Fascism: Why It Can Happen Here

In a matter of days the husband and I will head to Europe for two weeks - as usual, we have the house sitting/dog sitting lined up - and it will be interesting to see first hand how America's image is tattered in the eyes of long time allies.  A year ago while in the United Kingdom, the popular contempt for the Trump/Pence regime was palpable, especially as the violence exploded in Charlottesville and made the front page of every major London newspaper.  Britain, of course has its own problems with white nationalism, xenophobia, and dreams of lost empire that resulted in the Brexit vote - another election where Russia sought to breed hate and discord - which may yet destroy Britain's economy and eliminate any claim it clings to as a world power.  All thanks to what boils down to racial animosity. France, where we visit first, fought back Russian efforts to bring fascism to power yet still has its problems, not the least of which is its favored status as a target of Islamic terrorism - it represents everything religious extremists hate.  As we prepare to set off, America seems poised at a precipice where democracy may die if Democrats fail to prevail in a blue wave that blocks Republican efforts to turn the country into a democracy in name only.  A column in the New York Times looks at the perilous situation.  Here are excerpts:

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge.  And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all.

[In[ Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.

In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule. Just look at what has been happening at the state level.

In North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governorship, Republicans used the incumbent’s final days to pass legislation stripping the governor’s office of much of its power.

In Georgia, Republicans tried to use transparently phony concerns about access for disabled voters to close most of the polling places in a mainly black district.

In West Virginia, Republican legislators exploited complaints about excessive spending to impeach the entire State Supreme Court and replace it with party loyalists.

And these are just the cases that have received national attention. There are surely scores if not hundreds of similar stories across the nation. What all of them reflect is the reality that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power.

[A]t the national level? That’s where things get really scary. We’re currently sitting on a knife edge. If we fall off it in the wrong direction — specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November — we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine. This week Axios created a bit of a stir with a scoop about a spreadsheet circulating among Republicans in Congress, listing investigations they think Democrats are likely to carry out if they take the House. The thing about the list is that every item on it — starting with Donald Trump’s tax returns — is something that obviously should be investigated, and would have been investigated under any other president. But the people circulating the document simply take it for granted that Republicans won’t address any of these issues: Party loyalty will prevail over constitutional responsibility.

Many Trump critics celebrated last week’s legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker in chief. But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction: Faced with undeniable evidence of Trump’s thuggishness, his party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.

This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was a voice of independence in the health care debate; now she sees no problem with having a president who’s an unindicted co-conspirator appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution. Senator Lindsey Graham denounced Trump in 2016, and until recently seemed to be standing up against the idea of firing the attorney general to kill the Mueller investigation; now he’s signaled that he’s O.K. with such a firing.

But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?

Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.

The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.

Trump Is Making Us Rethink American Exceptionalism

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As earlier post have indicated, I am NOT a fan of the myth of "American exceptionalism" that is so popular with "conservative" politicians and right wing Christians.  The concept to me displays (i) great hubris, and (ii) a lack of knowledge of accurate history.  Worse yet, it can provide a smoke screen that blinds far too many to America's many deficiencies.  Now, in the age of Trump, the fact that America is not immune to rampant societal ills - often maintained by those preach American exceptionalism the most - and that ugly forces that have haunted other parts of the world are also at play in America.  Indeed, with Trump in the White House, if America is "exceptional," it is found in the moral bankruptcy of the Trump base and today's Republican Party.  A piece in Politico looks at how the concept of America exceptionalism is a myth.  Here are excerpts:

Americans have always thought their country was exceptional. They thought it even as early as 1630, when John Winthrop delivered a now-famous sermon in which he called the Puritan community a “city on a hill”—long before there even was an American country.

In more recent years, the idea of American exceptionalism has become tainted by politics—a rhetorical cudgel that politicians, particularly conservatives, wield to bludgeon their opponents. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, Republican leaders expressed concern that, in Newt Gingrich’s words, there was “a determined group of radicals in the United States who outright oppose American Exceptionalism.”

When most conservative politicians invoke the term “exceptionalism” they use it as shorthand for raw national chauvinism—the assertion that the United States is not just different, but better. Trump has replaced it, at least temporarily, with an angrier tag line that conveys the same sense of national power and entitlement—America First, itself a term ripped from history and freighted with dark meaning. When America is first, it owes little to everyone else. It’s a more Trumpian way of saying what other politicians often mean.

When they use the term “exceptional” to connote pure superiority, though, politicians generally betray a facile grasp of history. In its original formation, American exceptionalism was a much more complicated theory. It conveyed the idea that the United States was immune from social, political and economic forces that governed other countries—specifically, that it was invulnerable to communism and fascism, and to violent political convulsions of the sort that jolted Europe throughout the long 19th and 20th centuries. It also implied that Americans bore a providential obligation to be exemplars of virtue in a sinful world.

While some political scientists continued to explore potential variants of American exceptionalism, most historians concluded that the idea was meaningless and the very conversation itself stale.  Then came Trump.

His election and the conditions that accompanied it—a growing rejection of science and evidentiary fact, extreme political tribalism, the rise of conservative nationalist movements around the world, a popular reaction to immigration and free trade—may offer final and conclusive proof that there is nothing at all exceptional about the United States. We are fully susceptible to the same forces, good and ill, that drive politics around the globe.

But before we sound a death knell for the idea, it would help to remember what it actually means.  Ironically, the phrase that so many conservatives traditionally claimed as their own first entered the popular lexicon in 1929, when Joseph Stalin censored what he called the “heresy of American exceptionalism.”

If the phrase was new, the underlying sentiment—that America was somehow different, or special—was not. Since the earliest days of colonial settlement, the Puritan settler John Winthrop conceived of America as a “city on a hill,” a distinct place with a heaven-sent obligation to build a new and pure world. In the aftermath of the War for Independence, many citizens agreed with William Findley, a farmer from western Pennsylvania who would later serve in Congress, that Americans had “formed a character peculiar to themselves, and in some respects distinct from that of other nations.”

Though exceptionalism claimed deep roots in American tradition, the concept truly came into its own in the 1950s, as a generation of historians, writing in the wake of World War II, sought to make sense of why their country, alone, had escaped the violent disruptions that beset Europe over the previous 150 years: revolution, regicide, class uprising, total war and genocide. None of it had happened in the United States, these historians noted. They conveniently glossed over the violently repressive regimes of chattel slavery, Redemption, war on Indian nations, and Jim Crow, which, of course, most historians writing in these years blithely did.

The idea of American exceptionalism fell into intellectual disrepute by the early 1970s. After a decade of political turbulence over civil rights and Vietnam—police violence against peaceful black protesters, urban riots, political assassinations, pitched anti-war protests, acts of political terrorism by left-wing extremists—it seemed hardly certain that the country was any less fractured and unstable than its European cousins. Exceptionalism no longer seemed like a sure thing.

It wasn’t just external events that inspired a reconsideration. As successive generations of scholars grew interested in such phenomena as transnational immigration and borderlands conflict—not just between Mexico and the U.S., but between nation states far and wide—the clearer it has become that American history is inextricable from global events.

In short, many historians today argue that it was always folly to assume that invisible forces drove all of global history, but greater folly, still, to assert that those forces were somehow inoperable within America’s ever-changing borders and among its perpetually evolving citizenry.

If you still need convincing, look no further than recent events. It’s become axiomatic that Trump’s victory was of a piece with populist insurgencies as far and wide as France and the Netherlands, Britain and Greece. Driven by backlash against open borders, free trade and common markets, they share an angry ethno-nationalism, a rejection of elite institutions and actors, and a wispy nostalgia for an imaginary past. These movements reject sexual and cultural pluralism and, in some cases, claim a common patron in Moscow.

Nor is it clear that America’s democratic norms and institutions are fundamentally any more rock solid than those of, say, Poland, Hungary or Venezuela. As bad as? No. But any more unassailable? To observe Republican legislators in North Carolina attempt to abrogate the results of a gubernatorial election—to say nothing of Senators Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who have all but abandoned the legislative committee process in their feverish effort to cram the courts with conservative judges and pass deeply unpopular class legislation by cover of night—one can’t help but worry that the United States has slipped into what sociologist Larry Diamond calls a “democratic recession.”

As was the case one hundred years ago, America today is very much part—if not at the center—of history. It isn’t immune to the same currents of immigration, free trade, population aging and technological change that are upending political and economic systems around the globe. To believe that we’re “exceptional,” in the way that historians understand the term, is to reject reality for national theology.

Democracy in Decline - Do Republicans Even Care?

Before both World War I and World War II, America pursued an isolationist policy and tried to ignore events happening in Europe and around.  Such shortsightedness ended up costing America and the world dearly.  Now, American foreign policy seems headed toward making the same mistake as Der Trumpenführer seeks to back out of international treaties and agreements and panders to the uglier and more extremist elements of American society who seemingly embrace authoritarianism, ignorance, and a contempt - if not open hatred - of others.  The long term ramifications could prove dangerous both at home and abroad.  Yet Congressional Republicans for the most part appear only to happy to abandon long term policies and objectives as they mimic Trump's disdain for foreigners and the defense of democratic values around the world.  The world is watching and coming to realize that the values of red America are toxic.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the disturbing trends.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s no surprise that when President Trump shot back at Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last week, he failed to engage the substance of McCain’s argument.

But make no mistake: The challenge that McCain threw down a week ago, and that former president George W. Bush joined Thursday, is very much about an idea. It is about whether democracy, on the defensive around the world, can recover its confidence. That in turn depends in large part on whether the United States will honor what McCain called “the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth.’ ”

[T]he world is experiencing a “deepening democratic recession” characterized by fewer nations living freely, as measured annually by Freedom House; by increasing power projection from Russia and China; by the breakdown of democracy from Turkey to Thailand to Hungary; and by a “wave of illiberal populism” and a “decay of democratic values and self-confidence in the U.S. and Europe.”

You can debate the causes of this democratic decay, which obviously did not begin with Trump. Blame Bush’s invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq; President Barack Obama’s abandoning Syria to its grisly fate; or deeper, underlying trends of wage stagnation, economic inequality, fracturing social media.

But Trump’s admiration for strongmen and contempt for democratic values has accelerated the trend and shocked much of the world. Kori Schake, a Republican defense expert and Hoover fellow, said at the same seminar that the global anxiety today reminds her of what she was hearing from allies after the 9/11 attacks: People “are a little bit scared that America is becoming a different place than they thought they knew.”

Many Americans are worried about that, too. When I repeated Schake’s comment to Michael McFaul, a Hoover and Stanford scholar who served as Obama’s ambassador to Russia, he said he is “optimistic about our ability for renewal as a democratic society.”

But when it comes to global leadership, McFaul was less of an optimist. “The retrenchment period began under Obama, let’s be clear,” he said. “Trump is a more extreme version. That I fear may be permanent.”

The good news is the United States has hardly tried to counter the authoritarian offensive — which means that, if we stirred ourselves to act, we might yet shift the momentum. That is clearly what the old lions of the Republican Party are hoping for.

“For more than 70 years, the presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world,” said Bush. “And they knew that the success depended, in large part, on U.S. leadership.”

The sad news is how few Republican leaders can bring themselves to defend traditional American ideals in the same way. Unless they do, the democratic recession will be increasingly likely to shift from cyclical phenomenon to the onset of something much scarier.

Trump’s Design Style - Dictator Chic

Old money tends to like to be understated since it has no need to prove anything.  The contract, of course is new money - the nouveau riche - where it is all about impressing even if the end result is an impression of bad taste and an air of déclassé.   Stated another way, it's a case of having more money than good taste.  A historian has piece in Politico that looks at Der Trumpenführer's style that puts him not only in the déclassé category, but a style favored by dictators.   The piece reviews dictators of the past - some of whom met violent ends - and compares them to the style favored by Der Trumpenführer.  Here are article excerpts: 

Every good brand needs a theme and an aesthetic, and President Donald Trump has spent decades cultivating both. The theme is success, wealth, winning, and the aesthetic is bright, brassy, loud—or, depending whom you ask, gaudy and fake. . . . . Architecturally, it’s gilt and mirrors, as in his famous marble-and-gold Trump Tower apartment. . . .

Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. . . . it also has important parallels—not with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style.

A decade ago, I published a book on exactly that topic: Fascinated by the question of what makes dictators’ houses so recognizably similar . . . . trying to pick out the features they had in common and what those features said about their occupants. I ended up with 16 case studies. . . . most of them, I concluded, obeyed 10 defining “dictator chic” rules.

The first: Go big. Dictators’ building projects are almost always ludicrously overscaled. In the 1980s, the seriously short Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s longtime president, and his wife, Elena, started building what was to become one of the largest government buildings in the world. They called it the “People’s Palace,” and they knocked down a good chunk of old Bucharest to make room for it. There was a huge, impressive yet hideous facade and, inside, quite intimidatingly large public rooms. The Ceausescus were executed before the building was finished, and even today, it reportedly is mostly empty—too large for an entire country to fill.

The second rule of the dictator look is all about “repro.” Dictators might work in the grand styles of earlier centuries, but they don’t usually use old materials and furniture. Everything is brand spanking new. Old styles add gravitas, but antiques themselves are too faded and shabby.

This leads to the third rule: Think French. There may never have been an interior style quite as lavish as 18th-century France . . . . Sometimes dictators pull from other places and eras—Roman, Palladian/classical and more—but French can always be counted on to say “money” faster and louder than the subtler English antique look.

Aside from France, dictators often seem to draw from hotels (rule No. 4), perhaps the grandest ones they saw at a young age. . . . I reckon Saddam Hussein saw that early Hilton look as the good-life template for the estimated 65 palaces and other compounds—mostly hideous—he ended up with.

Then, there are the materials—rules 5, 6 and 7. “If I’ve only got one life,” most dictators seem to think, “let me live it surrounded by gold.” When you have all of your country’s resources at your disposal, why not? Gold furniture, gold wall decorations, columns with gold capitals, gold taps.

After gold comes glass—the better to reflect one’s abundant opulence. Shiny surfaces, giant chandeliers with glass droplets and giant mirrors with—you guessed it—more gold in the frames. And after glass is marble—floors, walls, tabletops, every square inch of the bathrooms. New, shiny marble, of course, not the worn, old stuff or the modern architect’s “honed” kind.

Rules No. 8-10 are about decorations and ornaments. When it comes to art, dictators, given a choice, prefer big and bright 19th-century potboilers, or their modern equivalents, to Old Masters (too dark and grim) and to contemporary or abstract art (too ugly and pointless). Dictators also like known-value items—things that people will understand instantly, aka brands. If you’ve got Lamborghinis and Ferraris out front, you want the equivalent inside: Aubusson carpets (new copies, of course), Chinese Ming vases (ditto) and bright Versace-style fabrics. Of course, the cult of personality needs iconography, too, and that means pictures of yourself.

If all of this sounds excessive, even fantastical, remember, these homes don’t exist to express personal collecting passions or evolved tastes. . . . . Dictators can’t understand why anyone would go for the genially scaled-back charm of Western Old Money houses in Cambridge, England, or Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why have old when you can have new, matte when you can have shiny, small when you can have huge? There is no subtlety or understatement, let alone irony.

The whole point is that dictators’ homes aren’t for one’s family, friends or private self; they’re not a refuge from the world or the job. Dictators’ homes, in fact, are the job—a place to do business, harangue people and settle scores, all while one’s entourage stays nearby. They are an architectural and artistic means of establishing the power of the occupants, of intimidating and impressing any visitor.

Why does all of this matter? Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people. With its marble-inlaid dining table, painted ceilings and gold flourishes quite literally everywhere, Trump’s aesthetic puts him more in the visual tradition of Turkmenistan President Saparmurat Niyazov, who erected a massive rotating golden statue of himself in Ashgabat, than the self-effacing gray-suited conventions of Western democratic leaders.

This, of course, is a startlingly un-American idea. The Trump look is miles from the architectural tradition of Washington, D.C., a city kept deliberately low-rise in its center, and whose neoclassical public buildings evoke stability and trustworthiness through their restraint. From the White House to the monuments, the American capital was designed to avoid Europe’s autocratic excesses, projecting a message of simplicity, democracy and egalitarianism—precisely the opposite of the new brand in town.

The Betrayal of Democracy by "Moderate" Conservatives

I suspect that history will blame much of the mainstream media for enabling the rise of Donald Trump and the extremism that has devoured the Republican Party.  During the Obama presidency, "moderate" conservatives who never did anything to support or defend the legitimacy of America's first black president did nothing to condemn or criticize the growing extremism and out right racism, religious fanaticism, and bigotry of the Republican Party.  Only when it was too late did the likes of David Brooks, Michael Gerson and a host of others begin a rear guard effort to stop Trump.  But it was too little and much too late.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this failure and targets Brooks in particular although the criticism applies to many who foolishly see themselves as "moderates".  Here are highlights:

Of all the failures that have led to the historical disaster of the Trump presidency, perhaps the least-remarked-upon is the abdication of responsibility of the American center. Those of us with moderate inclinations need an effective center as a brake against extremism. When one party veers too far from the center, the center joins the opposing party, until the extreme one can be coaxed back into the mainstream. David Brooks calls for a rejuvenation of the center under the Trump presidency. But Brooks himself is the perfect encapsulation of why the center has proven so hapless, allowing itself to enable extremism rather than prevent it.

The premise of Brooks’s column is that there needs to be space “between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.” This is a terrible way to conceptualize the political map. First, it distorts the ideas of the two sides, equating a small-d democrat like Sanders (who merely proposes more regulation, taxes, and spending) with Trump, who — as Brooks concedes — is authoritarian. And second, it distorts their power. Sanders remains a left-wing outlier among his party, while Trump is the dominant force within his.

Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.

If Obama offered a deal to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody was willing to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements. If Obama favored education reform, an infrastructure bank, and more high-skill immigration, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody favored those things. 

The effect of all this commentary was not to empower the moderate ideas Brooks favored, but to disempower them. Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand. The well-documented reality that the parties were undergoing asymmetric polarization was one they refused to accept, because their jobs was to be bipartisan, and it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon not understanding it.

The centrists could have played a role in braking the growing extremism of the Republican Party. It would have meant telling the country that there was now one moderate, governing party and one extremist faction, and parking themselves with the moderate party until such time as the dynamic changed. They could not do it. If there’s not much of a center left to stop Trump from trampling democratic norms, it is because the centrists abdicated their responsibility and destroyed themselves.