Donald Trump's big mistake is that he did not delegate the authority to smash democratic norms to his lawyers and various underlings so as to achieve plausible deniability. Throughout history, United States presidents have largely escaped widespread public opprobrium both at home and abroad via their studied personal absences from the scenes of actual crimes.
Richard Nixon was done in by the smoking gun of his tapes. Trump was done in by the smoking gun of his big fat mouth and his Twitter feed. When the ultimate sacrilege of the storming of the Capitol by his supporters came down, his various partners - who include both his right-wing pals and the liberal enablers who have profited mightily by substituting their contrived shock and outrage at Trump for providing any meaningful pandemic relief for the masses of people - cannot rid themselves of him fast enough.
His right-wing pals in the oligarchic establishment are cutting off the money spigots, and the neocon wing of the GOP is cutting off their political and emotional support. His Democratic enablers are impeaching him for a second time and fund-raising like mad as they attempt to elicit public sympathy for the physical danger they faced sheltering in place, and for the bodily fear they say they still experience, This fear in high places is already opening the doors for more social repression and more liberal McCarthyism to take up where #Russiagate left off.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this week that Congress form a new commission to "rein in" the media in order to combat misinformation, the right erupted in anger. But there has been nary a peep from the establishment "left" about the censorship threat. If liberals and progressives think that our elected officials will stop at squelching the speech of Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and their ilk, they should probably think again. Outlets (see, for example, this puff-piece in Jacobin) perhaps should also think twice about canonizing AOC the same way they once canonized Barack Obama, who later attained the dubious distinction of running one of the most secretive and repressive administrations in recent history.
Unlike Donald Trump, though, Obama did not make the mistake of tweeting and bragging about his right to target the very same perceived enemies, which include journalists, whistleblowers, immigrants, Muslims, and anti-police brutality protesters. When the nation's Democratic governors enforced a coordinated crackdown on Occupy camps in late fall 2011, Obama was conveniently out of the country on a trade junket. He did not unilaterally decide to assassinate thousands of people with his drones, but rather contrived a Disposition Matrix with the CIA and enlisted his attorney general to write erudite legal opinions to give him the necessary cover for assassinating people.
When the now fully rehabilitated George W. Bush gave his O.K. to mass surveillance and torture, he had his own team of lawyers write secret manifestos euphemized as "opinions." Thus do credentialed experts like John Yoo not only escape opprobrium and accountability, they are given regular platforms on cable news and the New York Times from which to virtuously pontificate on Donald Trump's serial assaults on democracy and the rule of law, but at the same time "consult with" Trump on ways to skirt the law. No matter that declaring an atrocity to be legal doesn't miraculously make it morally right. They wear their historical precedents as shields.
Nevertheless, liberal interventionists and neoconservative warmongers alike are not only proclaiming themselves "woke" to the racism in this country, they are also congratulating themselves for the "courage" to label Trump and his base as fascists. Critics have pointed out, rightly, that American fascism erupted with a real vengeance during Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow - under, of course, all the usual legal niceties and opinions written by the well-credentialed in order to give all kinds of inhumane horrors like lynchings and mob violence that all-important gloss of expert respectability.
Fast forward to 2021, and the newly Woke Elites are talking a lot about the Trump era being our own Weimar Republic. Fascism is suddenly all the fashion, but not the kind that they'd be caught dead wearing themselves, of course.
They're certainly not talking so much about the American Jim Crow laws against miscegenation being one of the main inspirations for Nazi Germany's own September 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of most of their human rights.
The New York Times, even in its own contemporaneous coverage, glossed right over the passage of those draconian edicts by headlining its article "Reich Adopts Swastika As Official Flag" and framing the Nuremberg Laws around Hitler's reaction to a group of anti-fascist protesters who'd torn down the swastika-emblazoned flag from a German ship docked in New York, and the ensuing diplomatic kerfuffle when a low-level New York City judge named Louis Brodsky dismissed all charges against the culprits. It was not the Nuremberg Laws themselves that the Roosevelt administration initially condemned. It was the fact that an upstart judge exceeded his job description and compared Nazis to pirates. Secretary of State Cordell Hull actually sent Hitler a letter of regret.
A later New York Times article assured readers that the Nuremberg law forbidding Jews from hiring Aryan household help did not apply to Jewish-Americans doing business in the Reich.
But let's not totally pile on the Paper of Record, which did not yet even exist during the colonial era when the frenzy of corporate land-grabbing and extermination of native human beings proceeded, in tandem with the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, in full fascistic fashion.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report aptly calls last week's Capitol riot a "white settler uprising." Fascism has not sprung fully-fledged from the small brain of Donald Trump. Not by a long shot:
White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans – a colony-in-arms — had all but completed the mission of racially “purifying” New England within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms in “defense” against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts. Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion.
Speaking of presidents, let's not forget the dude on the almighty dollar bill, Father of Our Country George Washington.
Before he fought the Brits and won the revolution despite his own ineptitude in battle, Washington was a slave-owning real estate speculator with a sick hunger for more riches no matter what the human cost. He was every inch the precursor of Donald Trump, only with a powdered wig instead of a comb-over. He relied on his base of aggrieved white settlers and failed farmers and small business people fleeing the East coast for native American territory to do his dirty work for him as much as Trump has relied on his. Washington flouted British peace treaties with the Indians as much as Trump flouts the "norms" of our own neoliberal system.
Extracting from written correspondence of Washington and sundry of his plutocratic pals, historian Peter Cozzens writes about the pre-Revolutionary class system, circa 1774, in his biography of the great Indian leader Tecumseh:
The royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunsmore, who himself coveted Indian land for personal profit, had no expectation of peaceful denouement. Frontier subjects, he wrote the Crown, despised treaties made with Indians, "whom they consider but little removed from brute creation." So too did the Virginia aristocracy. With the spring thaw in 1774, surveyors representing George Washington, Patrick Henry and other Tidewater elites staked large claims along the Ohio River. Waving away the royal edict against land grabs as "a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," Washington told his personal surveyor not to worry.
With the surveyors came settlers willing to wage their scalps on a scrap of land.
So the original meaning of Patrick Henry's clarion cry, "Give me liberty or give me death" seems to have been "Give me the liberty to plunder and get rich and I'll give you the freedom to sweep up my crumbs and kill and die for me in the process."
Some things never change.
Forget AOC's special commission on reining in disinformation. We need a commission on disseminating the truth and not hiding it, as officials and the aristocracy and ruling elites have striven to do probably since hominids first figured out how to get up and walk with two legs and developed the ability to think with autonomous brains. We need a well-stocked library in every neighborhood. We need courses in history, philosophy and the liberal arts much more than we need STEM curricula to prepare us for the low-wage precarious jobs of the future.
Our ignorance is their greatest strength. Always has been, always will be.
8 comments:
Caitlin Johnstone: Consent-manufacturing for Patriot Act II continues —
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/512613-caitlin-johnstone-patriot-act/
15 Jan. 2021
The post's closer inspires me. Instead of establishing a government bureaucracy to silence "disinformation," fund a Federal Committee of Librarians charged with building and staffing bulging libraries in every American community, a kind of Second Wave to the Carnegie libraries of a century ago coupled with another New Deal Arts Project. Let professional librarians, guided by the standards of their own guild, decide which books and electronic media will fill those libraries. By all means, lots of STEM subjects, but half the space reserved for philosophy, history, fiction, as well as the varieties of art and music.
Additionally, have the existing Department of Education require all high schools to fit into the curriculum at least one civics course (content to be set by the League of Women's Voters).
The library and civics budgets will probably cost far less than a 24/7/365 army of screeners doing something very much like Winston in 1984's Ministry of Truth, i.e., tossing troubling, controversial, unpopular information down the memory hole.
Somebody please explain to AOC that she's calling for the establishment of another Ministry of Truth employing thousands of Winstons.
Ugh: League of Women Voters
Today Michigan's Governor closed the state Capitol, boarded it up, and put up fences, saying the Republicans demonstrating outside were a threat.
Maybe they are. But those boards and fences are not new. They were put up when Republicans were inside, and Occupy was outside demonstrating. It looked exactly the same. I know, because I was outside with Occupy then, and I recognize it.
Government vs outraged extremist voters is not new. They've had the voters on both sides going nuts in outrage for a long time. They don't seem to care. They only notice when they get chased from their offices, and their offices trashed behind them.
That is what it takes to get their outrage, and then it is only outraged privilege, their egos insulted.
This is heading to a bad end, and that is not a good guys vs fascist thing. It is unresponsive self regard of government vs voters who are losing their minds in frustration.
Aloha Karen, push down by the ruling elite has always existed, they don’t want commoners getting in their way, or heaven forbid trying to join their country club. A good accurate history class would help those willing to listen, however I fear true enlightenment by the masses is a lost cause. Trump is just the latest in a long line of bullshit. .
This was a well-researched piece, Karen, and I learned a lot from reading it.
I agree with your closing point - our ignorance is their greatest strength. You have a good point - rather than muzzle the disinformation, we should be putting out accurate information. The question is where will people find it and do they have the ability to discern between truth and hype? More than once I have been asked where to find the truth in the media. I tell people to go to the blogosphere and recommend various blogs. My biggest concern is that, aside from a small percentage of readers - many of whom are from an older generation - people aren't able to read and think critically about what they read. As an educator, I freely admit, our schools are failing to teach our students the kind of critical thinking that is essential in a democracy.
I remember No Child Left Behind. At the time, there was a big push by Conservatives, who had quietly taken over school boards throughout the country, to move away from teaching good Literature to teaching non-fiction reading in the primary schools. They wanted us to teach children to read for information and knowledge - but not to grapple with moral issues. Most of you probably don't realise that a lot of the foundations for reading literature in high school and college are laid in primary school via adolescent literature. Even in fourth, fifth and sixth grades, students start having to do moral reasoning around issues of justice and injustice in literature discussions. Another casualty was History. It was very significant when NCLB turned to standardised testing that it was going to test reading, writing, spelling, grammar, math - both computation and problem solving - and science. NO HISTORY. Why? Because history might have shed light on what was happening in the current day.
Look, I too am appalled at the low standards of primary teacher education. Teachers are teaching historical facts - and because they don't know or understand history themselves - they are unable to make it relevant in light of current events or to help students relate it to their own lives. It is the same with adolescent literature - the teachers don't read so they don't know the good books to recommend or teach. However, this is a systemic failure that doesn't seem to be accidental. It is like those who have the power want to keep the masses ignorant - which, as Karen wrote, is to their advantage.
The result is Trumpism and conspiracy theories and people buying into policies like Free Trade Agreements and trickle down economics. I don't know how we are going to fix this mess, but good education - starting in the primary schools is key. The sad part is that teachers of my generation are not only getting old and tired, we are being marginalised in a google computer culture where rich discussion is being replaced by scanning, cutting and pasting. I’m not saying, “Oh poor me, I don’t get the accolades I should be getting.” Surprisingly, both parents and students value my teaching. It is the education system everywhere that is being undermined – and I can’t help but think there is a method to their madness.
Thank you, Karen, as always. Perhaps a country, founded on genocide and dependent on slavery, has sown seeds the result of which we may never recover. At the very least, we need a truth and reconciliation commission, as in South Africa. The likelihood of that, however, is dim, indeed. Even at that, a South African interviewed recently stated that the commission was unsuccessful because there was no accountability. This country has never had accountability for any of its greatest thieves, murderers, and general scoundrels. Valerie's post reminded me of George Carlin on "No Child Left Behind" and other matters - as significant today as they were when he was around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY4WlxO6i0
MLK: ‘If we are not careful, our colleges will produce … close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/01/17/mlk-education-quotes-prophetic/
Jan. 17, 2021 ~ by Valerie Strauss
“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
~ Wendell Berry
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