"What's Past is Prologue…"
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. First edition (hardcover). M. Evans & Company. Black Rose Press July, 1980
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. First edition (hardcover). M. Evans & Company. Black Rose Press July, 1980
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Third edition (paperback). South End Press, 1999
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Second edition (paperback), Black Rose Press, 1989
Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America is a book written by Bertram Gross, American social scientist and professor of political science at Hunter College, and published on June 1, 1980 by M. Evans & Company as a 419-page hardback book containing 440 quotations and sources (paperback editions were published by South End Press in 1980 and in 1999 and by Black Rose Press in 1989) The book examines the history of fascism and, based on the growth of big business and big government, describes possible political scenarios for a future United States. According to a 1981 review in the journal Social Justice, the book is described as "timely" on a subject requiring serious consideration and is about the dangers of fascism, focusing primarily on the United States, but being aware that monopoly capitalism needs to be understood internationally since capitalism "is not a national mode of production”.
In 2016, the book prompted the following response right after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States: "The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show. [...] That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over”.
According to Jason Epstein, editor, publisher and book reviewer for The New York Review of Books, "Friendly Fascism [...] reflects what seems to be a widespread feeling among liberals as well as conservatives that democracy in America has played itself out: that soon Americans won’t be able to govern themselves".According to Gaddis Smith, professor emeritus of history at Yale University and an expert on American foreign relations, the book is an "insightful lament over the growth of centralized power by business and government in alliance under the direction of faceless managers who [...] are replacing democracy with a form of benevolent fascism".Writing on behalf of Eclectica Magazine, reviewer Dale Wharton comments that the book offers "faint hope of averting neofascism", but as a possible offset suggests raising aspirations, notably by "setting forth clear lofty goals, broad enough to embrace a great majority". Help may come from insiders since "bubbling upward from all levels of the Establishment are longings for fulfilling employment disconnected from consumer exploitation, environmental degradation, or militarism”.
Reviewer Dennis Phillips notes in the Australian Journal of Law & Society that Gross wrote Friendly Fascism before Ronald Reagan had become President of the United States, but Reagan's United States, presumed in part to be a result of neofascist techniques described in the book, had "proven Bertram Gross to be an amazingly astute prophet . [...] The evidence for this [in the book] is stunning".[2] According to a book review in the journal Social Justice by Gregory Shank of the Institute for the Study of Labor and Economic Crisis, "Friendly Fascism [...] is written to alert readers to a clear and present danger in the current trajectory of American politics”.
More recently in 2016, the book prompted the following response from Michael Moore right after Donald Trump was elected President: "The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show. [...] That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over".
Related history
Fascism has been perceived to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
— Buenaventura Durruti, quote from an interview with Pierre van Paassen, July 24, 1936
External links:
C. W Mills (1958). "The Structure of Power in American Society" (PDF). British Journal of Socoiology. Vol. 9. No. 1.
"The Doctrine of Fascism". Complete text of the essay "Dottrina" ("Doctrines"). A translation of the Benito Mussolini "Doctrines" section of the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana.
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Second edition (paperback), Black Rose Press, 1989
Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America is a book written by Bertram Gross, American social scientist and professor of political science at Hunter College, and published on June 1, 1980 by M. Evans & Company as a 419-page hardback book containing 440 quotations and sources (paperback editions were published by South End Press in 1980 and in 1999 and by Black Rose Press in 1989) The book examines the history of fascism and, based on the growth of big business and big government, describes possible political scenarios for a future United States. According to a 1981 review in the journal Social Justice, the book is described as "timely" on a subject requiring serious consideration and is about the dangers of fascism, focusing primarily on the United States, but being aware that monopoly capitalism needs to be understood internationally since capitalism "is not a national mode of production”.
In 2016, the book prompted the following response right after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States: "The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show. [...] That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over”.
According to Jason Epstein, editor, publisher and book reviewer for The New York Review of Books, "Friendly Fascism [...] reflects what seems to be a widespread feeling among liberals as well as conservatives that democracy in America has played itself out: that soon Americans won’t be able to govern themselves".According to Gaddis Smith, professor emeritus of history at Yale University and an expert on American foreign relations, the book is an "insightful lament over the growth of centralized power by business and government in alliance under the direction of faceless managers who [...] are replacing democracy with a form of benevolent fascism".Writing on behalf of Eclectica Magazine, reviewer Dale Wharton comments that the book offers "faint hope of averting neofascism", but as a possible offset suggests raising aspirations, notably by "setting forth clear lofty goals, broad enough to embrace a great majority". Help may come from insiders since "bubbling upward from all levels of the Establishment are longings for fulfilling employment disconnected from consumer exploitation, environmental degradation, or militarism”.
Reviewer Dennis Phillips notes in the Australian Journal of Law & Society that Gross wrote Friendly Fascism before Ronald Reagan had become President of the United States, but Reagan's United States, presumed in part to be a result of neofascist techniques described in the book, had "proven Bertram Gross to be an amazingly astute prophet . [...] The evidence for this [in the book] is stunning".[2] According to a book review in the journal Social Justice by Gregory Shank of the Institute for the Study of Labor and Economic Crisis, "Friendly Fascism [...] is written to alert readers to a clear and present danger in the current trajectory of American politics”.
More recently in 2016, the book prompted the following response from Michael Moore right after Donald Trump was elected President: "The next wave of fascists will not come with cattle cars and concentration camps, but they'll come with a smiley face and maybe a TV show. [...] That’s how the 21st-century fascists will essentially take over".
Related history
Fascism has been perceived to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
— Buenaventura Durruti, quote from an interview with Pierre van Paassen, July 24, 1936
External links:
C. W Mills (1958). "The Structure of Power in American Society" (PDF). British Journal of Socoiology. Vol. 9. No. 1.
"The Doctrine of Fascism". Complete text of the essay "Dottrina" ("Doctrines"). A translation of the Benito Mussolini "Doctrines" section of the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana.
WHAT IS FASCISM?
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
—Robert Paxton, “The Anatomy of Fascism”, Random House, 2004
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Acclaimed Scholar and Historian Rick Perlstein On the Reality of American Fascism and precisely why it is the major question facing the United States in 2024 and Beyond
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/22/ron_desantis_drops_out_2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/22/ron_desantis_drops_out_2024
“American Fascism”: Historian Rick Perlstein on Trump’s Grip on the GOP & Chances of a Second January 6
January 22, 2024
Watch Full Show
Acclaimed author on the rise of the modern conservative movement.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZfedaGD5fE
Links:
"You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle"
Rick Perlstein books
Image Credit: Left: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
We look at the state of the Republican Party after Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement Sunday that he has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump to be the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee, making it a two-person race between Trump and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. With the pivotal New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, we speak with author Rick Perlstein, a historian of the modern conservative movement, who describes Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party as “American fascism.” He says regardless of how many votes Trump gets, the real question is how his extremist supporters will respond. “The horse race doesn’t matter if the guys in the MAGA hats blow up the track,” says Perlstein.
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
We look now at the state of the Republican Party as Tuesday’s presidential primary in New Hampshire narrows down to a two-person race after Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced he’s dropping out, in a video posted Sunday on social media.
GOV. RON DESANTIS: I am today suspending my campaign. I’m proud to have delivered on 100% of my promises, and I will not stop now. It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance.
AMY GOODMAN: As DeSantis drops out of the race and endorses Trump, more questions are being raised about Trump’s mental capacity. At a campaign event Friday in New Hampshire, Trump confused his Republican rival Nikki Haley repeatedly with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
DONALD TRUMP: By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know, Nikki Haley — Nikki Haley — Nikki Haley — you know they — did you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it, all of it, because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security? We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down.
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s lapse prompted his Republican presidential opponent Nikki Haley to question his mental fitness in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
NIKKI HALEY: I mean, he claimed that Joe Biden was going to get us into World War II. I’m assuming he meant World War III. He said that he ran against President Obama. He never ran against President Obama. He says that I’m the one that kept security from the Capitol on January 6th. I was nowhere near the Capitol on January 6th. But, Margaret, don’t be surprised: If you have someone that’s 80 in office, their mental stability is going to continue to decline. That’s just human nature. We know that.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by historian Rick Perlstein, author of a four-volume series on the rise of the modern conservative movement. His column for The American Prospect is “The Infernal Triangle.”
Rick, welcome back to Democracy Now! We don’t have much time, but a lot to cover. Talk about the significance of DeSantis pulling out, endorsing Trump, what this all means now, the two-person race, though he is winning in polls by a level — I mean, in Iowa — we haven’t seen before, trounced DeSantis by 30%. And one after another Republicans are endorsing him.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yes. He is definitely going to be the nominee, presuming his continued ability to function as a human being, which is, you know, negligible. The important thing to understand is that, you know, the horse race stuff is fine, but the horse race doesn’t matter if the guys in the MAGA hats blow up the track. The important thing is not how many votes Donald Trump is able to get. He’s going to win the nomination. The important thing is not how many votes he gets in November, because he’s going to claim he won no matter what. The important people is — the important question is: How many people are going to be willing to take arms up for Donald Trump, you know, on the next January 6th, you know, in 2025? I don’t want to be melodramatic about it, but, you know, reality itself now seems to — for millions of Americans, a considerable part of the Republican Party, flows from the person of Donald Trump. And the word we have to begin using for this situation, as melodramatic as it seems, is “American fascism.”
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about people like New Hampshire Governor Sununu, who did endorse Nikki Haley, now saying if it’s Trump, he’s going to ultimately support him, to the questioning of Kristen Welker on Meet the Press? “You’re saying you would support him despite January 6, despite what you said about insurrection?” All of these Republican leaders who have questioned Trump falling into line in the end, as Trump now, today —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — once again, is dealing with the rape of E. Jean Carroll, the judge called it, essentially, in common parlance, “rape.”
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right. There’s nothing new about that — right? — if we look at what people like Lindsey Graham said in 2015 and 2016 about Donald Trump, and then what they said when they saw him as a vector to keep their own power. Again, it’s really unfortunate and kind of creepy that the only sort of words that we have within the context of political philosophy that describe what’s happening come from the German language. This is Führerprinzip. You know, the truth comes from the leader.
And when they need to kind of get behind a criminal in order to be, you know, kind of a legitimate figure within a political party, that political party is — you know, you’ve got to wonder what these guys are going to look like 50 years from now in the eyes of history, right? They’ll look like, you know, the guys like Fritz von Papen, who said, “We have Hitler backed into a corner so far that he’s going to squeal.” Right? Fritz von Papen was the vice chancellor of Germany, the guy who made a coalition with Hitler that made him chancellor of Germany, right? These things are processes, you know? And we’re very far along a process, one for which the questions that are asked by conventional political journalism no longer signify anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the presidential race two days before the New Hampshire primary, less than a week after he lost to Donald Trump by a record 30 percentage points in the Iowa caucus. In a video released Sunday, DeSantis said he’s endorsing Trump.
GOV. RON DESANTIS: He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.
AMY GOODMAN: With DeSantis out, the Republican race has essentially become a two-person contest between Trump and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador. Over the weekend, Haley campaigned in New Hampshire. She questioned Trump’s mental fitness after he confused her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Joe Biden is now running an online ad questioning Trump’s mental capacities, featuring Nikki Haley’s comments.
NIKKI HALEY: Last night Trump is in a rally.
DONALD TRUMP: You know, Nikki Haley — Nikki Haley — Nikki Haley —
NIKKI HALEY: And he’s going on and on, mentioning me multiple times as to why I didn’t handle January 6th better.
DONALD TRUMP: Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. They don’t want to talk about that.
NIKKI HALEY: I wasn’t in office then. They’re saying he got confused. He got confused and said he was running against Obama. He never ran against Obama.
DONALD TRUMP: And we did with Obama. We won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won. Obama wants to — he doesn’t want to talk about it.
BRIAN KILMEADE: Well, you mean President Biden. So —
NIKKI HALEY: Don’t put our country at risk like this.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
AMY GOODMAN: So, there Trump says he ran against President Obama. He also said you wouldn’t want Joe Biden to preside over World War II, instead of III.
What Florida Governor Ron DeSantis represented, the amount of money that he spent in this failed presidential bid, where it came from?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah. I think the most important thing to understand about what Ron DeSantis represented, since, you know, he made no dent on the cult of personality of Donald Trump, you know, no appreciable contest, really, what he represents is the failure of the mainstream media to do its job in informing people about what it requires to be self-governing citizens. You know, they took this guy who celebrated torture at Guantánamo — you know, he kind of supervised it as a lawyer, laughed at the people being tortured — you know, a guy who basically is turning his own state into a kind of little fascist fiefdom, and they raised him up not only as the person who could beat Donald Trump, but as somehow better than Donald Trump, right? So we’re kind of caught in this hall of mirrors, as I’ve been repeating, where the kind of traditional ways of doing mainstream journalism, where you have the front-runner and you have the challenger and they’re in a horse race and yada yada yada, don’t even really signify what’s going on in America anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: And the amount of money that he got? He spent something like $150 million?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right. This speaks to, I think, the way a fascist cult of personality works. It’s impervious to facts. It’s impervious to challenge, right? I mean, the fact that Nikki Haley is pointing out that Donald Trump thinks he ran against Barack Obama and that she was the speaker of the House, I mean, this resembles what we read about in 1984 by George Orwell, where, you know, your loyalty to Big Brother is signified by your willingness to say two plus two equals five. I mean, really, if you look at Donald Trump’s quote, it’s not only that he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, he said that he requested 10,000 troops. That never happened, right? So there’s no fact-checking that’s possible when you’re within this kind of mythic space of this kind of almost religous figure who’s going to deliver us from transcendent evil. It’s not the way people learn about thinking about American politics in journalism school.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a few of the clips of, well, then-Republican presidential contender — now he’s dropped out of the race — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who doubled down on the Florida Board of Education’s new rules that require educators to teach students that enslaved Black people, quote, “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis defended the curriculum.
GOV. RON DESANTIS: I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual. They listed everything out. And if you have any questions about it, just ask the Department of Education. You can talk about those folks. But, I mean, these were scholars who put that together. It was not anything that was done politically.
AMY GOODMAN: The NAACP called Florida’s new curriculum a, quote, “sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.” Rick Perlstein, I was wondering if you could weigh in on this and also —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — the controversies around Nikki Haley, right? It’s now a —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — two-person Republican race.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Everything from her forgetting to say, as she said forgetting to say, but when asked what caused the Civil War, not mentioning slavery, and then —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — when asked on Fox about whether the United States was a racist country, she said it is not a racist country, and it never has been. Your thoughts, from DeSantis to Haley?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right, yeah. This one goes way back in the history of the right and the conservative movement and the Republican Party. I wrote about this in my 2014 book, The Invisible Bridge, with Reagan on the cover. You know, when Roots came out and, you know, introduced Americans, many of them for the first time, to the cruelties of slavery, he said he hated this show, that, you know, treated all the white people as the bad guys and all the Black people as the good guys, right?
This script of innocence in which America is God’s ordained nation and can’t do anything bad, you know, is one of these kind of structures that Trump inherits, but, like so much of kind of Trumpism — right? — as shown by Nikki Haley, it’s kind of conventional Republicanism kind of turned up to 11. Right? But this idea that you cannot be disturbed with anything other than the pristine perfection of your own country, you know, you can’t really kind of function in the world that way, in a modern world, in which kind of complexity and contradiction and reality — right? — have to be the ground of your actions. So, we’re kind of stuck in this situation where half the country has to live in this kind of mythic dream space. And that’s why some of us are beginning to use the word “fascism” to describe, you know, basically, the hegemony of the Republican Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about fascism.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, fascism, you know, is not just kind of ugly right-wing politics, right? We’ve had that for a long time. Fascism is a cult of personality around the individual, who is taken to embody the will of the people. And it’s the idea of a mythic return to, you know, this past that requires the destruction of these transcendent enemies of the people who are kind of constituted in this way of thinking as normal, you know, the true Americans. And they believe things like, you know, when you hear Mike Lindell say, if you had accurate polls, 70% of the American people are red, right? This idea that they are the people, that they are the state, and the idea that any opposition to this is illegitimate.
And when you pair that with, you know, an armed opposition, that say, quite explicitly — and this is, you know, the NRA ideology — that their guns are for fighting tyranny, you know, and preserving the Republican form of government against the bad guys, the tyrants — and they say the Democrats are the tyrants — this is a very bad formulation. This is a very ugly situation. And if people are tired of politics, if people are exhausted of politics, I don’t know what to say. You know, we might not have a — as Donald Trump likes to say, we might not have a country anymore that we can recognize five, 10, 20 years from now.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the New Hampshire primary is upon us. And when Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu was asked about what’s going on with the Republican Party on NBC Meet the Press, the host, Kristen Welker, this was his response.
GOV. CHRIS SUNUNU: I don’t care what political party you’re from, whether you’re an extreme conservative or a socialist liberal, everybody should be concerned with that type of mentality going into the White House.
KRISTEN WELKER: Despite all of these comments, despite his comments on immunity, despite what you said, about the insurrection, you would still vote for Donald Trump in a general election against Joe Biden?
GOV. CHRIS SUNUNU: Well, according to the polls, most of America would. This is how — I mean, this is what you guys aren’t reporting. This is how bad Biden has been. This is how incompetent he’s been. The guy can barely get off the stage. Nobody wants what is currently, and everyone is scared of a President Kamala Harris.
AMY GOODMAN: So, when he talked about everyone’s scared of, he didn’t talk about why he was endorsing Trump after criticizing him, you know, especially around —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — the insurrection. But he’s talked about Kamala Harris.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right. Yeah, I mean, that’s the mythic dream space — right? — the idea that, you know, Joseph Biden is a total failure, right? I mean, you know, there’s a lot, lot, lot to criticize about Joseph Biden, but we also have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, right? So, it’s just this kind of made-up world, you know, where everyone is against Kamala Harris, right? And, you know, this is one of the ways a fascist formation functions, right? You need these legitimate conservativesm, and the Sununu family have been retainers in the Bush family, just to take one example. His father, I think, was the chief of staff — right? — of the first President Bush. You need this kind of legitimation by the so-called establishment conservatives in order to seem like a viable holder of a position of power. So, you know, he’s just as responsible for what’s going on as, you know, some Proud Boy who’s willing to beat up an election worker.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the Davos meeting that took place, the Davos summit of the corporate elite of the world, corporate and governmental lead of the world, and what was being said. Last week, at the World Economic Forum, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon talked about how Trump has been right on many issues. He said, quote, “I don’t think they’re voting for Trump because of his family values. Just take a step back and be honest. He was kind of right about NATO. He was kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.” And the reported consensus out of Davos is that Donald Trump isn’t just going to win the Republican primary, he’s going to win the presidency back.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, that, again, reminds us of the German elite in the early 1930s, who thought that, you know, basically, they could control this, they could ride this tiger, right? And, you know, that’s not why they’re voting for Donald Trump. You know, what was it? Eighty-two percent of Republican primary voters said they agreed with Donald Trump that undocumented immigrants were poisoning the blood of America, right? So he’s living in this mythic dream space, too. And that’s — wow, if you’re not joining the resistance to, you know, the end of democracy as we know it — again, this is another establishment member who is revealing himself as part of the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you Donald Trump addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit in October.
DONALD TRUMP: Because they want to destroy our country. They want to destroy our country. Under Biden, we have not one, but two immigration disasters. We have one on the border, and we have one in the Biden State Department, which is admitting colossal amounts of jihadists into our communities and campuses and our refugee programs. That’s why you see all of these big demonstrations in New York, in Chicago. Nobody can believe what’s taking place. They’re letting them in at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We cannot allow that to happen. And we don’t want to be like Europe, with jihads on every corner. That’s what happens. I mean, we’re going to have — we’re going to be like Europe. You take a look at London. You take a look at Paris. You take a look at what’s going on over there. We want to be the United States of America, and we want to make our country great again. Right now we don’t have a great country. We have a laughingstock.
As president, I will end, once and for all, the mass importation of antisemitism into the United States. And just as I did before, we will keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country. We’re going to keep them out of our country. We were keeping them out. We were keeping them out. You remember the travel ban. On day one, I will restore our travel ban. We had a travel ban, because we didn’t want people coming into our country who really love the idea of blowing — blowing our country up. Let’s blow up our streets and our shopping centers and our people. So I instituted what we call the Trump travel ban. And it was an amazing success. It was suspended immediately upon his coming into the country. And I never talked about this for four years. I never mentioned it. We didn’t have one incident in four years, because we kept bad people the hell out of our country. We kept them out. We didn’t have one, not one instance. I didn’t want to say it during the four years, because I didn’t want to walk out of the speech and have something happen, right?
I’ll also be implementing strong ideological screenings for all immigrants coming in. If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country, and you’re not going to be getting into our country. I will cancel the student visas of Hamas and sympathizers on college campuses. The college campuses are being taken over. And all of the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests this month, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. We will deport you.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Trump after the October 7th attack, addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition, talking about the pro-Palestinian rights protests around the country on college campuses, among a number of other things, the Muslim ban, etc. Can you hold forth on this, Rick?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah. First of all, I appreciate you running an extended clip, because people really need to know what Trump discourse sounds like, and not just kind of the soundbites that kind of get picked up in the media reports.
Second of all, there’s lots to say about that, but the thing that really leaped out at me was the beginning, when he said, “Oh, you know, the State Department has been infiltrated by jihadists.” And that’s, you know, an exact parallel to what Joseph McCarthy said in his famous speech in 1950, that the State Department had been infiltrated by communists. And it just shows how so much of what we’re dealing with now is kind of — these kind of scattered kind of roots of it, you know, exist throughout the history of the Republican right.
And what McCarthy was saying and what Trump is saying is that anything bad that happens in America was made to happen by elites, right? So, that is a very dangerous way of thinking. And then, everything bad that happened that elites have made happen is caused by aliens. You know, in Chicago, where I am now, an 8-year-old boy was stabbed to death by his landlord, because he thought this young Palestinian kid must be a jihadist, right? He’s scapegoating undocumented immigrants.
And the way this dreamscape works is, this promise of redemption, this promise that everything bad in the world is going to go away if these bad people go away, it can’t be satisfied. So that’s when you get to the next group. That’s why, you know, Pastor Niemöller’s, you know, “They came for the communists, and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a communist” is so prophetic. You know, when the redemption doesn’t come, when he, quote-unquote, “kicks out the Mexicans,” and when he, quote-unquote, “kicks out the jihadists,” people will be looking for the next scapegoat. And we need to appreciate that this is a ongoing process. It ratchets in a more and more authoritarian direction every week, every month, every year, so there’s kind of no fever that breaks here. We’re on a course that’s extremely dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to ask how Wall Street fits into this picture. As we were speaking, a piece came over on CNBC — right? — NBCs business channel, and it says, “As Donald Trump surges toward the Republican nomination, many Wall Street executives have made a calculated decision not to speak out against him, and in some cases they will consider supporting the Republican former president over … Joe Biden, according to [more than] a dozen people familiar with” this case. “This view reflects one shared by large portions of Wall Street, who are scrambling to come to grips with the idea that Trump is the likely [Republican] nominee for president and … could beat Biden in November. A Real Clear Politics polling average Sunday had Trump leading Biden nationwide by about 2 points in a general election.” What does this mean? And do you think that money determines who is president? Is that just a truism, or perhaps not?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, if money determined who was president, you know, Nikki Haley would be on a glide path, because she’s the Koch brothers’ candidate, right? There’s lots of things that determine who becomes president.
What leaps out at me at that is by the corporate elite saying, you know, “Yes, it doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t matter to them if Trump wins. You know, they can work with him — right? — is another one of those kind of Fritz von Papen situations, right? I mean, history will not absolve them. I mean, they will be looked at as part of the problem, when people look at the ruins, the smoldering ruins of America as a functioning republic, you know, if there are historians to tell us the story 50 years from now or a hundred years from now. I mean, these people, you know, have to join the fascist resistance, the anti-fascist resistance, or else, you know, it’s like Lenin said. I mean, they’re basically selling Trump the rope to kill them, because he’s going to be — you know, they’re going to be under his thumb, right? I mean, what Ron DeSantis tried to do with Disney is going to be a picnic to anyone who crosses Donald Trump, you know, even if they’re some kind of corporate master of the universe. I mean, you know, the guy is going to have the NSAsurveillance technology behind him. He has the army behind him. And the idea that they somehow believe that, you know, as Winston Churchill put it, they can kind of negotiate with the crocodile, it just means that they’re going to be eaten last.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about young people voting. You know, a while ago, you wrote this op-ed in The Washington Post about the Democrats forsaking young voters.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right. Well, so, my column and a book I’m working on now about, basically, the last 25 years is called “The Infernal Triangle.” And the triangle is Republican authoritarianism, media incompetence — present company excepted — and, you know, kind of democratic fecklessness. And the fact that the Democratic Party has, you know, not seen it as an absolute priority to kind of hand the torch, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, to a new generation of Americans is a real institutional failure and a real institutional tragedy, right? Because if people can’t feel like they can identify with the Democratic Party, well, you know, in our political system as it exists, it’s like Stephen Douglas said in the 1880s to African Americans. You know, the Republican Party might suck. You know, they might be becoming more and more plutocratic. They might not really be protecting us from, you know, lynching and terrorism in the South. But the Republican Party is the boat, and all else is the sea. And if the Democratic Party is not giving young voters, who, basically, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now will be old voters, and if they become Democrats now will maintain that identity — if they’re not winning and maintaining their loyalty, they’re not doing their part to fight this fascism, either.
And, you know, I was very encouraged when Joseph Biden said that, you know, him and Kamala Harris were going to be — he said this in 2020 — kind of a bridge to the new generation of Democrats, but then kind of held on to their influence like grim death. You know, Nancy Pelosi, the fact that — you know, Ryan Grim has a wonderful — speaking of “grim” — a wonderful new book called The Squad. And the most shocking, jaw-dropping parts about it, frankly, is how instinctively she seemed to kind of patronize and condescend to the Squad and AOC, didn’t see them as an opportunity, but as a threat to her influence, you know, kind of calling the Green New Deal the “Green new dream” or whatever, right?
And, you know, to take your previous segment today on the issue of Israel-Palestine, nothing that the kind of superannuated class of 70-, 80-year-old Democrats believe about the world when it comes to what’s going on in the Middle East makes any sense to voters in their twenties, right? So, it’s just a terrible, sad situation. And we’re stuck with it. And, you know, I’ll go to the wall with the Democratic nominee, because the Democrats are the boat, and all else is the sea. But, you know, we have to think systematically about righting this tragic situation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you say what you’re looking for, Rick, when it comes to the New Hampshire primary? And let me also say that this is not just a Republican primary. It’s also a Democratic one.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Biden had said that New Hampshire and Iowa shouldn’t be the first two states.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, some of the whitest states in the country —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — determining the agenda of the rest of the country or, you know, laying out so much of what happens next.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he is not on the Democratic Party —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — roster in New Hampshire. But, what, Congressman Dean Phillips is. And quietly, his aides are launching a write-in campaign for Biden. But explain what that’s about, and then what you’re looking for out of the Haley-Trump competition in terms of the breakdown of who’s voting for who.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right, right. For the first part about the Democrats — and, you know, frankly, the behavior of the people running the Democratic Party in Iowa and New Hampshire, kind of holding on to their position of power, you know, as the first in the nation, like grim death, even though the DNC, quite reasonably and responsibly, tried to kind of reform that, it just shows, you know, one more tragedy of a group of incumbent power holders who don’t have the patriotism and civic fortitude to maybe do something for the common good of the country, right? This could have been fixed in 2024. It’s not being fixed.
And as far as the Republican side goes, you know, I will repeat this again and again and again and again, because Donald Trump is going to win the most votes in the primary. I mean, it’s really not worth all that much attention and coverage at all. The real question for voters who are supporting Donald Trump is, you know, not how many of them there are, but how many among them will be willing to take up arms on January 6, 2025, you know, if he loses the vote, you know, and, as we know he will do, claims that he won it. Right? So, we really need to think these days not just in terms of Republican voters, but as Republicans as also a paramilitary formation. And if reporters aren’t talking about that, if they’re not thinking about that, they’re still living in 1996.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Rick, with President Trump, for example, praising Viktor Orbán of Hungary and saying what he’s going to do on the first day, dictator for a day, he says —
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — how seriously do you think people should take what he’s saying?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Very seriously. There’s no dictator for a day. Right? I mean, if you, you know, say that you’re going to reverse executive orders, that’s one thing. That’s constitutional. It’s within the law. But if you think of that as a dictatorship — right? — and we know from, you know, the 2025 project that Republicans have gotten together to put out as their plan, it’s a completely integrated, you know, thousand-page plan to undo the idea of expertise in civil service itself, right? It is a plan to undo the American form of government. So, this is absolutely something we should take seriously. He absolutely intends to be a dictator. And, unfortunately, people like Jamie Dimon want to help him do it.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, why do you think Trump’s support hasn’t diminished at all, given the charges he faces for trials, 91 charges?
RICK PERLSTEIN: It’s the Führerprinzip. It’s that German word that all truth, all reality, all redemption flows from the person of Donald Trump. You know, it’s a cult of personality. There’s no breaking that spell, right? If the charge is coming from, you know, a state attorney general, well, that just means that it’s an African American, and they’re alien to real Americans, right? And the jury in a place like Washington is going to be Black, so they’re not real Americans. If it’s federal charges, it’s just somehow an extension of, you know, the deep state and Joseph Biden trying to delegitimize Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, right? This is a fascist dream space, a space of myth, in which there are bad guys and there are good guys, and Donald Trump is the good guy, and anyone associated with him is temporarily a good guy, and anyone against him is a bad guy and has to be terminated. That’s the situation we’re facing right now. We have to look it squarely in the eye, and we have to resist it with everything we have.
AMY GOODMAN: Rick Perlstein, author of a four-volume series on the rise of the modern conservative movement, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, and Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976 to 1980. He also writes a column for The American Prospect titled “The Infernal Triangle.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org
EPISODES IN AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Illusion and Delusion in Reality Based America or Fascinating Fascism Here We Come
“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
"When did America become untethered from reality?
September 15, 2017
I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”
—Kurt Anderson, "How America Lost Its Mind The Atlantic, September, 2017 issue
The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.
R. Kikuo Johnson
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-major-deadly-legacy-of-january-6.html
Monday, January 8, 2024
The Major Deadly Legacy of January 6, 2021: The Overwhelmingly Clear and Present Danger Of Fascism On Every Level of American Life, Culture and Political Economy
https://truthout.org/articles/downplaying-trumpism-is-dangerous/
"What's Past is Prologue…”
Op-Ed
Politics & Elections
Downplaying Trumpism Is Dangerous
by Henry A. Giroux
January 15, 2021
Truthout
[Part of the Series: The Public Intellectual]
PHOTO: Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Trump on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.Samuel Corum / Getty Images
Ten Republicans within the House of Representatives helped bestow on Trump the ignoble distinction this week of being the first president to be impeached twice, charging him with “incitement of insurrection.”
But the vast majority of Republicans in the House either remained silent or produced further falsifications diverting attention away from Trump and their own role in inciting the violent insurrection. For instance, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) claimed that impeaching Trump will turn him into “a martyr.”
One of Trump’s most egregious lackeys, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), defended Trump with the ludicrous claim that impeaching him was simply an expression of “cancel culture” and a further attempt to silence conservatives
Meanwhile, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated that he will not hold a Senate trial to complete the impeachment-and-conviction process before the end of Trump’s term, though he had no trouble convening the Senate to rush through Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
The Republicans’ continued defense of Trump points to a moral vacuum in the Republican Party that has paved the way for not just Trump’s crimes but also for the emergence of an updated version of fascist politics.
The continued GOP alignment with Trump is even more striking in a moment when many corporations and institutions are belatedly acknowledging how Trump and his enablers in Congress represent a dangerous threat to democracy and are unworthy of their support politically or financially.
Some universities have stripped Trump of honorary degrees and at the same time, a number of banks and large companies have “said they would halt donations from their political action committees, or PACs, to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results on Jan. 6,” according to The New York Times.
In addition, the Times reports that the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) of America will no longer hold its May 2022 championship at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The impeachment does not offer any guarantees that Trump’s control over the Republican Party will disappear.
History may have been made with the second impeachment of Trump, but the impeachment — while notable — does not offer any guarantees that Trump’s control over the Republican Party or his massive influence on his social base will disappear. Nor is there any implication that Trump’s big lie about losing the election, inseparable from his long-standing racism and white supremacist views, will suddenly dissipate. More specifically, Trumpism enacts, without apology, a form of historical erasure and willful forgetting that is particularly dangerous in a world wrought with anxiety and enveloped in a deadly surge of pandemics and plagues. This form of erasure has become even more apparent in the wake of the fascist mob attack on the Capitol.
As the long history of right-wing domestic terrorism disappears in the mainstream press’s emphasis on the immediacy of the events and images regarding the violent spectacle, little is said about how it is connected to what fascism historian Timothy Snyder describes as Trump’s belief that the “American government should be in the hands of white people who are willing to be violent about Black people.”
Memory is short-lived in the United States. In addition, the language used to describe the attack focuses repeatedly on the word “mob.” In doing so, what gets lost is the fact that this was a right-wing collection of extremists that included a sizeable number of white supremacists, right-wing militia groups, diehard racist segregationists and neo-Nazis, all of whom constitute Trump’s social base. Finally, historical erasure is particularly evident in the refusal in the mainstream and conservative media to address how neoliberalism and the long legacy of racism helped to create Trump, his followers and the Capitol breach.
The neoliberal-induced financial crisis produced the economic conditions of deindustrialization, homelessness and massive unemployment among the white working class. This laid the groundwork for mass anger among certain sections of the white working class, who as Walden Bello observes, were “ready to be mobilized someplace, and it was Trump and the right in the United States that took advantage of that, mobilized them, but in a right-wing direction, in a racist direction.” After all, the appeal to racism, voter suppression and state violence became central elements of the Republican Party with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and evolved with ever more intensity and dire consequences with the election of Donald Trump.
Impeaching Trump is a step forward in holding him accountable, but he did not act alone. The broader forces aligned with his ongoing acts of violence, cruelty and lawlessness must also be held accountable, and this must include the crimes of Wall Street, the right-wing extremist media conglomerates who lied about the election, and the financial elite who provided the funds for Trump’s political and cultural workstations of denial, diversion and falsehoods. It is impossible to separate the violent attack on the Capitol from both Trump’s language of violence and the systemic violence characteristic of neoliberal governance in the U.S.
The violence Trump used to stay in power did not happen in a vacuum. The governing principles of genocide, militarism and violence have a long history and should also be on trial as a moment of self-reckoning in a time of political and ethical crisis.
Impeaching Trump is a step forward in holding him accountable, but he did not act alone.
Historical vision, moral witnessing and democratic ideals are now buried in a glut of misinformation and the spectacle of political corruption, plague of consumerism and a culture of immediacy. Trump’s disimagination and depoliticizing propaganda machines produced a relentless tsunami of emotionally charged events that obliterated the space and time for contemplating the past while freezing the present in a fragmented display of shocks and spectacles.
Trumpism, with its mix of noxious white supremacist politics and poisonous use of conservative mainstream press and right-wing social media, represents a new form of fascism in which older elements of a fascist past are recycled, modified and updated. One example pertaining to Trumpism can be seen in the systemic lying that was not only at the heart of Hitler’s regime, but central to Trump’s rise to power and the development of his social base, though the latter expressed itself in a different context and through a unique set of cultural apparatuses. Timothy Snyder is instructive on this issue:
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump … is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Under such circumstances, the lessons of history disappear along with similarities between an authoritarian past and an authoritarian present. One consequence is that public consciousness of the space needed for critical reflection withers along with a rendering of the past as a source of critical insight. History, with its dangerous memories, becomes something that cannot happen in the present; that is, it cannot happen in a country that makes a claim to exceptionalism and in doing so argues, until recently, that Trump’s behavior is more performative than dangerous.
In this discourse, the shadows of an updated fascist politics disappears in the long-standing claims that Trump was merely incompetent and that his politics were inept and bore no resemblance to an incipient dictator. Of course, with Trump’s obvious role in inciting and legitimating the rebellious attack on the Capitol, liberal discourse has moved from calling him incompetent to dangerous.
Conservatives who believe that the market is the only template for politics and governance refuse to see Trump’s reign as an outgrowth of their own disdain for the welfare state and redistribution of wealth and power, while liberals live in fear of recognizing that neoliberal capitalism poses the greatest threat to democracy, and creates the conditions for the ongoing threat of fascism. This view provides a breeding ground for liberals who argue that Trumpism is a passing and failed anti-democratic exception to the rule, regardless of the violence that has been a hallmark of the Trump regime.
Trumpism is a worldview that defines culture as a battleground of losers and winners, a world in which everything is rigged against whites.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, liberals have focused on not only the danger Trump poses to the country, but also the radical and extremist elements that make up his social base. Moreover, they have finally moved with the impeachment proceedings to both hold him accountable for his actions and to prevent him from ever holding public office again. At the same time, little is being said about the need to revise earlier analysis of Trump’s coming to power, and the financial and corporate interests he has served and how this indicts not just right-wing extremism, but points to the fragility of democracy and the major threat posed to it by neoliberal capitalism.
For instance, the historical record needs to be revisited regarding the liberal view of Trumpism, especially evident in the work of Samuel Moyn, who argued that traditional institutional checks proved successful against Trumpism. Moyn also claimed falsely that Trump provided a “portal for all comers to search for alternatives beyond [neoliberalism], and never provided a systemic threat to American democracy.”
Moyn’s notion that Trump was anti-militarist and a champion of the working class, at least initially, rings especially false, in light of current events. Not only did Trump give the financial elite a $1.5 trillion tax break at the expense of funding crucial social programs, he also passed endless policies that promoted what Saharra Griffin and Malkie Wall, research assistants for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, call corporate wage theft. Trump’s policies included derailing “an Obama-era plan to extend overtime protections to more Americans and instead lowered the salary threshold…. Workers [were] denied an estimated $1.2 billion in earnings annually due to Trump’s overtime protection rollback.”
Trumpism made it difficult for workers to unionize while making it easier for employers to eliminate unions. This anti-worker campaign also included reducing workplace safety regulations, discriminating against people with disabilities and the weakening of civil rights protections for workers.
What is lost in the view of most liberals is that Trumpism is the endpoint of the historical failure of capitalism which has morphed into a nihilistic death drive — a quickened call to ugliness, violence and dehumanization — reinforced by market values that destroy any sense of moral and social responsibility.
Trumpism is not simply about Trump the bungling leader, a decrepit Republican Party, or a weak president, as Moyn, Jeet Heer, Cass Sunstein, Ross Douthat, and others have wrongly argued. What is lost in their politics of denialism is an honest look at the emergence of Trump’s undisguised authoritarian impulses. Also overlooked here are the mobilizing elements of a fascist politics that is an extension of capitalism and whose recent endpoint emerged with the violent assault on both the Capitol and democracy itself.
Trumpism may not constitute a fully formed fascist regime, but as Sarah Churchill, Timothy Snyder, Paul Street and Jason Stanley have argued, the Trump regime has consistently embraced the long standing and malignant traditions of American fascism.
Snyder dismisses the liberal claim that the fascist label does not apply to Trump because his ideology and policies do not invite a direct comparison. He writes:
These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it. My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities.
Moyn, Sunstein and others, such as Corey Robin, contributed to a politics of denial by refusing to look honestly at key elements of fascism that Trumpism mobilized prior to the violent January 6 attack.
Trumpism will continue to undermine the ability of individuals and institutions to think critically and produce informed citizens and aligned social movements that can fight collectively for and sustain a radical democracy.
In the aftermath of the assault, these issues need to be revisited, not simply cited. They need to be rigorously analyzed in terms of the wider economic, educational and political conditions that produced them. These include: a corporate-controlled media complex capable of flooding the country with lies and launching a full-fledged attack on the truth and science; the underlying ideologies and institutions that have played a major role in enacting racist fear-mongering and a politics of disposability; the political and cultural conditions that enabled the successful promotion by Trump of extreme nationalism and his normalizing alignment with dictators; and a neoliberal ethos that was elevated to the center of U.S. power that endorsed a discourse of winners, along with a list of losers and enemies who became the object of contempt, if not violence. Trump labeled the American press as the “enemy of the people”; legitimated a culture of cruelty and dehumanization that normalized, among other morally depraved acts, putting children in camps; reinforced the language of misogyny and xenophobia; and used a powerful right-wing propaganda machine to legitimate a culture of lawlessness and political corruption.
What is missed in these alleged liberal arguments is that Trumpism is the unapologetic plague of neoliberal capitalism that induces massive inequalities, manufactured ignorance, and horrific degrees of hardship and suffering among diverse groups of people, who are considered excess. It concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a financial elite.
Moreover, it is the logical outcome of a brutal neoliberal capitalism that colonizes subjectivity in order to turn people into isolated consumers and atomized individuals, willing to suspend their sense of agency and deem all democratic social bonds untrustworthy. Under this capitalist discourse, fate is deemed solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. Lost here is what the late Tony Judt called “the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities” to be found in any substantive democracy. The logical outcome of this upending of social connections that expand the common good is an individual and collective need for the comfort of strongmen — a default community that offers the swindle of fulfillment.
Trumpism is a worldview in which critical thought collapses into what Robert Jay Lifton calls “ideological totalism.” Under the influence of “ideological totalism,” narratives of certainty are produced through a language frozen in the assumption that there is “nothing less than absolute truth and equally absolute virtue,” all of which provides the conditions for “sealed off communities.”
Frank Bruni, an opinion writer for The New York Times, raised the question of just how rotten Trump must be for his followers to wake up and realize what a threat he is to both democracy and their very lives. In raising this issue, Bruni puts into high relief the cult-like and mind-boggling submission and irrationality that shapes the consciousness of many of Trump’s followers. He writes:
Trump was impeached. A plague struck. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and huge chunks of their savings. Trump responded with tantrums, lies and intensified attacks on democratic traditions. Trump’s supporters reinvented or decided to ignore his coronavirus denialism, which made America a world leader in reported infections and recorded deaths and has had catastrophic economic consequences. They disbelieved or forgave all of his cheating: on his taxes, in his philanthropy, when he tried to extort the president of Ukraine, when he grabbed another Supreme Court seat in defiance of the Merrick Garland precedent. They accepted or outright embraced his racism and nativism. They shrugged off his lying, which is obvious even through the pore-minimizing filters of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. They endorsed his cruelty and made peace with his tantrums and erratic behavior.
Coco Das goes further and argues that America has a Nazi problem that will not go away on its own and has to be addressed. Das observes:
"We have a Nazi problem in this country. Some 73 million people voted for it.… They don’t, for the most part, wave swastikas and salute Hitler, but we have a Nazi problem in this country as deeply as the German people had a Nazi problem in the 1930s. Their minds waterlogged with conspiracy theories, they take lies as truth, spread hate and bigotry, wrap themselves in several flags – American, Confederate, Blue Lives Matter – and use the Bible as a weapon of violence and repression. They are a grotesque expression of the worst of this country, of its ugly narcissism, its thuggish militarism, its ignorance.… They carry the torch of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow terror. Gunned up and mask-less, they exalt above all the right to kill."
In light of the refusal to view seriously the emergence of an updated fascism under Trump, a more comprehensive critical analysis of Trumpism is necessary. Such an approach should offer insights into the unthinking allegiance of Trump’s followers and the legacy of an authoritarian malignancy, such as white supremacy (among others) that has resurfaced in American political culture. One necessary insight is the recognition that any rendering of Trumpism as a version of authoritarianism carries with it elements of a fascist past that can easily disappear into a discourse in which historical similarities are dismissed. For example, Corey Robin has gone so far as to make the claim that Trump was a weak leader marked by political incompetence and failed in his attempt to change the political culture. This wild misreading of Trumpism goes hand in hand with the charge that those who claim Trump has resurrected the mobilizing passions of fascism represent what David Klion called “unhinged reactions to the Trump era.”
Neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a form of Trumpism which produces zones of abandonment where individuals become unknowable, faceless and lack human rights.
It is difficult to take such a charge seriously in light of a range of policies enacted under the Trump regime that are as cruel as they are oppressive. These range from voter suppression and the unleashing of the military on peaceful protesters to cruel anti-immigration policies and a politics of disposability that mimics what Richard A. Etlin calls the Nazi policy of “‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,’ that is, the ‘destruction’ or ‘extermination’ of ‘lives not worth living.’” There is no acknowledgment by Moyn, Robin, and others of this ilk of the centrality and the power of cultural politics and neoliberal and authoritarian pedagogies at work under Trumpism.
The lessons of history wither in the discourse of denial, especially since, as Hannah Arendt argues, “the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever-growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare.” Moreover, the argument ignores the groundwork of forces laid long before Trump came to power and it says little about the enormous ways in which he used Twitter, the internet, conservative foundations and the right-wing media to turn the Republican Party into a group of morally and politically vacuous sycophants. More specifically, it both ignores and underestimates the power of Trumpism in creating slightly more than 74 million followers who inhabit right-wing populist spaces where “reality can be dispensed and controlled,” according to Robert Jay Lifton’s Losing Reality. It also overlooks the power of Trumpism to create cult-like followers who disregard reason and reality for the image of the strongman who demands unmitigated loyalty and ideological purity.
The power of Trumpism in the cultural realm affirms the success of a new cultural/social formation. It testifies less to the personalized issue of incompetence than to the success of Trumpism to create regressive modes of identification among large segments of the American public that further strengthen and integrate once-marginal elements of a fascist politics into centers of governmental power. Thoughtlessness and the collapse of civic culture and moral agency echo a period in history in which criminality and corruption entered into politics, and as Stephen Spender once argued, as cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters, “the future is like a time bomb buried but ticking away at the present.” In the age of Trump, language reinforces the central fascist notion of friend/enemy distinction as an organizing principle of politics. In this instance, language is used to vilify those considered “other” while the language of environmental justice and anti-racism disappears. More shockingly, Trump used language to imply a moral equivalence between white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and peaceful protesters. At the same time, he employs the language of white supremacists to protest against removing Confederate flags and symbols from the American landscape. There is more at stake here than simply labeling Trump incompetent or ascribing his toxic beliefs and dangerous actions to his personality.
Trumpism is a worldview that defines culture as a battleground of losers and winners, a world in which everything is rigged against whites. This is a world in which unity disappears into Trump’s right-wing assault on the public good and truth, as reality itself dissolves into a right-wing propaganda machine in which politics becomes “a plot to steal from [whites] their natural due as Americans.” Trumpism defines power as immunity from the law, and that the most admirable representatives of power are those who are “triumphant and innocent in the face of every accusation of incapacity, criminality and unethical conduct.” How else to explain Trump’s pardoning of grifters, political cronies and war criminals?
Far from being the “almost opposite of fascism,” Trump’s politics pave the way for deeply entrenched legacies of hate to be passed on to his followers and future generations. Under Trumpism, there is an ongoing attempt to destroy any vestige of democracy as we know it, however flawed, and replace it with a form of neoliberal capital unmoored from any sense of social, political and ethical ethos. Trumpism will long outlive the language, actions, values and views that have defined Trump’s presidency.
What is crucial to recognize is that any starting point for challenging Trumpism and its fascist politics must begin, as Kali Holloway and Martin Mycielski observe, by “recognizing the reality of what is happening … how much damage is being done, how much earth was already scorched.… It’s good to remember the very big, very frightening picture before us, how far we’ve already come, and to consider what recourse we have with complicit and corrupt forces standing in the way.” Trumpism will not disappear once Trump leaves office. On the contrary, its afterlife seems assured as long as its politics is endlessly reproduced through the reactionary cultural workstations that produce and distribute its lies, regressive notions of agency, hatred and disdain for the truth. Trumpism represents both a crisis of the civic imagination and an educational and political crisis.
Trump’s impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
Until it is understood as a cultural crisis rather than defined exclusively as an economic and narrowly political crisis, Trumpism will continue to undermine the ability of individuals and institutions to think critically, question themselves, and produce informed citizens and aligned social movements that can fight collectively for and sustain a radical democracy. There is no democracy without an educated citizenry and no democracy can survive under the banner of Trumpism with its glut of ignorance, commercialization, concentration of power, corporate-owned media and illusion of freedom.
Drawing upon history, Masha Gessen argues that Trump’s defeat offers a choice “between two paths: the path of reckoning and the path of forgetting.” They further argue that the price for forgetting is too high and would leave in place a rationale for giving immunity to terror, lawlessness and corruption. More is necessary than simply impeaching Trump. In order to avoid becoming complicit with the crimes of Trumpism, it is necessary for the Biden administration to put in place a national project — which would include investigations, hearings, court trials, public assemblies, journalistic inquiries, and other invented formats — in order to hold accountable those who committed crimes under the Trump regime, including those individuals and politicians who advocated sedition by baselessly claiming voter fraud and attempting to overturn results of the Biden election.
Furthermore, there are two important points regarding Trump’s impeachment that should be embraced. First, as Georgetown University professor Neal Katyal stated in an interview with Brian Williams, Trump should be impeached in the hope that he would then be barred from holding any political office in the future. Second, a signal needs to be sent to the 12 Republican senators and more than half of congressional Republicans who are dousing the Constitution with fire through their attempts to create what amounts to a coup by invalidating Biden’s election and creating the groundwork for undermining free and fair elections in the future, if not democracy itself.
It is astonishing that in the face of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election, which closely resembles the actions of authoritarian regimes around the world, that 38 percent oppose his impeachment and 15 percent have no opinion. The data suggest little resistance on the part of such a large percentage of Americans who either willingly support the death of democracy or are misinformed about the U.S. being at the tipping point of becoming a full-fledged authoritarian regime. New York Times journalist Peter Baker did not miss the threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump’s actions regarding his attempt to overturn an election he decisively lost, while entertaining the use of martial law to do so. Quoting Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Baker writes:
Mr. Trump’s efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how authoritarianism works in the 21st century,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.” “Today’s leaders come in through elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office — until they get enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there indefinitely.’
With the possibility of instituting various layers of democratic accountability which now included impeaching Trump for a second time, the conditions can be laid for not only a project of truth-telling and answerability but also a narrative of remembrance in which crimes can be revealed and the stories of the victims heard. Under such circumstances, the historical record can become an object of critical inquiry, culpability and the rectifying of moral injury. Such reckoning can also serve as an educational and learning project in which the lessons of the past can create the conditions for connecting education to democratic values, relations, goals, and a redemptive notion of equity and inclusion. Desmond Tutu, in his opening remarks before the convening of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, rightly invoked the power of historical memory and the need to bear witness in the fight against tyranny. He stated: “We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of the past so that they will not return to haunt us.” The power of education, reason, and the search for truth and justice are one mechanism for learning from the past and resisting the ghosts ready to emerge in the present.
The eradication of the public good, the continued growth of neoliberalism’s disimagination machines, the individualizing of social problems, a collective indifference to the rise of the punishing state, the repression of historical consciousness, the failure to engage honestly with the full scope of the U.S.’s racist history, and the crushing role of racial and economic inequality are at their core educational issues. These issues speak powerfully to the task of changing consciousness by dismantling those depoliticizing forces that create apocalyptic visions that render the current social order a world without alternatives. In part, this means intellectuals, artists and other cultural workers must make the work they produce meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. This demands a revolutionary vision matched by a collective effort to create alternative public spaces that unpack how common sense works to prevent people from recognizing the oppressive nature of the societies in which they find themselves. The ideological tyranny and cultural politics of Trumpism demands a wholesale revision of how education and democracy mutually inform each other and how they are understood as part of a broader politics in which the oppressed can be heard and a world can be created in which the voices of the suffering find a public space for articulation.
Any movement for resistance needs to become more accessible to working-class people, and there is a crucial need to connect personal and political rights with economic rights. Democracy can only survive as a social state that guarantees rights for everyone. The question of who holds power, and how power is separated from politics, with politics being local and power being global, has to be addressed as a condition for international resistance. Neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a form of Trumpism which produces zones of abandonment where individuals become unknowable, faceless and lack human rights.
Under Trumpism, society increasingly reproduces pedagogical “death zones of humanity” that triumph not only in violence but also ignorance and irrationality, writes Étienne Balibar in “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty.” These are zones that undermine the capacity for people to speak, write, and act from a position of empowerment and be responsible to themselves and others. Against this form of depoliticization, there is the need for modes of civic education and critical literacy that provide the bridging work between thinking critically and the possibility of interpretation as intervention. Critical pedagogy is a moral and political practice committed to the realization that there is no resistance without hope, and no hope without a vision of an alternative society rooted in the ideals of justice, equality and freedom.
Trumpism evokes the shadow of authoritarianism in the form of a resurgent fascist politics that dehumanizes all of us in the face of a refusal to confront its specter of racism, lawlessness and brutality. Trump’s impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
The influence and legacy of Trumpism will long outlast the aftermath of Trump’s presidency making it all the more urgent to reclaim the redemptive elements of government responsibility, democratic ideals and the public spheres that make a radical democracy possible. In the current historical moment, the time has come to reclaim the great utopian ideals unleashed by a long history of civil rights struggles, the insights and radical struggles produced by the Black Lives Matter movement, and a cultural politics and pedagogy written in the language of justice, compassion, and the fundamental narratives of freedom and equality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department in Toronto, Canada and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018) and The Terror of the Unforeseen (LARB Books, 2019). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.
"What's Past is Prologue..."
THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN SEVEN YEARS AGO ON JANUARY 6, 2017
DOES THIS SAME DATE SEVEN YEARS LATER IN 2024 AND THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPH HAVE ANYTHING IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER?
YOU BET THEY DO…
PHOTO: January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him. (Gabriella Demczuk)
"What's Past is Prologue..."
November 23, 2016
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
All,
Keep in mind that the following article ("The Real Danger of Donald Trump") was written a mere six months ago(!)
NOW (after winning seven of the ten Republican primaries tonight in resounding fashion) look at how much closer we are to the very real possibility that a genuine fascist could become the next President of the United Hates in November. Don't laugh, or even think about blithely dismissing this once extremely remote possibility. A looming catastrophe of monumental proportions is now only 8 months away from actually happening. If Trump is able to win a mere 2-3 more midwestern states (given that like Romney in 2012 it is absolutely assured that he will win at least 95% of the entire South--a grand total of 13 states-- plus 5 more in the Plains states region of Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North and South Dakota in addition to 3 more in Nebraska, Alaska, and Idaho). Add the certainty that like Romney in 2012 Trump would also easily win three of the 10 midwestern states (Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri), and all of a sudden we are looking at a grand total of 24 states (which is exactly the same number of states Romney won in 2012). It is also likely under this horrific scenario that if Trump is also able to win back the state of Florida that Obama was barely able to win against Romney by a little less than 1% of the vote he would suddenly be much closer to actually winning the Presidency. Then all Trump would need to win the election is two more states TOTAL in the rest of the country, If you don't think this is possible given how thoroughly reactionary and rabidly rightwing most of the national white vote in this country actually is (in 2012 60% of that national voting demographic went to Romney as Obama only won a feeble 39% nationally of this vote and actually lost the white vote in both New York and California!) you are deluding yourself.
So don't think for a nanosecond that the worst possible scenario could not possibly occur at this point and that an extremely wealthy and openly bigoted white male supremacist and certifiable meglomaniac could win the White House and turn a horrific fantasy into a nightmarish reality very soon ...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/…/the-real-danger-of-…/…
Taking Note - The Editorial Page
Editor's Blog
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
by Lawrence Downes
September 16, 2015
New York Times
PHOTO: Donald Trump.Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
Some may find him amusing, but he is stirring up hatred that will take a long time to die down.
takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com
by Lawrence Downes
The caller to Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show on Wednesday morning was pining for a strongman, a president who would do what was necessary to get rid of immigrants, whom she blamed for taking jobs and money away from real Americans.
“We’re very angry about what’s going on in the world today. We’re very angry about all the immigration,” she said. “He does speak for the people. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t realize that there are a lot of angry people out here that are tired of listening to the politicians step all over us.”
She was speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, whose vehement anti-immigrant message is working brilliantly for him. Heading into tonight’s second Republican debate, he is the 2016 campaign’s main object of fascination and intimidation — the gas planet around which the discussion will likely revolve, while his rivals spin, tumble and flail.
Because Mr. Trump is caustic and bombastic, many people find him delightful and refreshing. Late-night comedians have been praying for him to stick around, because the jokes write themselves.
But the problem with this particular clown is that his words are not clownish. The language he uses about immigrants is dehumanizing and vile. The audiences that adore him are animated not just by infatuation, but by the age-old catalysts of fear, resentment and hate.
This is what moves the Trump effect into the realm of the frightening, rather than amusing or fascinating.
When did that move happen? For me, it was his rally on Monday in Dallas, where he told an adoring crowd he was disgusted with what was happening to America. He called it “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”
The garbage he was referring to is people, the same kind of people we describe more poetically on a plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Mr. Trump’s rivals are talking, in all seriousness, of undoing the Constitution and building a border wall. A Fox News host compares immigration to “a tumor or a disease.” Two young thugs in Boston attack and urinate on a homeless Latino man, saying Mr. Trump inspired them. A Trump supporter outside the Dallas rally grabs a microphone and yells at anti-Trump protesters: “Clean my hotel room, bitch!” Another, referring to Mr. Trump’s mass-deportation plan, says: “This isn’t going to be painless. They’ve been inflicting pain on us for 20 years.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Trump will end up with any power to pursue his racist agenda — his ambitions seem a lot narrower, more TV-based. But the toxic support he is stirring up, the polluted ideas he is spreading, the hate he is emboldening his supporters to voice with his blaring, surround-sound campaign — that evil will live after him. We will be cleaning up after Mr. Trump for a long time.
Vice President Joe Biden spoke reassuringly to a Latino group on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans were taking pages from an old playbook that always fails.
“This will pass,” he said. This “sick message” has been tried on America before, and we always — “always, always, always, always” — overcome it.
Yes, we do, but it keeps coming back, and keeps doing damage.
I think of some recent examples, close to home.
Long Island, where I live, has been transformed in recent years, like many other American suburbs, by an influx of Latino immigrants. The demographics of Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are similar. But where Nassau had a cool, pragmatic county executive, who talked of unity and sensible solutions, Suffolk had a county executive who liked to blame immigrants for overburdened housing, schools and hospitals, and for supposedly lawless acts like gathering on sidewalks to look for work. His words inflamed and incited community passions; his claims that immigrants were a blight on the county found a receptive audience.
And Suffolk, not Nassau, became nationally notorious for repeated attacks on Latino immigrants, including one horrific murder. Even the county police department was accused of patterns of racial abuse. Other politicians have risen to power in communities where people feel uneasy and resentful and are looking for a target for their anger. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has perennially been elected despite — or rather because of — his history of oppressing Latinos in his jurisdiction.
Mr. Trump has made the nativists restless, on a national scale. Those in media and entertainment who are distracted by his comedic potential are missing the point. Jimmy Fallon, doing a skit with Mr. Trump, normalizes his toxic message, with giggles. (I’m hoping that Stephen Colbert, who has Mr. Trump on his show next week, will do better at avoiding this moral trap, but I’m not holding my breath.)
The Trump effect leads to a question I’ve been pondering. Is politics like physics, where adding gas to a container creates pressure and heat? If you keep pumping inflammatory speech into the public discourse, do you eventually get ignition?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/bannons-war/
PBS
FRONTLINE
Documentary: ‘Bannon's War’
May 23, 2017
54 minutes
Season 2017: Episode 13
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPkUrVj0VPc
Produced by:
Michael Kirk
Mike Wiser
Gabrielle Schonder
Philip Bennet
The inside story of Trump adviser Stephen Bannon’s war — with radical Islam, Washington and White House rivals.
Topics
U.S. Politics
Ten Republicans within the House of Representatives helped bestow on Trump the ignoble distinction this week of being the first president to be impeached twice, charging him with “incitement of insurrection.”
But the vast majority of Republicans in the House either remained silent or produced further falsifications diverting attention away from Trump and their own role in inciting the violent insurrection. For instance, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) claimed that impeaching Trump will turn him into “a martyr.”
One of Trump’s most egregious lackeys, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), defended Trump with the ludicrous claim that impeaching him was simply an expression of “cancel culture” and a further attempt to silence conservatives
Meanwhile, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated that he will not hold a Senate trial to complete the impeachment-and-conviction process before the end of Trump’s term, though he had no trouble convening the Senate to rush through Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
The Republicans’ continued defense of Trump points to a moral vacuum in the Republican Party that has paved the way for not just Trump’s crimes but also for the emergence of an updated version of fascist politics.
The continued GOP alignment with Trump is even more striking in a moment when many corporations and institutions are belatedly acknowledging how Trump and his enablers in Congress represent a dangerous threat to democracy and are unworthy of their support politically or financially.
Some universities have stripped Trump of honorary degrees and at the same time, a number of banks and large companies have “said they would halt donations from their political action committees, or PACs, to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results on Jan. 6,” according to The New York Times.
In addition, the Times reports that the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) of America will no longer hold its May 2022 championship at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The impeachment does not offer any guarantees that Trump’s control over the Republican Party will disappear.
History may have been made with the second impeachment of Trump, but the impeachment — while notable — does not offer any guarantees that Trump’s control over the Republican Party or his massive influence on his social base will disappear. Nor is there any implication that Trump’s big lie about losing the election, inseparable from his long-standing racism and white supremacist views, will suddenly dissipate. More specifically, Trumpism enacts, without apology, a form of historical erasure and willful forgetting that is particularly dangerous in a world wrought with anxiety and enveloped in a deadly surge of pandemics and plagues. This form of erasure has become even more apparent in the wake of the fascist mob attack on the Capitol.
As the long history of right-wing domestic terrorism disappears in the mainstream press’s emphasis on the immediacy of the events and images regarding the violent spectacle, little is said about how it is connected to what fascism historian Timothy Snyder describes as Trump’s belief that the “American government should be in the hands of white people who are willing to be violent about Black people.”
Memory is short-lived in the United States. In addition, the language used to describe the attack focuses repeatedly on the word “mob.” In doing so, what gets lost is the fact that this was a right-wing collection of extremists that included a sizeable number of white supremacists, right-wing militia groups, diehard racist segregationists and neo-Nazis, all of whom constitute Trump’s social base. Finally, historical erasure is particularly evident in the refusal in the mainstream and conservative media to address how neoliberalism and the long legacy of racism helped to create Trump, his followers and the Capitol breach.
The neoliberal-induced financial crisis produced the economic conditions of deindustrialization, homelessness and massive unemployment among the white working class. This laid the groundwork for mass anger among certain sections of the white working class, who as Walden Bello observes, were “ready to be mobilized someplace, and it was Trump and the right in the United States that took advantage of that, mobilized them, but in a right-wing direction, in a racist direction.” After all, the appeal to racism, voter suppression and state violence became central elements of the Republican Party with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and evolved with ever more intensity and dire consequences with the election of Donald Trump.
Impeaching Trump is a step forward in holding him accountable, but he did not act alone. The broader forces aligned with his ongoing acts of violence, cruelty and lawlessness must also be held accountable, and this must include the crimes of Wall Street, the right-wing extremist media conglomerates who lied about the election, and the financial elite who provided the funds for Trump’s political and cultural workstations of denial, diversion and falsehoods. It is impossible to separate the violent attack on the Capitol from both Trump’s language of violence and the systemic violence characteristic of neoliberal governance in the U.S.
The violence Trump used to stay in power did not happen in a vacuum. The governing principles of genocide, militarism and violence have a long history and should also be on trial as a moment of self-reckoning in a time of political and ethical crisis.
Impeaching Trump is a step forward in holding him accountable, but he did not act alone.
Historical vision, moral witnessing and democratic ideals are now buried in a glut of misinformation and the spectacle of political corruption, plague of consumerism and a culture of immediacy. Trump’s disimagination and depoliticizing propaganda machines produced a relentless tsunami of emotionally charged events that obliterated the space and time for contemplating the past while freezing the present in a fragmented display of shocks and spectacles.
Trumpism, with its mix of noxious white supremacist politics and poisonous use of conservative mainstream press and right-wing social media, represents a new form of fascism in which older elements of a fascist past are recycled, modified and updated. One example pertaining to Trumpism can be seen in the systemic lying that was not only at the heart of Hitler’s regime, but central to Trump’s rise to power and the development of his social base, though the latter expressed itself in a different context and through a unique set of cultural apparatuses. Timothy Snyder is instructive on this issue:
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump … is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Under such circumstances, the lessons of history disappear along with similarities between an authoritarian past and an authoritarian present. One consequence is that public consciousness of the space needed for critical reflection withers along with a rendering of the past as a source of critical insight. History, with its dangerous memories, becomes something that cannot happen in the present; that is, it cannot happen in a country that makes a claim to exceptionalism and in doing so argues, until recently, that Trump’s behavior is more performative than dangerous.
In this discourse, the shadows of an updated fascist politics disappears in the long-standing claims that Trump was merely incompetent and that his politics were inept and bore no resemblance to an incipient dictator. Of course, with Trump’s obvious role in inciting and legitimating the rebellious attack on the Capitol, liberal discourse has moved from calling him incompetent to dangerous.
Conservatives who believe that the market is the only template for politics and governance refuse to see Trump’s reign as an outgrowth of their own disdain for the welfare state and redistribution of wealth and power, while liberals live in fear of recognizing that neoliberal capitalism poses the greatest threat to democracy, and creates the conditions for the ongoing threat of fascism. This view provides a breeding ground for liberals who argue that Trumpism is a passing and failed anti-democratic exception to the rule, regardless of the violence that has been a hallmark of the Trump regime.
Trumpism is a worldview that defines culture as a battleground of losers and winners, a world in which everything is rigged against whites.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup, liberals have focused on not only the danger Trump poses to the country, but also the radical and extremist elements that make up his social base. Moreover, they have finally moved with the impeachment proceedings to both hold him accountable for his actions and to prevent him from ever holding public office again. At the same time, little is being said about the need to revise earlier analysis of Trump’s coming to power, and the financial and corporate interests he has served and how this indicts not just right-wing extremism, but points to the fragility of democracy and the major threat posed to it by neoliberal capitalism.
For instance, the historical record needs to be revisited regarding the liberal view of Trumpism, especially evident in the work of Samuel Moyn, who argued that traditional institutional checks proved successful against Trumpism. Moyn also claimed falsely that Trump provided a “portal for all comers to search for alternatives beyond [neoliberalism], and never provided a systemic threat to American democracy.”
Moyn’s notion that Trump was anti-militarist and a champion of the working class, at least initially, rings especially false, in light of current events. Not only did Trump give the financial elite a $1.5 trillion tax break at the expense of funding crucial social programs, he also passed endless policies that promoted what Saharra Griffin and Malkie Wall, research assistants for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, call corporate wage theft. Trump’s policies included derailing “an Obama-era plan to extend overtime protections to more Americans and instead lowered the salary threshold…. Workers [were] denied an estimated $1.2 billion in earnings annually due to Trump’s overtime protection rollback.”
Trumpism made it difficult for workers to unionize while making it easier for employers to eliminate unions. This anti-worker campaign also included reducing workplace safety regulations, discriminating against people with disabilities and the weakening of civil rights protections for workers.
What is lost in the view of most liberals is that Trumpism is the endpoint of the historical failure of capitalism which has morphed into a nihilistic death drive — a quickened call to ugliness, violence and dehumanization — reinforced by market values that destroy any sense of moral and social responsibility.
Trumpism is not simply about Trump the bungling leader, a decrepit Republican Party, or a weak president, as Moyn, Jeet Heer, Cass Sunstein, Ross Douthat, and others have wrongly argued. What is lost in their politics of denialism is an honest look at the emergence of Trump’s undisguised authoritarian impulses. Also overlooked here are the mobilizing elements of a fascist politics that is an extension of capitalism and whose recent endpoint emerged with the violent assault on both the Capitol and democracy itself.
Trumpism may not constitute a fully formed fascist regime, but as Sarah Churchill, Timothy Snyder, Paul Street and Jason Stanley have argued, the Trump regime has consistently embraced the long standing and malignant traditions of American fascism.
Snyder dismisses the liberal claim that the fascist label does not apply to Trump because his ideology and policies do not invite a direct comparison. He writes:
These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it. My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities.
Moyn, Sunstein and others, such as Corey Robin, contributed to a politics of denial by refusing to look honestly at key elements of fascism that Trumpism mobilized prior to the violent January 6 attack.
Trumpism will continue to undermine the ability of individuals and institutions to think critically and produce informed citizens and aligned social movements that can fight collectively for and sustain a radical democracy.
In the aftermath of the assault, these issues need to be revisited, not simply cited. They need to be rigorously analyzed in terms of the wider economic, educational and political conditions that produced them. These include: a corporate-controlled media complex capable of flooding the country with lies and launching a full-fledged attack on the truth and science; the underlying ideologies and institutions that have played a major role in enacting racist fear-mongering and a politics of disposability; the political and cultural conditions that enabled the successful promotion by Trump of extreme nationalism and his normalizing alignment with dictators; and a neoliberal ethos that was elevated to the center of U.S. power that endorsed a discourse of winners, along with a list of losers and enemies who became the object of contempt, if not violence. Trump labeled the American press as the “enemy of the people”; legitimated a culture of cruelty and dehumanization that normalized, among other morally depraved acts, putting children in camps; reinforced the language of misogyny and xenophobia; and used a powerful right-wing propaganda machine to legitimate a culture of lawlessness and political corruption.
What is missed in these alleged liberal arguments is that Trumpism is the unapologetic plague of neoliberal capitalism that induces massive inequalities, manufactured ignorance, and horrific degrees of hardship and suffering among diverse groups of people, who are considered excess. It concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a financial elite.
Moreover, it is the logical outcome of a brutal neoliberal capitalism that colonizes subjectivity in order to turn people into isolated consumers and atomized individuals, willing to suspend their sense of agency and deem all democratic social bonds untrustworthy. Under this capitalist discourse, fate is deemed solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. Lost here is what the late Tony Judt called “the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities” to be found in any substantive democracy. The logical outcome of this upending of social connections that expand the common good is an individual and collective need for the comfort of strongmen — a default community that offers the swindle of fulfillment.
Trumpism is a worldview in which critical thought collapses into what Robert Jay Lifton calls “ideological totalism.” Under the influence of “ideological totalism,” narratives of certainty are produced through a language frozen in the assumption that there is “nothing less than absolute truth and equally absolute virtue,” all of which provides the conditions for “sealed off communities.”
Frank Bruni, an opinion writer for The New York Times, raised the question of just how rotten Trump must be for his followers to wake up and realize what a threat he is to both democracy and their very lives. In raising this issue, Bruni puts into high relief the cult-like and mind-boggling submission and irrationality that shapes the consciousness of many of Trump’s followers. He writes:
Trump was impeached. A plague struck. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and huge chunks of their savings. Trump responded with tantrums, lies and intensified attacks on democratic traditions. Trump’s supporters reinvented or decided to ignore his coronavirus denialism, which made America a world leader in reported infections and recorded deaths and has had catastrophic economic consequences. They disbelieved or forgave all of his cheating: on his taxes, in his philanthropy, when he tried to extort the president of Ukraine, when he grabbed another Supreme Court seat in defiance of the Merrick Garland precedent. They accepted or outright embraced his racism and nativism. They shrugged off his lying, which is obvious even through the pore-minimizing filters of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. They endorsed his cruelty and made peace with his tantrums and erratic behavior.
Coco Das goes further and argues that America has a Nazi problem that will not go away on its own and has to be addressed. Das observes:
"We have a Nazi problem in this country. Some 73 million people voted for it.… They don’t, for the most part, wave swastikas and salute Hitler, but we have a Nazi problem in this country as deeply as the German people had a Nazi problem in the 1930s. Their minds waterlogged with conspiracy theories, they take lies as truth, spread hate and bigotry, wrap themselves in several flags – American, Confederate, Blue Lives Matter – and use the Bible as a weapon of violence and repression. They are a grotesque expression of the worst of this country, of its ugly narcissism, its thuggish militarism, its ignorance.… They carry the torch of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow terror. Gunned up and mask-less, they exalt above all the right to kill."
In light of the refusal to view seriously the emergence of an updated fascism under Trump, a more comprehensive critical analysis of Trumpism is necessary. Such an approach should offer insights into the unthinking allegiance of Trump’s followers and the legacy of an authoritarian malignancy, such as white supremacy (among others) that has resurfaced in American political culture. One necessary insight is the recognition that any rendering of Trumpism as a version of authoritarianism carries with it elements of a fascist past that can easily disappear into a discourse in which historical similarities are dismissed. For example, Corey Robin has gone so far as to make the claim that Trump was a weak leader marked by political incompetence and failed in his attempt to change the political culture. This wild misreading of Trumpism goes hand in hand with the charge that those who claim Trump has resurrected the mobilizing passions of fascism represent what David Klion called “unhinged reactions to the Trump era.”
Neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a form of Trumpism which produces zones of abandonment where individuals become unknowable, faceless and lack human rights.
It is difficult to take such a charge seriously in light of a range of policies enacted under the Trump regime that are as cruel as they are oppressive. These range from voter suppression and the unleashing of the military on peaceful protesters to cruel anti-immigration policies and a politics of disposability that mimics what Richard A. Etlin calls the Nazi policy of “‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,’ that is, the ‘destruction’ or ‘extermination’ of ‘lives not worth living.’” There is no acknowledgment by Moyn, Robin, and others of this ilk of the centrality and the power of cultural politics and neoliberal and authoritarian pedagogies at work under Trumpism.
The lessons of history wither in the discourse of denial, especially since, as Hannah Arendt argues, “the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever-growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare.” Moreover, the argument ignores the groundwork of forces laid long before Trump came to power and it says little about the enormous ways in which he used Twitter, the internet, conservative foundations and the right-wing media to turn the Republican Party into a group of morally and politically vacuous sycophants. More specifically, it both ignores and underestimates the power of Trumpism in creating slightly more than 74 million followers who inhabit right-wing populist spaces where “reality can be dispensed and controlled,” according to Robert Jay Lifton’s Losing Reality. It also overlooks the power of Trumpism to create cult-like followers who disregard reason and reality for the image of the strongman who demands unmitigated loyalty and ideological purity.
The power of Trumpism in the cultural realm affirms the success of a new cultural/social formation. It testifies less to the personalized issue of incompetence than to the success of Trumpism to create regressive modes of identification among large segments of the American public that further strengthen and integrate once-marginal elements of a fascist politics into centers of governmental power. Thoughtlessness and the collapse of civic culture and moral agency echo a period in history in which criminality and corruption entered into politics, and as Stephen Spender once argued, as cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters, “the future is like a time bomb buried but ticking away at the present.” In the age of Trump, language reinforces the central fascist notion of friend/enemy distinction as an organizing principle of politics. In this instance, language is used to vilify those considered “other” while the language of environmental justice and anti-racism disappears. More shockingly, Trump used language to imply a moral equivalence between white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and peaceful protesters. At the same time, he employs the language of white supremacists to protest against removing Confederate flags and symbols from the American landscape. There is more at stake here than simply labeling Trump incompetent or ascribing his toxic beliefs and dangerous actions to his personality.
Trumpism is a worldview that defines culture as a battleground of losers and winners, a world in which everything is rigged against whites. This is a world in which unity disappears into Trump’s right-wing assault on the public good and truth, as reality itself dissolves into a right-wing propaganda machine in which politics becomes “a plot to steal from [whites] their natural due as Americans.” Trumpism defines power as immunity from the law, and that the most admirable representatives of power are those who are “triumphant and innocent in the face of every accusation of incapacity, criminality and unethical conduct.” How else to explain Trump’s pardoning of grifters, political cronies and war criminals?
Far from being the “almost opposite of fascism,” Trump’s politics pave the way for deeply entrenched legacies of hate to be passed on to his followers and future generations. Under Trumpism, there is an ongoing attempt to destroy any vestige of democracy as we know it, however flawed, and replace it with a form of neoliberal capital unmoored from any sense of social, political and ethical ethos. Trumpism will long outlive the language, actions, values and views that have defined Trump’s presidency.
What is crucial to recognize is that any starting point for challenging Trumpism and its fascist politics must begin, as Kali Holloway and Martin Mycielski observe, by “recognizing the reality of what is happening … how much damage is being done, how much earth was already scorched.… It’s good to remember the very big, very frightening picture before us, how far we’ve already come, and to consider what recourse we have with complicit and corrupt forces standing in the way.” Trumpism will not disappear once Trump leaves office. On the contrary, its afterlife seems assured as long as its politics is endlessly reproduced through the reactionary cultural workstations that produce and distribute its lies, regressive notions of agency, hatred and disdain for the truth. Trumpism represents both a crisis of the civic imagination and an educational and political crisis.
Trump’s impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
Until it is understood as a cultural crisis rather than defined exclusively as an economic and narrowly political crisis, Trumpism will continue to undermine the ability of individuals and institutions to think critically, question themselves, and produce informed citizens and aligned social movements that can fight collectively for and sustain a radical democracy. There is no democracy without an educated citizenry and no democracy can survive under the banner of Trumpism with its glut of ignorance, commercialization, concentration of power, corporate-owned media and illusion of freedom.
Drawing upon history, Masha Gessen argues that Trump’s defeat offers a choice “between two paths: the path of reckoning and the path of forgetting.” They further argue that the price for forgetting is too high and would leave in place a rationale for giving immunity to terror, lawlessness and corruption. More is necessary than simply impeaching Trump. In order to avoid becoming complicit with the crimes of Trumpism, it is necessary for the Biden administration to put in place a national project — which would include investigations, hearings, court trials, public assemblies, journalistic inquiries, and other invented formats — in order to hold accountable those who committed crimes under the Trump regime, including those individuals and politicians who advocated sedition by baselessly claiming voter fraud and attempting to overturn results of the Biden election.
Furthermore, there are two important points regarding Trump’s impeachment that should be embraced. First, as Georgetown University professor Neal Katyal stated in an interview with Brian Williams, Trump should be impeached in the hope that he would then be barred from holding any political office in the future. Second, a signal needs to be sent to the 12 Republican senators and more than half of congressional Republicans who are dousing the Constitution with fire through their attempts to create what amounts to a coup by invalidating Biden’s election and creating the groundwork for undermining free and fair elections in the future, if not democracy itself.
It is astonishing that in the face of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election, which closely resembles the actions of authoritarian regimes around the world, that 38 percent oppose his impeachment and 15 percent have no opinion. The data suggest little resistance on the part of such a large percentage of Americans who either willingly support the death of democracy or are misinformed about the U.S. being at the tipping point of becoming a full-fledged authoritarian regime. New York Times journalist Peter Baker did not miss the threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump’s actions regarding his attempt to overturn an election he decisively lost, while entertaining the use of martial law to do so. Quoting Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Baker writes:
Mr. Trump’s efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how authoritarianism works in the 21st century,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.” “Today’s leaders come in through elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office — until they get enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there indefinitely.’
With the possibility of instituting various layers of democratic accountability which now included impeaching Trump for a second time, the conditions can be laid for not only a project of truth-telling and answerability but also a narrative of remembrance in which crimes can be revealed and the stories of the victims heard. Under such circumstances, the historical record can become an object of critical inquiry, culpability and the rectifying of moral injury. Such reckoning can also serve as an educational and learning project in which the lessons of the past can create the conditions for connecting education to democratic values, relations, goals, and a redemptive notion of equity and inclusion. Desmond Tutu, in his opening remarks before the convening of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, rightly invoked the power of historical memory and the need to bear witness in the fight against tyranny. He stated: “We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of the past so that they will not return to haunt us.” The power of education, reason, and the search for truth and justice are one mechanism for learning from the past and resisting the ghosts ready to emerge in the present.
The eradication of the public good, the continued growth of neoliberalism’s disimagination machines, the individualizing of social problems, a collective indifference to the rise of the punishing state, the repression of historical consciousness, the failure to engage honestly with the full scope of the U.S.’s racist history, and the crushing role of racial and economic inequality are at their core educational issues. These issues speak powerfully to the task of changing consciousness by dismantling those depoliticizing forces that create apocalyptic visions that render the current social order a world without alternatives. In part, this means intellectuals, artists and other cultural workers must make the work they produce meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. This demands a revolutionary vision matched by a collective effort to create alternative public spaces that unpack how common sense works to prevent people from recognizing the oppressive nature of the societies in which they find themselves. The ideological tyranny and cultural politics of Trumpism demands a wholesale revision of how education and democracy mutually inform each other and how they are understood as part of a broader politics in which the oppressed can be heard and a world can be created in which the voices of the suffering find a public space for articulation.
Any movement for resistance needs to become more accessible to working-class people, and there is a crucial need to connect personal and political rights with economic rights. Democracy can only survive as a social state that guarantees rights for everyone. The question of who holds power, and how power is separated from politics, with politics being local and power being global, has to be addressed as a condition for international resistance. Neoliberal capitalism has morphed into a form of Trumpism which produces zones of abandonment where individuals become unknowable, faceless and lack human rights.
Under Trumpism, society increasingly reproduces pedagogical “death zones of humanity” that triumph not only in violence but also ignorance and irrationality, writes Étienne Balibar in “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty.” These are zones that undermine the capacity for people to speak, write, and act from a position of empowerment and be responsible to themselves and others. Against this form of depoliticization, there is the need for modes of civic education and critical literacy that provide the bridging work between thinking critically and the possibility of interpretation as intervention. Critical pedagogy is a moral and political practice committed to the realization that there is no resistance without hope, and no hope without a vision of an alternative society rooted in the ideals of justice, equality and freedom.
Trumpism evokes the shadow of authoritarianism in the form of a resurgent fascist politics that dehumanizes all of us in the face of a refusal to confront its specter of racism, lawlessness and brutality. Trump’s impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
The influence and legacy of Trumpism will long outlast the aftermath of Trump’s presidency making it all the more urgent to reclaim the redemptive elements of government responsibility, democratic ideals and the public spheres that make a radical democracy possible. In the current historical moment, the time has come to reclaim the great utopian ideals unleashed by a long history of civil rights struggles, the insights and radical struggles produced by the Black Lives Matter movement, and a cultural politics and pedagogy written in the language of justice, compassion, and the fundamental narratives of freedom and equality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department in Toronto, Canada and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018) and The Terror of the Unforeseen (LARB Books, 2019). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.
"What's Past is Prologue..."
THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN SEVEN YEARS AGO ON JANUARY 6, 2017
DOES THIS SAME DATE SEVEN YEARS LATER IN 2024 AND THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPH HAVE ANYTHING IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER?
YOU BET THEY DO…
PHOTO: January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him. (Gabriella Demczuk)
"What's Past is Prologue..."
November 23, 2016
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
All,
Keep in mind that the following article ("The Real Danger of Donald Trump") was written a mere six months ago(!)
NOW (after winning seven of the ten Republican primaries tonight in resounding fashion) look at how much closer we are to the very real possibility that a genuine fascist could become the next President of the United Hates in November. Don't laugh, or even think about blithely dismissing this once extremely remote possibility. A looming catastrophe of monumental proportions is now only 8 months away from actually happening. If Trump is able to win a mere 2-3 more midwestern states (given that like Romney in 2012 it is absolutely assured that he will win at least 95% of the entire South--a grand total of 13 states-- plus 5 more in the Plains states region of Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North and South Dakota in addition to 3 more in Nebraska, Alaska, and Idaho). Add the certainty that like Romney in 2012 Trump would also easily win three of the 10 midwestern states (Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri), and all of a sudden we are looking at a grand total of 24 states (which is exactly the same number of states Romney won in 2012). It is also likely under this horrific scenario that if Trump is also able to win back the state of Florida that Obama was barely able to win against Romney by a little less than 1% of the vote he would suddenly be much closer to actually winning the Presidency. Then all Trump would need to win the election is two more states TOTAL in the rest of the country, If you don't think this is possible given how thoroughly reactionary and rabidly rightwing most of the national white vote in this country actually is (in 2012 60% of that national voting demographic went to Romney as Obama only won a feeble 39% nationally of this vote and actually lost the white vote in both New York and California!) you are deluding yourself.
So don't think for a nanosecond that the worst possible scenario could not possibly occur at this point and that an extremely wealthy and openly bigoted white male supremacist and certifiable meglomaniac could win the White House and turn a horrific fantasy into a nightmarish reality very soon ...Stay tuned...
Kofi
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/…/the-real-danger-of-…/…
Taking Note - The Editorial Page
Editor's Blog
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
by Lawrence Downes
September 16, 2015
New York Times
PHOTO: Donald Trump.Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Real Danger of Donald Trump
Some may find him amusing, but he is stirring up hatred that will take a long time to die down.
takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com
by Lawrence Downes
The caller to Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show on Wednesday morning was pining for a strongman, a president who would do what was necessary to get rid of immigrants, whom she blamed for taking jobs and money away from real Americans.
“We’re very angry about what’s going on in the world today. We’re very angry about all the immigration,” she said. “He does speak for the people. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t realize that there are a lot of angry people out here that are tired of listening to the politicians step all over us.”
She was speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, whose vehement anti-immigrant message is working brilliantly for him. Heading into tonight’s second Republican debate, he is the 2016 campaign’s main object of fascination and intimidation — the gas planet around which the discussion will likely revolve, while his rivals spin, tumble and flail.
Because Mr. Trump is caustic and bombastic, many people find him delightful and refreshing. Late-night comedians have been praying for him to stick around, because the jokes write themselves.
But the problem with this particular clown is that his words are not clownish. The language he uses about immigrants is dehumanizing and vile. The audiences that adore him are animated not just by infatuation, but by the age-old catalysts of fear, resentment and hate.
This is what moves the Trump effect into the realm of the frightening, rather than amusing or fascinating.
When did that move happen? For me, it was his rally on Monday in Dallas, where he told an adoring crowd he was disgusted with what was happening to America. He called it “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”
The garbage he was referring to is people, the same kind of people we describe more poetically on a plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Mr. Trump’s rivals are talking, in all seriousness, of undoing the Constitution and building a border wall. A Fox News host compares immigration to “a tumor or a disease.” Two young thugs in Boston attack and urinate on a homeless Latino man, saying Mr. Trump inspired them. A Trump supporter outside the Dallas rally grabs a microphone and yells at anti-Trump protesters: “Clean my hotel room, bitch!” Another, referring to Mr. Trump’s mass-deportation plan, says: “This isn’t going to be painless. They’ve been inflicting pain on us for 20 years.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Trump will end up with any power to pursue his racist agenda — his ambitions seem a lot narrower, more TV-based. But the toxic support he is stirring up, the polluted ideas he is spreading, the hate he is emboldening his supporters to voice with his blaring, surround-sound campaign — that evil will live after him. We will be cleaning up after Mr. Trump for a long time.
Vice President Joe Biden spoke reassuringly to a Latino group on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans were taking pages from an old playbook that always fails.
“This will pass,” he said. This “sick message” has been tried on America before, and we always — “always, always, always, always” — overcome it.
Yes, we do, but it keeps coming back, and keeps doing damage.
I think of some recent examples, close to home.
Long Island, where I live, has been transformed in recent years, like many other American suburbs, by an influx of Latino immigrants. The demographics of Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are similar. But where Nassau had a cool, pragmatic county executive, who talked of unity and sensible solutions, Suffolk had a county executive who liked to blame immigrants for overburdened housing, schools and hospitals, and for supposedly lawless acts like gathering on sidewalks to look for work. His words inflamed and incited community passions; his claims that immigrants were a blight on the county found a receptive audience.
And Suffolk, not Nassau, became nationally notorious for repeated attacks on Latino immigrants, including one horrific murder. Even the county police department was accused of patterns of racial abuse. Other politicians have risen to power in communities where people feel uneasy and resentful and are looking for a target for their anger. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has perennially been elected despite — or rather because of — his history of oppressing Latinos in his jurisdiction.
Mr. Trump has made the nativists restless, on a national scale. Those in media and entertainment who are distracted by his comedic potential are missing the point. Jimmy Fallon, doing a skit with Mr. Trump, normalizes his toxic message, with giggles. (I’m hoping that Stephen Colbert, who has Mr. Trump on his show next week, will do better at avoiding this moral trap, but I’m not holding my breath.)
The Trump effect leads to a question I’ve been pondering. Is politics like physics, where adding gas to a container creates pressure and heat? If you keep pumping inflammatory speech into the public discourse, do you eventually get ignition?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/bannons-war/
PBS
FRONTLINE
Documentary: ‘Bannon's War’
May 23, 2017
54 minutes
Season 2017: Episode 13
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPkUrVj0VPc
Produced by:
Michael Kirk
Mike Wiser
Gabrielle Schonder
Philip Bennet
The inside story of Trump adviser Stephen Bannon’s war — with radical Islam, Washington and White House rivals.
Topics
U.S. Politics
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
FROM TIMOTHY MCVEIGH TO DONALD TRUMP: The Modern Ideological, Cultural, and Economic Turn of White Supremacy Towards Fascism in American Politics, 1995-Present:
"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”
—Kofi Natambu, July 15, 2009
"The Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history. 'Has there ever been an organisation in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?' Not that I'm aware of."
--Noam Chomsky, April 24, 2017
"Trump is not just an ethically dead aberration. Rather, he is the successor of a long line of fascists who shut down public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse violence as a response to dissent and criticize any public display of democratic principles. The United States has reached its endpoint with Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of the nightmare to come. Trump is not an isolated figure in US politics; he is simply the most visible and popular expression of a number of extremists in the Republican Party who now view democracy as a liability."
--Henry A. Giroux, "Fascism in Donald Trump's United States", December 8, 2015
"Like all fundamentally authoritarian and fascist expressions the political, social, economic, and cultural triumph of sheer hatred, greed, stupidity, cruelty, resentment, corruption, ignorance, paranoia, indifferance, psychosis, sadism, cowardice, hypocrisy, cultism, idolatry, and various forms of racial, gender, and class based violence promoted AS PUBLIC POLICY AND IDEOLOGICAL PLATFORM is what Donald J. Trump fully embodies and represents, and most importantly is what the great overwhelming majority of his over 63 million voters from 2016 most love, respect, encourage, endorse, and support about their very own national zombie cult "leader”. This is the clear and present danger on both an empirical and existential level that we are all up against and absolutely must defeat and remove from power in 2020 and beyond at all cost.”
—Kofi Natambu, December 22, 2019
"Alarm bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior of the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie, refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression legislation across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new trend in American politics that threatens the foundations of our democracy itself.
Viewed through the lens of history, however, none of this is new. The hard truth is that whichever United States political party has been most rooted in the fears, anxieties, and resentments of white people has never cared much about democracy or the Constitution designed to preserve it. Those who do want to make America a multi-racial democracy must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and values.
Contemporary analysis of domestic politics is obscured by the historical fact that white Americans fearful of the ramifications of equality for people of color have moved their political home from the Democratic Party, which was their preferred vehicle at the time of the Civil War, to the Republican Party, where they reside today. In the 19th century, Democrats dominated the South, led 11 states to secede from the Union, and waged a murderous multiyear war against their fellow Americans. Today, it is the Republicans who are the standard-bearers of the modern-day Confederate cause. “
—Steve Phillips, May 26, 2021
"...It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power...In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence...
Trump’s political career began in advocacy of birtherism. But long before that, he had made his worldview clear...
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies...
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The First White President", The Atlantic, September 11, 2017
"What's Past is Prologue..."
http://www.nybooks.com/.../an-open-letter-to-my-sister…/
PHOTO: Newsweek Cover of Angela Davis, October 26, 1970
"One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings’ Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
--James Baldwin, excerpted from "An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis", The New York Review of Books, November 19, 1970; January 7, 1971 issue of journal
'WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE..."
[NOTE: The following article originally appeared 14 years ago on April 12, 2010]
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
by Matthew Rothschild
April 12, 2010
The Progressive
Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.
And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”
He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.”
When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.
No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said.
“These are lessons to keep in mind.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-fundamental-crisis-and-foundational.html
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 9
"What's Past is Prologue..."
November 15, 2016
All,
For some very odd, stubbornly evasive, and clearly self deluding reason far too many people in the United States today (the overwhelming majority of whom are white American citizens both in terms of their aggregate numbers and baseline percentage of the national population) continue to cling to the glaringly false, utterly bizarre and even willfully perverse notion that the rancid outcome of the presidential election last tuesday night was somehow a historical anomaly, and was not merely a determined continuation and extension of a very longstanding tradition in American politics generally over the past 150 years and especially in the modern post 1945 era.
That tradition of course is the pervasive all encompassing role of racial ideology in voting generally in this country and especially in national federal elections for the Presidency and Congress. That racial ideology of course is the structural, institutional, and systemic doctrine and practice of White Supremacy. For the past four years on this facebook site and for the past eight years in the online pages of the Panopticon Review website I have been constantly pointing this out in a very broad array of articles, commentary, editorials, and historical essays by not only myself but many other professional journalists, historians, political theorists, cultural critics, and social activists.
One of those essays is an excerpted piece of a much longer piece in progress on modern American politics since 1945 by myself that I have run on two previous occasions on this facebook page since its first appearance online on the Panopticon Review site on March 2, 2016. I am reprinting this excerpt here a third time because it continues to be a source of great frustration and even angry annoyance that so many people even in the wake of Trump's horrific victory on November 8, 2016 still insist on clinging to and even actively promoting an intellectually bankrupt notion about the actual theoretical, strategic, and tactical reasons for the abject failure of far too many liberal and even more significantly neoliberal pundits, operatives, activists, and theorists from the Democratic Party (and even among some left leaning ideological "independents") to properly organize, educate, mobilize, and advance the genuine interests and needs of the U.S. citizenry in both philosophically rooted and radically activist terms that would not only uphold the banner of political, economic, and cultural democracy in general terms, but would actively combat and oppose the social and ideological forces of racial, class, gender, and sexual oppression, exploitation, and discrimination in the public sphere. The protofascist rightwing forces led by Trump won the presidential and congressional elections for clearly defined reasons that we all have to be intellectually, morally, and ethically honest about. For without this honesty and clarity we cannot proceed to seriously address what is really wrong, dysfunctional, and destructive in our national politics and why...Stay tuned and pass the word...
Kofi
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/the-central-role-of-…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated 71% of the black (male) vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether they were the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and including 2020)…"
Labels: American political history, Capitalist hegemony, Hubris, Ideology and Politics, Mass media, Mythology, the Confederacy, Voting
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 4:20 PM
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2020/12/httpswww_31.html?m=0
Some Final Reflections on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate
by Kofi Natambu
December 31, 2020
The Panopticon Review
Eight weeks ago on November 3, 2020 the national voting public of the United States—an alltime record of over 155 million citizens!—elected Democratic Party candidate Joseph R. Biden as the 46th president of the United States in what many observers and analysts have deemed the most important and consequential national election since 1860 on the cusp of the Civil War. The deeply alarming, even terrifying rise and emergence in just the past five years of ideologically malevolent forces both here and abroad and rapidly metastasizing in the form of the wildly chaotic and authoritarian neofascist regime of Donald J. Trump had sent the entire political system and much of U.S. civil society itself into widespread turmoil, conflict, and panic. This stark reality only greatly increased deep seated anxieties and fears throughout the Republic over centuries long structural, institutional, and systemic fears, dislocations, corruption, and demagoguery regarding addressing the foundational public categories of race, class, and gender in the American body politic at the levels of both political economy and cultural identity.
As a result what ultimately distinguished the 2020 election from its historical predecessors was a tsunami of bizarre and deeply disturbing behavior and actions involving openly public confrontations, endless disinformation campaigns and venomous rhetorical assaults by President Trump on not only his Democratic Party opponent and challenger Joseph Biden but an ongoing series of unrelenting attacks on virtually any and everyone the president thought, felt, or simply imagined were opposing, slighting, or otherwise dismissing him and his bluster. This included not only many Democratic Party politicians and stalwarts like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer but also many others like progressive politician Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez and what was known as “the Squad” (fellow progressive Congressional representatives Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) all of whom happen to be both women and people of color, two of Trump’s favorite punching bags, but many members of his own subservient enabling Party as well on the vary rare occasions when they didn’t openly kiss his ass and sing his praises. The impact on the general election outside of these machinations and ID-fueled rages by the president and the ugly destructive fallout from it was complicated and made even more sinister and disruptive given the extensive racist police violence against African Americans throughout 2020 (e.g. George Floyd, Armaud Arbrey, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake etc.). Meanwhile a massive deadly global pandemic ravaged the entire country making it virtually impossible for the Democratic nominees (Biden and Kamala Harris) to campaign in any traditional or conventional manner which involved appealing to large crowds live in realtime. However even this clear and present danger of spreading the virus via live events which led inevitably to the direct transmission and eventual infection of thousands of supporters didn’t stop the wild antic “super-spreader”events in which thousands of Trump’s supporters endangered themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
Despite all the many distractions and the often patently cruel and simply braindead demonstrations of a national cult of fervent supporters of Trump’s despicable rightwing demagoguery and rank exploitation of not only the general public (most of whom were intensely opposed to the president on both a personal and political/ideological level) but of his most dedicated followers as well. Meanwhile the already very deep and persistent divisions of the country along racial, class, and gender lines and revealed once again (as they have for over 70 years now) just how dependent the two major political parties remain on the electoral and ideological domination of these divisions. Thus while Trump continued as he had in 2016 to garner a very substantial majority of white American voters (over 57% of all white voters—which collectively numbered over 100 million people this year!-- cast their ballot for Trump, with 58% of white males and an equally distressing 55% of all white female voters also voting for Trump’ despite his deeply white supremacist, corporate, and misogynist agenda.
As a deeply determined counterweight to this huge national surge of white American “vote of confidence” in a clearly fascist regime and its raging sociopathic leader nearly 80% of a huge number of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters voted against this same regime and leader with the national black vote as usual leading the way with 87% of its voters refusing a replay of the last four years despite widespread voter suppression. As a result, over 81 million American voters collectively voted for Biden while an astonishing 74 million still voted for Trump (a very ominous sign of just how "popular" FASCISM currently remains in American politics and culture). This gigantic turnout meant that the two candidates individually received the most votes of any two candidates in the history of the Republic. That the country is still reeling from an extremely deadly pandemic (over 350,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus as of this writing), a rapidly collapsing national economy, and a frankly maniacal and equally deadly national rightwing coalition led by the heinous Republican Party and the brazenly ruthless likes of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, as the rabidly criminal and fiercely antidemocratic antics of the now defeated president continues to assault the political system in general it’s clear that the 2020 election has merely delayed but is still nowhere close yet to firmly and decisively DEFEATING what is as of January 1, 2021 still a clear and present danger to not only this nation but the entire world. Stay tuned because the political, economic, cultural and ideological war that MUST be waged in this society and throughout the globe against the still gathering and rapidly expanding forces of fascism, whether we “win” an election or not and especially whether we “like it” or not is more imperative than ever …
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 11:30 PM
Labels: 2020 presidential election, class, Democracy, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Fascism,gender, Ideology and Politics, Joe Biden, Race, Republican Party, The Black Vote, The white vote
"What's Past is Prologue..."
November 15, 2016
All,
For some very odd, stubbornly evasive, and clearly self deluding reason far too many people in the United States today (the overwhelming majority of whom are white American citizens both in terms of their aggregate numbers and baseline percentage of the national population) continue to cling to the glaringly false, utterly bizarre and even willfully perverse notion that the rancid outcome of the presidential election last tuesday night was somehow a historical anomaly, and was not merely a determined continuation and extension of a very longstanding tradition in American politics generally over the past 150 years and especially in the modern post 1945 era.
That tradition of course is the pervasive all encompassing role of racial ideology in voting generally in this country and especially in national federal elections for the Presidency and Congress. That racial ideology of course is the structural, institutional, and systemic doctrine and practice of White Supremacy. For the past four years on this facebook site and for the past eight years in the online pages of the Panopticon Review website I have been constantly pointing this out in a very broad array of articles, commentary, editorials, and historical essays by not only myself but many other professional journalists, historians, political theorists, cultural critics, and social activists.
One of those essays is an excerpted piece of a much longer piece in progress on modern American politics since 1945 by myself that I have run on two previous occasions on this facebook page since its first appearance online on the Panopticon Review site on March 2, 2016. I am reprinting this excerpt here a third time because it continues to be a source of great frustration and even angry annoyance that so many people even in the wake of Trump's horrific victory on November 8, 2016 still insist on clinging to and even actively promoting an intellectually bankrupt notion about the actual theoretical, strategic, and tactical reasons for the abject failure of far too many liberal and even more significantly neoliberal pundits, operatives, activists, and theorists from the Democratic Party (and even among some left leaning ideological "independents") to properly organize, educate, mobilize, and advance the genuine interests and needs of the U.S. citizenry in both philosophically rooted and radically activist terms that would not only uphold the banner of political, economic, and cultural democracy in general terms, but would actively combat and oppose the social and ideological forces of racial, class, gender, and sexual oppression, exploitation, and discrimination in the public sphere. The protofascist rightwing forces led by Trump won the presidential and congressional elections for clearly defined reasons that we all have to be intellectually, morally, and ethically honest about. For without this honesty and clarity we cannot proceed to seriously address what is really wrong, dysfunctional, and destructive in our national politics and why...Stay tuned and pass the word...
Kofi
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/the-central-role-of-…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated 71% of the black (male) vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether they were the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and including 2020)…"
Labels: American political history, Capitalist hegemony, Hubris, Ideology and Politics, Mass media, Mythology, the Confederacy, Voting
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 4:20 PM
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2020/12/httpswww_31.html?m=0
Some Final Reflections on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate
by Kofi Natambu
December 31, 2020
The Panopticon Review
Eight weeks ago on November 3, 2020 the national voting public of the United States—an alltime record of over 155 million citizens!—elected Democratic Party candidate Joseph R. Biden as the 46th president of the United States in what many observers and analysts have deemed the most important and consequential national election since 1860 on the cusp of the Civil War. The deeply alarming, even terrifying rise and emergence in just the past five years of ideologically malevolent forces both here and abroad and rapidly metastasizing in the form of the wildly chaotic and authoritarian neofascist regime of Donald J. Trump had sent the entire political system and much of U.S. civil society itself into widespread turmoil, conflict, and panic. This stark reality only greatly increased deep seated anxieties and fears throughout the Republic over centuries long structural, institutional, and systemic fears, dislocations, corruption, and demagoguery regarding addressing the foundational public categories of race, class, and gender in the American body politic at the levels of both political economy and cultural identity.
As a result what ultimately distinguished the 2020 election from its historical predecessors was a tsunami of bizarre and deeply disturbing behavior and actions involving openly public confrontations, endless disinformation campaigns and venomous rhetorical assaults by President Trump on not only his Democratic Party opponent and challenger Joseph Biden but an ongoing series of unrelenting attacks on virtually any and everyone the president thought, felt, or simply imagined were opposing, slighting, or otherwise dismissing him and his bluster. This included not only many Democratic Party politicians and stalwarts like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer but also many others like progressive politician Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez and what was known as “the Squad” (fellow progressive Congressional representatives Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) all of whom happen to be both women and people of color, two of Trump’s favorite punching bags, but many members of his own subservient enabling Party as well on the vary rare occasions when they didn’t openly kiss his ass and sing his praises. The impact on the general election outside of these machinations and ID-fueled rages by the president and the ugly destructive fallout from it was complicated and made even more sinister and disruptive given the extensive racist police violence against African Americans throughout 2020 (e.g. George Floyd, Armaud Arbrey, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake etc.). Meanwhile a massive deadly global pandemic ravaged the entire country making it virtually impossible for the Democratic nominees (Biden and Kamala Harris) to campaign in any traditional or conventional manner which involved appealing to large crowds live in realtime. However even this clear and present danger of spreading the virus via live events which led inevitably to the direct transmission and eventual infection of thousands of supporters didn’t stop the wild antic “super-spreader”events in which thousands of Trump’s supporters endangered themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
Despite all the many distractions and the often patently cruel and simply braindead demonstrations of a national cult of fervent supporters of Trump’s despicable rightwing demagoguery and rank exploitation of not only the general public (most of whom were intensely opposed to the president on both a personal and political/ideological level) but of his most dedicated followers as well. Meanwhile the already very deep and persistent divisions of the country along racial, class, and gender lines and revealed once again (as they have for over 70 years now) just how dependent the two major political parties remain on the electoral and ideological domination of these divisions. Thus while Trump continued as he had in 2016 to garner a very substantial majority of white American voters (over 57% of all white voters—which collectively numbered over 100 million people this year!-- cast their ballot for Trump, with 58% of white males and an equally distressing 55% of all white female voters also voting for Trump’ despite his deeply white supremacist, corporate, and misogynist agenda.
As a deeply determined counterweight to this huge national surge of white American “vote of confidence” in a clearly fascist regime and its raging sociopathic leader nearly 80% of a huge number of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters voted against this same regime and leader with the national black vote as usual leading the way with 87% of its voters refusing a replay of the last four years despite widespread voter suppression. As a result, over 81 million American voters collectively voted for Biden while an astonishing 74 million still voted for Trump (a very ominous sign of just how "popular" FASCISM currently remains in American politics and culture). This gigantic turnout meant that the two candidates individually received the most votes of any two candidates in the history of the Republic. That the country is still reeling from an extremely deadly pandemic (over 350,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus as of this writing), a rapidly collapsing national economy, and a frankly maniacal and equally deadly national rightwing coalition led by the heinous Republican Party and the brazenly ruthless likes of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, as the rabidly criminal and fiercely antidemocratic antics of the now defeated president continues to assault the political system in general it’s clear that the 2020 election has merely delayed but is still nowhere close yet to firmly and decisively DEFEATING what is as of January 1, 2021 still a clear and present danger to not only this nation but the entire world. Stay tuned because the political, economic, cultural and ideological war that MUST be waged in this society and throughout the globe against the still gathering and rapidly expanding forces of fascism, whether we “win” an election or not and especially whether we “like it” or not is more imperative than ever …
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 11:30 PM
Labels: 2020 presidential election, class, Democracy, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Fascism,gender, Ideology and Politics, Joe Biden, Race, Republican Party, The Black Vote, The white vote
IMAGE:
Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross.
First edition (hardcover). M. Evans & Company. Black Rose Press
July, 1980
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Third edition (paperback). South End Press, 1999
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Second edition (paperback), Black Rose Press, 1989
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Third edition (paperback). South End Press, 1999
IMAGE: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. Second edition (paperback), Black Rose Press, 1989
