Tag: history

Out of Africa: Apartheid, Wealth, and Trump’s Immigration Policy

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ICYMI, at the same time that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the pitiless sadists that comprise this administration are sending heavily militarized ICE operators to raid restaurants and conduct mass arrests of immigrant laborers, and dispatching masked agents in plainclothes to kidnap international graduate students right off the street (or from their homes) and disappear them into foreign gulags, they also did this:

They rolled out the red carpet for 54 white South Africans who were given preferential, expedited treatment and welcomed into the United States on the specious grounds that they are being persecuted in their home country.

ICYalsoMI, these people are Afrikaners, members of the privileged white minority that for close to a hundred years were central to the oppression of their country’s Black majority under apartheid, one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in the 20th century.

Does that mean each of them is culpable for their ancestors’ sins, or participated in that travesty themselves? Not in and of itself. (Though many are old enough to have grown up under apartheid, which only ended in 1990.) But they are certainly its beneficiaries, and the claim that they are now being persecuted because of their race is spurious at best. There is certainly no credible case to let these people jump the line when the US is turning away actual, legitimate refugees from many other countries, and worse, when legal permanent residents (and even some US citizens) are being rounded up and renditioned without even a whiff of due process, largely because of their skin color and/or political views.

Like Trump’s recent raft of pardons, his Afrikaner policy seems consciously designed to reward the very worst people possible. 

Reportedly, Elon Musk was a prime mover in this fiasco, whispering in Trump’s ear about a “white genocide”—a longstanding and self-serving canard among South African racists—and spreading other pro-Afrikaner disinformation. (That must have been in between snaking Stevie Miller’s wife and getting in a fistfight with Scott Bessent—probably while shrooming.)

For extra cruelty, Axios reports that the same day the administration welcomed those white South Africans into the US, it also announced it was ending deportation protections for refugees from Afghanistan, including many who served valiantly alongside US forces and who face lethal retaliation from their country’s new Taliban rulers should they be forced to return. So much for the GOP’s howling, sanctimonious outrage over Biden allegedly “abandoning” our allies.

But I bet you didn’t hear much about that in your local news, did you?

In fact, it gets even worse. At least one of the Afrikaners given political asylum has an ugly history of antisemitic social media posts…..at a time when the Turmp™ administration is on its high horse about allegedly battling antisemitism in the US. (Zero tolerance!) That horse-riding, of course, is really just transparently fake cover for attacking the independence of American universities, as well as the Democratic Party and others on the left full stop. Indeed, “antisemitism”—which the administration conveniently defines as any criticism of the Netanyahu government, especially over its atrocities in Gaza—is a specific reason cited for the arrest and deportation of people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Oztruk.

This Afrikaner episode is such a blatant example of this administration’s shameless, overt white nationalism that I can hardly wrap my head around it. Team Trump no longer even tries to hide it, as the crypto-racists of previous Republican regimes did: it’s right there in the open—highlighted, no less. Even as he knows that these actions will thrill his white supremacist base, Trump is all but rubbing it in the faces of the people of color who—incredibly—supported him in the last election. And in all our faces, of course.

Not long after the Afrikaners’ arrival in the US, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa paid a state visit to Washington and met with Trump in the Oval Office. It was—uh—awkward. During their meeting, Trump showed pictures of alleged black-on-white homicide in South Africa that were actually from fighting in Congo, and a video depicting a field of white crosses that he falsely claimed represented thousands of murdered white people. (Hold onto your hats: they didn’t.) Ramaphosa firmly rebuffed those lies, for all the good it did with his opposite number. Trump also bragged about his new Qatari jet—lying that it was a gift to the US Air Force, not to him personally—prompting Ramaphosa to say, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (“I wish you did,” Donald replied.)

A HISTORY LESSON AND THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

To better understand the context of this Afrikaner debacle, it’s necessary to know a little bit about the history of South Africa. Why does that matter, you ask? For the same reason history always matters: because its distortion is used to justify contemporary policies, including the howling injustice of giving these white Afrikaners special treatment in emigrating to the US.

Michael Meeropol, professor emeritus of economics at Western New England University, taught classes on the history of South Africa for many years. “I think very few people in our country understand South Africa at all,” he told me. “Most Americans can only see it through the lens of the Black/white situation in the United States—an American paradigm—which doesn’t map exactly on to that very complicated crisis.”

Meeropol notes that the US became a wealthy nation in large part because we had massive numbers of immigrants to build that wealth: ironic, given the repulsive xenophobia resurgent in right wing America today—with the aforementioned Mr. Miller as its poster boy—and the ass-backwards argument that immigrants hurt us economically. In reality, the very opposite is true. “That multicultural European immigration was the beginning of the American labor force that basically gave us our industrial development,” Meeropol says.

The situation in South Africa, however, was very different. “The Boer—the white settlers from the Netherlands who colonized South Africa, and who are the forefathers of its modern Afrikaner minority—didn’t have a labor force like that.”

Meeropol explains that, as far back at the late 1800s, the Boer had control of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth, but needed a large workforce to extract it. “Imagine a United States where the Cherokee and the Sioux and the Navajo and Comanche comprised 80% of the population, and the white minority—having conquered those peoples with the US cavalry—now had to figure out a way to make them work in mines and factories. That’s where apartheid came in.”

Meeropol describes the policies—including a punishing tax system—used by the Pretoria government to make it impossible for rural Black South Africans to continuing practicing subsistence agriculture, forcing them to move and go to work in the mines.

“The Natives Land Act of 1913 gave Blacks the right to own just 13% of the land within the four former colonies that comprised the Union of South Africa—a self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth—while the rest went to the white minority. That accelerated the destruction of subsistence agriculture. Then there were so-called ‘black spots’—Black-owned land—that were systematically taken from the people who had farmed that land for generations. That kind of expropriation went on as late as the 1970s.”

“Over the years, the rights of Blacks and Asians were further restricted and restricted and restricted until finally, with the victory of the National Party in 1948, apartheid was instituted, and white South Africa claimed they were setting up independent, self-governing African nations within the country who would have an economic relationship with the white regime. They called this ‘separate development,’ but it was absolute nonsense.”

“Famously, one of these was Sun City—aka Bophuthatswana—a short bus ride away from Johannesburg. If you were a white person and you wanted to see Blacks dancing with no clothes on, you could go to Sun City, and also gamble, which was illegal in South Africa. So there was an effort to boycott Sun City.”

Indeed: Miami Steve Van Zandt’s 1985 record “Sun City”—as in, “I ain’t gonna play”—credited to Artists United Against Apartheid, was one of the best all-star social consciousness-raising songs of that era. (Little Steven’s E Street bandleader—his boss, you might say—is on that record, too. See end of blog for more.)

DESTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT

Redressing this economic inequity was a chief objective of the post-apartheid government—and a daunting challenge.

“During the anti-apartheid struggle,” Meeropol explained, “the ANC was very clear about the need for redistribution of wealth, and as a result, was attacked as a revolutionary communist organization. In fact, early on in the era of apartheid, there was a law passed called the Suppression of Communism Act, which banned the ANC and the South African Communist Party and made them illegal organizations, from the 1950s until 1990.” But as part of the deal to avoid a “bloodbath,” which so many American conservatives direly predicted would ensue if apartheid came to an end—often as an excuse for preventing it from ending—the ANC agreed to an incredibly generous compromise.

“In the negotiations to end apartheid and minority rule, it was a conscious decision by the ANC to let the privileged white minority retain a vast amount of the wealth it had usurped over many decades. In other words, the white folks and everybody else who had property and wealth got to keep it. That concession was why the South African transition to Black majority rule in 1994 occurred with very little violence.”

“But Mandela and his South African Communist Party allies had made a pact with the devil. They basically said to the whites: you get to keep your riches, even though many of those riches were ill gotten gains from years of oppression. They said, we will work things out. And what they did is they started a program of affirmative action for Black Africans to fill the upper reaches of corporations, and of political appointments, so that there was a growing sliver of successful Black Africans—many of them politicians in the African National Congress who climbed the ladder with some government help. And of course, one of the arguments that white critics have is that affirmative action means there’s less opportunity for whites. If they weren’t born into wealth and just go to school and get jobs, they don’t have as easy a time achieving success because the government has these very, very strong affirmative action programs.”

This “reverse discrimination” argument is of course the same argument that we see in the United States from people who are opposed to affirmative action. Obviously, it’s incredibly ironic that whites in either country would complain about people getting preferential treatment on the basis of race when that is a chief reason for their own success, or the success of their ancestors which was passed on to them. And with their lobbying of the Trump administration to allow this special immigration to the US by white Afrikaners, these same people are again asking for preferential treatment and falsely casting themselves as victims, when in fact they are some of history’s greatest villains.

Needless to say, that false narrative dovetails beautifully with Trump’s own right wing agenda. The Bizarro World / DARVO strategy in which white people purport to be the real victims of racism feeds perfectly into Trumpism and the whole ethos of this retrograde presidential administration.

But some Afrikaners—like these recent migrants and their advocates—have taken complaints of anti-white discrimination even further, to the lie that the Black majority government of South Africa is carrying out (or at least condoning) a deliberate program of killing whites and taking their land. It’s South Africa’s version of the Big Lie, or the Weimar-era Dolchstoßlegende—the German “stab in the back” myth that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and World War II (which of course gave birth to the Biggest Lie of them all—Holocaust denial).

Here’s the truth. Despite the Trump administration’s best fearmongering efforts, the situation in South Africa is not at all analogous to what happened in Zimbabwe under the brutal dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, when white farms were in fact seized and their owners killed. When it comes to white farmers in South Africa, Meeropol notes that while there is potential danger because of the isolated areas in which their farms are located, “there’s very little interest on the part of the people who live near the white farmers to harm them. Many of those neighbors are working for those farmers.”

“Yes, there have been examples of whites being killed,” says Meeropol, “but there are many, many more examples of Blacks being killed. The numbers are very, very clear. There is no higher rate of whites being murdered than Blacks—in fact, the other way around. The percentage of Blacks who are murdered is higher than the percentage of whites who are murdered.”

But that has not stopped a subset of Afrikaners from trying to spread that lie and exploit it.

As Meeropol points out, the lie is especially galling when the post-apartheid rulers of South Africa have gone out of their way to do the opposite, most prominently with the nation’s historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In fact, South Africa’s efforts at healing are often held up as a model of what the United States—eventually—could do or should do to recover from Trumpism, if and when that glorious post-Trumpist day arrives. (No wonder Donald hates it.)

“For Donald Trump to suggest that there is this is epidemic of revenge killings of whites is a calumny, it’s defamation, and it flies in the face of exactly what South Africa did to try to create a sense of reconciliation,” Meeropol says. “Did it work 100%? Of course not. But Trump is playing this unbelievably horrible racist card, and exposing that depends on people who know about South Africa spreading the word here in the US.”

THE SPIGOT AND THE TUB (NOT AN ENGLISH PUB)

You may have noticed that the injustice we are discussing hinges on the concept of wealth, which at first blush would seem very intuitive. But in truth, the topic suffers from a woeful lack of clarity in most public discourse. I confess to being quite ignorant about it myself, until I spent five years co-directing the new feature documentary Death & Taxes, with Justin Schein. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

“In South Africa, you have incredible wealth inequality,” Meeropol notes. “It’s just horrendous. But many people don’t really understand the difference between wealth and income.”

“Income is the flow that you get in a particular period of time. The analogy is: you turn on the bathtub faucet and, over an hour, how much comes out of that faucet? That’s income. The level of water in the tub is wealth. That’s the accumulation of assets for your entire life. So if you’ve had an income from the time you turned 21 that allowed you to save and invest as opposed to just spending every penny of it on living, then you accumulate wealth. And if there’s enough income so that you don’t have to spend it all on necessities, the water in the tub rises and rises and rises.”

“Now, the great thing about wealth is, if your income shuts off, wealth can be used to give you more income. If I have a house and I deed it to my kids, now they’ve got something they can borrow on, they can rent it out, they can sell it. That’s why wealth is the key to security, and why it’s so much more important than income. Income inequality can come and go. You lose your job, your income goes to zero, and you’re in trouble. But if you have a significant amount of wealth, you can ride it out while you wait for your next job. It’s almost as simple as that.”

“And losing wealth takes time. If the water in the bathtub is pretty full, and all of a sudden the stopper is pulled out, that draining takes time. Three generations of very rich kids might squander grandpa’s money, but it could take them their entire lifetimes to do it.”

“So wealth increases security, it increases the ability to get more income, and—most significantly—it creates political power because people can use their wealth to influence politicians. The most obvious example, of course, is Elon Musk, who took the wealth that he had accumulated and spent a tremendous amount of it supporting Trump and other Republicans.” (The best estimate of Musk’s contribution is about $288 million dollars.) “I’m not so sure, but I wonder if you take Elon Musk out of the equation, whether Trump actually wins in 2024. He might very well have, because of certain issues related to policy and inflation. But Musk certainly made it easier.”

Similarly, Musk’s fellow billionaire tech bro Peter Thiel got J.D. Vance into the US Senate with a $15 million contribution to his campaign in 2022, the largest single donation to a Senate campaign at the time. (Not counting Mehmet Oz’s self-funded campaign to the tune of $27 million of his own money in a failed effort to win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, a state he did not live in.) Musk, Thiel ,and their tech friends then convinced Trump to make Vance his running mate in ‘24.

“And of course Musk is South African and grew up under apartheid, emigrating before it ended, and he has been whispering in Trump’s ear about these terrible things that are allegedly happening to whites in South Africa.” (Worth noting: although he was German born, Thiel also lived in South Africa as a young child.)

Of course, now it looks like Elon’s days as a Trump whisperer are over.

LONESOME JUBILEE

Wealth inequality, inextricably connected to (and turbocharged by) systemic racism, is therefore at the core of South Africa’s troubles—and of the United States’s as well. Meeropol:

“The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who believed in free markets, argued that even if everybody is using their God-given talents and developing income and working in the marketplace and getting jobs, etc., there are going to be some inequalities that develop. So in order to make sure that people get a fresh start every generation, there needs to be a ‘jubilee’ where we redistribute wealth so that people start with a level playing field. Obviously this was a theoretical thing that never went anywhere because the people with money had the power to say ‘not on your life.’ But that idea comes from traditional laissez faire economics.”

Wealth is like speech. (In fact, wealth is speech, according to Citizens United.) In principle, the idea of an unfettered ability to accumulate wealth and pass it on to your children, like pure absolutist free speech, makes a certain kind of appealing intellectual sense…..but it’s so warping to democracy that we have to have common sense restrictions on it. Chief among those restrictions is taxation, which, as Prof. Darrick Hamilton of the New School argues, goes far beyond mere revenue collection to a reflection of our national values and priorities and a strategic direction of national resources. The big question, Hamilton asks, is for whom?

“Obviously, if you start with a tremendous amount of wealth inequality, it’s going to perpetuate itself,” Meeropol says. “And that is why, for instance, a wealth tax not only raises money, but also reduces the ability of wealth to perpetuate itself in such a dramatic way. But when I would tell my students that, of course, a lot of them would say, ‘I don’t know about that. I’d like to be wealthy someday’.”

Meeropol notes that the highly successful American economy of the 1950s and 1960s was also a time of extremely high marginal tax rates by contemporary standards—as high as 91% on the richest citizens at one point under Eisenhower. (Marginal referring to the rate paid on the highest dollar of income after deductions and exemptions.) More typically, it was around 70% in that era. JFK, a Democrat I would remind you, is actually the president who later lowered those rates.

And did those tax rates destroy innovation and investment and prosperity, as conservatives consistently claim when such policies are proposed today? Quite the contrary. The economy boomed, as a prosperous middle class formed. We can call that “demand side economics,” rather than “supply side,” in that it was bottom-up in nature, driven by the creation of a large chunk of ordinary people who can afford to buy consumer goods, not just a small sliver of ultra-wealthy at the top.

“During the time that the top rate was 70%, the economy did great,” says Meeropol. “And it’s not that rich people didn’t get rich. They did. We just didn’t have the same kind of unbelievable increase in inequality that we’ve seen since the early 1980s with Reagan’s policies, and continuing right up through the first Trump term. And it’s only going to exacerbate now because the 2017 tax cuts for the richest Americans are likely to be made permanent. And the thing that’s so disgusting about it is that many of the painful cuts to services have been postponed, so nobody’s going to feel that between now and November 2028. So they think they can get away with it.”

So what does that have to do with racist South Africans? Everything. Because apartheid-era South Africa was a textbook example of self-perpetuating, extreme wealth inequality, and how hard it is to redress even decades after it formally comes to an end. That it was racially based only makes it worse. South Africa’s failure to address centuries of oppression and inequality through workable, common sense measures—including affirmative action, baby bonds, tax policy, reasonable wealth redistribution that did not create resentment and instability, and other ways to build wealth for those who had none—is part of why it has the problems it has today. And the same can be said of the United States.

WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE

The Afrikaner sense of entitlement is deep in its cultural marrow. And you’ll be shocked to hear that it is religious in origin. (How often does that happen????)

Meeropol: “To this day Afrikaners celebrate what they call the Battle of Blood River, when—in their mythology—God wiped out these heathen Zulu. They call it the Day of the Covenant, indicating that they’re God’s chosen people, just like the children of Israel who were allowed to go into Canaan while the Canaanites were wiped out by God. They said that the Black South Africans were descended from Ham, the child of Noah who disrespected his father by seeing him naked and drunk in the tent, and as a result the sons of Ham will be cursed forever. They will be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.” (Joshua 9:21.)

“The white South Africans said, ‘Those people were put here by God to serve us. That’s why God sent us the kaffirs’—that’s the South African version of the n-word in the US. It’s actually an Arabic word that means infidel.” (Worth noting: Pete Hegseth has the word kaffir, in Arabic, tattooed on his right arm. Also, in case you missed it, Pete Hegseth is the United States Secretary of Defense.)

Trump’s willingness to help this group of privileged white people, with their long and ugly history, and at the same time screw over Black and brown people, could hardly be more blatant, even in defiance of ideology, partisanship, and reason full stop. “He doesn’t want to let in people from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela,” says Meeropol, “even though many of those Venezuelans were opposed to the left wing Chavez regime. You would think that the United States want to give them political asylum, just as we did for so many Cubans.”

When you see this happening, particularly for a person of color who maybe even voted for Trump, how can you deny the inherent racism? Could it possibly give some of those folks buyers’ remorse? Maybe. (For some Trump supporters, of course, it’s a feature not a bug.) Then again, for tens of millions of Americans, not even trying to overthrow the government was enough to turn them against Trump, so I don’t imagine this will. But it does seem to me that the South African travesty, the Qatari jet, and the reverse Robin Hoodery of the budget bill are the kinds of things that are so brazen and so shameless that for at least some Americans, they have to be having some cumulative effect. I have to believe that in order to get up every morning and go on.

You just could not make it up. If a writer scripted this in a movie, the studio would say “No, not a chance—nobody would believe it.” But a lot of things are happening in America today that, a few years ago, no one would have believed.

********

Photo: Pro-Trump South Africans in hats reading “Make Afrikaners Great Again,” outside the US Embassy in Pretoria, February 2025. Credit: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

“Sun City,” written by Steven Van Zandt, produced by Van Zandt and Arthur Baker. Featuring Little Steven, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, DJ Kool Herc, Melle Mel, The Fat Boys, Rubén Blades, Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Ringo and his son Zak, Lou Reed, Run-DMC, Peter Gabriel, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Darlene Love, Bobby Womack, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Bono, George Clinton, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Peter Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, Michael Monroe, Peter Garrett, Ron Carter, Ray Barretto, Gil Scott-Heron, Kashif, Nona Hendryx, Pete Townshend, Pat Benatar, Clarence Clemons, Stiv Bators, and Joey Ramone.

Check it out—it has aged WAY better than any other celebrity-studded charity anthem of the Eighties (except maybe “Tears Are Not Enough”—sadly not the ABC song, but the product of an all-star lineup of Canadian rock stars calling themselves Northern Lights).

The Limits of Tyrants

Published on by thekingsnecktie4 Comments

Last week’s blog post, “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror,” was a form of immediate first aid for the psychic wound of Election Day and the appalling surrender of the American people to a fascist candidate……and not just any old fascist candidate, but one who had already been in office and shown us very clearly who he is and how bad he intends to be.

Now we move out of the teeth-gnashing phase of acknowledging what we just did to ourselves, and on to the struggle ahead.

In the coming weeks I will get into the nuts and bolts of what I believe the Democratic opposition in Congress can do, what blue state governments can do, what the courts can do, what the press can do, what civil servants and businesses and healthcare workers and teachers and soldiers and cops and artists can do….and above all, what all of us ordinary citizens can do. Much of that material will be drawn from my book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, a handbook for surviving a second Trump administration that I published last summer and hoped would not be needed. (Buy it please and I’ll stop this pledge drive and send you a tote bag.)

But first we need the philosophical underpinning for this whole endeavor. To crib a famous line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “Assembly of Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind.”

So does fighting homegrown autocracy.

FREDDY GET IT READY

(From Resisting the Right, Chapter 9, with updates)

We are often regaled with Frederick Douglass’s famous line from 1857, that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But it’s well worth considering the longer quote, and the context of that maxim:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The first thing to understand, then, is that the source of all political power, even in the most repressive police state, is the consent of the people.

Autocrats want you to be discouraged. Instilling a sense of apathy and resignation is one of their favorite and most frequently reached for tricks, as they prefer a public that believes it has no power to improve its lot and can’t change things. But we do and we can—and the ferocity of their gaslighting is evidence of that power and how much they fear it. Human history is thick with examples, even with regimes far more brutal than we have yet faced in the United States.

“Ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives,” writes Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor of Northwestern University. “But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence.” In fact, even in the best of circumstances, when American democracy is functioning reasonably well, change typically comes from forces outside the government putting pressure on it—which is to say, from the people. Now that a truly repressive, retrograde right-wing government is coming to power in the US, the onus will shift even more in that direction.

But we need not think of this resistance as some gargantuan political thing, intimidating in its size and scope. The Filipina activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, and autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of regular folks like you and me. Our starting point is the simplest of all, which is the very way we think about what we are doing.

The psychological preparation for the pro-democracy struggle requires full-time vigilance to the ways that autocracy demands our complicity.

In the very first chapter of his slim but seminal 2017 book, On Tyranny, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder advises us: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” This impulse to bend voluntarily to an oppressive regime is what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience,” and need not even take the form of active support. It can be simple apathy, and a Niemöllerian indifference to the sound of marching boots and knocks on neighbors’ doors, and to the even almost-inaudible sound of democratic norms falling one by one.

A perfect example—which caused many observers to specifically cite Snyder’s rule number one—was Jeff Bezos’s craven decision, of his own free will, to block a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by The Washington Post, which he owns. If the world’s richest man (or at least one of the top two, depending on the day) is that willing to bend the knee to Trump before he was even elected, and without even being pressured to do so, it tells you how right Snyder is. (Bezos’s wealth reportedly grew by $7.1 billion dollars in the 24 hours after Trump won the race.)

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” wrote the political scientist Gene Sharp in his three-volume magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), calling the submission of the citizenry ”the most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist.” The citizens of free countries give their obedience gladly, while those living under despotic regimes give it less so. But they give it nonetheless:

To say that every government depends on consent of the people does not, of course, mean that the subjects of all rulers prefer the established order to any other which might be created. They may consent because they positively approve of it—but they may also consent because they are unwilling to pay the price for the refusal of consent….The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

In other words, repression only works when the people are cowed by it.

Sharp then asks a bold question: What happens if the people refuse to accept political oppressors—foreign or domestic—as their masters? His conclusion is that “noncooperation and defiance by subjects, at least under certain conditions,” has the power to thwart those rulers, and even destroy them.

“If this is true,” Sharp asks, “then why have people not long since abolished oppression, tyranny, and exploitation?” The answer, primarily, is that “The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power”—and tyrants have every reason to keep them from so doing.

As we have just observed, inculcating a sense of resignation, hopelessness, and despair in the citizenry is the ruler’s greatest tool. Sharp goes on to cite the South African philosopher Errol E. Harris that, consequently, a public subjected to despotism “become[s] its accomplices at the same time as they become its victims. If sufficient people understood this and really knew what they were about and how to go about it, they could ensure that government would never be tyrannical.”

“A nation gets the government it deserves,” Harris wrote. That is not to blame the victim or to allege weakness, only to say that a despotic regime can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be). That is bitter pill for any nation to swallow, but it can also be inverted. If it is only the complicity of the ruled that enables their oppression, that acquiescence can also be withdrawn. Therefore, it is within the power of the oppressed to be the means of their own salvation. 

It is this understanding that is central to any American defiance of an autocratic right-wing regime that seems likely to arise under Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

NEW AND IMPROVED: THE WHEEL

Fortunately, in summoning a movement to oppose an autocratic regime in the United States, it is not necessary for us to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Models abound.

In Poland, a trade union born in a shipyard—illegal at first, in that totalitarian country—grew into a broad antiauthoritarian movement that eventually forced free elections in which its leader was chosen as the country’s president. In the Philippines, the flagrantly corrupt Marcos regime, which robbed the country blind during its twenty-one-year reign, instituted martial law, stole elections, and even murdered political opponents like Benigno Aquino, was finally brought down by the People Power movement led by Aquino’s widow, Corazon. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress led a decades-long campaign to end apartheid and eject the white minority government, a campaign that saw Mandela himself imprisoned for twenty-seven years. That imprisonment was a particular object lesson in the weak spots of autocracy, as Pretoria’s ham-handed brutality turned Mandela into a global hero, shaming the regime and bringing international pressure onto it. (Putin may have made that exact mistake with Alexei Navalny).

And these are but a handful of prominent case studies. In recent decades, surely the most dramatic example of popular unrest leading to political change was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989—35 years ago this past weekend—and the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet empire in August 1991. In neighboring Czechoslovakia, a peaceful movement of students and activists led to the Velvet Revolution that ended four decades of communist rule in favor of liberal democracy under the playwright/dissident Vaclav Havel. Similar bloodless revolutions took place in other former Warsaw Pact countries.

Notably, Havel, following Gandhi’s example, aimed his activism not at overthrowing the regime but at “immediate changes in daily life….an unshakable commitment to achieving modest, concrete goals on the local level,” as Jonathan Schell writes in his 2003 book The Unconquerable World. These measures included financial aid to dissidents at odds with the authorities and the families of jailed workers; an underground press; and a clandestine university teaching uncensored material in private homes. Schell recounts how Havel, along with fellow activists like Gyorgy Konrad in Hungary and Adam Michnik in Poland, “lowered their field glasses from the remote heights of state power and turned their gazes to the life immediately around them…..Their new rule of thumb was to act not against the government but for society—and then to defend the accomplishments.”

In this country, there is no better example of a successful pro-democracy struggle than the Civil Rights Movement, itself the heir to the abolitionist movement that predates even the founding of the US.

Shall we quibble with the word “successful”? Racism remains a pox on our country, and discrimination, bigotry, police brutality, economic injustice, and other longstanding ills continue to roil the nation. But that in no way minimizes the achievements of the Black liberation movement, which carries on even now into the continuing campaign against racism and poverty led by successors to Dr. King, like the Rev. William Barber II.

Malcolm Gladwell notes that the Civil Rights Movement was a highly disciplined, rigidly organized hierarchical endeavor with centralized control, distinguished by formal planning, training of volunteers, and reconnaissance of locations and targets, under the auspices of groups like the NAACP, SNCC, and SCLC. In the same way that Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to give up her seat was no impulsive act but a carefully planned and deliberate operation, the entire movement was similarly strategic, targeted with near-military precision at very specific objectives.

Subsequent movements in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ’80s proved again the power of the people as a political force. The anti–Vietnam War movement, which galvanized millions across the country, undeniably helped bring significant pressure to bear on successive administrations to end its war in Southeast Asia. Anti-war fervor helped drive LBJ out of the 1968 presidential race, and—in a bitter irony—helped Nixon take his place, only to continue the war for another five futile years at a cost of 21,000 additional American dead and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. But ultimately even he had to bend to public clamor, accelerated by the revelations of Daniel Ellsberg.

The nuclear freeze movement played a substantive role in forcing the US to scale back the madness of the arms race and helped prompt landmark nonproliferation treaties in the Reagan era, while the anti-apartheid movement shamed universities and other organizations into divesting from financial interests in South Africa and helped spur the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, enacted over Reagan’s veto by a Republican-controlled Senate.

I’ll repeat that. A Republican-controlled Senate.

And these are not outliers. Throughout its history, American life has been shaped by determined dissident movements. The suffrage movement of the early 20th century—which itself grew out of the abolitionist movement of the previous century—got women the vote, a struggle that continues with the ongoing fight for equal pay, the fight against workplace discrimination and harassment, the fight for reproductive justice, and in the struggle of #MeToo. The labor union movement put an end to the most exploitative working conditions of American industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and—for a time—played a major role in remaking American life and reining in naked capitalism. The gay rights movement made astounding gains over a relatively brief period on behalf of a constituency that has been among the most reviled and persecuted in human history and remains so in large parts of the world.

But how, you ask, can we mobilize enough Americans to make this happen in the current situation? It might not be as tall an order as it seems.

We hear about the Three Percenters, a right wing militia akin to the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys whose name derives from the unproven claim that only 3% of American colonists fought against the British. (Self-flattering cosplay as Revolutionary War figures is big in MAGA World.) But that idea goes both ways. In Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2010), the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan surveyed 323 resistance movements over the 106 years from 1900–2006. The authors’ research caused them to formulate the “3.5% rule,” which sets that number as the threshold of citizen participation necessary for a resistance movement to succeed. In their study, all the movements that met that standard were nonviolent.

Three and a half percent of the adult US population is about nine million people, the same number of people who bought Matchbox 20’s 1996 album Yourself or Someone Like You. That seems a highly achievable number for an anti-MAGA, pro-democracy campaign in America should a second Trump regime come to power. We’re not talking about Thriller here.

DOWN TO THE WELL

What do all these pro-democracy movements have in common? All were external to the elected government (though some had allies within it, on the opposition side), and all succeeded by means of a sustained campaign that swayed public opinion to its side. That is because all political struggle is ultimately psychological in nature.

Jon Else, the MacArthur-winning filmmaker and retired UC Berkeley journalism professor, was a student volunteer in Mississippi in 1964 and ‘65—what he calls a “lowest level pavement pounder” in SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), founded by Ella Baker, Julian Bond, and others. In that role, he was also on the steps of the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, when the racist sheriff Jim Clark went berserk in front of the national press. Else told me that it was the public nature of the Civil Rights Movement that gave their actions much of their power. They were informational acts aimed at galvanizing attention and changing minds, or what Sharp calls “political jiu-jitsu.”

“With SNCC and SCLC, we were always aiming at the folks in power who could actually change the laws,” Else told me. “Getting that mad dog sheriff to attack the demonstrators with dogs in Birmingham, or flushing the lynch mobs out of the back alleys in Mississippi—that was not designed for white folks in Alabama or Mississippi. It was designed for members of Congress. Because we were operating at a time when Congress and the executive were actually fairly functional, and you could actually shame Republican lawmakers into seeing what a bald-faced injustice was going on right in their backyard and doing something about it. It was all about finding the most effective targets with power high up in Washington.”

In the contemporary moment, in resisting the second Trump regime, shaming Congress into action is not in play. But changing the minds of our fellow Americans is the pressure point at which we must aim. Clearly, the verdict of the American people last Tuesday suggests that there is work to be done there; I will get into that challenge in detail in the coming weeks. But the important thing to remember is that perception is the fulcrum of political power, and that is not a matter of formal de jure authority, but of who controls the narrative. An autocracy maintains power only so long as it does so, and especially when it succeeds in making the resistance quit out of despair when its own struggle feels unwinnable.

Therefore, at its most basic, defeating Trumpism and getting a proper small “d” democratic government back in power will require winning the proverbial battle for hearts and minds. Some might say that sounds too ephemeral and insufficiently concrete….but they’re wrong. Others will say it’s not possible. They are also wrong. All the nuts and bolts stuff we have to do springs from that strategic objective.

“If there’s one thing that I feel very certain about,” Jon Else told me, “it’s that you have to figure out why you’re doing any particular action. Organizing movements and actions will always have an effect for the people who are involved. It gives people a sense of agency, which they may otherwise be missing. But is it actually gonna change things? Does that matter to you? Is it gonna change things now? Is it gonna change things a year from now, or ten years from now?”

“When we were in Mississippi in the summer of ’64, trying to mount a challenge to the segregated all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey came up with a compromise that was unacceptable to the folks who’d risked their lives for this effort. But getting Fannie Lou Hamer on national television that summer saying, ‘Is this America?’ set the stage in many ways for the Voting Rights Act, which followed only a year later. So the victory is not always right in front of you.”

In the coming weeks, this blog will continue to post other excerpts from Resisting the Right along with new material related to the pro-democracy struggle in which America is now joined. That is a well that is in no danger of running dry. But as we get into those specifics, let’s never lose sight of this bedrock principle: even in an autocracy, power derives from a mandate of the people. That is the one thing that is within our control, and even a small number of us can tip that balance.

A Man, a Plan, a Cabal

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

Donald Trump has a lot of trouble keeping secrets.

He feels compelled to deliver them on a silver platter to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister right in the Oval Office, to wave them around in front of the Japanese prime minister over dinner, to brag about them to an Australian businessman, and even to steal them and illegally stash them in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. His terrible sense of OPSEC was on display again the other night at his Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden when he bragged that he and Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have a “secret,” presumably having to do with winning the election.

Memo to Donald: It’s not a secret if you go around telling the whole country about it.

Nevertheless, this Nixon-like secret plan has me very worried.

Actually that is a disservice to Trump, because unlike Nixon, I think he really does have a plan, even if it’s not very secret, and even if it’s destructive to the country—in installing a homegrown autocratic right wing regime—rather than constructive, like an end to the Vietnam war five years earlier than it actually did end.

So what is this not-so-secret? We dunno, exactly. Maybe Don and Mike like to dress up like French maids, sing Edith Piaf songs, and engage in the vice anglais. But it seems more likely that the “secret” is this:

That Trump, Johnson, various Republican governors and state legislatures, and possibly the Supreme Court (indirectly) could be colluding to deliver the upcoming election to the Donald irrespective of the results of the vote, and in a very specific way that involves something called a “contingent election.”

SECRETS AND LIES (AND THEN MORE LIES)

I have written about GOP election-stealing schemes before, in broad terms, but what we are talking about now is more specific.

For some time now Trump has been going around openly saying that he doesn’t need votes to win. I’m not a poker player (I like Rummikub), but that’s a tell and a half. He said it again at the Garden, while looking in Mike Johnson’s direction: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact.” Then he actually pointed at Johnson, adding, “He and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Asked later about the cryptic remarks, Johnson told the press, nearly as cryptically: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared—and I don’t intend to share this one.” So that’s actually a fucking confirmation of Trump’s remarks, which he might otherwise have dismissed as just rhetoric. But he didn’t.

Later, Johnson elaborated a little, but not much, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania: “It’s nothing scandalous, but we’re having a ball with this. The media, their heads are exploding.” Given Republicans’ demonstrable disregard for what is genuinely “scandalous,” that doesn’t reassure me either. (He went on to claim, nonsensically, the “secret” remark was merely a get-out-the-vote strategy.)

Basically, these assholes are proud that they plan to steal the election.

Writing in The Nation, the great Elie Mystal explains that a “contingent election” is one in which no candidate gets the requisite majority of electoral votes, causing the decision to be thrown into the House, where it’s settled by a straight-up state-by-state vote. Since the GOP controls 26 of the 50 states, the presumption is that this Republican majority would then award the presidency to Trump. (And because I’m sure you’re wondering, even if the Democrats retake the House next week, that current GOP majority will remain in power until that new Congress is seated on January 3, which is after the presidential election would be settled by that chamber.)

But Mystal actually thinks Trump might be trying something even sneakier:

I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.

Nobody has tried this before, but Trump specializes in new presidential frontiers, doesn’t he? Like refusing to release his tax returns, or divest his business interests, or engage in a peaceful transfer of power. Elie again:

The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections. In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don’t even have to get “fake” electors submitted but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines.

All slates of electors are supposed to be certified by December 11, and those electors are supposed to vote by Christmas Day. So the Republicans don’t have to win, “they just have to stall.” If states are allowed to delay the certification of their results past the deadline, Team Trump’s lawyers will be in what Mystal calls a “heads I win, tails they lose” situation.

They’ll say either the unappointed electors don’t count toward the overall number, and Trump wins a majority of the electors present, or they’ll say the electors not present should count toward the overall number, which means no candidate has achieved a majority of electors and the election must be decided by the House.

Mystal notes that “There are currently 27 states with Republican state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. There are currently 26 Republican governors running states like Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia. If some of these people are able to delay certification past the deadline, the ‘whole number of Electors appointed’ would be diminished, lowering the number of electors Trump would need to hold a majority.”

If the race is close enough, a single state—say, Wisconsin, with its ten electors—could trigger this claim simply by not submitting its slate before the December 11 deadline. “In this scenario, the new total number of electors becomes 528, not 538—and Trump needs only 264 electoral votes to ‘win.’ If you take Wisconsin and Nevada’s six electors out of the mix, Trump needs only 262 electoral votes to ‘win.’ He’ll likely achieve those numbers without having to win one of the ’blue wall’ states.”

The Democrats, of course, have surely anticipated this plan and will have an army of lawyers standing by to challenge it, led by Marc Elias. But if it ends up in the Supreme Court, as it likely will, we all know what’s going to happen.

As John Roberts and his cabal of antidemocratic goons (and their wives) have repeatedly shown this year, the Supreme Court is willing to do Trump’s dirty work. In 2020, the Supreme Court rejected almost all of Trump’s various nonsensical claims to overturn that election. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’ll do so again, especially because this time the Trump people will not necessarily be asking the court to overturn the results of a state’s election. They’ll just be asking them to delay certification of those results, until some later date. In addition to ruling for the Trumpers outright, the court could simply delay hearing the case for as long as the delay is helpful for Trump. The Supreme Court can put its thumb on the scale for Trump simply by pretending to “stay out of it” and allowing the “process” to play itself out.

Scared shitless yet?

Then, in a bitter irony, we on the left will be in the ones saying the election was stolen….and even though we would be correct, the GOP and the rest of MAGA Nation will pounce upon that with howling cries of hypocrisy. False cries, but unhelpful nonetheless.

But just to be clear, what we are talking about would very much be a stolen election. This “contingent election” scheme would not be the GOP cleverly exploiting a perfectly legal mechanism within the US Constitution; the whole plan hinges on one or more Republican-controlled states breaking the rules and defying the will of the voters by not delivering its slate of duly chosen electors. One can easily imagine them doing so under the false veneer of some sort of “electoral irregularities,” a canard that—not coincidentally—the right wing has been carefully promoting for decades, and ramped up over the past five years.

And they just might get away with it.

PLANS A, B, AND C

Mystal thinks this plan accounts for Trump’s otherwise counterintuitive and self-destructive campaign behavior. “Trump and his people really don’t think they have to win. They think they can stop certification of states they lose long enough to let Mike Johnson shut the door on democracy.”

When Nancy Pelosi was Speaker in 2020, such bullshit was a non-starter. (Mystal suggests she would have just extended the deadline.) Magic Mike is a different story. “If electors are not submitted by December 11, he’ll likely declare the process ‘over’ and say that the electors appointed by that date are the only ones allowed to vote for president.” The chances that he would not go along with Trump’s plan are roughly the same as a fan reaching out and yanking a fly ball out of an opposing outfielder’s glove.

Wait—strike that. I’ll come up with a better analogy later. 

In fact, it’s perfectly likely that this plan originated with Johnson’s office, or someone like that, rather than with Trump’s brain trust, and certainly not with Trump himself, whose familiarity with the Constitution is a lot like his familiarity with the Bible (and his favorite chapter in it, “Two Corinthians: The Sequel”).

Johnson’s insistence that he will certify a free and fair election, as he recently told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is not reassuring, as the GOP will certainly claim that the election is not free and fair if Trump loses. Do you dream that it would not? (Mike then went on a Fox News-style tear about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Hunter’s laptop, and the Russia “hoax.” I’m not kidding.)

As usual, Trump’s defenders say his critics are overreacting, that we should not take him literally—or seriously, or both—and that he was just owning the libs, as Johnson suggested. (Memorandum for record: That’s acceptable, shrug-inducing behavior for a presidential candidate now?)

The New York Times—which for all its flaws, did at least endorse a presidential candidate this year—reports:

Mr. Johnson’s blustery statement was striking not just for its groundless claims presented as facts. It also seemed to validate that Mr. Trump was actually referring to something specific, and not just speaking with his regular vagueness that allows listeners to hear whatever they want.

But of course, this being the New York Times (in an article to which—you guessed it—Maggie Haberman was a contributor), it has to bothsides it with the classic “to be sure” trope:

Democratic nightmares about what havoc Mr. Johnson could wreak may, in fact, be overblown. It is the vice president who presides over the certification of the election, not the speaker. And an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which Congress passed after the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack, tightened the safeguards around the process to make it less likely to happen again.

Yeah! Democrats are always overreacting to what Donald Trump might do, and he never goes as far as we fear, right Ross “There Will Be No Trump Coup” Douthat?

In any case, we’re not talking about a repeat of 2020’s certification fiasco. We’re talking about a theft of the election upstream from that, in the House, before the Senate’s certification would even take place. And this scenario would actually tee up Kamala Harris to be in a Mike Pence-like position where she would have to choose between refusing to certify—thereby inviting howls of outrage from the right, accusations of wanton hypocrisy, and perhaps even violence—or meekly accepting the GOP scam.

Later, Johnson even bragged to CBS News about all the “great work that’s been done at the federal, state and local level to prevent the chaos that ensued after 2020, the Covid election year, when all the states were changing their laws and regulations.” So even in defending himself against charging of election-rigging, he was obliquely continuing to spread lies about the other side election-rigging last time.

In further response to the furor, Johnson has also claimed that, as “a lifelong constitutional law attorney” he and his party are “going to respect the law. We’re going to follow the constitution to a T.” But his record belies that. As The Hill reports, Johnson” led amicus brief in support of a lawsuit challenging President Biden’s 2020 victory in four states, and voted against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.”

Not sure this dude deserves the benefit of the doubt. Let alone Trump.

In the words of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), my very own congressman, and a former assistant US Attorney in the SDNY: “There’s a lot of ability for a bad actor to mess with the Electoral College if he’s the speaker of the House. If I’m wrong, they should say so. Trump has a lot of secrets: His medical records are secret, his taxes are secret, his phone calls with Vladimir Putin are secret. Clearly he hides a lot from the American people. Now he’s openly stated that he’s hiding something from the electorate.”

All this from that party that brought you the Big Lie and the Insurrection. A political party that is willing to mount a violent coup, and to claim that its perpetrators were patriots—and now, political prisoners and even hostages—can hardly claim to above this kind of electoral skullduggery.

WE MUST GET MOOSE AND SQUIRREL

Speaking of ratfucking, remember how for two whole years America was consumed with the question of whether or not Trump had colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 presidential election? And ultimately, the cautious conclusion was that the Russians had absolutely interfered, but it could not be proven that Trump or his team solicited that help had directly coordinated with them?

OK.

Well now we’re having another presidential election, one in which Russia is again undeniably interfering, and Trump and his allies like Musk are OPENLY coordinating with Putin on a regular basis. And everyone just accepts that as normal.

In that world, is a plan to outflank the Electoral College so hard to believe?

In fact, I am beginning to think that some version of the “thrown-into-the House” scheme is the most likely of all electoral scenarios. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to conceive that Trump won’t try this, or something like it.

Why do I think that? Because it’s so straightforward as a deceitful path to victory, because Trump is known for cheating whenever there’s an opportunity (and sometimes when there ain’t), and because Trump cannot afford to lose this race: it’s go to the White House or go to jail.

Naturally, Trump thinks he can win the election outright—via the Electoral College, though not the popular vote, which regrettably doesn’t matter—and he might. That would make all this moot. He is even trying to win the election, in his way, though he isn’t disciplined enough to run the sort of tight campaign (tacking to the center, appealing to swing voters, etc) that a conventional candidate would run if that was their goal. But given the stakes—that he’s probably going to prison if he loses—he can’t take any chances. So he has this fiendishly simple, if untested, backup plan. All he has to do is it have it be close enough that the abstention of a few rogue GOP-controlled states can make the difference. And it is close.

If some version of this wildly anti-democratic heist unfolds and the Supreme Court rubber stamps it, as it likely will, it will fall to us to collectively rise up and say “Oh, hell no.” And I don’t mean a couple thousand revolutionary fantasists, cosplaying dipshits, and militia member warrior wannabes of January 6th, but a peaceful, disciplined, nationwide turnout of millions of law-abiding Americans who will make our voices heard and not accept this subversion of the Constitution, or allow this travesty to take place in defiance of the will of the people.

COMING SOON

So watch this space. I will put up one more blog post before the election, on Monday November 4. Look for it here, or wherever you get your self-righteous left-wing bloviating.

We’re in the home stretch, folks. Keep the faith.

*********

Photo: Halloween edition! For the second week in a row, after his fifteen minute fake shift at McDonald’s, Trump dresses up like a working American. Which he ain’t.

Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

How Far Would He Go?

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

As many observers have noted, Donald Trump is seeming extra unhinged of late, which is really saying something. He is slurring his words at rallies, going off on pointless, incoherent tangents (#theweave), slandering Kamala Harris as “mentally disabled” (every accusation is a confession, innit, Donny?), and claiming that Joe Biden is withholding hurricane aid even as Republican governors bluntly report the opposite. He has called for a day-long Purge in which cops can run riot, suggested that critics of the Supreme Court be summarily imprisoned, brought a 9/11 truther to a memorial at Ground Zero, and stood by a gubernatorial candidate who called himself a “Black Nazi,” all the while painting a totally false portrait of America as a crime-ridden hellscape in economic freefall (quick factcheck: crime is down and the economy is booming). And of course, as we noted two weeks ago, he continues to insist that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating housepets.

And that is but a small sample of Don’s oeuvre. A full accounting would require a David Foster Wallace-length tome.

And yet, if the polls are to be believed, this hideous excuse for a human being remains within a froghair of becoming President of the United States for a second time.

We shall reckon with what that says about America another time. For now, this state of affairs has prompted me to ponder where all this could possibly lead.

Think of how far the Overton window for acceptable behavior by a national politician has moved—or perhaps more precisely, how low we have sunk—when Donald Trump can both promise to “terminate” the Constitution and retweet a meme about his opponent giving a blowjob and still have seventy-some million Americans supporting him. (I cite those two examples because they so neatly embody his twin vices of authoritarianism and personal hideousness.) Some of Trump’s craziness is, admittedly, straight outta the theater of the absurd, beggaring satire. But ultimately it is not funny at all—it is terrifying. We have the candidate of one of our two major parties who is not only openly fascist, but also clearly out of his fucking gourd. And millions of our countrymen are fine with both those pieces.

Now hang on a minute, I hear you saying. So much of Trump is just bluster, right? He’s just owning the libs, and you King’s Necktie, are taking the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Am I?

I don’t have the stomach for another tiresome iteration of the take-him-literally-but-not-figuratively debate. (Or is it the other way round?) True, Trump’s word isn’t worth the sulfurous fumes on which it rides out of his piehole. He has promised myriad things that never had—and never will have—a prayer of materializing: the border wall, Infrastructure Week, a replacement for Obamacare, and so forth. But by the same token, he has in fact carried through with a great many travesties: the Muslim ban, a tax cut for the richest Americans, US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the JCPOA, Dobbs. I could go on.

So what I want to ask, dear reader, is simply this: What do you think would constitute something so horrible, so over the line, so unconscionable and morally objectionable that Donald Trump would not go there, if there were some benefit to him in it?

I’ll wait.

AMERICAN WANNSEE

I think you may have guessed where this thought experiment is heading.

In conventional discourse it is commonplace to consider Adolf Hitler a monster unique in human history, which is how much of popular memory has duly recorded him. But read Volker Ullrich: Hitler was an ordinary politician of his era, one who hit upon a winning formula with his anti-Semitic rants, who saw that the crowd thrilled to them, and then built his persona and his program from there. The vision of him as something much more than that, as possessed by some supernatural evil, conveniently relieves us of the possibility that we too, like the Germans of the 1930s, could fall prey to such a demagogue, or even rally eagerly to his side.

But at the risk of shocking American exceptionalists, there is nothing special about our national character than makes us morally superior to the people of Germany. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think Donald Trump possesses some magic moral backbone that Hitler was lacking, some steel core of integrity or principle that would keep him from going as far as the Fuhrer once did. And if you think the American people are more innately resistant to that sort of thing than our German friends, I’ll be happy to sell you a bridge that I keep down near Jane’s Carousel and the Shake Shack in Dumbo.

I can hear the howling and scoffing and sense the eye-rolling from Fox Nation already. We’ll get to Godwin’s Law in a moment. Just indulge me for a moment.

I do not mean to suggest that an American version of the Final Solution is imminent; I propose it only as an exercise in imagination. Admittedly, it is almost impossible to think that any US president would order the mass murder of American citizens (though a US president—one of our best ever, in fact—once ordered their mass internment), or even of non-citizen resident aliens. But if you’ve ever been to a Trump rally—and I have not—or even watched one on TV, it certainly feels conceivable, or at least not inconceivable. Does anyone honestly believe that, were the circumstances right, upon some favorable emergency, when presented with a plan to massacre undocumented immigrants in industrialized slaughter (by Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon, for instance), Trump would say, “No—I can’t do that. It’s simply immoral.”

Of course not.

Sure, Trump might balk at such a proposal for other, non-ethical reasons. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Donald is—occasionally—more sensible and pragmatic than others in his party, if only out of his innate, transactional sense of animal cunning for what the people want. For instance, he seems to know that outlawing abortion is an electoral loser, which is why he vacillates between baldly lying that he does not favor such a policy, when addressing the MSM, and his narcissist’s urge to brag—correctly—that he is responsible for overturning Roe, when talking to anti-abortion groups. The man loves the sound of applause.

But once you accept that Trump has no moral boundary that would stop him from committing genocide, either abroad or at home, we find ourselves staring into a very very dark abyss. Obsidian, in fact. Black as night, black as coal, in the words of Jagger & Richards. None more black, in the words of Nigel Tufnel.

Mass murder may yet remain way beyond the pale, even for Trump. But many many things that were once impossible to imagine have happened over the last nine years, and I have long since stopped considering anything too far-fetched. After all, he has already promised to round migrants up by the millions and place them in concentration camps—a wildly impractical proposal, with no details on offer of how that would work, with or without violent nationwide upheaval, not that practicality is the chief objection to it. But just the fact that he would suggest it! From the establishment of concentration camps it is but a hop skip and jump to the thing that so often happens inside them. For that matter, in his first term he already instituted and carried out a policy of kidnapping small children from their parents, caging them in inhuman conditions in what can only be called concentration camps, and making it impossible for thousands of them ever to be reunited with their families. Do you really doubt he could go even further in a second term, untethered from legal accountability as he would be, thanks to the right wing justices he installed on the Supreme Court?

One does not have to go so far as a second Holocaust to understand and accept the horrors that would likely accompany a second  Trump term. They have been widely reported upon, but to name just one, the likes of Mark Milley, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and even Joe Biden are bracing to be arrested, or should be.

Participatory democracy can expect abrupt cancellation as well. I have mentioned previously that a very very smart and politically sophisticated friend of mine recently scoffed when I suggested that if Trump wins in 2024, there may be no presidential election at all in 2028. Maybe my friend is right, and I’m being alarmist. But for me, that’s a slam dunk, on an eight-foot junior high school hoop. Trump already tried to overturn an election he lost. How much easier would it be for him, as a sitting president in his second term, emboldened by his victory and with nearly a decade of institutional knowledge, and with that aforementioned toadying  SCOTUS supermajority behind him, to simply gin up some “national emergency” as a Reichstag  fire-like reason to “postpone” the election, indefinitely? Is the GOP gonna rise up and stop him?

In fact, the Republican Party and the so-called conservative movement at large have consistently behaved toward Trump precisely as center-right German politicians and business leaders did toward Hitler in the ‘30s: underestimating him, believing they could control him and use him rather than the other way round, enabling him and excusing his outrages, bowing to his every whim, and rationalizing their incremental (and sometimes not so incremental) submission to his atrocities until they were wholly complicit in absolute depravity. In a second Trump term, with a wrathful Donald unbound and on a quest for retribution, no sudden emergence of courage from the GOP can be expected. Very much the contrary.

I FOUGHT THE LAW

OK, now to my critics.

I assume that by now people are familiar with Godwin’s Law—probably a lot more familiar than is healthy for a democracy, if we need to be talking about it. In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell writes:

(P)eople roll their eyes and tune out when they hear commentators or historians warn, yet again, about another big bad Great Dictator. Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen.

In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing “blood and soil”-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago. At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.” This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that “young American girls” are “being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”

Of Vance’s demonizing of Haitian migrants in his own state, and the ensuing threats of violence toward them, Rampell writes:

It is hard to recall a senator in recent memory who’s done more to endanger the lives of his own constituents than Vance has.

I’m not saying he and Trump actually want to start a modern-day pogrom, but if they did, I’m not sure what they’d be doing differently.

So yeah, when people behave like Nazis (no “neo” about it), they deserve to be called out for it.

Mike Godwin, originator of the meme, himself disavowed it in a Washington Post op-ed last year, calling analogies to Hitler apropos and necessary for Trump, citing his “authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as ‘vermin’; and claiming that immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ an infamous Hitler talking point.”

Even JD Vance himself, lest we forget, compared his running mate to Hitler way back inn 2016, before he had even done a fraction of the terrible shit he would go on to do. Rampell again:

Lest Trump’s fascist echoes be too faint for Vance to hear these days, the former president occasionally cranks up the volume with antisemitic tropes. For instance, he accused American Jews of voting for “the enemy” and agreed with a radio host that Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a “crappy Jew.” (Debates over “good” and “bad” Jews rarely end well for Jews.)

Last week, shortly after a Republican gubernatorial candidate was revealed to have expressed pro-Hitler views, Trump took things to their logical conclusion: He preemptively blamed Jews if he performs poorly this November. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said at a summit devoted to (I kid you not) combating American antisemitism, then “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

Not the most eloquent closing argument. But then, as Molly Ivins once quipped, it probably sounded better in the original German.

GOAT’S HEAD SOUP NAZI

Let’s go now to a recent essay by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and the man whom my friend Tom Hall—himself one of the smartest political observers I know—calls the GOAT when it comes to this topic.

In a Substack piece called “Trump’s Hitlerian Month: A September to Remember,” Snyder notes the self-flattering hypocrisy of American exceptionalism: the syllogism that says no American president could be a tyrant because America is good and pure by definition. “(T)he idea that ‘comparison’ is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism.” 

A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator.  Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.” Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

Snyder writes that ”The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers. 

‘Never again’ is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.”

He also rightly connects Trump’s Big Lie to its granddaddy, the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth of Versailles, and also the Big Lie that the Holocaust never happened.

His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

Snyder states bluntly: “Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign,“ citing the dogs-and-cats thing in particular, and draining it of its comic value:

(Trump) found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the ‘them’ in his politics of us-and-them…..The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression.  Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people.

Now, the Hitlerian things that Trump says would be Hitlerian with or without this Hitlerian context of the last four years, the last year, or the last month. And this context would be Hitlerian with or without Trump’s recent Hitlerian utterances. It is helpful, however, to see all of this together, as a whole, because it makes it harder to excuse each individual piece of the story. 

In the second half of his piece, Snyder echoes Rampell in recounting in great detail Trump’s openly anti-Semitic remarks of late, including warning American Jews of the repercussions if he doesn’t win, ostensibly couched as an I’m-on-your-side caution about their potential fate under Democratic rule, but also functioning as a blunt threat. Of course, the scapegoat in question need not be Jews for Trump’s fascism to obtain; in the case of him and his followers, immigrants and people of color largely seem to serve that role. I invite you to read Snyder’s whole essay, but if you take away only one line, maybe it should be this one:

“In the silence about Trump’s fascism, those who care about freedom and the future will hear one more reason to act.”

THE (UN)DECIDERS

The race for the White House remains razor close, and we are told that a tiny handful of our countrymen—swing voters, who have not yet made up their minds—will determine who wins.

Hang on while I go get my US Army Arctic Warfare Extreme Cold Weather parka to warm me from the chill that just went down my spine.

Let me get this straight. The people we’re relying on to save our democracy are the people who can’t decide between Trump and Harris? For them, I offer this chestnut from David Sedaris, which remains pertinent as ever:

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

And Sedaris wrote that in 2008, when the choice was between Barack Obama and John McCain. My literary powers do not extend to thinking of an updated metaphor that reflects the menu choice between Kamala and Trump.

But those undecideds are, apparently, not limited to low-information voters. Witness those two pompous asses who comprise the august New York Times’s dynamic duo of resident right wing apologists—er, I mean, opinion columnists—Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, both of whom have been seen recently stroking their chins in allegedly high-minded contemplation of whether Kamala is a sufficiently palatable alternative to an openly fascist twice-impeached convicted felon who has promised to install a dictatorship. The Stephenses and Douthats of the world and their fellow travelers are either neck deep in their own narcissism and denial of reality, or unwilling to admit that they are actually fine with white Christian nationalism, despite their high-minded veneer. 

On that topic, a strong candidate for the most ridiculous magazine article of 2024 is one in The Atlantic last month titled “Let Us Now Praise Undecided Voters,” by Gal Beckerman. It was one of those very-pleased-with-itself, mildly contrarian think pieces that magazines like the otherwise very fine Atlantic like to run…..and maybe the cautiousness and slow-moving decision-making that it praises does have some merit when it comes to deciding, say, what ice cream flavor to choose (an example the article employs). But when it comes to choosing between the fascist candidate for president and the non-fascist one, it was one of the most absurd pieces of journalism I’ve read in ages. But it pairs nicely with the likes of Stephens & Douthat.

But The Atlantic soon made up for it with a superb article on that same topic by the great Ronald Brownstein called “The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are.” Its point: most undecided voters are not choosing between Trump and Harris, they are unsure whether they will vote at all.

That makes a lot more sense, even if I still find it hard to believe anyone doesn’t recognize the crisis we’re in, or the imperative of acting. Let’s hope the Democratic strategists are working to impress upon those folks the importance of this election, and get them to the polls in November. Because the stakes could not be higher or the options more stark.

The New York Times has been among the most egregious offenders when it comes to sanewashing Trump, engaging in outrageous bothsidesism, and holding Kamala to a ridiculously high standard while giving Donny a pass. That pattern continues, and it’s infuriating. But credit where it’s due: the Gray Lady’s editorial board published an endorsement of Vice President Harris that hit the bullseye:

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth—Donald Trump is not fit to be president—should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election. For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

HOME, HOME ON DERANGE

This essay is unlikely to be read by Trump’s supporters and defenders, but if it were, I am sure they would return their usual diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because they have a lot of credibility when it comes to recognizing hysteria and displacement from objective reality.

But that is their standard retort whenever anyone warns of something awful that Trump (we are told) would never do…..like mount a coup. (Looking at you again, Douthat). Yes, it is hard to imagine Final Solution on American shores. But tyrants depend on the unimaginable, and the inability of their constituents to fathom it.

So how far would he go? I don’t want to find out.

*********

Illustration by Randy Pollak; Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty, originally published in The New Republic’s issue “What American Fascism Would Look Like.”

“Resisting The Right”—an Online Discussion

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Next Saturday June 15, at 3pm ET, I’ll be doing an online conversation with my dear friend James Carroll regarding my forthcoming book RESISTING THE RIGHT: HOW TO SURVIVE THE GATHERING STORM, as part of Writers for Democratic Action’s Democracy Book Club.

Formed in August 2020, Writers for Democratic Action began as a small group of writers, poets, and journalists—Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk—who believed the Trump administration to be uniquely dangerous to our society. Today it is a volunteer organization of writers, readers, editors, and booksellers with a membership of more than 3000 worldwide, standing together to champion democracy and the institutions that embody and protect it. 

The WDA is devoted to defeating Trump in 2024; to fighting the wave of book banning in places like Florida and Texas and censorship in all its guises; to connecting citizens to their bookstores and libraries; to defending civil liberties including the right to vote and to have our votes counted; and to advocating for justice and equality in the US and across the globe.

Every month, the WDA’s Democracy Book Club features a book on a pressing issue related to those matters. In the past year the Club has done talks with Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Congressman Jamie Raskin, Dahlia Lithwick, and many others. I’m honored to be included in that parade.

My book surveys the current emergency for democracy in the United States and what we can do to protect the republic from the autocratic forces that Trump represents. Out of prudence—but not fatalism—it also contemplates the “worst case scenario” of a second Trump presidency and what we can do should that dark fate befall us.

You can register to see my talk about it with James Carroll here.

Having previously previewed it in these pages, here’s another brief passage from the book, which is available for pre-order now from OR Books here in New York, and will come out next month.

**************

The primacy of the vote in a democratic society can hardly be overstated. Every other nightmare, no matter how horrible—whether it’s a policy of forced birth, or of kidnapping immigrant children, or of accelerating an environmental catastrophe that threatens the very future of human life—can be addressed so long as we have recourse to free and fair elections as a means to eject elected officials with whom we are unhappy. But once that is gone, democracy is gone with it.

As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes in his slim but seminal 2017 book On Tyranny, when free elections disappear, few citizens realize they are voting in the last one. That paradigm, of course, is common in many nations that succumb to autocracy. In the modern era, the demise of a democracy via an extralegal takeover, violent or otherwise, is much rarer than one that begins at the ballot box, with an authoritarian party ascending to power through legitimate or quasi-legitimate means, then slowly choking off the very mechanisms it used to gain that power and installing itself in permanent control.

 In How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer voluminous historical examples, including Mussolini and Hitler of course, but also Fujimori, Chávez, Orbán, Erdoğan, and to some extent even Putin.Almost all follow the same pattern, which involves capturing the courts, controlling the media, neutering (or co-opting) the legislature, and installing loyalists in every relevant arm of the bureaucracy. Surprisingly, control of the military and law enforcement—the chief tools of old-school autocracies—are less important, and typically fall into place once the other goals are achieved. Also omnipresent in these scenarios: vicious demonization of the regime’s critics and opponents that justifies their subjugation.

For America to go down that dark path, all that remains is for the GOP to obtain control of the US government, which it very much aims to do in 2024. When it does, it is unlikely ever to give it up.

But rare is the autocracy that needs to maintain power through total repression of a seething, resentful populace, or can. More often a Stockholm syndrome takes effect, an invitation to conspire in one’s own bondage.

“The truth about many in the GOP base (is) they prefer authoritarianism to democracy,” writes Jennifer Rubin, noting that about 26 percent of the US population qualify “as highly right-wing authoritarian,” according to a recent study—twice the number of the runners-up, Canada and Australia. In order to keep the American experiment alive, we will have to reckon with this demographic, the one that facilitates and gives oxygen to the Republican Party’s campaign for countermajoritarian power and is energized by it in return.

Autocrats want you to be discouraged. Instilling a sense of apathy and resignation is one of their favorite and most frequently reached for tricks, as they prefer a public that believes it has no power to improve its lot and can’t change things. But we do and we can—and the ferocity of their gaslighting is evidence of that power and how much they fear it. Human history is thick with examples, even with regimes far more brutal than we have yet faced in the United States.

“Ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives,” writes Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor of Northwestern University. “But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence.” In fact, even in the best of circumstances, when American democracy is functioning reasonably well, change typically comes from forces outside the government putting pressure on it—which is to say, from the people. Should a truly repressive, retrograde right-wing government come to power, the onus will shift even more in that direction.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, but autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of ordinary citizens like you and me. Our starting point is the simplest of all, which is the very way we think about what we are doing, for the psychological preparation for the pro-democracy struggle requires full-time vigilance to the ways that autocracy demands our complicity.

In On Tyranny, Snyder advises us: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” This impulse to bend voluntarily to an oppressive regime is what he calls “anticipatory obedience,” and need not even take the form of active support. It can be simple apathy, and a Niemöllerian indifference to the sound of marching boots and knocks on neighbors’ doors, and to the even almost-inaudible sound of democratic norms falling one by one.

We are often regaled with Frederick Douglass’s famous line from 1857, that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But it’s well worth considering the longer quote, and the context of that maxim:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The first thing to understand, then, is that the source of all political power, even in the most repressive police state, is the consent of the people.

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” wrote the political scientist Gene Sharp in his three-volume magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), calling the submission of the citizenry ”the most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist.” The citizens of free countries give their obedience gladly, while those living under despotic regimes give it less so. But they give it nonetheless. 

“To say that every government depends on consent of the people does not, of course, mean that the subjects of all rulers prefer the established order to any other which might be created,” Sharp continued. “They may consent because they positively approve of it—but they may also consent because they are unwilling to pay the price for the refusal of consent . . .The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.”

In other words, repression only works when the people are cowed by it.

Admittedly, it sounds naïve. How can an unarmed citizenry under the heel of a tyranny that controls all the levers of power, including a monopoly on violence as exercised by the police and armed forces, possibly avoid submission? 

In his own epic history of nonviolence, The Unconquerable World (2003),Jonathan Schell writes of the delusion “that the foundation of all state power is force,” arguing that it is a confusion of police power with political power. “Terror, even as it keeps its practitioners in office for a time, destroys the foundations of their power,” Schell argues, contending that “each time the  Soviet Union used its tanks to crush a rebellion in Eastern Europe, it was diminishing its power, not increasing it.” Even Clausewitz, Schell writes, was of the opinion that “military victories were useless unless the population of vanquished army then obeyed the will of the victor”—a formulation that calls into question the very definition of victory itself.

But let’s not stop with Clausewitz, an admirable enough figure as far as Prussian generals go. Even Adolf Hitler, the very model of the most monstrous totalitarianism, declared that occupying a conquered nation was largely a psychological matter. “One cannot rule by force alone,” he wrote in the midst of subjugating much of Europe in July 1943. “True, force is decisive, but it is equally important to have this psychological something which the animal trainer also needs to be master of his beast. They must be convinced that we are the victors.”

Sharp then asks a bold question: What happens if the people refuse to accept militarily successful invaders—or domestic oppressors—as their political masters? His conclusion is that “noncooperation and defiance by subjects, at least under certain conditions,” has the power to thwart those rulers, and even destroy them.

“If this is true,” Sharp asks, “then why have people not long since abolished oppression, tyranny, and exploitation?” The answer, primarily, is that “The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power”—and tyrants have every reason to keep them from so doing. As we have just observed, inculcating a sense of resignation, hopelessness, and despair in the citizenry is the ruler’s greatest tool. Sharp goes on to cite the South African philosopher Errol E. Harris that, consequently, a public subjected to despotism “become[s] its accomplices at the same time as they become its victims. If sufficient people understood this and really knew what they were about and how to go about it, they could ensure that government would never be tyrannical.”

“A nation gets the government it deserves,” Harris wrote. That is not to blame the victim or to allege weakness, only to say that a despotic regime can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be). That is bitter pill for any nation to swallow, but it can also be inverted. If it is only the complicity of the ruled that enables their oppression, that acquiescence can also be withdrawn. Therefore, it is within the power of the oppressed to be the means of their own salvation. 

 It is this understanding that is central to any American defiance of an autocratic right-wing regime that might arise under Donald Trump and/or the Republican Party. We are the majority, and power flows only with our consent, which we have the capacity to withdraw.

Happy New Year Zero

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At the end of 2020, on New Year’s Eve, in fact, I put out an essay for this blog called “Buh-Bye, Annus Horribilis.” In it, I recalled how crappy the previous twelve months had been, from a global pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election before the fact:

I’ve rarely been so happy to turn the page on a calendar.

I’m aware that our measurement of time is an artificial construct. I know that, in reality (or is it Reality?) the sun that sets on the evening of December 31, 2020 and rises on the morning of January 1, 2021 is the same star. I am also aware that even the idea of a sun “rising” and “setting” is an anti-Copernican illusion. In other words, the line dividing 2020 from 2021 is a purely imaginary one.

But as long as we are maintaining arbitrary allegiance to Gregorian calendar, this New Year’s Day merits an assessment of the past 366 rotations of the planet. 

They sucked.  

How little I knew. Not being part of the John Eastman-Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon planning cell at the Willard Hotel, I had no idea that an even more mind-blowing event—an attempted coup d’état by an ousted president—loomed just on the far side of the Times Square ball drop and yet another godawful version of “Imagine” on live TV. As it turned out, imagination paled in comparison to the reality that awaited. 

THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY (BECAUSE I DRANK IT)

Looking back, I went into that new year with a surprising amount of cheeriness, by my standards:

So good riddance, 2020. Your successor promises to bring pain and suffering of its own, but also the promise of rehabilitation, and therefore cause for optimism. Here in America, we will soon be under new management, with adult supervision for the first time in four years. The rollout of the vaccine brings the end of this ordeal within sight, and our return to competent leadership makes me believe that recovery is possible. But we will have to fight for it.

But my optimism was not entirely misplaced. As I noted at the time, there were some good things in 2020, some of which were directly related to those aforementioned tragedies. COVID gave the lie to the “paranoid style” anti-governmentalism that is prevalent on the right, showing that there are some crises so big that only communal efforts in the public sphere can address them. George Floyd’s murder prompted a long overdue (re-)awakening about the ongoing scourge of racial injustice in America. And Joe Biden’s victory provided evidence that some semblance of sanity still prevailed in the United States, for the moment. 

I have since written of my fears that the Biden administration will prove only a brief respite from the madness, if we are not diligent. Three years on from my Bronx cheer for 2020, that decisive moment is now barreling down upon us, as 2024 promises to be a year unlike any other in the lifetime of any living American.

In the next twelve months we will witness something that has never before happened in American history: the multiple criminal and civil trials of a former President of the United States, who is under indictment for 91 separate felonies (but who’s counting?). Fueled by the furor surrounding those trials, we can also look forward to what will surely be the ugliest presidential race in modern times. We must also brace for a possible victory in that race by an openly fascist candidate, one who has made no secret of his desire to install a right wing autocracy, where the top priority will be using all the levers of power to punish his enemies. 

Contrary to the self-defeating wave of pessimism currently prevalent on the left, and even the center, beating Trump in November is very much within our power. But even if we do, he will no doubt double down on his false claims that he wuz robbed, meaning we will still have to deal with a Big Lie movement embraced by tens of millions of our countrymen, a subset of which will be aggrieved, apoplectic white nationalists who feel entitled to use violence to overturn the will of the people. 

So we have that to look forward to. Which is nice.

In other words, buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, PART V

Apropos of the looming election, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last put things in perspective quite neatly this week:

Republicans are super excited to renominate a guy who:

  • Lost the popular vote twice;
  • Left office with the economy in a very bad place;
  • Attempted a violent coup;
  • Was twice impeached;
  • Is currently facing 91 criminal indictments; and
  • Was just removed from the ballot in one state because his candidacy has been ruled a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Looking at all of this, both Republican voters and Republican elites are pumped to get 

Trumped.

Meanwhile, Democrats have an incumbent president who:

  • Got more votes than anyone in American history;
  • Beat COVID;
  • Achieved a nearly-unprecedented economic soft landing;
  • Has kept unemployment under 4 percent and seen median household wealth increase by 37 percent; and
  • Is generally regarded has having handled geopolitical crises as well as any president in the modern era.

Yet Democratic elites and voters are desperate to get this guy off the ticket and replace him with some unspecified, unknown quantity.

It’s just interesting. Republicans have a manifestly unfit candidate and they continue to drive past all of the off-ramps offered to them. Democrats have a successful incumbent president and all they want to do is find an off-ramp.

(When I posted that on Facebook last week, I faced some pushback on the “beat COVID” piece. Fair point. Yes, saying that Biden beat Covid is an exaggeration. But to give credit for the vaccine to the guy who kept saying that the virus would disappear, who refused to tell people to wear masks, who suggested they inject bleach, is even more off base. Operation Warp Speed succeeded in spite of Trump, not because of him.)

The point is, we absolutely can beat Trump and turn back this wave of incipient American authoritarianism. But it will require all hands on deck, every shoulder to the wheel, and every other cliché in the book.

Americans are tired of hearing that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” But for the fifth election cycle in a row (2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2024), it’s arguably so. It will also be the first US presidential election conducted with the added complication of one of the two candidates on trial for some of the worst crimes imaginable for a former head of state, and tens of millions of his followers—our fellow Americans—who either think he did nothing wrong, or don’t care, or are glad he did. Therefore, per above, even if we win, the struggle to reclaim and defend American democracy will only be beginning. 

I can’t really even fathom just how intense the next twelve months are going to be. 

So Happy New Year, everybody; I hope y’all had a good and restful holiday. We may drink a cup of kindness yet, but first, grave business lies ahead.