Our National Complicity With the Scumbag-in-Chief And Its Lethal Assault on Democracy

"In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the "mobilizing passions" of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence. Informal educational apparatuses, particularly the corporate-controlled media, appear increasingly to be on the side of tyranny. In fact, it would be difficult to overly stress the growing pedagogical importance of the old and new media and the power they now have on the political  imaginations of countless Americans. This is particularly true of right-wing media empires, such as those owned by Rupert Murdoch, as well as powerful corporate entities such as Clearwater, which dominates the radio airwaves with its ownership of over 1,250 stations. In the sphere of television ownership and control, powerful corporate entities have emerged, such as Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the largest number of TV stations in the United States. In addition, right-wing hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have an audience in the millions. Right-wing educational apparatuses shape much of what Americans watch and listen to, and appear to influence all of what Trump watches and hears. The impact of conservative media has had a dangerous effect on American culture and politics, and has played the most prominent role in channeling populist anger and electing Trump to the presidency. We are now witnessing the effects of this media machine. The first casualty of the Trump era is truth, the second is moral responsibility, the third is any vestige of justice, and the fourth is a massive increase in human misery and suffering for millions.

Instead of refusing to cooperate with evil, Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian strains and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. As such, they remain silent and therefore, complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy. Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless polices of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s. Both groups bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, encouraged anti-Semitic mobs, embraced a militant masculinity, demonized racial and ethnic others, supported an unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanctioned state violence at home and abroad.

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

This is not to propose that those who support Trump are all Nazis in suits. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest a more updated danger in which people with power have turned their backs on the cautionary histories of the fascist and Nazi regimes, and in doing so, have willingly embraced authoritarian messages and tropes. Rather than Nazis in suits, we have a growing culture of social and historical amnesia that enables those who are responsible for the misery, anger and pain that has accompanied the long reign of casino capitalism to remain silent for their role and complicity in the comeback of fascism in the United States. This normalization of fascism can be seen in the way in which language that was once an object of critique in liberal democracies loses its negative connotation and becomes the opposite in the Trump administration. Politics, power and human suffering are now framed outside of the realm of historical memory. What is forgotten is that history teaches us something about the transformation and mobilization of language into an instrument of war and violence. As Richard J. Evans observes in his The Third Reich in Power:

Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism ... so that 'fanatical', 'brutal', 'ruthless', 'uncompromising', 'hard' all became words of praise instead of disapproval... In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of much of the American imagination. This is a dystopian imagination marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. There is more at work here than shrinking political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political and a full-scale attack on moral outrage, thoughtful reasoning, collective resistance and radical imagination. Trump has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible.

Of course, Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism. As Ronald Reagan made clear, government was the problem. Consequently, it was framed as the enemy of freedom and purged for assuming any responsibility for a range of basic social needs. Individual responsibility took the place of the welfare state, compassion gave way to self-interest, manufacturing was replaced by the toxic power of financialization, and a rampaging inequality left the bottom half of the US population without jobs, a future of meaningful work or a life of dignity.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Trump has added a new swagger and unapologetic posture to this concoction of massive inequality, systemic racism, American exceptionalism and ultra-nationalism. He embodies a form of populist authoritarianism that not only rejects an egalitarian notion of citizenship, but embraces a nativism and fear of democracy that is at the heart of any fascist regime.

In Trump's world, the authoritarian mindset has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the truth, ethics and alleged human weakness. For Trump, success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or to license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness and state-sanctioned violence. Trump is a master of performance as a form of mass entertainment. This approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein rightly argues in No Is Not Enough, Trump "approaches everything as a spectacle" and edits "reality to fit his narrative."

As the bully-in-chief, he militarizes speech while producing a culture meant to embrace his brand of authoritarianism. This project is most evident in his speeches and policies, which pit white working- and middle-class males against people of color, men against women, and white nationalists against various ethnic, immigrant and religious groups. Trump is a master of theater and diversion, and the mainstream press furthers this attack on critical exchange by glossing over his massive assault on the planet and enactment of policies, such as the GOP tax cuts, which are willfully designed to redistribute wealth upward to his fellow super-rich billionaires. Trump's alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels garners far more headlines than his deregulation of oil and gas industries and his dismantling of environment protections.

Economic pillage has reached new and extreme levels and is now accompanied by a ravaging culture of viciousness and massive levels of exploitation and human suffering. Trump has turned language into a weapon with his endless lies and support for white nationalism, nativism, racism and state violence. This is a language that legitimates ignorance while producing an active silence and complicity in the face of an emerging corporate fascist state…”

--Henry A. Giroux, "The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump" February 13, 2018, Truthout | News Analysis

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/scandal-ridden-scoundrel.html?action=click&contentCollection=Music&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Opinion | Op-Ed Columnist

Scandal-Ridden Scoundrel

by Charles M. Blow  

February 15, 2018

New York Times

SCUMBAG-IN-CHIEF.  Credit Jim Watson
Agence France-Presse  Getty Images

Donald Trump has turned the political world upside down, again and again, like a kid flipping a coin. Every day we wake up to either a new scandal or several lingering ones.

It is astounding. It is maddening. It is numbing.

At this moment, he is embroiled in a scandal of a six-figure payment to a porn star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels and who, at one point, gave an interview in which she claimed that the two were engaged in an extramarital sexual affair.

He is also embroiled in a scandal over why a top aide, Rob Porter, accused of physically assaulting his two ex-wives, was allowed to remain on the White House staff even after these allegations had been brought to the attention of the White House by the F.B.I.

Exacerbating this scandal is the fact that the official White House timeline about the events leading to Porter’s resignation turned out to be a lie, according to sworn testimony on Tuesday by the F.B.I. director Christopher Wray. It is also exacerbated by the fact that after Porter resigned, Trump praised him, and initially failed to say anything about domestic violence in general, reserving that condemnation for a week later, when he said, “I’m totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind.”

And of course, there is the omnipresent issue of Russia attacking our elections in 2016 and the investigation into whether anyone in the Trump orbit colluded or cooperated with the Russians, conspired to commit a crime, lied to officers or tried to obstruct justice.

That’s just the big three at the moment. We also mustn’t forget that the president has never released his tax returns, he refused to sever ties with his businesses, and he is burning through our money going to golf courses or his properties with decadent regularity. He also defended Nazis and was disrespectful to the hurricane-ravaged people of Puerto Rico.

And Trump has lied about pretty much everything. As The Washington Post reported in November: “In the past 35 days, Trump has averaged an astonishing nine [false or misleading] claims a day. The total now stands at 1,628 claims in 298 days, or an average of 5.5 claims a day.”

Any of this would have crippled another president, but not Trump. In a perverse way, Trump appears to benefit from the sheer volume of his offenses. They overwhelm many Americans’ ability to process and track, maintain outrage or even fact-check.

This may rightfully be called Trump’s Deluge Doctrine of American Politics, a thing that many of us never properly feared because we never thought it possible. We never thought a man of such moral depravity and such little respect for propriety, protocol and honesty would ever be president.

But the storm is upon us; we are in it.

I must continue to submit that although I disagree vociferously with Trump on policy, my objection here isn’t about policy or partisanship. This is a fight for the soul of the country.

When more than a third of the country — among them many who once considered themselves part of the “moral majority” — stand with a man who is the literal antithesis of all the values they once professed, that is a problem for America. They are no longer interested in the health of the democracy. Their mission and objectives have veered into a dark place where vision is short and risks and dangers are multiple.

I know that it is a fool’s errand to try to convince these people that honesty, valor and character are fundamental requirements of the American presidency, and when they are lost from the office, the country itself is in peril.

As Trump himself said during the campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” The enduring truth of that outrageous claim is a permanent stain that his supporters must carry.

These people are not only hypocrites; they are au pairs to his obscenity.

Who else would they have allowed to get away with paying off a porn star?

Who else would they have allowed to refuse to sufficiently acknowledge that the country had been attacked, with profound consequences and continued threat, by another country?

The director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, said Tuesday at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing:

“There should be no doubt that Russia perceived that its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian midterm operations.”

He continued:

“We need to inform the American public that this is real, that this is going to be happening, and the resilience needed for us to stand up and say we’re not going to allow some Russian to tell us how to vote, how we ought to run our country.”

But Wray testified at the same hearing that he had never been “specifically directed by the president” to prevent Russia from interfering in our elections.

That is a jaw-dropping statement. As the Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence H. Tribe wrote on Twitter:

“F.B.I. director Wray just testified in the Senate that — despite Russia’s ongoing intrusions into our electoral systems — Potus has never charged the F.B.I. with protecting U.S. elections from Russia! Let that sink in. That’d be like F.D.R. doing nothing in response to Pearl Harbor.”

Let me be clear: Any president who refuses to protect Americans from a foreign threat is himself a domestic threat.

How can any of this be sustained? How can it be rationalized? How can it be tolerated?

America, what is left of it, is slipping away a little bit more every day, with a blessing and a wave from the truculent Trump supporters who simply get giddy whenever liberals lament.

This is the politics of the petty, where people dance and shout as the republic burns.

We patriots and dissidents, we many, we strong, we steadfast, are the last hope the country has of returning to what remains of a pre-Trump America, where porn stars weren’t paid off, accused wife beaters weren’t valorized and our president showed more allegiance to our country than to another.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.

The Real Crisis in American Politics in the Ominous Age of Trump

The Major Ongoing Crisis in American Politics (and Society) and Why Virtually No One Really Wants To Honestly Acknowledge And/Or Seriously Deal With It

by Kofi Natambu

February 13, 2018

The Panopticon Review

The conventional historical narratives governing the "nature and meaning” of modern American politics (i.e. since 1945) are often brazenly distorted and stubbornly ill-informed analyses that far too often over emphasizes how the two major national political parties (and the various intensely ambitious and obsessively media focused individual “candidates and leaders” of these institutions) shape and influence our system of government and thereby impact the pervasive social, economic, and cultural fallout stemming from their involvement and participation in the normative rituals of this system.  What is blatantly missing from the larger discourse however is a much broader and far more detailed and critical assessment and interpretation of how fundamentally existential factors and dynamics of U.S. history and social reality go far beyond those of self serving media personalities and careerist politicians within the structural and institutionally based bureaucratic parameters of mainstream political activity.  What needs to be critically identified and examined instead is how the larger society and culture itself—its values, motives, ideas, desires, fears, anxieties, perceptions, behavior, and perspectives not only ‘influence' but in many cases actually determine how and why major decisions are made regarding what happens to the general polity via the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government.

Nowhere is this major influence and determined intervention of large demographic groups of American citizens in the affairs of government and the political economy generally felt more intensely or pervasively than in the ideological and political minefields (boobytraps?) of “race and gender” (or more accurately the   omnipresent roles that the varying doctrines and practices of white and male supremacy—as well as state sanctioned xenophobia— plays in American society and culture generally at the levels of both material reality and ideological/social activity). The empirical evidence of these factors and their actual role can be found most tellingly and dramatically in the historical voting patterns of  white American citizens of every demographic class group in U.S. national and statewide elections over the past seven decades. What is revealed time and again is just how consistently and incessantly  these voting patterns have determined not merely the perennial outcomes of these elections but how they have in turn shaped the very form and content of the national discourse on what American politics "is and should be” with respect to the social and economic policy investment issues of labor, education, housing, energy, environmental protections, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and fiscal/budgetary management.  Furthermore the ways in which these voting patterns reveal how American citizens generally perceive and thus participate in its rituals on the basis of seeking and demanding social, political, and economic status that openly advantages their relative position(s) in the structural and institutional  hierarchies that systemically rules and dominates via specific demographic segments of our national population over that of “others" they deem are “not worthy” of social, political, and economic parity and equality in the society as a whole (e.g. oppressed national minorities as defined by the coercive and ideologically imposed white supremacist category of “inferior races”, and the sexist, misogynist and patriarchal domination and control of women generally).

For example it is painfully clear given the overwhelmingly well documented empirical evidence that generally speaking white American voters in particular are not by any stretch of the imagination either progressive or liberal and are certainly not even remotely leftwing in their fundamental political positions, values, beliefs, and attitudes.  In fact since 1945 the United States has been quite distinctive and even unique among so-called advanced and highly developed Western nations in that such a large major swath of their national population of voters are so consistently conservative to openly rightwing politically and their voting records at both the federal and state levels as well as locally reflect this blatant fact (by contrast European nations like England, France, Germany, and Italy not to mention politically progressive and social democratic scandinavian  countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a far wider range of ideological and political positions and representatives than are customary in the United States. Thus it is no mystery why in the past half century since 1968 the Republican Party has dominated national politics  (most ominously revealing stat: As of this very moment in 2018 Republicans have now been the occupants of the White House a commanding 60% of the time (30 out of the past 50 years or 8 out of 13 elections) and if not for the national black vote of over 90% on behalf of the Democratic Party in the specific elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012  the Republicans would have won every single national presidential election in the past 50 years! 

In that light no one needs to ask how we all got here in the deadly Orwellian dystopian dungeon known as the 'Age of Trump.'


"What's Past is Prologue..."

https://www.poynter.org/news/ta-nehisi-coates-trump-and-duty-we-have-connect-dots

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump and the duty we have to connect the dots

by David T.Z. Mindich  

October 23, 2017

Poynter:  A Global leader in Journalism

Ta-Nehisi Coates is pictured in this YouTube video speaking to the the 2017 Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities at the U.S. Military Academy.

In the 2016 election, which age ranges of white supporters did Trump win? Which economic brackets? And which gender? If you answered all, all and both, you are correct. If you did not, what does your mistake say about the ability of journalism to paint an accurate picture of reality?

One of the most sweeping and thoughtful critiques of the media comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ just-released book, "We Were Eight Years in Power." Coates argues that journalists missed an essential truth when we diminish Trump’s support among whites.

“Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31),” writes Coates. “He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, ages 18–29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19).” Trump also won among every economic bracket of whites, writes Coates, drawing on findings from Edison Research.

Coates argues that after the recent election, journalists lessened the consequences of whiteness and by extension, white supremacy. The reason why journalists discount the enormity of Trump’s support among whites is because to do otherwise would call into question the American self-image of goodness. This is a similar argument to the one Coates made in his writings about the shootings of unarmed black men: Many white Americans need black victims to be guilty because it protects an image of a fair America.

This misperception grips even thoughtful, enlightened writers like Nicholas Kristof and George Packer, Coates writes, and he suggests that the mainstream news media suffers from widespread delusion about whiteness. Can a democratic nation’s free press operate under a mass delusion about race?

Ida B. Wells

To answer this question, let’s travel back in time to the pinnacle of post-Civil War white supremacy: 1892. That's the year that lynching of African-Americans peaked in the United States. On March 10, 1892, the New York Times reported that three African-American men were “literally shot to pieces” by a white mob. One of the lynched men, Thomas Moss, was a friend of Ida B. Wells, a woman who was born the daughter of slaves and who became a journalist and anti-lynching crusader.

Moss and his associates, said the New York Times, were lynched because they had shot three white “Deputy Sheriffs.” In fact, as Wells quickly learned, a white mob surrounded a black-owned business and fired into it. The three African Americans defended themselves against the mob, firing back and injuring three men, none of whom were “Deputy Sheriffs.”

“This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” wrote Wells in her autobiography. “An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’” This led Wells to embark on one of the most courageous journalistic crusades in American history. Journeying across the South, Wells investigated lynching cases and discovered a disconnect between the perception of blacks as lawless and thus deserving of mob action, and the reality that many black victims were clearly innocent.

Wells was not only uncovering facts; she was operating against the deep-seated racism embedded in the reporting of the day. In an article in 1894, the New York Times referred to white lynch mobs as “savages,” but in the same paragraph stated that “The crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched, and occasionally been put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone.” The crime the Times was alluding to was rape. The mainstream press believed that black men were lynched because they were raping white women.

In fact, through her investigations, Wells uncovered four truths about the “black rapist” trope. First, rape was not the stated cause in most lynching cases. Second, when rape was charged, it was generally done so after the lynching took place as an ex post facto justification. Third, in most cases where a sexual relationship was in fact real, it was generally between consenting adults. And fourth, the root cause of lynching could often be traced to economic competition.

For her efforts, Wells was met with incredulity and anger. In 1894, the Times said that Wells was a “slanderous and nasty minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.” Despite all her courageous reporting, Wells could not break through a national narrative that protected a vision of white benevolence.

Even the great and otherwise enlightened Frederick Douglass told Wells that until he read her evidence to the contrary, he too was troubled by “lasciviousness on the part of Negroes,” Wells recalled in her autobiography. While Douglass and other African-Americans learned from Wells’ exhaustive reporting, white America clung to the myths. Twenty years after Wells finished her investigations, the blockbuster "Birth of a Nation" told a story a heroic Ku Klux Klan defending the innocence of white maidens against lascivious black brutes.

We live in different eras, and 2017 is not 1892. But parallels exist.

If Coates is right, Trump’s advocacy of white privilege and his erasure of Obama are the central features of his presidency. Imagine for a second that Trump’s perceived advocacy of white rights is not considered by his supporters to be a bug, but a feature.

That would explain why his outrageousness never seems to hurt his base. If many among his wide, white base voted for a racial realignment, then the wackier Trump is, the more muscular a white supremacist he could be.

A recent article in BuzzFeed reveals the extent that the so-called Alt-White radicals, in coordination with members of Trump’s team, promoted a white supremacist agenda. Coates believes that we have failed to grasp the brutal consequences of broad white support of President Trump.

“Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist,” Coates writes. “But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

When a writer as careful and probing as Coates tells us that we might be suffering from a widespread delusion, we should pay attention to the charge and understand that historical precedent suggests it is possible, that journalism as a whole can suffer from a widespread insensitivity to racial issues.

What should journalists do today? First, unlike the mainstream journalists of the 1890s — who rejected charges of bias — we should use the charges of Coates and others to goad ourselves to examine our perspectives.

When the media of a majority culture sees the world, it often perceives it as race-neutral, the “color of water,” to borrow a phrase, used in a different context, in James McBride’s best-selling memoir. But today’s journalists, with less overt racism and far more access to different perspectives, need to face the issue of race forthrightly.

The second thing today’s journalists should do is to connect the dots. The 1890s saw a relentless string of lynchings, and the era’s press was better at listing the horrors than finding the golden threads.

Journalism has often been a better strobe light than a searchlight. But when we list Trump’s endless tweets, proclamations and imbroglios, we could do a better job of seeing them as pieces of a whole.

When Trump maligns an American judge of Mexican heritage; defends neo-Nazis; attacks two Gold Star families, one Muslim and one black; or views Puerto Rico’s population as being too lazy to help themselves after a hurricane, we must avoid seeing these as distinct incidents.

Connecting the dots of white supremacy would challenge journalistic objectivity and require a level of self-awareness that is difficult to achieve, but reporters, above all else, are charged with creating a true picture of the world. And we must not avoid grappling with all the racial issues that hide in plain sight.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Mindich is the chair of the journalism department at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University; before that, he was a journalism professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he served nearly a decade as chair. The author of two books and numerous articles.