Don't Pity the US Because of Trump, Oppose Him, Isolate Him Aggressively

And from yours truly,

Fintan O’Toole wrote a devastating evaluation of the state of American leadership under Donald Trump for the Times last Saturday. He declared that whereas “the rest of the world” has viewed the country with a panoply “of feelings from “love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

While I largely agree with Mr. O’Toole’s assessment of Trump’s America, and even the notion that the state of the affairs in the country is pitiful, there are two points upon which I want to take issue with him. First, I think there are some nuances in regard to the role of race in American politics that he overlooks. Secondly, I urged my fellow citizens of the world not to pity Trump’s policies, but to aggressively oppose them.

O’Toole’s analysis of the way that the Republicans have rolled over in the face of Trump and the potentially horrific impacts of their posture in the COVID-19 crisis is spot on. He concludes that the party’s failure to stand up to Trump “is deliberate and homicidal stupidity.”  He finds the reason for the party’s stance in the contradiction between its desire “to control all the levers of governmental power” even as it has built its “popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.”

O’Toole is only partially right here. Republicans may be no more interested in total control over the government than Democrats. But what the corporate wing of the party seeks is a control that cuts taxes and regulation of the economy as much as possible. Such cuts include axing the social programs of America’s attenuated welfare state as much as possible. That agenda could never have been majoritarian. But since the presidency of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and ever more aggressively from the time of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Republicans have used the resentment of white Americans unhappy with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s to craft a reconfigured national party coalition. That coalition featured economically conservative capital and socially conservative white racists (and fundamental Christians as well). So it is not “homicidal stupidity” as much as corporate greed and white racism that animates the Republican base and makes it all but impossible to make rational public policy.

The corporate wing was the party establishment. For half a century they were able to dupe working class whites into believing that big government was “evil,” because it helped people of color to white people’s disadvantage. But as communism collapsed and with it, the logic of “big government,” free markets were unleashed, flight of capital toward cheap labor overseas ensued, and social programs were slashed. Black and brown people certainly didn’t benefit from those policies, but neither did the white working class.

Getting angrier and angrier, especially after the trauma of the Great Recession in 2008-09, white racists, by now termed “white nationalists,” engineered the Republican victory in the 2010 mid-term US Congressional elections, let us recall, with a black man in the White House. And when too many establishment politicians (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio) stayed in the 2016 primaries too long and split the establishment vote, racist whites coalesced around Donald Trump and propelled him to the nomination … The nation was in shock! America continues to have its problems around race, but as O’Toole admits, most of us didn’t vote for Trump and we certainly didn’t ask for a president like him.

In my work I have talked about how with the demographic shifts this century, America is becoming two nations: a traditional America which is older, whiter and more male, and a progressive America, which is younger, more multiracial, female and gender non-conforming. People of Color had been pounding on their chests since the millennium observing that by mid-century America would be a majority-minority nation. Many scholars and activists have proclaimed that for people of color, “the future is ours” (Bowler and Segura, 2010). The oncoming majority is generally thought to be the natural constituency of the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately for progressives, Republicans were also reading that data. In states they controlled Republicans passed state-level policies imposing strict voter identification standards and the configuring of electoral districts in ways that concentrate racial minority voters into fewer districts and minimize the number of Democrats winning office. Policies such as these forestall the day when the true American majority can exert its will in the halls of government and public policy.

Working class and poor whites support Trump, because they feel marginalized in 21^st century  America. When they hear “build the wall” to keep Latinos out, or immigration bans on mostly Muslim countries, they also hear “make America great again” as “make America white again!” O’Toole is right. Trump does embody this mindset, “but he did not invent it.”

On the question of the world’s pity for the United States, American progressives and moderates, still the majority, need not your pity but a greater determination on “your part” to oppose Trumpism more aggressively than has been the case up until now. Yes, you were appalled as Trump pulled out of the Paris environmental accords, and stunned when he abrogated US involvement in the Iran nuclear deal; but you didn’t do anything about it. This is especially true in regard to the Iran deal upon which world peace might reside. Trump promised sanctions against any country whose corporations continued to do business with Iran. So even while European governments remained in the deal, the European corporations immediately stopped doing business with Iran so they could continue to do business with United States. In the end EU governments are but paper tigers and EU corporations are no different than greedy anti-humanitarian American corporations, and Trump.

In this regard then, Europe is no less pitiful than the United States. In fact, the entire North Atlantic world which has dominated world politics even beyond the last 200 years Mr. O’Toole talks about is ineffectual in the face of Trumpism and the right-wing populism he represents. I would advocate that European politicians openly assault Trump’s character and make fun of him with a devil may care attitude! Screw him! Treat him the way he treats you. I would also suggest that European companies should return to doing business with Iran in defiance of Trump and risk sanctions. Multinational corporations are always nervous about severely affecting their global market opportunities. But could US sanctions be any worse than the shock from nowhere --- COVID 19?

I don’t suspect European corporations to stand up frontally to Trump over Iran, but I do think that the risk for EU politicians is less, as he bumbles his way through the corona crisis. Let me just close by saying that in America, unlike Europe, there is a very courageous populist left matching Trumps’ populist right and represented by Bernie Sanders and people like Elizabeth Warren. It is not at all certain that we will win the November elections, because of the structural inequities alluded to earlier. But we are very vocal and determined to take our government back. What we need from you is international solidarity!

O'Toole: Pity the US

Dear friends,
Long time away, read this piece from an Irish journalist abut  how pitiful the US is these days, and then read my response in next post. Hope it's not too much!

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Populism, Fascism, Socialism

As populist of the right and left pull American political discourse away from a pragmatic center, we are hearing warnings from each side that many on the opposing side trade in ideas that are fundamentally un-American. Bernie Sanders nearly won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 while proudly proclaiming himself a democratic socialist. He successfully tugged the base of the party to the left around issues such as taxes, health care and access to higher education. President Trump signaled in his State of the Union address that a creeping socialism is taking over the Democratic Party and that such ideological thinking is un-American. Already we see front-running Dems such as Elizabeth Warren proclaim that she is a capitalist, and Kamala Harris declare that she is not a democratic socialist.

From the left many journalists and activists have called President Trump a racist because of his vitriolic rhetoric toward Latinos and Muslims on immigration issues and his reference to Africa as “shithole countries.”  And recently two newly-elected Democratic congresswomen,  Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, boldly asserted that the president is a racist. No elected official has yet called Trump a fascist, but many voices, not all of them from the far left, have started to do so. According to conventional wisdom, one of the ways that America has been exceptional historically, is that we prefer pragmatism, believing in what works in the everyday world, to abstract and un-American ideologies like fascism and socialism. So hearing our president and leading contenders from the other party be described in such extreme ideological terms is distressing.

The United States is in a period of crisis that is one of the most serious in our history. The twin challenges of the browning of America and the hangover from the Great Recession have shaken the post-Cold War political consensus and severely wounded the establishment of both major parties who signed onto it.  The combined pressures of populist forces such as the Tea Party from the right and the Occupy Movement from left combined to make 2016 a year for shaking up the political establishment. Both sides felt the shock from the Recession and wanted to make corporate America more accountable to the people. The culturally conservative sections of the right were still also smarting from eight years of a Black president and fearful of the oncoming minority majority. The populist left, mobilized by massive pro-immigration rallies in 2006, the Black Lives Matter movement from 2014 and the Standing Rock anti-pipeline movement until 2016, included the imminent majority so feared on the right.

Both parties saw vigorous populist challenges to the status quo in the 2016 primaries. Bernie Sanders loudly proclaimed his socialism and nearly won the Democratic nomination. Donald Trump, who I will say is a fascist, did win the Republican nomination and the presidency. But what is socialism, and what is fascism? And how un-American and dangerous are these ideologies?

Socialism is a system in which the collective welfare is prioritized over the welfare and rights of individuals. It has a rich and wide-ranging history. At one extreme is the state socialism of the communist Soviet Union and Maoist China in which private enterprise is eradicated and the state owns and controls the economy toward the end of the redistribution of wealth. At the other is the social democracies that emerged in Western Europe that created cradle to grave welfare states featuring high levels of taxation, but what most Europeans would say is a higher quality of life than ours. Private enterprise still exists in these systems, but is much more highly regulated than in this country. Bernie Sanders’ version of socialism is parallel to the Western European model, not Soviet-styled communism.

Fascism is an extreme form of nationalism. For fascists, the nation is composed of a mythical “people” who are culturally homogeneous. Those who are not viewed as part of the nation are scapegoated and can be targets of violence. Fascism first appeared between the two world wars in places like Italy and Germany. In differing ways each country was humiliated during World War One and faced severe political crises thereafter. Mussolini and Hitler were able to harness that collective trauma and turn it into a sense of victimhood. Behind the charismatic leadership of those men political elites who were said to be corrupt were targeted and ultimately pushed from power (again in very different ways). Political institutions and established practices were also pushed aside and the only relationship that came to matter was that between “the leader” and “the people.” Fascism as a system of practices is made possible when the political status quo is in crisis. Donald Trump is a fascist and a racist, because he divides the American public between real Americans and the others. From the day he announced his candidacy it has been clear that the others were primarily people of color, though progressive white people are also not his Americans. He is also fascist, because he trashes any traditional institution, practice or politician that opposes him and he seeks to communicate directly, with his people, the real Americans. And he implores them to listen only to him.

So Trump is a fascist and America is in the midst of a political crisis. But unlike interwar Germany and Italy, the United States has a set of political institutions featuring checks and balances that have endured for over 200 years. They are democratic institutions. So Trump may be a fascist, but the system is not. The push back that he has received from the media, the courts and most recently, the mid-term elections are proof of that.

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. America is also not a socialist system. Despite our penchant for pragmatism and what works, most students of intellectual history and political philosophy would say that our dominant ideology is liberalism: a set of ideas advancing individual rights and equality of individuals before the law. There are right and left versions of liberalism, which approximate the principles behind our Republican and Democratic parties. The left version of liberalism, or what philosophers call social liberalism, promotes the regulatory welfare state and favors high taxation very much like democratic socialism. In fact, in terms of real policy preferences the two are almost indistinguishable. Then there is the fact that we have had a state that regulates capitalism, offers minimum wages and the 40 hour work week and delivers socialized K-12 education. Most American conservatives as well as liberals support these policies today, but beginning in the 19^th century, socialist were some of the earliest proponents of these policies. So we have long had elements of socialism embedded in our socio-economic system.

So I ask my fellow Americans which ideology is most un-American, and which is most dangerous to the stability of the country?

Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

In the recent government shutdown Donald Trump revealed himself to be a right-wing populist. Populists believe there’s a “people” out there that they alone cater to. And once in political power they try to govern as if only those they cater to matter. They are willing to side-step or usurp normal governmental practices, laws and the constitution itself to give those “people” what they want. In his lovely little book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder cautions us to “be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” He talks about how the fire at the German Parliament in 1933 became the cause for Hitler to declare a state of emergency that would last through World War Two, until 1945.

What Snyder means by being calm is to calmly and soberly assess the danger and to stand up and push back immediately and forcefully. In the parliamentary elections that where held less than a week after the fire the Nazis won a majority. Less than a year after those events Germany was effectively, a one-party state. Who set fire to the parliament was never determined. But Hitler declared that it was Germany’s internal enemies. Germany lacked the kind of robust but deliberate civil society in which people might openly say “well let’s investigate who set the fire,” or we don’t really know who set it. So let’s go to the street to oppose martial law.” Instead the German people, reeling from post-World War One malaise, the Great Depression and more than a decade of unstable governments rolled over before “Der Fuhrer.”

Populism is troubling for the political establishment. But populism on the right trends toward fascism. Fascist populist not only purport to despise big government and big capital. They also fear and scapegoat ”foreign” elements in the population: Jews and Gypsies in 1930s Germany; and people of color in contemporary America. They thus, also become white nationalists. Fascist in power are much more troubling than garden variety populists.

Donald Trump is a populist, a fascist and a white nationalist. The people he seeks to scapegoat are people of color; and especially immigrants. Snyder says be calm when the unthinkable occurs. He then describes the creation of a climate of crisis, which induces hysteria in the citizenry, and justifies a state of emergency. This is what Trump has done over the issue of the border wall. Those living along the border, including most Republican congress members would not describe the border situation as a crisis. Fewer undocumented people are coming across now than before 9-11. Many of those arriving at the border today are seeking asylum. They aren’t trying to enter illegally. And, many of those in the country illegally, are people who came legally and overstayed their visas. Incidentally, many of those people, if not most are white people from places like Canada and Ireland. So there is no crisis, except that manufactured in Trump’s head and sold to his base.

The real difference between Germany in the 1930s the United States today is the durability of our political institutions, specifically, our system of checks and balances. Heralded as some of the strongest institutions in the world, they are under supreme challenge from Trumpism and the long-frustrated white Americans who see the country they’ve known historically slipping away. Trump has been continually frustrated by the media, the courts, blue state attorney generals and local officials who won’t do his bidding. And then the American people sent a thunderous rebuke to his manner of governance in the 2018 federal elections. The government shutdown over a border wall that he couldn’t get when Republicans completely controlled Congress was Trump’s latest desperate attempt to side-step the normal processes of government and get his way in the name of his “American people.” The steadfast leadership of Nancy Pelosi and the decline of Trump’s strategy in the polls is the calm in the face of the unthinkable that Snyder talks about, and the determination to use our institutions to push back hard that I’m calling for here.

Round One goes to Pelosi and the Democrats in the House. But Trump may not be finished. He may declare a state of emergency if this three weeks of negotiations fail. He probably won’t shut down the government again, but if he does, average citizens must be prepared to take direct action in myriad ways to send him and his feckless Republican minions in Congress the message that we’re not going down without a fight. In fact, we have no intention of going down period!