Republicans Will Paint Democrats As Socialists as the GOP Pushes a Fascist Agenda

As the second night of Democrat presidential candidate debates takes place with serious discussions about means to address some of the most pressing problems facing millions and millions of average Americans, including the nation's health care crisis, an economy that is providing little if any financial increase to working Americans, and a thoroughly broken immigration system, a column in the New York Times looks at the lies and disingenuous tactics Republicans will utilize to dupe voters into voting against their own best interests.  Yes, the familiar ploys of racism and religious extremism will be trotted out, but the lead GOP mantra will likely be that Democrats are socialists and they seek to take the nation down the road of Venezuela - ignoring, of course, that Democrat plans are no different than those in other leading western industrial nations.  The piece also calls attention to just how extreme the GOP agenda is in terms of historic perspective.  Indeed, the GOP has become a de facto white supremacist, oligarchical political party. Lastly, the piece looks at the need for the media to stop parroting Republican lies and report lies as the lies they are in fact.  Here are column excepts:

The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years, but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders . . . . Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call “social democrats”: advocates of a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.

Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. . . . And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.  Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.

To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to the truth than calling Democrats socialists.

The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist extremists.

[I]t matches up with lots of other evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.

Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has effectively created a permanent one-party state.

Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses that don’t toe the line. Does any of this sound like something that can’t happen here? In fact, does any of it sound like something that isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of if they get the chance?

One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to win all the same — these practices seem if anything more prevalent here than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.

So it’s really something to see Republicans trying to tar Democrats as un-American socialists. If they want to see a party that really has broken with fundamental American values, they should look in the mirror.

But that won’t happen, of course. Whoever the Democrats nominate — even if it’s Joe Biden — Republicans will paint him or her as the second coming of Hugo Chávez. The only question is whether it will work.

Republicans have squandered much of the accusation’s force. And Donald Trump, who was installed in office with Russian help and clearly prefers foreign dictators to democratic allies, is probably less able to play the “Democrats are unpatriotic” card than previous Republican presidents.

Still, a lot will depend on how the news media handle dishonest attacks. Will we keep seeing headlines that repeat false claims (“Trump Says Democrats Will Ban Hamburgers”), with the information that the claim is false buried deep inside the article? Will we get coverage of actual policy proposals, as opposed to horse-race analysis that only asks how those proposals seem to be playing?  I guess we’ll soon find out.

How the GOP Became the Party of Vladimir Putin

It has been said that when fascism came to America it would be wrapped in the American flag and clutching a Bible.  Those who uttered such prediction likely never believed that a morally bankrupt, greed driven narcissist like Donald Trump would be the harbinger of the death of American democracy or that the Republican Party would become the party praising a brutal yet cunning Russian dictator. Those who made such predictions obviously underestimated the linger power of racism and Christian fanaticism to make far too many Americans - i.e. the 26% that voted for Trump/Pence - only too ready to overthrow the American republic. Just so they could reclaim their white privilege and force their extreme right wing Christian beliefs on all even as they push a social agenda that is the antithesis of the Gospel message. Greed and cruelty to others have replaced the Gospel message of caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and sheltering to the homeless. A column in the Washington Post looks at this ugly transformation of a once great political party that I once supported.  Here are excerpts:  

In Donald Trump, the GOP nominated the most pro-Russian U.S. presidential candidate since Henry Wallace, whose 1948 bid on the Progressive Party ticket was largely run by communists. Throughout last year’s campaign, Trump lavished praise on Russian President (and career KGB agent) Vladimir Putin, attacked NATO and encouraged the Kremlin to hack his Democratic opponent’s emails. He even proposed recognizing Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula — the first violent European land grab since World War II — a move that would put the United States in the company of Cuba and North Korea. Since the election, he has openly contradicted the intelligence community’s finding that Moscow tampered in our democracy, calling such claims a “political witch-hunt.”

In his victory, Trump is bringing other Republicans along with him. . . . A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it. And a survey released this past week by HuffPost/YouGov showedthat 82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do. Now that Russia has dropped its official atheism and anti-capitalism, claiming to be the protector of traditional values and Christendom, a growing number of American conservatives are receptive to Trump’s Russian rapprochement.

Pro-Russian converts on the American right appear to take two forms. The opportunists simply want power and are willing to sacrifice principles in pursuit of it. The ideologues, meanwhile, see Russia as nothing worse than an occasional nuisance, if not a potential ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.

Perhaps the most prominent opportunist is former House speaker Newt Gingrich. In 1994, Gingrich included NATO expansion to Eastern Europe in his “Contract With America.” Yet last summer, while rationalizing Trump’s unprecedented vow not to defend NATO allies unless they “pay us,” Gingrich said of tiny, vulnerable Estonia (one of the few NATO members to meet the alliance’s recommended defense budget threshold) that he was “not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg.”

The need to defend Trump’s victory at any cost has induced conservatives to praise a virulently anti-American anarchist, who is probably in cahoots with Russian intelligence, and whose head they once called for. When WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange published emails stolen from the Clinton campaign by Russian hackers last fall, a few patriotic Republicans such as Marco Rubio said the party should ignore the blatant attempt to subvert our democracy. But most seized on the correspondence, and earlier hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, as a political cudgel. 

Trump, who had suggested the “death penalty or something” for Assange in 2010 after he released secret U.S. Army logs, now sides with Assange over the U.S. “intelligence” community, as he derisively referred to it on Twitter.

Republican Rep. Trent Franks (Ariz.) told an interviewer that Russian hackers “merely did what the media should have done” in stealing and exposing Democratic Party communications. Break the law?

Though the opportunists outnumber the ideologues, it’s the true believers who could pose the greatest damage to U.S. foreign policy over the long term. Their proposed strategic realignment with Moscow, predicated upon shared opposition to vaguely defined “Islamic terrorism,” is seductive but wrong: Far from being a potential partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism, Russia does much to stoke it.

A representative bellwether is former American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, who, writing in the Washington Times, cast doubt on the intelligence community’s assessments regarding Russian hacking and favorably quoted right-wing former Czech president Vaclav Klaus (who lost a sinecure at the libertarian Cato Institute for his pro-Putin views ) to the effect that “a nation and its leaders may be detestable without being dangerous.” 

Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.) is the perfect embodiment of this ideological makeover. In the late 1980s, he was a rock-ribbed Orange County Republican speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who actually fought the Russians alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Today, Rohrabacher (who praised Russian hacking as “terrific ”) is Capitol Hill’s greatest defender of Putin, whom he portrays as an opponent of radical Islamic terrorism.

Trump’s supporters in the white-nationalist alt-right also venerate Russia as a reactionary regime standing athwart a liberal, cosmopolitan West that promotes feminism and homosexuality. When I interviewed him last year, alt-right leader Richard Spencer gushed about how the “Trump-Putin understanding” presented “a vision of a white world that is not at war.”

Some Republicans, such as Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), are putting principle before party by protesting Trump’s coziness with a regime that the GOP’s previous nominee, Mitt Romney, rightly labeled America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Yet they appear to be losing. 

In an interview recorded more than 30 years ago, Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov revealed the KGB’s counterintuitive approach to recruiting. “This was my instruction: Try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media. Reach . . . cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruit-able people, people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or suffer from self-importance.” Say this for Bezmenov: He knew his mark.

Bezmenov could not have better described the white supremacists and Christofascists who have rallied to Trump/Putin's standard.  

Hope for the Best, Expect and Prepare for the Worse

In the wake of last week's devastating election results, I and many others, especially those in minority populations hated and derided by Donald Trump and his alt-right and Christofascist supporters, continue to feel as if we are lost in a nightmare and cannot wake up to re-find normalcy.  Meanwhile, the statements from friends, some of whom have shown their duplicity by voting for Trump, tell us to "give him a chance," "it will all be OK," and other platitudes that are easy to say if one is a white, heterosexual Christian.  Adding to the surreal nature of the situation are all of the strained relationships with "friends" that will never be fully trusted again.  What does one do to move forward?  A piece in Mother Jones lays out the approach that the husband and I have decided to adopt: hope for the best but expect and plan for the worse.  Here are some article highlights on where to go from here:

CNN commentator Van Jones has been a leading voice for progressivism, a smart critic of failings within the Democratic Party, and an unflinching tribune against the bigotry exhibited by the Donald Trump campaign. On election night, Jones—co-founder of Color for Change and president of the social justice incubator Dream Corps—spoke for many when he said that parents who'd told their kids not to be bullies or bigots were dreading how to explain the outcome to them in the morning.

On Friday, I spoke with Van Jones about where we go from here.

Clara Jeffery: On election night, you said it was pretty clear that this was a "whitelash" against not only Barack Obama, but also due to the unease that whites have of losing their demographic choke hold.

Van Jones: That part got the most attention because I was the only person on national TV willing to call out the elephant in the room. The vast majority of white people voted for Trump, and the vast majority of people of color didn't. . . . in a race where even Paul Ryan said there were textbook examples of racism coming out of the mouth of the Republican nominee, we have to accept that some very toxic stuff was marbled into the Trump phenomenon.

Now, the Trump phenomenon has a lot of really good stuff in it, the anti-elitism, the concern for America's economy in the Rust Belt, the desire to see better days for the country. That's all great stuff. Some of that stuff is Bernie Sanders stuff. The problem is that it's marbled through with xenophobia and misogyny and bigotry.

Now I think liberals have gone from underreacting to Trump and saying that Trump is just a clown and a buffoon, and that Hillary Clinton's going to kick his ass, to now overreacting, and saying, "Oh my God, 60 million people consciously endorsed a white supremacist for president."

Neither of those are true, okay? I put out a video on MoveOn.org explaining how Trump was going to beat us. I had insufferably arrogant people from across the Democratic establishment and innumerable regular NPR liberals tell me I was crazy.

Now, these same people are completely panicked and they think that Trump has power he doesn't have. Trump is holding together the shakiest coalition that you could conceivable govern on. It is a conservative, populist alliance that agrees with itself on very little.

Civil liberties, immigration, there's a whole bunch of terrible stuff to come. But this idea that 60 million people all want to join the Klan and now have absolute control of all three branches of government and that America's over is just ridiculous.

CJ: But we have seen attacks on people all over the country, people who are Muslim or Latino or whatever. What should our level of panic be about Trump supporters who think they have permission to act like that.

VJ: One, we should take it very, very seriously. We are on track now for a tragedy. There will be a Muslim Trayvon Martin within the next six months on our present trajectory. Some completely innocent Muslim, possibly a female, who gets gravely injured, if not killed, by somebody who feels empowered by white nationalist extremes of the Trump phenomenon. So we should take it very seriously.

Number two, we need to try to get as specific and concrete as we can and gather the evidence, because one or two stories circulate on Facebook, bounce a thousand times, and it can sometimes feel like there's more going on than there is. We want to make sure we're accurate in what we're describing.

Number three, we need to put pressure on Trump, to speak out very forcefully that he's the president of all Americans including Muslims, and that his administration, including his law enforcement, is going to take very, very seriously any crimes against any Americas based on their race or their faith, including Muslims. He needs to send that signal very, very soon and very, very clearly. Otherwise, he's going to be seen as culpable. And his silence may be interpreted as encouragement, rightly or wrongly.

I think we have every reason to hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst. It is conceivable that maybe he won't feel the need to throw so much raw meat at his base and might govern reasonably, but it seems more likely that he'll follow the usual pattern of demagogues. The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures. He's promised the moon. Now he has power. He's going to fail to deliver. He's not going to be able to bring a bunch of coal jobs back and a bunch of factory jobs back in this global economy. Period. Because you can't. It's not going to happen.

When he fails to deliver and the economic pain is the same as it is right now, he'll have two choices. He's going to have to spend a bunch of money on infrastructure jobs, which, frankly, I'm not mad at.  . . . . Then he's going to start blaming people. He's going to start a war, he's going to start attacking immigrants or Muslims or Black Lives Matter or whatever. Because he's going to have to distract them from the no jobs. I think we have every reason to hope for the best but to expect and prepare for the worst.

This is the first election we ever went through where an enemy deliberately disrupts our democracy, and everybody keeps acting like it didn't happen. The Russians have had and continue to have an active program to undermine American society, and a part of that was accelerating all this online stuff. It hacked the DNC but not the RNC. We've never seen Donald Trump's email. All of this stuff was part of the disruption, so yeah, there were some Bernie bros who were saying bad stuff, some horrible behavior. I'm not trying to excuse it, but what I am saying is that… We're in the middle of a cyberwar with Russia. Yes, there was terrible behavior from some Sanders people. But Hillary Clinton was almost certainly going to be the nominee. I think they really misread the Sanders voters.

This is a horrific setback—there's going to be horrible consequences for a generation or more. The country may never fully recover from this, but it's not all bad and it's not over yet, and the American people may recover their senses.

First of all, almost half the people didn't vote at all. Of the half that did vote, Hillary got more votes, and of the people who voted for Trump, only probably 10 percent of them endorsed all this crazy stuff; the other 40 percent were just giving a middle finger to either Hillary Clinton, DC, or PC stuff run amok, whatever that means to them. . . . That's a lot of people who cannot be rationally included in the Trump camp at all.

Hopefully this will open up our eyes to how fragile democracy is and how key civility is to civilization. Civility isn't just some optional value in a multicultural, multistate democratic republic. Civility is the key to civilization. Everybody got through it with their kids as best they could. If you're a Muslim parent, if you're a Latino parent, you're still going through it. For the rest of us who have a little bit of privilege, maybe we should be a little bit more tender-hearted.

Are First Amendment Rights Now At Risk?

Throughout his campaign Donald Trump attacked the media - usually for reporting the truth about him.  Moreover, he made pronouncements about changing the libel laws to stifle critics.  On the freedom of religion front, he has pledged to sign federal legislation granting special rights to Christian extremists who would be permitted to discriminate at will and trample on the religious freedom rights of others.  Some are saying that they hope Trump's calm appearance on 60 Minutes last night shows that he is "making a pivot" toward normal, acceptable behavior.  But how does one trust a man who flip flops constantly and seems to say whatever he sees as expedient at any moment in time.  And then there is the reality of the extremists being give positions in Trump's transition team and thereafter in his administration. Don't actions speak louder than words?  A column in the Washington Post stresses the need for vigilance and opposition to whatever erosion of civil rights may be in the offing.  Here are highlights:

What really makes America great?

It’s the meaning of 45 words found in the Bill of Rights. Here they are, the entire First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Everything we have — everything that makes us unlike any other nation — flows from those words and the protections they offer for free expression.

Donald Trump’s presidency is very likely to threaten those First Amendment rights.

If they are damaged or removed, we’ll be like a lot of unenviable places.

“Freedom of speech is a rare thing, after all. It’s one of the big differences between the United States and a place like Cuba,” wrote John Daniel Davidson last March in the Federalist. “Cuba has no freedom of the press — or rule of law. Libel is whatever the regime says it is.”

These are rights that allow us to march in the streets, to worship freely, to publish tough stories about the government.

Trump has made it clear that he has no intention of protecting or defending those rights. He has said repeatedly that he wants to change the laws that allow the press to publish news — however imperfectly — without fear of punishment.

He has called journalists “scum” and encouraged his followers to abuse and hate them. He would like to see his political opponent locked up.

Nothing but campaign rhetoric? Clean slate time? No way. . . . . It’s already happening. Trump barred reporters from his first official act as president-elect — his visit to the White House. Then, in a tweet, he blamed the media for “inciting” street protests, when there was no evidence of that.

Meanwhile, Corey Lewandowski, who carried out Trump’s press blacklist and reportedly roughed up a female reporter, was preparing for a possible role in the Trump administration. And Steve Bannon, chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News, was named chief strategist on Sunday.

“We’re facing a moment that threatens equal protection, due process, free expression, democracy — not just press freedom,” wrote Brian Beutler in the New Republic. “It’s not a drill.”

Americans should be confronted, he said, with whether they “really want a state-controlled Ministry of Information under the thinly veiled guise of a Pravda-like press.”

Indeed, in countries where the government controls the press, and which lack other speech protections, journalists are jailed, even killed, as they try to do their work. Citizens are afraid to express their views publicly or to assemble. Until now, the United States has been a beacon for them.

Look the situation in the eye; know how bad it is. That’s the pessimism of the intellect.

As for the optimism-of-the-will part? For journalists, it’s writing and reporting aggressively and fearlessly, and being willing to fight for access. For citizens, it’s being well-informed, including subscribing to newspapers and supporting the best journalism. It’s helping to debunk and call out fake news. It’s donating to, or getting involved with, civil rights and media rights organizations. And it’s backing public officials committed to protecting free expression.

Americans certainly shouldn’t move to Canada, but they should heed the words of the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

We’ve still got our precious First Amendment rights. Now it’s time — high time — to protect them from the fire.

Witnessing An American Tragedy

As a history major, I know that at various points in the past, huge events occurred and frequently the citizens of the nation or nations impacted failed to realize the cataclysmic nature of what they were witnessing.  Sadly, I believe we may have just witnessed the beginning of the end of the American Republic.  A con-man is headed to the White House and Congress is controlled by, in many cases, by frantic ideologues who care nothing about the nation or its citizens.  Instead, it is only about enhancing their own power at any cost, regardless of the destruction done to the country.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the tragedy that has hit the nation.  My biggest fear is what will this nation be as my grandchildren grow up.  I am very fearful that their future will not be positive.  Here are article highlights:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. . . .  It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion.

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her [Clinton's] earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

It is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.

Talking about staying and fighting is well and good, but if I had the financial resources, I move myself and my children and grandchildren and shake the dust from my shoes.  Those who supported Trump deserve misery and misfortune.  Sadly, many others will suffer as a result of their bigotry, self-centered natures, and general misogyny. 

Donald Trump’s Caesar Moment

If one is a student of history, one recognizes that the worse despots - and mass murderers - of the 20th Century all shared a common traits: overweening ego, narcissism, and paranoia toward those who opposed them.  Think Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Josef Stalin.  There are others lesser known, but these traits defined them, as well as a ruthlessness directed at opponents, both real and imagined. Fast forward to 2016 and we see an individual with similar traits wrapped in the mantle of the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.  A column in Politico looks at this frightening moment in America's history.  Here are excerpts:

It was a speech perfectly suited to the nominee. It was a speech utterly unconnected to anything we have ever heard from any previous nominee.

Most American presidential nominees—indeed, most convention speakers—pay homage to outsized figures of the nation's past, even some from the other side of the spectrum.

And Donald Trump? In his speech, there was no thread of any kind linking him to past American greats, no sense that he is following any tradition. Indeed, in one of the best-received lines of the speech, he told us, of our “rigged” system: “I alone can fix it.” Fix it with his own party’s leadership in Congress, or with an aroused populace? No. “I alone can fix it.”

In so many other ways, Trump presented himself as a man alone, imbued with the power to do what no other person or institution can do.

In this declaration—repeated at the end of the speech—Trump defined himself as a bedrock figure in American culture: the figure who faces danger alone, who follows his own code of conduct.

Nor is there any room for a cautionary note about the limits of presidential power. John Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, for instance, ends by saying of his: “all this will not be finished in the 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of this Administration.”

What does Trump say?

“..the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end.”

“On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.”

“On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.” 

In this speech, we have finally seen the answer to the perplexing question of just what political philosophy Donald Trump embraces. It is Caesarism: belief in a leader of great strength who, by force of personality, imposes order on a land plagued by danger. If you want to know why Trump laid such emphasis on “law and order”—using Richard Nixon’s 1968 rhetoric in a country where violent crime is at a 40-year low—it is because nations fall under the sway of a Caesar only when they are engulfed by fear. And the subtext of this acceptance speech was: be afraid; be very afraid.

 

It is impossible to imagine anyone else giving an acceptance speech so disconnected from anything in the American political tradition. Whether voters see that departure as a cause for celebration or worry may help decide what happens in November.

Donald Trump’s Police State

Sadly, many Americas know very little accurate history of their own nation much less that of other nations.  This deficit of knowledge and the vulnerability it creates for demagogues to simply lie at will is becoming increasingly obvious as one watches the Republican Party swing towards fascism, especially in the person of Donald Trump who seems to believe that Americas are willing to accept a police state in exchange for "security."  It's the type of pact with the devil that many Germans accepted in the early days of the 1930's and lived to regret - assuming they and their families survived World War II intact.  If one really listens to Trump, it is frightening, especially since 75% of his "facts" are untrue.  A column in the New York Times looks at what a Trump regime could bring to America.  It's not a country in which I would want to live.  Here are excerpts:

[O]ver the last three months, in listening to plans of the Republican presidential front-runner and the views of his increasingly thuggish followers, I’m starting to have some dark fears should Donald Trump become president.

Take him at his word — albeit, a worthless thing given his propensity for telling outright lies and not backing down when called on them — Donald Trump’s reign would be a police state. He has now outlined a series of measures that would make the United States an authoritarian nightmare. Trump is no longer entertaining, or diversionary. He’s a billionaire brute, his bluster getting more ominous by the day.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he said in the demagogic spiral following the Paris attacks. “And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule.”

What’s he talking about? In his words, he wants to implement “the unthinkable.”

Let’s start with his most far-reaching crush of cruelty, the Trump promise to create a huge “deportation force” to storm into homes, churches, schools and businesses and round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants. In doing so, he would need an army of agents to go door-to-door, breaking up families, and snagging many citizens caught up the in the mass sweeps.

As his jackbooted minions grab legal Americans (the children born in this country, citizens per the 14th amendment) and separate them from their illegal parents, he will place them — where? In foster homes? In detention centers? In concentration camps?

He says it will take only two years for him to disrupt nearly every community in the United States, destroying thousands of businesses in the process. “I’m going to remove them so fast your head would spin.”

To go with his Deportation Force, Trump would send another wave of federal authorities out to identify, track and monitor Muslims in America. All of them? He hasn’t said. He’s building his police state on the fly. But in just a few days he went from saying he would “strongly consider” closing houses of worship (mosques), to saying he would have “absolutely no choice” but to shut them down. As for tracking Muslims through some kind a database, he’s been squishy, but also unequivocal, saying, “I would certainly implement that.”

To further clamp down in this land of the formerly free, Trump could borrow a few police state ideas from his fellow Republican presidential candidates. Mike Huckabee has suggested using federal agents to invade doctors’ offices and homes, physically preventing women from ending a pregnancy.

[A]ttend a Trump public event.   These rallies are scary spectacles of rabid brown shirts in Dockers. His followers cheer while others pummel protesters, or spit on them. A few days ago in Alabama, a black protester was punched and kicked by his supporters. Trump suggested the man had it coming.

Like any good authoritarian — Soviet or banana republic — Trump concocts plots and dark doings to scare the quivering masses. And no one on the public stage is better at the Big Lie this year than Trump. PolitiFact found that 75 percent of his so-called factual statements are “mostly or entirely false.” The other 25 percent were “half true” or “mostly true.” His score in the flat-out “true” column was zero.

The more lies he tells, the more popular he is with a large part of the Republican base that lives in a world of made-up horror and blunt force solutions.

So, hordes of Mexicans continue to rush into the United States, he says, when in fact more people are now returning to Mexico than are coming in. Syrian refugees are “pouring into the country” when barely 2,000 have been admitted. And Trump continues to say “I saw” thousands and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11, when no such thing has ever been documented. The goal is to get you to hate them — Mexicans, Muslims, the object of all your fears.

As we enter the holidays, there is one more Trump vow to consider. “If I become president, we’re all going to be saying Merry Christmas again, that I can tell you.” With Trump, the seasonal salutation may be mandatory, and creepy.

So why is Trump so popular with the many in the Republican Party base? Very simple.  The party base is now mostly made up of straight, white, far right Christian, white supremacists who embrace ignorance and feel threatened by anyone who is different and/or threatens their white privilege and/or their fantasy based world view (if one can even call their restricted version of reality a world view).  Trump is playing to everyone of their prejudices and making them promises just as Hitler did as he began his rise to power. The rest of us should be very, very afraid.  

The GOP and the New American Fascism

The far right regularly accuses liberals and gays of being fascists and being a threat to "freedom."  The reality is, of course, that it is the far right and today's Republican Party that are the advocates of a new American fascism.  This fascism is dressed up in the guise of patriotism and protecting American values (most often so-called "Judeo-Christian values").  Hitler and the Nazis used similar tactics in the early days of their take over of Germany in the 1930's. Frighteningly, the Republican Party and the ugliest elements of its base want to take America down a similar road.  A column in Salon looks at the disturbing phenomenon championed by those like Ted Cruz and Donald trump.  Here are highlights:

It would appear that our descent into irrationality has not yet hit its limit. Yesterday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said that he would consider forcing Muslims to register with the government to be part of a tracking database. Here’s what he said:

MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard: Should there be a system a database to track Muslims?

Trump: There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases, we should have a lot of systems, and today you can do it.But right now we have to have order, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall and we cannot let what’s happening to this country happen any longer.

Hillyard: Is that … your White House would…(inaudible)

Trump: I would certainly implement that.

This took place at a ropeline in Iowa where Trump was campaigning. The question didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier in the day Yahoo News had published an interview in which Trump said that he would deport any Syrian refugees allowed to enter this country under President Obama and didn’t rule out draconian surveillance measures to track American Muslims. He ominously warned:

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

The MSNBC reporter asked him why Muslims databases would be different than having Jews register in Nazi Germany. He replied, “You tell me.”

So, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president has once more upped the ante on the xenophobia that’s been sweeping through the right wing for some time. Mexicans, Muslims, it all the same. Gotta build that wall, track them, deport them, keep ’em out.

Unfortunately, the nervousness coursing though society after the terrorist attack in Paris has made this kind of talk sound less unreasonable to more people, and we had the Congress yesterday struggling to find a way to appease voters who were calling into their offices demanding that refugees be denied entry into the country.
The explanation as to why 47 Democrats would join in this immigrant bashfest is as prosaic as it is depressing. They fear being called “soft on terrorism.” A bunch of hysterical voters who listen to demagogues on cable TV and talk radio called their offices to demand they put a stop to this foreign threat. Rather than be leaders and try to calm the waters, they just went with the flow, knowing that this legislation is unlikely to become law, but wanting to be able to tell their constituents they voted to bar refugees from our shores and keep the children safe. (Well, the good American children anyway. Syrian children will not be so lucky.)

Why they believe this will work for them is unknown. . . . Voters who succumb to xenophobia will likely vote for the Republican alternative. Stoking paranoia is the GOP specialty.

And anyway, this is a soulless sort of politics. This isn’t a highway bill or a tax hike. It’s an issue of life and death. These are votes that should be taken on merit, not political calculation (which very often turn out badly — ask Hillary Clinton). And feeding this xenophobic beast in an environment in which the frontrunner of the Republican Party is endorsing government registration of American Muslims is a very risky business. This kind of thing can get out of hand  quickly.

The public’s fear of Syrian refugees may be understandable but it is nonetheless irrational, and political leaders have a responsibility to be rational at times like these, if for no other reason than to actually protect the nation instead of playing kabuki games for political purposes. 

[E]nabling Islamophobia is one of the most dangerous things our leaders can do:

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, is pursuing a strategy explicitly designed to provoke hostility toward innocent Muslims in Western society in order to radicalize these communities and recruit them to their cause. Listening to the American political debate in the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks in Paris, that strategy may be working. Islamophobic rants are both morally offensive and factually inaccurate and play right into the hands of our terrorist enemies.

Hopefully, the House will calm down and the Senate will derail this bill. But more importantly, one hopes that Democrats and whatever sane Republicans are left will recognize that every time they feed this xenophobic monster it makes Donald Trump and his ilk stronger. And if they make Donald Trump and his ilk stronger they are also making the ISIS terrorists stronger. That’s a bad policy on every level.

Why the GOP War on Democracy Must be Stopped

This blog has looked at the Republican effort to subvert the Electoral College in several posts, but  many readers still underestimate the danger this effort poses.  If successful, thanks to previously gerrymandered districts, majority rule would simply no longer matter.  A future president could win the White House even though his/her opponent won millions of more votes.  Democracy in effect would be dead in America.  What makes the situation even more frightening is that the party pushing for this disingenuously crafted de facto revolution is the party of racism, greed, religious extremism and open bigotry against millions of Americans.  It is the most serious threat to democracy as I have known it in my lifetime.  America now has wealthy disparities worthy of a banana republic of old.  If the GOP succeeds our system of government will also reflect the rigged elections of the former banana republics.  One can only hope that American wake up to the threat and begin their assault on the GOP immediately, beginning in states like Virginia which have elections this year.  The bastards MUST be voted out of office.  They are literally a threat to democracy.  A piece in Daily Kos quantifies the threat we are now facing.  Here are highlights:

Republicans can't win national elections anymore, having lost the popular vote in five of the last six, and with demographics shifts moving solidly against them, rather than try to better represent the will of the American electorate, they're instead going to try to break the system so that the will of the American electorate no longer matters. And it would be perfectly legal, because we choose our presidents through the Electoral College, and there are very few rules about how the electors are allocated. Make no mistake: This is a war on the very concept of democracy and republic. This is a war on the very nature of our system of governance. If it succeeds, it will tear this country apart.

Last week, while much of the country was focused on President Obama's second inauguration, or was distracted by a three-day weekend, a quiet coup by Virginia state Senate Republicans disappeared a Democratic state Senate seat. Virginia's upper house is evenly split, but with Sen. Henry L. Marsh III in Washington for the presidential inauguration, the Republicans used his absence and a party line vote to approve a new redistricting plan that eliminates a Democratic Senate seat, thus giving themselves a likely more permanent majority, beginning in 2015. But that was only the beginning of what they want to do. Virginia's Republicans have an even more cynical plan for 2016:

A Republican-backed bill that would end Virginia's winner-takes-all method of apportioning its 13 electoral votes in presidential elections cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday.

How would the new system work?

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state's 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts.

And what would it have meant, last November?

Last fall, President Barack Obama carried Virginia for the second election in a row, making him the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win Virginia in back-to-back presidential elections. For his victories, he received all 13 of the state's electoral votes.Under (the Republican sponsor's) revision, Obama would have received only four Virginia electoral votes last year while Republican Mitt Romney would have received nine.

President Obama won Virginia by 149,298 votes, or 3.88 percent, yet under this new Republican plan he would have won less than half of Virginia's electoral votes. Whatever you want to call it, that is not democracy, it is not the will of the people, and it is antithetical to every precept by which representative government is supposed to work.
Think about what it would do to this country, and what it would tell the rest of the world. President Obama won the national popular vote by close to 5 million votes, but if the Republican plan had been in effect Mitt Romney might now be president. No matter your political allegiance, if you believe in such basic concepts as democracy and representative government and will of the people and fair elections, such a plan should leave you not just angry but infuriated and aghast. Unless this effort is buried, it should be the issue and the the story, because nothing even approaches it in importance. Every political issue is by it trumped, because it would trump every issue, and in countless cases countermand what the people of this nation want done on the issues.

Unless this effort is buried, all elected Democrats must understand and act on the reality that Republicans with this effort are proving they are neither responsible nor responsive, and that their every pretense of patriotism and honor is nothing but a lie. The danger of this effort cannot be overstated. And if it is allowed to happen, it is a certainty that if on election night 2016 a Republican has by these rigged rules stolen the presidency despite losing the popular vote by millions, the traditional media will shrug it off, just as they shrugged off the later proved stolen election of 2000. But this would be so blatant that even the traditional media's best efforts wouldn't be able to obfuscate it. It would tear the country apart, as every person of principle and conscience awakened to the reality that the dreams and ideals of democracy and republic were dead. But it would be too late. It would be legal, even though the rule of law itself no longer would have any basis in popular consensus.

The time to speak out is now. This can only succeed if done quietly, in the shadows. Already, Florida Republican leaders are backing away from the idea, and the more Americans hear about it, the more they will be outraged by it. Regardless of partisan affiliations, you can be sure that the vast majority of Americans still has a basic sense of fairness, and a respect for the ideals by which this country is supposed to work. The time for Democratic leaders to speak out is now. The time for Republican leaders to be forced to take public stands for or against representative government is now. All Americans of conscience and integrity must stand up and be heard, or anything good and just about the American system of government will fall and be silenced.

The GOP Plan to Steal Elections

In an earlier post today I made reference to the Republican Party effort to steal elections even where the GOP candidate(s) receive significantly fewer votes than their Democrat opponents.  Having successfully gerrymandered congressional districts to guaranty a GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the GOP now wants to trash the Electoral College as it has operated for many decades.  Under the GOP plan, Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 election even though he failed to receive a majority of votes while Obama DID win a majority of the vote.  It is nothing short of an attempt to mount a coup d'état and it illustrates just how extreme, dangerous and anti-democracy the GOP has become.   Fortunately, here in Virginia it appears that the GOP attempt may fail due to opposition from two GOP state senators and Governor Bob McDonnell who likely sees passage of the bill as a nail in his political future's coffin.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this disturbing effort which makes one wonder when the GOP brown-shirts are going to begin appearing and attacking liberals and anyone who opposes the GOP's increasingly fascist agenda.  Here are column highlights:

When the subject is today’s GOP and the conservative movement, things can always get worse. Having attempted virtually every dishonest and cynical trick in the book under existing rules, they have decided now that the problem is not their dishonesty or cynicism, but the existing rules, so the new task is to change them.

You’re familiar by now with the broad contours of how the GOP wants to change the Electoral College. OK, in case you’re not: They seek in six states to apportion the electoral vote according to congressional districts won instead of to the presidential candidate who won the state overall. For example, Pennsylvania has 18 congressional districts. Mitt Romney won 12 of them, and Barack Obama six. So even though Obama won the state overall by around five points, Romney would “carry” Pennsylvania, 12 electoral votes (EVs) to six (actually, 12 to eight—every state has two more EVs representing its two Senate seats, and Obama, as the overall winner, would get those; so nice of them!).

The six states, as you might guess, are not Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alaska, and the Dakotas. They are the aforementioned Keystone State along with Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia. The Virginia plan adds the clever wrinkle of giving those extra EVs not to the overall winner, but to the candidate who won the most congressional districts.

[T]his is just vote-rigging. Open cheating. It is astonishing, I mean absolutely jaw-dropping, that a major party chairman should openly endorse such an openly crooked scheme, as Reince Priebus has. It’s so Third World 1950s, like something Sukarno might have done, probably did do, in Indonesia to make sure the competing ethnic group didn’t win elections. He sure better be asked, the next time he goes on a Sunday show, how he purports to defend a plan that would have made someone president while receiving 5 million fewer votes than the other guy.

Rule-changing, as Donovan Leitch might have put it, is bound to be the very next phase, and not just on this front. The nullification craziness, mostly talk during the first Obama term, is inching toward codification. State legislators in Mississippi are pushing a bill to establish a (get this name) Joint Committee on the Neutralization of Federal Law to review federal statutes for their “constitutionality.” We don’t know how far this effort will get. But it is Mississippi, so who knows? But if not Ole Miss, then South Carolina or some other state will almost surely attempt to nullify some federal law in the next four years.

We could toss all this information onto the ever-growing “Oh, those crazy Republicans” slag heap, have a laugh, and let it go. But this is concerted and serious. Rules, laws, customs, and norms that we have all abided by for centuries (the Electoral College and the primacy of federal law) or decades (recess appointments) have simply been producing too many outcomes conservatives don’t like. Most people, and movements, would try to change themselves so that they could maybe win under the long-agreed-upon rules. But conservatives have a cleverer way. Just make new rules. You better believe things can get worse.

 Sentient Americans who care about the rule of law need to be afraid - very afraid, in fact - and strike back by voting against every GOP candidate  every opportunity that they get, starting with the Virginia 2013 elections in November.