. But disorder in the streets would not help to keep a Trump regime in power, no matter how well-armed Republican brownshirts might be. Disorder in the streets does not prop tyrants up. It takes them down.

One of the points that Erica Frantz makes again and again in Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know is that authoritarian leaders are the most dangerous when they are afraid of punishment on leaving office. That is probably the No. 1 reason why Trump has become so dangerous and so willing to go to extremes to try to stay in office. He’s going to prison, and he knows it. Once he leaves office, no longer with the power to hold off the legal nooses that are tightening around him, his life is over. If he’s smart, he and his family will just get on his plane (which I saw last year parked in plain sight at La Guardia airport), and fly to Russia. There is no future for him in the United States other than an ugly one.

One thing that greatly puzzles me is why the Republican Party has allowed Trump to get away with pushing things this far. A rational Republican Party would have cut a deal with Trump to get him out of the way, to keep the Senate, and to prevent Trump from taking the party down with him. Trump probably would have been able to negotiate some immunity for his crimes. Several pieces have been written about what senators say about Trump in private, though in public those same senators are Trump loyalists. It seems they’ve got Trump’s number, yet they’re siding with Trump and violating their oaths to the Constitution and to the law. Eventually, journalists and historians will figure that out. But I’m afraid that it’s one of the things that we won’t really know until after Trump has been put down and we can trace the money and the kompromat.

In short, I cannot imagine that a Trump-Republican takeover would last long. Once the takeover was put down, I think that the United States would return to democracy, with many lessons learned and many fixes to the law (and maybe even the Constitution) to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Update: Some Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s threat (but without mentioning Trump). But some Republicans, such as Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, are using it as just another opportunity to show how vile they are. Republicans condemn Trump’s refusal to commit to peaceful transfer of power.

The hidden powers that are killing democracy

Source: Wikimedia Commons

To the global super-rich, the rest of us are little more than just another natural resource to be exploited, no different in any meaningful way from industrial chickens or pigs. To a significant degree, though, the super-rich are afraid of the masses. The masses can be a bit more threatening than chickens and pigs. That’s because, if the masses are poorly controlled and insufficiently deceived and distracted, the masses can be very dangerous to oligarchic power. Taking to the streets is the last resort of the masses. But the power of the masses is most threatening to the global oligarchy when the power of the masses is coldly and quietly organized around a few formidable institutions that are the enemies of oligarchy: the law, democracy, and deep and truthful sources of information.

As long as some fear of the law remains, criminality and corruption must remain disguised and secret. And yet, given that the No. 1 project of the global criminal oligarchy at present is to corrupt the United States, to disable the American democracy, and to bring down the American rule of law, that project cannot be accomplished entirely in secret. All of us can see the tip of the iceberg in the daily headlines, as Trump and his criminal syndicate do everything they can to corrupt the rule of law and cripple American democracy. It is terrifying that the global criminal oligarchy even got — and seized — an opportunity to take down the United States. How that happened is a question for another day. But that such an opportunity even exists can only mean that democracy and the rule of law have become weak, and that the global criminal oligarchy have become strong.

The global oligarchy surveil the masses very carefully. But normally the masses have very little ability to surveil the global oligarchy. But, two days ago, we the masses got a rare leak of information on the vast amount of money (and therefore the vast amount of power) that oligarchs depend on. That leak provided some hints on where the money comes from and where it goes. Clearly a corrupted U.S. Treasury Department is part of a coverup, while doing little or nothing to enforce the law. But no reasonable person can doubt that a great deal of money — mostly Russian money — has been directed to Trump, to members of Trump’s criminal syndidate, and to the Republican Party. They are actively working to corrupt the rule of law and to neutralize the institutions of democracy — in short, to turn us into Russia. The law, actually — and Trump’s attorney general has made terrifying progress with that part of the project — is to be used against the enemies of the regime and to cover up the crimes of oligarchs. There is nothing new in this project or in its tactics, except that now they’ve come for the United States. Money gained from looting Russia is now being invested in making it possible to loot the United States.

Even many who carefully follow the news from day to day remain mostly unaware of the titantic struggle beneath the surface. It takes a historian’s perspective and depth of sources to penetrate the murk. I have previously mentioned Heather Cox Richardson as an essential daily source of information. She is a Harvard historian who posts daily on Facebook. (To find her on Facebook, search for her name.) In today’s post, she brings this leak to our attention:

“For all that these stories are important, my favorite candidate for the story we’re not supposed to notice is last night’s leak of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by banks with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. This agency combats money laundering. The documents, leaked to BuzzFeed, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, found that banks flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money between 1999 and 2017. The leaked documents, which make up less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million SARs filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017, show a world awash in money from criminal activity. They paint a picture of a world of fabulously wealthy oligarchs and criminals, operating out of our sight.

“There is nothing specifically about Trump or his company in the leaked documents, and being flagged in a SARs does not necessarily mean wrongdoing. But transactions involving $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank, Trump’s bankers, made other bankers nervous enough to flag them. In one of the documents, Bank of America raises concerns about the amount of Russian money flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.”

Richardson understands how important this is. And yet the media have mostly ignored it. That the leak went to a tawdry little site such as BuzzFeed, as opposed to, say, the New York Times, is very revealing about how easily the media can be manipulated to distract rather than inform. The New York Times, though, did write a brief story about the BuzzFeed leak. As for who leaked this information and why, it would be safe to assume that the leak came from a principled insider who was exasperated by FinCEN’s and the U.S. Treasury’s failure to enforce the law. The leaker knows, of course, that when corruption has blocked enforcement of the law, then the only hope is that the masses will act — assuming that the masses have the information to act on, and assuming that democracy and law are sufficiently intact to empower the masses to act effectively.

This vast flow of international criminal money is something we must keep on our radar screens. Most of Trump’s hundreds of crimes and coverups are sideshows compared with this. His scam university, his bankrupt businesses, the pilfering of his foundation and campaign funds are nothing compared with this — working with the international criminal oligarchy to destroy the American democracy, to loot its resources, to exploit the population like pigs and chickens while providing social services at the same level as Mongolia, and to create a corrupt economy in which criminal syndicates can suck up 25 percent of GDP, while getting away with it all, as they do in Russia.

Virtual emigration, anyone?

My 20-year-old Sony headphones, well worn but still working

Ken, who is now back in Scotland after being stuck in the U.S. for six months during the Covid-19 lockdown, writes: “I can’t tell you how detoxed I already feel from U.S. politics…. No more Trump signs, no more awful religion, no more right wing madness…. It feels good to be away, honestly.” Luckily for him, Ken has two passports. One of them is a beautiful red British passport, the ones I admire most while standing in the immigration lines. Meanwhile, here I am, with only my useless American passport, unable to breathe the free air of Europe this year, if only for a couple of weeks.

Republicans, while doing such great deeds to make America great again (with generous Russian assistance), say that we liberals would turn America into a flaming hellscape. Actually, what we liberals will do is make America much more like Europe.

We liberal Americans are torn in two directions right now. On the one hand, we’re obsessed with the news, terrified at how far right-wing Americans and their little Hitler will go to get the right-wing dictatorship they crave. And on the other hand we try to preserve our mental health by trying to shut it all out.

This post is about shutting it out.

Technology can bring us all the news (and propaganda) we can eat. But technology also gives us ways to shut out the public madness to protect our mental health. I actually have come to love my Covid-19 masks. I especially love my Covid-19 masks when I’m in a place where right-wingers are maskless. So far, I’ve not been harassed for wearing a mask, but there is a lot of that going on. My mask says to the glowering maskless: I don’t want to be around you. I suspect that’s part of why mask-wearers gall them so badly. It makes them feel low and dirty, when what they want is to feel superior and powerful. I’m considering wearing masks in public for the rest of my life, actually.

Unlike viruses, noise won’t kill you. But too much noise damages our hearing, and too much noise damages our mental health. Noise is not a huge problem for me now, given that I live in the woods. Nor do I find myself in noisy places much anymore. But, partly because I’m so accustomed to silence, I have a low tolerance for noise. I have come to be disgusted by the sound of loudspeakers blaring country music, for example. Once upon a time, country music could express vitality, energy, and optimism. Consider Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” (1958), or the stunning performance of “Cocaine Blues” by Joaquin Phoenix in the film “Walk the Line.” (See footnote for a musical factoid.)

The country music that I’m exposed to in public places these days is always about whining and masochistic suffering. The whining voice, apparently, is supposed to convey emotion. I find myself mocking it and making fun of it behind my mask, or muttering, “Why don’t you just go die and get it over with.” Some cultures are rotting all right, and not the ones in Europe.

Noise was a huge problem when I lived in San Francisco. It was sirens, buses, trains on Market Street, and loud motorcycles. Eventually I refused to go to restaurants, or at least the noisy ones, where the sound level was often over 100 decibels. I also fought the noise with some noise-canceling headphones. I bought headphones that were of poor quality, though, and they didn’t last long. (The headphones in the photo are good headphones, but they don’t do noise canceling.)

I was very excited when I heard that Apple is going to make some over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones. Apparently they’ll be called “Airpods Studio,” and the rumors at present are that they’ll be available in October. The price is said to be $349 or $399. That’s pretty pricey, but my guess is that they’ll be worth it.

Apple has figured out how to get amazing sound quality (and a wide range of frequencies) out of small devices, with low distortion. I’ve never used ear buds, because they don’t fit my ear well, and because buds can’t do noise canceling. For noise canceling, the ears must be covered with sound-suppressing padding. Another virtue of the Apple headphones, I’m sure, is that they’ll integrate well with other Apple devices — iPhones, computers, and watches. The headphones will surely have a microphone. And Apple knows how to make products that are hard to break and don’t wear out.

It’s a sad thing when we have to protect ourselves against the environment we live in. And yet, we don’t fret about protective items such as caps (against sun damage) and gloves (against skin damage). For now, more options are needed. Masks defend against viruses, and, as a bonus, tell maskless right-wingers that you’re not one of them. Noise-cancelling headphones not only keep out the ear-damaging noise and the soul-damaging music, they also help build a virtual bubble, one’s own private Edinburgh.

A musical aside: The Folsom Prison scene from “Walk the Line” contains a fine example of what musicians call “vamping.” Vamping is what accompanists do while they wait for the vocalist to start to sing. The accompanist(s) just keep an eye on the singer and repeats a short musical phrase, maybe only one measure long. In the Folsom Prison scene, the band vamps while Joaquin Phoenix delivers a monologue that sets his audience on fire. Then, at 0:51, he breaks a glass, signaling the band that he’s ready to go. When Phoenix returns to the microphone, a guitar cues the singer with a chromatic sequence of four eighth-notes, dominant to tonic. Then Phoenix proceeds to kill it with “Cocaine Blues.” Hollywood, on the dreaded and liberal West Coast, knows how to do this. Nashville seems to have forgotten how.

Update: Even in Edinburgh, noisy restaurants are a problem. From the Scottish newspaper The Herald: We shouldn’t have to wear ear defenders when eating out.

Not quite what the 2nd Amendment crowd expected

Inside a Ruger gun factory, from a Ruger “how it’s made” video

We’re starting to get data on who has been buying so many guns this year in America. Guess what. It’s not just old rural white guys. It’s women and African-Americans and liberals.

A news release on Aug. 24 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation says: “NSSF surveys revealed that 58 percent of firearm purchases were among African American men and women, the largest increase of any demographic group. Women comprised 40 percent of first-time gun purchasers. Retailers noted that they are seeing a 95 percent increase in firearm sales and a 139 percent increase in ammunition sales over the same period in 2019.” Also this month, Outdoor Wire reported on a survey of new gun owners and why they bought guns this year.

The white guys for whom the Second Amendment is the only part of the American Constitution that matters must have thought that they had a patent and a monopoply on owning guns. After all, liberals (or so they thought) not only won’t touch guns, they want to take them all away. And it seems not to have occurred to those white guys that, if they want to refight the Civil War or go around waving their guns at people, then African-Americans have the same rights as everyone else to own guns, to learn to use them, to acquire concealed carry permits, and even to acquire semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15’s that the militias have.

Yes, this is crazy. Let me hasten to say that I don’t want to live in an America in which both sides of the culture war are armed to the teeth, while the occupant of the White House and the Republican Party try to incite division and conflict. But even less do I want to live in an America in which only one side of the culture war is defenseless while the other side starts showing up in caravans of armed militia men, enraged by Republican propaganda, and where the police take sides.

After Barack Obama was elected president, gun sales in the U.S. went way up, because the right wing wanted to raise a bunch of money and stir up rage by telling people that Democrats would take away their guns. After Trump was installed in the White House, gun sales at first went down, because gun lovers felt safe. But that began to turn around as the situation darkened and as those who oppose Trump began to rethink things.

First came the Socialist Rifle Assocation, in October 2018. This group states its purpose as: “[T]o provide an alternate to the mainstream, toxic, right-wing, and non-inclusive gun culture that has dominated the firearms community for decades. We seek to provide a safe, inclusive, and left-leaning platform for talking about gun rights and self defense, free from racist and reactionary prejudices, while providing a platform for the working class to obtain the skills necessary for all aspects of community defense.”

A Reddit group for liberal gun owners seems to have been around since 2012. But its membership has surged under Trump. This group says about itself: “Gun-ownership through a liberal lens. This is a place for liberal gun-owners who want to discuss gun ownership absent the ‘noise’ of most right-leaning pro-gun forums. ‘Liberal’ here is ‘left-of-center,’ in U.S. political terms. Liberal/Leftist/Progressive. This is a place for those who would identify as Democrats, Progressives, Socialists, etc. That does not mean ‘classical liberal’ or libertarians.”

As much as we might wish for an America that is not armed to the teeth, it is not irrational for those who are despised by armed right-wing Americans to start acquiring their own guns. Though I had owned a pistol for ten years that mostly sat in a drawer, I too started rethinking things after Trump. I did a lot of shooting practice, and last year I got a concealed carry permit. I also bought (gasp) a semi-automatic rifle, and I know how to shoot that gun, too. As I see the political situation in which we now find ourselves, the American oligarchy, represented by the likes of Trump and inspired by the likes of Putin, has found its brownshirts. If some Americans seek to intimidate other Americans with guns, it probably was inevitable that those who are being intimidated will start working to level the playing field.

Still, I had a lot of concerns about the ethics involved, not to mention joining in what feels like cultural regression and a dangerous symptom of the erosion of American civic life. But, as I tried to think it through, I came across an article from the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. The article is written in the usual dense language of philosophy, but I got the gist of it: It would be better if no one owned guns. But, if some people own guns, then others are justified in also owning guns, lest they become subject to domination and control. I concur with that argument. And, speaking only for myself, I don’t tolerate intimidation well.

Incidentally, during this election, I will be working with the voter protection project organized by the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party in my state. Here in my county, we have a history of voter intimidation of Democrats by Republicans outside the voting places. I’m afraid that is likely to be worse this year.

I took this photo in a recent election in the county where I live, outside a voting place. The truck belongs to a militia. That’s the Christian flag on the back.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer. Simon & Schuster, 1959. 1,252 pages.

If I had read this book five years ago, I would have read it pretty much purely as history. Barack Obama was still president of the United States. Having elected its first black president and experienced eight years of economic recovery with competent, scandal-free government, America seemed to have outgrown its worst vices. Now we know that America has not outgrown its worst vices.

In writing this post, three times I’ve written something angry, and three times I’ve deleted it. Instead of venting my anger over the ugly turn in American history that we are now living through, I think I’ll just say this: There is no better time to read this book than now. Adolf Hitler, of course, was character number 1 in this history. Just behind him were Hermann Goering (who cheated the hangman with suicide by cyanide) and the others who had great power who were hanged at Nuremberg. There were hundreds more with lesser roles whose names are on the historical record. And there were the millions of nameless Germans who should have known better but didn’t. If you read this book now, you will recognize these people, because today people just like them are still with us. That these people today have not acquired the power to do the damage the Nazis did, or that they’d be satisfied with domination and oligarchy and anti-democracy tyranny rather than genocide, says little about their character. They are the same people.

We are fortunate that so many records survived to document this history: the secret government records captured in Berlin, the diaries, the letters, and the Nuremberg interrogations, depositions, and testimony. Those are the sources that Shirer used to write this history.

Shirer writes, in his afterword to the 1990 edition:

“Perhaps it will help too if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”

If only the worst people among us could recognize what they are and how eager they are to be misled. But, because of what they are, I doubt that they ever will.

Germany, redeemed

Germany today: Hamburg, Nov. 12, 2017

I have only about 150 pages to go in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just finished reading the horrifying chapter on the atrocities of the Nazis. Shirer also describes what the Nazis had in mind, had they won the war. They would have established a vast slave empire and police state reaching all the way from France and Great Britain to Russia. Having already exterminated millions during the war, millions more would have been exterminated. Everyone who survived, including the French and the British, would have been enslaved to the Germans, given enough only to subsist, with no rights to speak of.

But consider Germany today. While the American democracy is hanging by a thread under the depraved Donald Trump and the now-dangerous Republican Party, Germany is a model of how the world could be. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is now often referred to as the leader of the free world. Trump and the Republican Party literally are trying to turn the United States into Russia — authoritarian, lawless except for police in the streets, looted by, owned by, and run by, the extremely rich.

We Americans need to study Germany. First, we need to study what Germany was at its worst. There probably is no better single source than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Then we need to study what Germany is today. There we will find a roadmap for what we Americans must do once the Republican Party is put out of power.

As I see it, Germany’s case affirms what I as a liberal American see as the object of our political struggle. That is that the answer to America’s biggest problems — whether inequality, poverty, poor health, racism, appalling ignorance, and even gun violence — is the same single answer. That is the enactment of the entire liberal project, in which the destination is democratic socialism, equality under the law, the redistribution of wealth downward instead of upward, a highly regulated economy that emphasizes shared prosperity rather than elite profit, a real commitment to real (and free or affordable) education from childhood to university, and fixes in our laws and Constitution that have allowed corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democracy forces to gain control. That we as Americans can’t afford these things is one of the many lies that prevent our having them. America is outrageously rich, and that wealth is produced by all Americans, not by our untaxed lords-of-the-universe CEOs. All must share in that wealth. Germany and the other socialist democracies prove the case. When polls ask Americans what they want, once you strip away all the loaded words such as “socialist,” what Americans want is to be like Denmark. Or Germany.

Had Hitler won the war and established his vast slave empire and police state, it could not have lasted. The people of Europe, including the Germans, would not have put up with it for long.

Having almost finished this history of Germany (from about 1930 to 1946), I find that I very much want to know what happened next in Germany. I know that it was bleak in Germany for many years after Hitler, not least because I lived through the Cold War. Russia went one way, of course, and the NATO allies went another. I used to listen to Soviet propaganda from Radio Moscow on shortwave radio. I also listened to Radio Deutsche Welle. (Both Radio Moscow and Deutsche Welle broadcast in English, with stations aimed at the United States.) And there was the BBC World Service, as there is now. I knew as a young American who would have been sent to Vietnam, had my date of birth not drawn a high number in the lottery, that what had happened, and was happening, in Europe mattered. But it was all so complicated, and I knew far too little history. But I was learning.

I have never been to Germany. After this book, I now find that I would like to see the rebuilt Berlin. As a old pagan, I wouldn’t give two pfennigs for all the churches in the world (except for the Gothic cathedrals). Rather, it’s to the concert halls that one goes to be immersed in what is best in European culture, and Germany has a fine new one, at Hamburg. I’m guessing that Germans today might have a lot of interesting advice for us Americans, if we Americans care to go there and get it. I am guessing that Germans are quite rightly proud of what they have accomplished, not only since Hitler, but also since they pulled down the wall.

In any case, I find that I feel that I don’t greatly blame the Germans for Hitler. They should have known better, certainly, and some resisted, though they were cowed. But there are just two many examples from all over the world of what happens when a certain kind of people gain power, as Trump and his base have done in the United States. It would seem to be a way of being to which all human societies everywhere are susceptible. It is authoritarianism, the will to dominate, the need to scapegoat, a strange tolerance for — even an attraction to — cruelty and violence, an uncaring attitude toward unfairness and injustice, a worshipful devotion to the purity of ideologies (or theologies), a susceptibility to being deceived and for deceiving oneself. The degree of fanaticism varies, as does the level of power these people acquire. But they are the same people, and today they are 25 to 30 percent of the American population. There are still such people in Europe, to be sure. But they are outnumbered. They usually are outnumbered. But the defects of their character leads them to play dirty. Part of the purpose of laws and constitutions is to keep such people out of power as the minority they are. If the time ever comes when the majority of people truly want to subsist in a slave empire and police state, then by all means let’s have it. But that won’t happen, because a democracy with the support of the majority doesn’t have to be a police state, just as a failed democracy without the support of the majority has to be a police state, if there is to be the law and order that authoritarians love so much: lawlessness and loot for them in their palaces, à la Putin and Trump, and law and order for the rest of us, with jackboots in the streets.

How strange — and encouraging — it is that, having almost finished with this book about Germany, the Germany of today is something very different. I’d pack my bags for a visit today, but Americans aren’t allowed in, owing to authoritarian, ideological, know-nothing misgovernance. And anyway my cat wouldn’t let me go. But I will get there.

Update: As a minority, these crazies will always be with us. Just this morning, the New York Times posted this story on far-right activities in Germany. Note the references not only to Trump, but also to Russia.

The other pandemic: Trumper psychosis

Hitler in Nuremberg, 1935. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Two pandemics are at present raging across the United States. Both are particularly severe in the West and South, where, for similar reasons, people are particularly likely to be infected. One pandemic, of course, is a biological pandemic, Covid-19. The other is what Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has called “the mental health pandemic.”

Lee published a book about this in 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She also has an article this week at Salon:

Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s psychosis has infected his followers. Here’s how to get them better

I think it must have been Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who originated the concept of psychic epidemics. Jung frequently mentions psychic epidemics in his writings, and, as I recall, Freud and Jung frequently discussed psychic epidemics in their letters. I’m aware that everything about Freud and Jung is now in dispute among the intelligentsia. But even if you dispute whether Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories are good science, there is no disputing the fact that both of them were brilliant and well-placed cultural observers, at a dangerous time in world history. Jung is famous for having said (in 1936), “I saw it coming. I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant…” [See footnote at end.]

What Jung was referring to was what he called an archetype. Jung was claiming that his psychoanalysis of German patients in 1918 found similar, and pathological, stirrings in his patients’ minds. He called that “the blond beast.” If that was true in 1918, then surely today, I would argue, Donald Trump is feeding a similar archetype in the minds of his “base.” I thought for a while about what we might call it, and the term I ended up with is “the white barbarian.” The American white barbarian is way beyond stirring in its sleep, though. It’s in the streets. This morning I was shocked by the news that a Democratic Party headquarters in Arizona was destroyed in an arson attack. If you’re on Facebook and haven’t removed all the right-wingers from your feed, then it’s easy to see that Facebook is a key trolling ground for white barbarians. Images from Trump rallies have captured white barbarian faces for history. Hordes are their most hospitable habitat, but they also operate individually, as in the photo below, or as with the pathetic “pizzagate” gunman who fired his AR-15 inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, where he was told that Democrats were holding children as sex slaves. He subsequently was sentenced to four years. White barbarians in a state of psychosis seem capable of believing anything they’re told.

In her Salon article, Bandy Lee says that, to keep their followers psychotic, an “influential figure” with his “severe pathology” must create and maintain an atmosphere of psychological contagion. Hitler used rallies for that, as does Trump. One of Trump’s biggest political problems at present is that he can’t hold his rallies because of Covid-19. Covid-19 also has forced the Republican Party to cancel its national convention, which Trump desperately needed to keep his base of white barbarians in a state of psychosis. During the Bush-Cheney administration, Bush and Cheney brilliantly and diabolically deceived the media into getting almost the entire country into a state of war fever, as preparation for invading Iraq. In March 2003, only 17 percent of Americans strongly opposed invading Iraq. I was among the 17 percent. It is a terrifying thing to see such a large majority of one’s country deceived into a state of madness in support of violence. Republican politics is now completely dependent on public psychosis to achieve its ends — and has been since Newt Gingrich (1995) and Fox News (1996). An irrational, uncaring, authoritarian and anti-democracy politics that provides no benefits to its voters but only to its richest contributors can’t do things any other way.

A big topic with the rational intelligentsia at present is whether conditions will get better after Trump goes down. Many argue that things will not get better, that the Republican Party will just find new ways to keep its base in a state of rage and psychosis. At present, I’m more optimistic. I think that the period between now and Nov. 3 may be very dangerous, but if Trump goes down in a landslide — as it appears he would if the election were held today — then I think the Republican Party will have to conclude that its politics of rage and deception and keeping its base mentally ill won’t work anymore, as demographic change leaves them behind and as people see through their deceptions. Still, it’s a very dangerous party machinery that can lie and deceive its way to war with only 17 percent (of very well-informed people, I might add) resisting the contagion. Why are some of us immune? Why are some so susceptible? What can be done to improve the odds of recovery for those who have gone mad? There is much to think about there, but it will have to be a post for some other day, after Trump is turned out of the White House.

These two white barbarians, by the way, have been charged with felonies for pointing their guns at dark-skinned protesters. Note that her finger is on the trigger, an absolute no-no for anyone who has been trained to use guns.

Note: The quote from Jung comes, I believe, from the Tavistock lectures a year before World War II. I believe the quote is accurate, and much has been written about it. The “blond beast” probably refers to Nietzsche. See more here.

Update: For a long time, no matter what the right wing in America was up to, comparisons to Germany were out of bounds in public discourse. That taboo has fallen. Here is yet another piece in the New York Times drawing comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s America:

American Catastrophe Through German Eyes: Trump says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens. In 1933, Hitler issued his ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’

The German election of 1933

The Reichstag burns, Feb. 27, 1933.

It’s impossible to read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich without making comparisons to Donald Trump. To risk an unattractive analogy, to compare the two is like comparing a hot little pustule ripe for popping to a deadly case of gangrene. Donald Trump is stupid, lazy, cowardly, petty, and gratuitously cruel. Whereas Hitler was a political and military genius, and a total psychopath. Hitler had a plan — a diabolical plan that he had the discipline and nerves to execute.

At present I am 450 pages into the 1,250 pages of Third Reich. I’ll have more to say about this impressive book later. But the German election of 1933 is on my mind now because the next American election is just over three months away. We already can see that Trump’s strategy for Nov. 3 is a crummy, timid imitation of the German election of 1933.

Trump wants as much disorder in the streets as possible between now and November. The hot spot at the moment is Portland, where noisy and naive protesters, probably with inexperienced leadership, are up against heavily militarized police and uninvited federal agents. Trump will continue to call for “law and order” to stop the “violent Marxist thugs,” saying that only he can make us safe. Nancy Pelosi, who knows her history and is more inclined toward understatement than overstatement, makes the comparison to Hitler: “Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti. These are not the actions of a democratic republic. Trump and his stormtroopers must be stopped.”

Trump cannot win — or steal — the November election without treachery in some form. The question is: How far will he go?

The complete story of the Reichstag fire is still in dispute. Hermann Göring once boasted that he had set the fire, though Göring denied that at Nuremberg. Whatever happened, the Nazis wasted no time in blaming a Communist conspiracy and using the Reichstag fire to try to swing the election, which came six days later. The Prussian government declared:

“Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down…. Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups…. The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war…. It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.”

The election was March 5, 1933, and it was the last democratic election in Germany during Hitler’s lifetime. The Nazis got 44 percent of the total vote.

FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, as of July 16, shows Trump with 41.2 percent. To take control with 41.2 percent support, a level of treason and treachery would be required that I don’t think Trump is capable of even conceiving, let alone carrying out. (We should keep in mind, though, that Putin, who owns Trump, is much more competent.) Nor is the American democracy as weakened and exhausted as Germany’s was in the years after World War I. Trump has goons (many of whom have already been brought to justice), but Trump has no Göring.

Just listen to the sadistic voice of Göring, in Frankfurt the day before the elections:

“Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking…. I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! … Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to my utmost, my dear Communists, so don’t draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those down there — the Brownshirts.”

In comparison with that, Trump and the even the sadistic Stephen Miller are feckless amateurs. But they will try to keep their power, and their only possible game is a dirty one.

The protesters need to learn some history, too. To march in great numbers and to make as much noise as possible is perfectly good protesting. But to break things or to make any use of fire before such a dangerous election is very foolish.

Update 1: From the Washington Post (be sure to watch the video, which went viral):

A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.

Update 2: Heather Cox Richardson’s Facebook post last night makes the same point that I made in this post yesterday morning. As she puts it: “It seems clear that the Trump campaign — which got a new director last Wednesday — is going to make its case for reelection on the idea that there is violence in America’s cities that must be addressed with federal force, and that only Trump is willing to do so.”

Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook

Update 3: New York Times:

Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun: Protesters are being snatched from the streets without warrants. Can we call it fascism yet?