The final stages of capitalism Karl Marx predicted would be marked by global capital
being unable to expand and generate profits
at former levels.
that sustained them.
Democracy social welfare electoral participation
the common good and investment i n public transportation
roads bridges utilities industry education healthcare
and the protection of the ecosystem
would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term
profit.
These assaults would destroy the host.
This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.
Trump and his reactionary capitalists who have seized 34 of 50 governorships
And 68 of 99 state legislatures
49 of which are bicameral
plan to oversee the final campaign of corporate pillaging of America
and the rest of the planet.
It will be crass and brazen.
as crass and brazen as the fleecing
of the desperate people hoping for a miracle
in the face of dead-end jobs and ruinous personal debt
who patronized Trump’s casinos
and the casinos springing up across the United States and Canada
-- or who shelled out thousands of dollars
for the sham of Trump University.
He is unleashing a kleptocracy -- the word comes from the Greek klépto meaning thieves
and kratos meaning rule so it is literally “rule by thieves” -- one that will rival
the kleptocracies carried out by Suharto in Indonesia and Marcos in the Philippines.
It is not that Trump and his family will use
the influence of government to increase their
wealth although this will certainly take place on a massive scale it is that hundreds
of billions of federal dollars will be diverted
into the hands of cronies sleazy bankers
unethical financial firms and scabrous hedge fund managers.
Everything will to use a business term be
“harvested.
The decaying pillars of the liberal state in America will be obliterated.
At the same time the militarization of America is being accelerated.
The defense budget will be increased by 10 percent or 54 billion dollars
although the United States already spends more than the defense budgets of the next 7 countries combined.
The paramilitary forces of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement
which will soon hire 10 0 more agents
and the Border Patrol which will hire 5 0 more agents along with
Homeland Security have all deputized local and
state police to function as their auxiliaries.
They will be flooded with cast-off military-issue equipment.
These paramilitary forces will not disband once they have finished terrorizing and deporting
some of the 11 million undocumented workers
in the Untied States.
They will turn on their next victims -- Muslims African-Americans Asians dissidents.
This militariziation of society is designed to carry out the race war
that Trump and those around him see as inevitable at home and abroad.
In poor communities of color this race war has already begun.
Racial profiling.
Random police stops.
Raids at homes and businesses.
People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints.
Seizures of individuals with no criminal records
or who never committed a serious crime.
Imprisonment without trial.
Expedited deportation hearings and removal proceedings that violate the most basic human rights.
The arrest of a beneficiary of the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program
Daniel Ramirez Medina 23 who along with
the program’s other 750 0 successful applicants
had revealed all personal history to the government in applying for DACA status.
Parents separated perhaps forever from their
children.
The hunted going underground.
The end of the rule of law.
The abandonment of the common good.
The obliteration of a social state in which
institutions and assistance programs -- from
public education to Social Security and welfare -- make justice equality and dignity possible.
White Europeans who are undocumented are not
being targeted.
The executive orders of Trump are directed against people of color.
They begin from the premise that white Americans
are the true victims of neoliberalism deindustrialization
and falling living standards.
The Trump orders are written not to make America great again but to make America white.
They are an updated version of the Nazis’
Nuremberg laws the Jim Crow laws the Chinese
Exclusion Act and the Naturalization Act of
1870.000
They are intended to institutionalize an overt
racial hierarchy in the United States one
already advanced in the miniature police states
where people of color live in marginal communities.
In these impoverished enclaves there is no right to trial or due process.
Militarized police kill with impunity and the courts lock people away often for life.
Rights are treated as privileges that can
instantly be revoked.
The poor especially poor people of color are exempted from moral consideration.
They are attacked as impediments to social cohesion.
And these impediments must be eliminated.
Jews -- their community centers enduring threats
of violence and their graveyards desecrated
-- will also be persecuted.
American fascism is rapidly being cemented into place
by uniformed and heavily armed paramilitary
goons clutching the flag and the cross and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the
Lord’s Prayer.
“Little or no prospect of rescue from individual
indolence or impotence can be expected to
arrive from a political state that is not and refuses to be a social state ”
the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote.
“Without social rights for all a large and in all probability growing number of people
will find their political rights of little
use and unworthy of their attention.
If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place social rights are indispensable
to make political rights ‘real’ and keep them in operation.
The two rights need each other for their survival
that survival can only be their joint achievement.”
Presidential chief strategist Stephen Bannon in his public comments and his films such
as “Generation Zero ” has embraced a historical
determinism worthy of Karl Marx.
He posits that Western culture has been contaminated and is being destroyed by darker races and
barbaric religions and belief systems.
His conspiratorial view of history and society
sees a global war between the white race and
the lesser breeds of the earth as not only inevitable but one that will reinvigorate
and purify America.
This idea of regeneration through violence which has always been part of the American myth
is also a central tenant of fascism.
Racists and conspiracy theorists such as Bannon Michael Anton Stephen Miller and Sebastian
Gorka constitute Trump’s ideological brain
trust.
Gorka goes so far as to argue that the failure
to understand the evil of radical Islam stems
from a “systematic subversion of the national security establishment under the banner of
inclusivity cultural awareness and political
correctness.”
In a 2014 speech Bannon said “I believe we’ve come partly off-track in the years
since the fall of the Soviet Union and we’re
starting now in the 21st century which I
believe strongly is a crisis both of our church a crisis of our faith a crisis of
the West a crisis of capitalism.”
“There is a major war brewing a war that’s
already global ” Bannon said.
“It’s going global in scale and today’s technology today’s media today’s access
to weapons of mass destruction it’s going
to lead to a global conflict that I believe
has to be confronted today.
Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is and the scale of it and really
the viciousness of it will be a day where
you will rue that we didn’t act.”
Bannon is a proponent of the theory popularized by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in
their books “Generations: The History of
America’s Future 1584 to 2069” (1991)
and “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy -- What the Cycles of History Tell Us About
America’s Next Rendezvous With Destiny”
(1997).
This authors argue that roughly every 80 years
roughly an average human life span the country
goes through a cataclysmic crisis.
This crisis triggers war industrious slaughter and genocide
and lasts for a decade or more.
In its aftermath they argue the social order is rejuvenated.
Strauss and Howe highlight the American Revolution of 1775-83 the Civil War the Great Depression
and World War II as examples of how the cycle works.
Pseudo-intellectuals such as Strauss and Howe
play the role that Paul de Lagarde Julius
Langbehn Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and
Alfred Rosenberg played for the Nazi Party.
They give an intellectual veneer to racist conspiracy theories a virulent nationalism
a hatred for culture and the lust for domination through violence.
I share Bannon’s distaste for corporate globalization free trade agreements the
failure to put Wall Street bankers in jail
the bank bailouts and crony capitalism and
would even concede that Americans wallow in the moral swamp of a culture of narcissism.
He is right when he attacks the two major
political parties as the one “party of Davos.”
But his solution to the purported crisis -- total war by the white race to regain its ascendancy
-- is insane as are the causes he cites:
a New Deal that turned citizens into whining
dependents the permissiveness of the 1960s white guilt that made the country cater in his words irresponsibly
to African-Americans by giving them social
service programs and undeserved mortgages
that led to the 2008 financial meltdown an
intellectual and a liberal class composed
essentially of traitors who hate America and the “new barbarity”
of “Jihadist Islamic fascism.”
Racism misogyny the inherent cruelty of capitalism and the crimes of empire from
Wounded Knee to Vietnam and Iraq simply do
not exist in Bannon’s mystical nationalist
worldview.
He insists that the white male aristocratic
elites who formed a republic that enslaved
African-Americans exterminated Native Americans and denied the vote to women and white men
without property created “a church and a
civilization that really is the flower of
mankind.”
This is the myth he wants to recover.
It may be that the deep state -- the shadowy
world of the security and surveillance bureaucracy
the arms industry Wall Street Silicon Valley and corporations that actually rule the country
-- disturbed by Trump’s impulsivity irrationality and incompetence will move to replace him.
This was certainly the idea when the organs
of internal security used a wiretap to discredit
and remove Michael Flynn
and it is what is happening now with the leaks about the Attorney General's two meetings withe Russian Ambassador.
But the ascendancy
to the White House of Michael Pence a more
polished and disciplined politician who will vigorously advance the agenda of the Christian
Right will not make things better – indeed
they may make things worse.
Those being placed now into positions of power are agents of destruction.
Betsy DeVos is moving to defund our system of public
education and use government vouchers to expand
corporate charter school chains and those run by the Christian right.
Scott Pruitt is dismantling the Environmental
Protection Agency.
He has already called for a 25% reduction in the EPA's budget
the elimination of 3000 jobs and the slashing of numerous programs including
a 70% cut to its climate protection program that oversees cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
Bannon was the dark hand behind the ban on Muslims
entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries -- a ban you can expect to see extended
if the Trump administration is successful
in removing a stay issued by a district court
or issuing a new executive order.
Bannon was behind the order to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
organizations and individuals in the United
States that in the language of the executive
action have been “radicalized” and
“provided material support to terrorism-related
organizations in countries that pose a threat
to the United States.”
Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and the institutions and organizations
they built.
Then once the Muslims are dealt with there will be new Homeland Security lists that will
allow the government to target the press
activists labor leaders dissident intellectuals
and the left.
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state and
that’s my goal too ” Bannon told the writer
Ronald Radosh in 2013.000
“I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
This culture of destruction was launched 4 decades ago by corporate forces.
The corporate elites terrified by the mobilization
of the left in the 1960s or by what political
scientist Samuel Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy ” built and funded
counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize
critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism.
They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties.
They imposed obedience to the neoliberal ideology
within academia and the press.
This campaign laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American
Free Enterprise System ” was the blueprint
for the creeping corporate coup d’état
that 45 years later is largely complete.
The dismantling of democratic institutions
places where the citizen has agency and a
voice is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Trump.
The coup destroyed our two-party system.
Labor unions are a spent force.
The press is corporatized.
Universities have been purged of dissidents and independent scholars who criticize neoliberalism
and decry the decay of democratic institutions
and political parties.
Public broadcasting and the arts -- places where voices not beholden to corporate power
should find a sanctuary -- have been defunded and forced to beg for corporate money which
comes of course with corporate censorship.
And it is expected that what little money the government gives to public broadcasting
and organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts
will soon be eliminated under Trump.
The courts have been stacked with judges whose
legal careers were spent serving corporate
power a trend in appointments that continued
under Barack Obama.
Money has replaced the vote which is how someone as unqualified as Betsy DeVos can
buy herself a Cabinet seat.
And the Democratic Party rather than sever its ties to Wall Street and corporations
is naively waiting in the wings to profit from a Trump debacle.
This coup destroyed more than our democratic institutions.
It destroyed the very credibility of liberal democracy.
Self-identified liberals such as the Clintons
and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal
democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power.
The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system
that has betrayed workers but also for many the ideas and values espoused by a bankrupt
liberal class.
This is very dangerous.
The discrediting of liberal democracy will
allow the radical right to cement into place
in America and much of Europe and other parts of the globe
a form of fascism.
Presidential adviser Stephen Miller an ardent
white supremist in an interview on Face the
Nation on CBS was quite blunt about what to expect.
“We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a
supreme branch of government ” he said.
“Our opponents the media and the whole
world will soon see as we begin to take further
actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial
and will not be questioned.”
History may not repeat itself but it echoes.
The framers of our Constitution steeped in the history of ancient Greece and Rome attempted
to provide checks and balances to keep the American republic from falling like their
ancient counterparts into oligarchy and tyranny.
This kind of historical knowledge – dismissed as frivolous by our consumer culture and business
elites – allows us recognize the familiar warning
signs on the road to tyranny.
If we studied the collapse of ancient Greece Rome the Weimar Republic or the former Yugoslavia
we would be far more alert to the current march towards despotism.
Thucydides who wrote that the tyranny the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally
imposed on itself is a better guide to our
future than Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand.
The historian Fritz Stern in “The Politics of Cultural Despair ” his book on the rise
of fascism in Germany warned repeatedly of
the danger of a bankrupt liberalism.
Stern who saw the same dark irrational forces at work today that he watched as a boy in
Nazi Germany argued that the spiritually and politically alienated are the prime recruits
for a politics centered around cultural hatreds and personal resentments.
Stern told me that in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word fascism was invented.
“They attacked liberalism ” Stern wrote of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany
“because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society everything they
dreaded seemed to spring from it the bourgeois life Manchesterism materialism parliament
and the parties the lack of political leadership.
Even more they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings.
Theirs was a resentment of loneliness their
one desire was for a new faith a new community
of believers a world with fixed standards and no doubts a new national religion that
would bind all Germans together.
All this liberalism denied.
Hence they hated liberalism blamed it for
making outcasts of them for uprooting them
from their imaginary past and from their faith.”
It turns out 45 years later that those who
truly hate us for our freedoms are not the
array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine -- the Vietnamese Cambodians
Afghanis Iraqis Iranians or even the Taliban
al-Qaida or ISIS.
They are the financiers bankers politicians
public intellectuals and pundits lawyers
journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools
who served as Matt Taibbi says as the guardians of the orthodoxy of neoliberalism and empire.
In the twilight phase of capitalism wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing.
It is created by manipulating the prices of
stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling
debt peonage on the public.
Our casino capitalism has merged with the actual gambling industry.
This is an economic model designed to prey on the desperate
-- young
men and women burdened by student loans underpaid
workers crushed by credit card debt and mortgages
bankrupt towns and cities forced to borrow to maintain
municipal services and sell off municipal assets from sewers and water treatment plants
to their parking authority to corporations.
Casino magnates such as Sheldon Adelson – who has advocated attacking Iran with nuclear
weapons -- and hedge fund managers such as Paul Singer – who buys distressed or defaulted
bonds at pennies on the dollar and then successfully
sues for full repayment --
which is how we trashed the Argentine economy
-- and Robert Mercer
add nothing of value to society.
They do not generate money but instead redistribute
it upwards to the 1 percent.
They use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rewrite laws and regulations and build
monopolies -- this is how the drug company
Mylan in the United States raised the price of an EpiPen used to
treat allergy reactions from $57 in 2007 to
They have given themselves the legal power
to carry out a tax boycott loot the
Treasury close factories and send the jobs overseas and gut social service programs.
These corporate mandarins are if we speak
in the language of God and country traitors.
They are parasites.
Financial speculation in 17th-century England
was a crime.
Speculators were hanged.
The heads of most of today’s banks and hedge funds and the executives of large corporations
such as Walmart and Gap that run sweatshop death traps for impoverished workers overseas
deserve prison far more than most of the poor students of color I teach within the prison
system people who never had a fair trial or a fair chance in life.
When a tiny cabal seizes power -- monarchist communist fascist or corporate -- it creates
a mafia economy and a mafia state.
Trump is not an anomaly.
He is the grotesque visage of our collapsed
democracy.
Trump and his coterie of billionaires generals half-wits Christian fascists criminals
racists and deviants
play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels.
The Snopes filled the power vacuum of the
decayed South and ruthlessly seized control
from the degenerated former slave-holding aristocratic elites.
Flem Snopes and his extended family -- which
includes a killer a pedophile a bigamist
an arsonist a mentally disabled man who copulates
with a cow and a relative who sells tickets
to witness the bestiality-- are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to
the highest level of the federal government.
“The usual reference to ‘amorality ’
while accurate is not sufficiently distinctive
and by itself does not allow us to place them as they should be placed in a historical
moment ” the critic Irving Howe wrote of
the Snopeses.
“Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards:
the creatures that emerge from the devastation
with the slime still upon their lips.”
“Let a world collapse in the South or Russia and there appear figures of coarse ambition
driving their way up from beneath the social
bottom men to whom moral claims are not so
much absurd as incomprehensible sons of bushwhackers
and muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking
over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force ” Howe wrote.
“They become presidents of local banks and
chairmen of party regional committees and
later a trifle slicked up they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo.
Scavengers without inhibition they need not
believe in the crumbling official code of
their society they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”
Trump and those around him believe in one truth.
Which is whatever they proclaim at the moment
although any such declaration may contradict what they said a few hours before.
They are possessed by one idea:
conflict.
They sanctify violence misogyny a disdain for empathy and the self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage.
These characteristics they insist are a sign of strength and virility.
Their highest aesthetic is militarism violence and war.
Without conflict without enemies real or imagined their ideological structures and their racism
collapse into a heap of contradictions and absurdities.
Christian fascists are the vanguard of
this emerging American fascism.
They ferret out facts and formulas that buttress their peculiar worldview and discard truths
that contradict their messianic delusions.
They mouth a few Biblical clichés to justify
bigotry homophobia chauvinism and repression.
It is propaganda masquerading as ideology.
These Christian fascists are singularly incurious.
They are linguistically culturally and historically
illiterate about the Muslim world and about
most other foreign cultures science and intellectual pursuits yet blithely write off one-fifth
of the world’s population – Muslims -- as
irredeemable and dismiss climate change as
a hoax.
The inability of white supremacists and Christian
fascists to recognize the humanity of others
springs from their spiritual and intellectual impoverishment.
They mistake bigotry for honesty. They mistake their ignorance for innocence.
They cannot separate fantasy from reality.
Such people are as author James Baldwin said
“moral monsters.”
Evil for them is embodied in the dehumanized other.
Once the human personification of evil is
eradicated evil itself is supposed to disappear.
Except of course that as soon as one group of human beings is annihilated another human
embodiment of evil rises to take its place.
The Nazis began with Jews.
Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims and the undocumented.
History has shown where they will go from
here.
“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus ” the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis writer said.
“Nationalism is the line of least resistance
the easy way.
The nationalist is untroubled he knows or
thinks he knows what his values are
that’s to say national that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to ethical
and political he is not interested in others they are no concern of his hell -- it’s
other people other nations another tribe.
They don’t even need investigating.
The nationalist sees other people in his own images -- as nationalists.”
Like all utopians these people believe that their agenda
is being implemented for our benefit.
They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno
at the stake and who argued that eradicating
heretics does them a favor because it saves
them from their own damnation.
It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with people who view reality through the binary
lens of black and white -- us and them.
They do not recognize the right of dissent.
Dissent is at best obstruction and probably treason.
Fanatics in power always become inquisitors.
Trump has no coherent belief system or coherent ideology.
but his ideological vacuum is being filled -- by
the Christian Right.
What comes next history has shown will not be pleasant.
A corrupt and inept ruling elite backed by
the organs of state security and law enforcement
will transform workers into serfs.
The most benign dissent will be criminalized.
The ravaging of the ecosystem will propel
us ever closer towards extinction.
Hate talk will as stagnation and decay continue call for attacks against Muslims undocumented
workers African-Americans feminists intellectuals
artist dissidents all of whom will be
scapegoated for the country’s decline.
Magical thinking will dominate our airwaves
and be taught in our public schools.
Art and culture will be degraded to nationalist kitsch.
All the cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to view the world from the perspective
of the other that foster empathy understanding and compassion will be replaced by a grotesque
and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.
The language of racism bigotry misogyny
and homophobia will infect our national discourse.
Reality and a discourse based on verifiable fact and truth is under assault.
Verbal confusion reigns.
Truth and illusion have merged.
Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening.
We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Revealed lies are answered with new lies.
The rational is countered with the irrational.
Cognitive dissonance prevails.
We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt.
Tens of millions of Americans especially
women undocumented workers Muslims and African-Americans
suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator.
All this is by design.
Demagogues always infect the governed with
their own psychosis.
The lies pour daily out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election
victory was a landslide.
He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history.
3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants
voted illegally.
Climate change is a hoax.
Vaccines cause autism.
Immigrants are carriers of “tremendous infectious
disease.”
The election was rigged—until it wasn’t.
We don’t know “who really knocked down”
the World Trade Center.
Torture works.
Mexico will pay for the wall.
America will be great again.
Trump a 70-year-old with orange-tinted skin
and hair that Penn Jillette has likened to
“cotton candy made of piss ” is as Trump often reminds us “very good looking.”
He does not read.
He knows little of history politics law philosophy art or governance but insists
“my IQ is one of the highest -- and you all know it!
Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure
it’s not your fault.”
He goes on to say
of the mediocrities he has installed in his Cabinet that they have “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet
ever assembled.”
It is an avalanche of absurdities.
And this mendacity would be easier to repulse if the problem was solely embodied in Trump.
But even in the face of a rising despotism the Democratic Party and the liberal class refuses to denounce the
corporate forces that eviscerated our democracy impoverished the country and created Trump.
The neoliberal Trump demonizes Muslims undocumented workers and the media.
The neoliberal Democratic Party demonizes Vladimir Putin and FBI Director James Comey.
No one challenges corporate power.
The warring elites pit alternative facts against
alternative facts.
All engage in demagoguery.
And we will I fear be condemned to despotism
by Trump and by the cowardice
and dishonesty of the liberal class.
The order for some employees of several federal agencies including the Environmental Protection
Agency the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research service the National Park Service
and the Department of Health and Human Services
to restrict or cease communication with the
press or members of Congress along with the attempt to impose 10-year felony convictions
on six reporters who covered the inauguration
protests is part of a campaign to marginalize
reality itself and replace it with fantasy.
Facts for demagogues depend solely on those who have the power to create them.
And the goal of the Trump administration is to
create an artificial consistency
an absorbing and endless spectacle
that advances its warped perception of the world.
It must as it has day after day dominate our lives as it reconfigures reality.
Fantastic and absurd assertions are treated seriously a process that over time erodes the power of the rational.
“Before they seize power and establish a
world according to their doctrines totalitarian
movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the
human mind than reality itself in which
through sheer imagination uprooted masses
can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences
deal to human beings and their expectations ” Hannah Arendt wrote.
“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda
-- before the movements have the power to
drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing by the slightest reality the gruesome quiet
of an entirely imaginary world -- lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the
real world.”
This assault on fact on truth on reality is empowered
by the loss of credibility of our democratic institutions and it has thrown the country into an existential
as well as an economic crisis.
The courts universities and press are no longer trusted by tens of millions of Americans
who correctly see them as organs of the corporate
elites.
These institutions are traditionally the mechanisms
by which a society is able to unmask the lies
of the powerful critique ruling ideologies and promote justice.
Because Americans have been bitterly betrayed
by their institutions the Trump regime can
attack the press as the “opposition party ” threaten to cut off university funding taunt
a federal jurist as a “so-called judge” and denounce a court order as “outrageous.”
The decay of democratic institutions is the prerequisite for the rise of authoritarian
or fascist regimes.
This decay has given credibility to a pathological liar.
The Trump administration according to an Emerson College poll is considered by 49
percent of registered voters to be truthful
while the media are considered truthful by
only 39 percent of registered voters.
Once American democratic institutions no longer function once large sectors of the public
believe as Trump says that the press is “the enemy of the American people ” reality
becomes whatever absurdity the White House issues.
Most of the rules of democracy are unwritten.
These rules determine public comportment and
ensure respect for democratic norms procedures
and institutions.
Trump has to the delight of his supporters rejected this political and cultural etiquette.
Arendt noted that when democratic institutions
collapse it is “easier to accept patently
absurd propositions than the old truths which
have become pious banalities.”
The chatter of the liberal ruling elites about
our democracy is itself an absurdity.
“Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories ”
she wrote infects political discourse.
This vulgarity is “mistaken for courage
and a new style of life.”
Trump’s theatricality works.
He forces the press and the public to repeat his lies inadvertently giving them credibility.
He is always moving.
He is always on display.
He has no fixed belief system.
Trump as he consolidates power and adopts the ideology of the Christian right
seamlessly forges the magical thinking of the Christian right with his own magical thinking.
Idiocy self-delusion megalomania fantasy and government repression will come wrapped
in images of the Christian cross and the American
flag.
The corporate state hostile or indifferent to the plight of the citizens has no emotional pull among the public. It has long presented political candidates as celebrities. Campaigns eschew issues to make people feel good about candidates and themselves. Ideas are irrelevant. Emotional euphoria is paramount. The voter is only a prop in the political theater. Politics is anti-politics. It is reality television.
Trump proved better at this game than his opponents. It is a game in which fact and knowledge do
not matter.
Politicians like celebrities are manufactured personalities.
Reality is what you create. Entertainment is paramount. The skillful manipulation of emotion is confused with knowledge. We were conditioned for a Trump. The lies create a climate in which everyone is assumed to be lying.
The truth becomes suspect and obscured.
Narratives begin to be believed not because
they are true or even sound true but because
they are emotionally appealing.
The aim of systematic lying as Arendt wrote is the “transformation of human nature itself.” The lies eventually foster somnambulism among a population that surrenders to the magical thinking and ceases to care. It checks out. It becomes cynical. It only asks to be entertained and given a
vent for its frustration and rage.
Demagogues produce enemies the way a magician
pulls rabbits out of a hat.
They wage constant battles against nonexistent dangers rapidly replacing one after the other to keep the rhetoric at a fever pitch. “Practically speaking the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy so that he can with some plausibility go out and kill him
in self-defense ” Arendt wrote.
“This certainly is a little crude but it
works -- as everybody will know who has
watched how certain successful careerists
eliminate competitors.”
To recover our mental balance we must respond to Trump the way victims of trauma respond to abuse. We must build communities where we can find understanding and solidarity. We must allow ourselves to mourn. We must name the psychosis that afflicts us.
We must carry out acts of civil disobedience and steadfast defiance to re-empower others
and ourselves.
We must fend off the madness and engage in
dialogues based on truth literacy empathy and reality. We must invest more time in activities such as finding solace in nature or focusing on music theater literature art and even worship -- activities that hold the capacity for renewal and transcendence.
This is the only way we will remain psychologically
whole.
Building an outer shell or attempting to hide will exacerbate our psychological distress
and depression. We cannot as the Democratic Party appears to be doing hope that the 2018 or 2020 elections will solve our dilemma. These reactionary forces which have been plotting for four decades for this moment extend far beyond the Trump White House. Their tentacles reach across national borders meaning no country including Canada is immune.
As the state increases the levels of violence against nonviolent dissent we must never respond
with violence. The use of violence including property destruction and taunting the police is a gift to the security and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression.
The corporate state understands and welcomes
the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flag-burning rock-throwing angry mob that embraces violence we will be easily crushed. We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the structures of power including the police.
When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice it exposes
the weakness of the state.
It delegitimizes those in power.
It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that as I witnessed in the revolutions in Eastern Europe paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held marches in Birmingham Ala. rather than Albany Ga. because he
knew Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner
“Bull” Connor would overreact and expose
the city’s racist structures.
The acts of resistance -- including the massive
street protests the day after the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on Muslims the Department of Energy’s refusal to give the Trump administration a of employees that worked on climate change acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State Department staff members’ signing of a memo opposing the immigration restrictions
-- terrify those around Trump.
We have the power to make any country ungovernable.
But we do not have much time. Corporate power is global It will make it harder and harder to organize get into the streets to carry out the nationwide strikes including within the federal bureaucracy. And this resistance must also be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist society. Because the enemy is in the end not Trump or Bannon it is corporate power.
And if we do not dismantle corporate power we will never stop fascism’s seduction of the white working class and unemployed. Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed.
So should we. Hope comes from the numerous protests that have been mounted in the streets at town halls led by First Nations people held by members of Congress and at flash points such as Standing Rock.
It may also come from the 2.500 million civil servants within the U.S. federal government if a significant number refuse to cooperate. “The new president is clearly aware of the power wielded by civil servants who swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution not to any president or administration ” We must engage in these battles on the local
and the national level.
We must in our own community mobilize to prevent the deportation of undocumented workers the evictions from homes of the unemployed those with disabilities the elderly or those living on small fixed incomes. The reclaiming of our democracy will only happen only when we make our physical presence felt in public spaces. We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions -- the press labor third parties civic and church groups public broadcasting well-funded public universities that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements.
They did so imperfectly.
They provided only enough reforms to save
the capitalist system from widespread unrest
or with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s from revolution. They never addressed white supremacy and institutional racism misogyny or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working men and women. These liberal institutions exist now only in name. They are props in the democratic facade.
There are as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote no institutions certainly left in
America that can authentically be called democratic.
We will have to build new radical movements and most importantly new parallel institutions that challenge the hegemony of corporate power. It will not be easy. It will take time. We must not be seduced by foundation money and grants from established institutions that blunt the radical restructuring of society Trusting in the system to carry out reform and
wrest back our democracy ensures our enslavement. We will have to pit power against power. We will have to defy the rules. We cannot be predictable. We must disrupt the machinery of governance. And none of this will come by forming flash mobs on the Internet. It will come by building real and enduring relationships within our communities the old
way – person by person.
It will come when we take time to listen.
And we have to surprise those in authority. And these kinds of protests – not the choreographed boutique activism where you stay within free a free space area or are politely taken to sit in a jail cell for a few hours -- are greeted with real anger by the state. If we are to succeed we will have to make alliances with people and groups whose professed
political stances are different from ours and at times unpalatable to us.
We will have to shed our ideological purity.
The Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky argued that the ideological rigidity of the left -- sometimes that can be epitomized in identity politics and political correctness -- effectively severed it from the lives of working men and women. This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students led the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting and dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss Trump supporters as irredeemable racists
and bigots and ignore their legitimate feelings of betrayal and very real suffering.
Condemning all those who support Trump is political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He insisted that there were “no permanent enemies no permanent allies only permanent power.” We must also acknowledge our own failures on the left our elitism our arrogance our own misoygny our refusal
to root our politics locally in our communities.
Rosa Luxemburg understood that unless we first address the most pressing economic and physical
needs of the destitute – something understood by Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter
and Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution -- we will never gain credibility or build an effective resistance movement. Revolt surges up from below. Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power elites afraid do not succeed. The movements that opened up the democratic space in America -- the abolitionists the suffragists
the labor movement the communists socialists anarchists the civil rights and labor movements -- developed a critical mass and a militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice equality and democracy are just that. Only when power is threatened does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn’t have one. The days ahead will be dark and frightening.
But as Immanuel Kant reminded us “if justice perishes human life on earth has lost its
meaning.” The moment we rise up to defy radical evil we are victorious. The moment we stand alongside the oppressed and accept being treated like the oppressed we are victorious. The moment we hold up a flickering light in the darkness for others to see another narrative another way of being we are victorious.
The moment we reopen a public library or save a public school
or provide a sanctuary to a battered woman or affordable housing -- we are victorious. The moment we thwart the building of a pipeline or a fracking site we are victorious. And the moment those in power fear us we are victorious. If nothing else Let those who come after us say we tried.
Let them say that we kept hope alive.
Let our lives be an example of the empathy and justice that all authoritarian regimes
and dictatorships seek to eradicate. Let us love our neighbors as ourselves. Thank you.