Month: September 2020

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

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.