America, the Banana Republic

Perhaps I am dating myself, but I have lived at this point under 13 different occupants of the White House and never has there been such an embarrassment - indeed, threat to the nation, like the current occupant. Given polling results, it appears that a majority of the citizenry agrees with that assessment.  Seemingly, only evangelical Christians - who have glaringly displayed their moral bankruptcy - white supremacists, and greed driven vulture capitalist on Wall Street appear to continue to support the current occupant who daily displays his unfitness for office.  His Vice President who makes Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes look like a pillar of decisiveness and wisdom.  America has become a caricature of the banana republics once so derided during my lifetime.  Frighteningly, there is no clear sign post of how the national nightmare will end.  Even America's closest ally, the United Kingdom, with all of its own problems, does not want Trump to visit. A piece at Moyers.com looks at how low America has fallen.   Here are excerpts:

When people call Donald Trump an authoritarian, it almost gives him more credit

than he deserves.  You don’t think favorably of authoritarians; they are despicable. But you do think of them as monstrously large, grievously terrifying, as somehow taking the measure of the polity they control and drawing on its stature to puff themselves up, even as they destroy their nation’s moral core. Despots like Mussolini and Hitler epitomized evil on the grandest possible scale. To call them clowns would trivialize the unconscionable horrors they inflicted.

Trump is certainly an authoritarian, but he is more of a tinhorn dictator, a tiny, negligible man who, rather than inflating himself with the nation’s grandeur, has managed to deflate the nation with his own insipidness. Thanks to him, America is now a banana republic. It is no longer a country of soaring ideas and idealism, a beacon to the world, an example of freedom at home and a protector of freedom abroad, an anchor of sanity in a world often bouncing on the waves of madness.

Whatever her failings, America was once majestic. Now she is hopelessly diminish

-ed — a wealthier version of the corrupt nations in the developing world that we 

used to ridicule. And we owe it all to Donald Trump for making America small again.

The meme of America withering into a banana republic is not a new one. Some observers made the claim after the 2000 presidential election, when Republicans successfully wrested the presidency from Al Gore, just the way cabals do in those banana republics. 

In Vanity Fair, the late Christopher Hitchens was more expansive. He enumerated 

the many ways in which America, the last great hope of mankind, had become 

a banana republic — primarily the way the government was willing to bail out 

the oligarchs while letting the general public suffer.

Hitchens added that there is absolutely no accountability for the thieves. This all 

should sound very familiar this week, as Republicans retool the entire tax system 

to rob from the poor and middle classes and give to corporations and the 

wealthy. If that isn’t a banana republic, I don’t know what is.

But Krugman and Hitchens were writing before we had a bona fide banana republic dictator to rule our kleptocracy. And while America long has had the economic and social characteristics of a banana republic, it took Trump, who has the instincts and temperament of a gangster, to finish the transformation. There is no disguising it now. We are what we are.

Trump is the kleptocrat-in-chief. He not only appears to be using the presidency as his own personal ATM, now promoting a tax-cut scam by which he stands to gain tens of millions of dollars, he also has been petty enough to steer business to his hotels and hawked his “Make America Great Again” tchotchkes. Check.

Apparently not satisfied to have enriched himself at the public’s expense, Trump has brought unprecedented nepotism to the presidency in a way that only tinhorn dictators do, giving his family access to the public trough while placing his unqualified cronies in positions of power. In this administration, everyone may be on the take. Check.

Just about every Trump directive, from health care to the environment to so-called tax reform to trade policy, seems expressly designed to give benefits to a small coterie of the wealthiest Americans while the rest of the country goes to hell. . . . Sure sounds like a banana republic to me. Check.

Like other tinhorn dictators, Trump has no use for the essentials of democracy. 
He openly attacks a free press and has a house press of his own, Fox News, and soon, 
quite possibly, Time Inc.

[T]here are allegations that he may using the levers of government to punish his 
press opponents, using the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against the
proposed AT&T purchase of Time Warner to try to force the divestment of CNN.  
This, too, is unprecedented in an American democracy, but not in a banana republic. 

Trump has taken aim at the electoral process itself, not only claiming that his loss 
of the popular vote was a fraud, but empaneling a government commission whose 
sole purpose is thought to be the disenfranchisement of voters who might oppose 
him. This is pure banana republicanism and an affront to democracy. Check.

Banana republics are often agent states — that is, they operate at the behest of larger
states. In fact the phrase “banana republic” first was coined by the writer O. Henry 
back in 1904, to describe the dependence of Central American countries on American 
businesses like United Fruit, which ran plantations in those countries and exported 
bananas.

Now, America itself is one of those agent states, thanks to Trump’s troubling obeisance to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Let’s not pretend otherwise just so we can save some face. There is no more face to save. American elections interfered with by Russia and a president intimidated by a Russian dictator? Check.

Tinhorn dictators do everything they can to dismantle a system of checks and 
balances. Trump has done everything in his power to do the same — from 
dismissing FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating Trump, 
intimidating the Justice Department and taking over the Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau to…. well, you name it. Untrammeled power is his goal. Check.

In a banana republic, the dictator makes his own rules and lives by his 
own reality. Clearly, Trump thinks he is above the law, be it legal or moral. 
He boasts of it. He also is above fact. The latest example of the thousands 
of his presidency: According to The New York Times, he privately has 
declared that the Access Hollywood tape was not actually him! Banana 
republic time. Check.

Donald Trump has demeaned himself, but he has also demeaned the country
that was deranged enough to elect him. These characteristics speak to a corrupt
and desiccated nation, one that is staggering into oblivion.

The “alt-right” insist that until Trump, America was going the way of Rome — rotting from the inside. They are wrong. It is not decadence that is destroying America, but petulance. We are going not the way of Rome but the way of Guatemala or Zimbabwe or the Philippines — the way of banana republics. Thus does this once great nation tumble.

 

As for those who cite the fall of the Western Roman Empire as precedent, they miss two things (among others).  One of the precursor was that they system became so tilted in favor of the wealthy class, that average people simply ceased to see a benefit from living under the empire.  A second factor was the insidious rise of Christianity and its call to ignore fact and objective reason with its adherents withdrawing into a fantasy world that undermined the empire.  We see both of these elements growing under the Trump/Pence regime.