It looks like the US finally found a US-backed coup that it didn't like. At least, I hope that enough Americans didn’t like it to finally catch themselves on and act firmly and decisively. Checking the comments of some, though, that may well be a vain hope. Some people are well versed in the art of apologetics and blame-shifting. They have, evidently, being doing it for a long while. Practice makes perfect. And so the slide continues.
Forgive me Father, but I haven’t sinned; it was Antifa who coveted my neighbour’s ox.
And ‘they’ did it earlier. We denounced it as wrong then, but now it’s right, because they set the precedent and we just followed. And do it better. It helps to have friends on the inside.
And, for the sake of peace and unity, let’s let it all pass. And give us the chance of another attempt later on. Practice makes perfect.
Except that the deliberate poisoning of democracy never passes. Flirt with fascism and you are soon married with two kids called Benny and Adolf. There were many warnings of what was to come before Mussolini and Hitler finally did come. Appeals to peace and unity – short of a firm justice, regardless of complaints – will be taken as weakness. A form of government and social life that cannot protect itself from threats within and without will fall.
We shouldn’t spare the enablers and facilitators nor their propaganda networks and conspiracy theories. Whilst it can be claimed that many are sucked into the vortex, all too many have gone their voluntarily, choosing in full awareness of what they are doing. Democracy, indeed the very nature of doing politics properly, has been poisoned, and quite deliberately. Behind the hatred of ‘government’ lies a sustained and systematic rejection of any kind of politics concerned with collective purposes and common goods. That is called ‘socialism.’ In such delusions, there is no difference between the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Europe, anywhere which isn’t the American anarchy. In short order, US politics has become a reality show, reality in its worst aspects, as serious concern with policy and adherence to principle was cast aside and replaced by an organised conspiracy to maintain power for narrow self-interest. Religion as well as politics has been reduced to calculations of self-interest, shedding any notions of public good let alone salvation. The ‘god’ they cite so often is not God but an alibi, a licence, sounding more like Moloch, an idol with which to threaten enemies. Instead of civics and civic involvement, this anti-government animus has bred a self-justifying, self-validating know-nothing populism manifesting an authoritarian personality. Of course, such people are party to the cult of authority. What we have here is a grotesque amalgam composed of extremist groups, conspiracy theorists, militia, white nationalists, proto-fascists and many more, enablers, facilitators, supporters, cheerleaders, all those who are incapable of recognizing any reality that contradicts their lurid fantasies. And so those fantasies become ever more lurid until you either check them, firmly and decisively, or they swallow you up. The point comes when even centrists and moderates cannot deny that the political world is engulfed in a fight. There are only two ways to win this fight: you can either bring such a recalcitrant opponent to submission by breaking their back or you play by the rules and allow them to carry on with a war of attrition that grinds you down to exhaustion. This has been going on for decades now, and has confronted every left of centre government in office. The crushing of every progressive democratic alternative merely entrenches a divided, crisis-ridden status quo, driving the world further to extreme. Every compromise, in the name of unity, peace, and healing, merely emboldens the forces concerned most of all to squeeze the life out of progressive alternatives. The crises intensify, and bring about real possibilities for authoritarian resolution.
Once we allow the enemies of democracy to exhaust us in this fight, we lose democracy. The forces behind the anti-government animus of the age have to be broken and brought to submission. I said so in the mid-1990s, when the jury was in on Reagan and Thatcher. Instead, Democrats and Labour made a point of insisting on a classless consensus that not merely preserved the aggressive hardball libertarianism of the neo-liberal agenda, but extended it further. When the Conservative Party ditched Margaret Thatcher, many people cheered. I didn’t. Thatcher, I said, not only had to be beaten, she and the doctrine she stood for had to be seen to be beaten, and broken, by a positive agenda. It didn’t happen. The problems we face go much deeper than Trump. Trump is the kind of thing that can happen so long as these anti-democratic forces are at large instead of being at bay.
These forces, forced which Trump and his enablers and facilitators certainly incited, need to be driven back and reduced. These people have deliberately and systematically vandalised political institutions and poisoned the public good, turning people against government and collective political means for resolution of their social needs, turning people inwards to their own private interests, as mere powerless atoms on the market. Of course, the image of a market society in which individual choice issues happily in public goods exists nowhere other than the textbooks. In reality, fragmented individuals crave the sociality and commonality that has been stripped from them, and reconstitute it in grotesque ersatz forms. Social atomism and political centralism and authoritarianism go hand in hand. There is no paradox at all in the sight of libertarians marching in a cult of authority.
The animosity towards each other has been engineered. Trump stokes it for political gain. But the social habitus has been deliberately poisoned by those who would atomize social life. There is no mystery as to why there has been a withering of civic involvement and engagement. It preceded Trump. He and those who support him need to be checked, and checked quickly and firmly. But this checking will succeed only if it is part of a wider transformation that restores sociality, publicity, and civility.
Trump calls himself the "golden goose". That’s a half-truth. He is, in fact, the Golden Calf, the idol and cult image worshipped by those practising a pernicious blend of politics and religion. Such people commit the sin of idolatry and sacrifice their souls at his altar (Exodus 32:4). The religiously inclined display no compunction at all in subordinating their religion to political ideology, masking that ideology in religious texts and principles. There has been a progressive change, in the sense of a degenerative illness, in the Christian churches of conservative America, where the right and good allegiance to God's authority has been captured, co-opted, and perverted to the allegiance first of pastoral authority, and then, seamlessly, to party and presidential authority, all reinforced by the issuing of imperatives and edicts of what it is to be a "good Christian." The result of this inexorable connection is a bad politics and a bad religion, turning droves away from Christianity. For that reason, it may be openly denounced as a diabolic perversion, separating people from others, from God, and from themselves.
In the first instance, there should be a restoration of justice. The "justice" departments should investigate and prosecute Trump and his enablers to the full extent of the law. All those who have expressed violence towards others. There is a call to avoid this for the sake of peace and unity. There is no unity when people deliberately and consciously aim to destroy. There is no peace without justice. There will be backlashes from all those who have succumbed to such thinking, but these will merely grow and fester over time, not go away. The problem needs to be faced head on, with firm action against all who break the law. This type of behaviour cannot be allowed to stand in a democracy, if we want to hold onto democracy. I have called out the left these past few years on this, noting the growth of a taste for lawlessness. That mentality, once it becomes hide-bound by constant practice, subverts politics, democracy, and government to leave only the strongest arm and loudest voice in positions of domination. Or the biggest guns. I warned that the public realm to which appeals to ‘act’ are made is not solid and secure but is actually suffering from a crisis of authority and legitimacy. The other side, the right in politics, the fascistic elements that prowl around, under, or increasingly on the surface of society can play that game too. We see it now.
There is a dearth of serious political involvement and civic engagement in the contemporary world, with the ‘public’ fractured into a congeries of groups, each presenting government with a shopping list of demands. It is not viable.
So what part of the path from confession to contrition to redemption do those big on personal responsibility not understand? If they even understand the language. Probably the bits which are opposed to apology, deceit, and deception – which is all of them.
To peddle this in the name of religion is an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
The sowing of discord is something people do to evade their own shadow and project it onto another.
John Ciardi, writing before the 1968 presidential election, said that we should not again have a great president until we elected one who, like all who had been great in the past, could speak that clear and beautiful English without clichés, whereby alone a president may truly interpret their own meaning to the people. Jargon, whether of the intellectual or hippy variety, is born of primitive mass thinking and never of the true feeling-intellect. When we hear it, we may be sure of the emptiness it covers. Nimrod looms dark and menacing in our world.
Beneath the fires of Hell, at the centre of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence, the rigidity, and the coldness of the eternal prison. It is an image of sin as the freezing of perverted human emotions and essential powers. It is, sadly, the image in The Comedy which the modern world will recognize most easily, indicating an egotism that has grown cold and cruel by way of a gradual process that strikes ever inward until even the passions of hatred and destruction come to be frozen into immobility. This the final state of sin. And at the bottom pit of Hell, it is irredeemable.
Here in the freezing bitter cold of the eternal prison, Dante and Virgil meet the traitors of all kinds, the betrayers of kin and country, as well as of guests. The traitors are buried up to their necks in ice, confined within the paralyzing cold their thoughts and actions willed and delivered by their denial of all the values of human sympathy, solidarity, and exchange. Among the shades, Dante recognizes one who is still alive. Virgil explains that the body can live on even though the soul is so dead to all humanity as to lie already in the ice of Hell. Finally, they come to see those traitors who broke their sworn solemn oaths and pledges. The traitors are those who deliberately break faith and trust. Their heads are covered. In the finality of Hell, they are utterly isolated from all contact with anything other than their own perverted egos. This place is called Judecca, named after Judas, and signifies the conscious betrayal of God and man which is the final negation of love.
We look now upon Lucifer himself.
I see people wishing that the horrifying assault on democracy would end so that they can just get back to my devastating pandemic and climate catastrophe. I can hear dear Greta now, hijacking the issue of the day in her usual manner, asking one and all why they are so concerned with fascistic insurrection against democracy when they should be talking about climate change. We know the patter by now: Yes, the overthrow of democracy and the hanging of elected politicians is bad, but it will be so much worse under climate change.
You mean it’s the end of the world? As predicted? Whether it comes sooner or later is no matter. ‘This is what it will be like with climate change.’
Right. Which always begged the question of what, politically, socially, and morally, is to be done. Any ideas, other than awakening us to the bleeding obvious?
Politics is always in the here and now. Come and join it. Or continue to be ignored, including and especially the pious impotent lamentations.
Trump is a symptom and not a cause of the problems; these problems are underlying in the socio-economic fabric and have entered the institutional, cultural, and mental fabric. I have been repeating myself on this again in the last few days, so it comes as some relief to read influential commentators saying the same. The penny may yet drop. As it must. Because Trump may well be a lucky escape, lucky in the sense that the man is not an organised political operator but incompetent and erratic. A sharper, younger, more savvy leader – one that actually is a fascist – will be much, much worse and will run a coach and horses through such a flabby terrain.
This is no time for middling mediocrity peddling the tired old consensus politics. There are real divisions and real imbalances to be uprooted. They cannot be smoothed over and ignored, which has been the way for the past quarter of a century. A quarter of a century ago I warned that if crises are not addressed positively, they will exploited destructively.
Joseph Stiglitz
‘The assault on the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, incited by the president himself, was the predictable outcome of his four-year-long assault on democratic institutions, aided and abetted by so many in the Republican party. And no one can say that Trump had not warned us: he was not committed to a peaceful transition of power.
Many who benefited as he slashed taxes for corporations and the rich, rolled back environmental regulations and appointed business-friendly judges knew they were making a pact with the devil. Either they believed they could control the extremist forces he unleashed, or they didn’t care.
Trump is the product of multiple forces. For at least a quarter century, the Republican party has understood that it could represent the interests of business elites only by embracing anti-democratic measures (including voter suppression and gerrymandering) and allies, including the religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and nationalist populists.
Then, advances in technology provided a tool for rapid dissemination of dis/misinformation and America’s political system, where money reigns supreme, allowed the emerging tech companies freedom from accountability. This political system did one other thing: it generated a set of policies (sometimes referred to as neoliberalism) that delivered massive income and wealth gains to those at the top, but near-stagnation everywhere elsewhere.
The neoliberal promise that wealth and income gains would trickle down to those at the bottom was fundamentally spurious. As massive structural changes deindustrialised large parts of the country, those left behind were left to fend largely for themselves.
It was class struggle and a politics of redistribution from above. If I may, I was one of a number of people arguing this from the first. The argument was central to my work on economics in 1995, Industry and Europe. But let me return to the article:
‘this toxic mix provided an inviting opportunity for a would-be demagogue.
As we have repeatedly seen, Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit, combined with an absence of moral constraints, provides an ample supply of charlatans, exploiters and would-be demagogues. Trump, a mendacious, narcissistic sociopath, with no understanding of economics or appreciation of democracy, was the man of the moment.
‘we should not sleep comfortably until the underlying problems are addressed.’
Precisely.
Stiglitz goes on to list those underlying problems and what needs to be done to check them.
We need to decrease the influence of money in politics, he states, arguing that no system of checks and balances can be effective in a society which is so unequal. It was a point that Plato made more than two thousand years ago, when asked to draw up a constitution for a profoundly unequal society. The most perfect constitution in history couldn’t save such a society. Plato refused the task.
‘If we not only hold Trump accountable, but also embark on the hard road of economic and political reform to address the underlying problems that gave rise to his toxic presidency, then there is hope of a brighter day.’
‘Fortunately, Joe Biden will assume the presidency,’ Stieglitz states. I think that optimism is worryingly complacent. I had no great hopes for Clinton, Blair, Hollande, Obama etc, and was neither disappointed nor disillusioned. I find the whole cycle of modern politics depressingly predictable.
But Stiglitz at least is on the right lines – Trump is the symptom of these problems, not their architect. And if you don’t act in a concerted political way to ensure that things get better, then they will assuredly get worse.
And for those who are drawing an analogy between Trump being denied access to Twitter and Nazism, this is nothing like what the Nazis did to the trade unionists, the socialists and communists, the gipsies, and the Jews, and those that think it is are either morons or Nazis who have been exposed for what they are and are concerned to accuse others of being the very things they are. The President can call a press conference at any time and answer questions from members of the Press. As Presidents do.
I am now reading that there are members of the United States Congress who are afraid to vote to impeach Trump due to concerns about their families’ safety.
This is how terrorism works, folks! This is a textbook example of terrorists succeeding with efforts to coerce decision makers in a government.
This is what Hitler did by using the muscle of the Brown shirts to terrorize the German people. They beat and killed members of the socialist and communist parties, rivals to the Nazi party and the Aristocracy. A power play that led to the fall of Democracy.
This statement should be a national badge of shame:
Nancy Pelosi said her young staffers knew to barricade the door, turn out the lights, and be silent, because they learned it in school.
US troops are now guarding government buildings, as they do in any failed state.
But you need to address a phenomenon by addressing it as it is, not by false analogies to the past that twist the facts. Your demons are in the here and now, not in the text books.
‘To state these obvious facts is not to encourage complacency. It means that rather than fighting the demons of the past – fascism, Nazism, the militarised politics of Europe’s interwar years – it is necessary to fight the new demons of the present: disinformation, conspiracy theories and the blurring of fact and falsehood.
Trump’s incessant and false claims that the election was rigged have convinced many Americans that their votes no longer count for anything. This lack of democratic faith, not a violent seizure of power, is the real threat to the American republic.
Whether the US and its citizens succeed in preserving democracy and its institutions depends to a large extent on whether they succeed in identifying what the real threats are and developing appropriate means to defeat them. Imagining that they are experiencing a rerun of the fascist seizure of power isn’t going to help them very much in this task. You can’t win the political battles of the present if you’re always stuck in the past.’
The weakening of public trust and public imagination as a result of a sustained, systematic denigration of the political realm has reared generations who lack the political sense to engage in give-and-take, debate, and compromise and who lack faith in political institutions. People have been taught to pursue their liberty and happiness in the private realm, as a matter of personal choice. That is the real threat.
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