American Fascist 2024

 

American Fascist 2024

May 31, 2024

 

Back in October, 2016, when Donald Trump was the Republican candidate for president and it appeared that he might win (mostly because so many people so irrationally hated Hillary Clinton) I put a post on this blog with the title “American Fascist.” I argued as best I could that the term fascist truly does apply to Trump. I discussed first what the word fascist means. Then I attempted to describe what it could mean for someone to be a true fascist in the American context. Sadly, I must now say that parts of that essay seem hopelessly naïve today. Back in those days I stressed that American fascism was not violent, that it had not tried to grasp or retain power through violence. The events of January 6, 2021, belie my claim that violence has never played a role in the transition of power in our country and likely never would. I must now revise what I said in 2016.

I must start this revision by stating the undeniable fact that Donald Trump, who still is undeniably an American fascist, lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. He lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. The election officials of every state, many of them Republicans, certified the outcome of the vote in their state to Congress. There is absolutely no evidence of any significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. None. Anywhere. Biden won the election fair and square. Trump lost it fair and square. About that there simply is no doubt.

Trump has never conceded the election to Biden. A concession by a losing candidate in an election in this country has no legal significance, but it is nevertheless traditional in this country for a candidate for any political office who loses an election to concede defeat and wish the winning candidate well in the position to which that candidate has been elected. John McCain, for example, conceded defeat to Barack Obama in a most gracious and positive concession speech. Concession has no legal effect, but it often brings an election to a de facto close and facilitates the winning candidate peacefully assuming the office to which she has been elected.

Donald Trump has never admitted that he lost to Biden. He has never wished Biden success in his presidency. Quite the contrary. Against all of the evidence, Trump continues to claim not only that he won the election but that he actually won it in a landslide. He keeps on insisting that somehow someone stole his victory from him. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. Nonetheless, Trump had Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers file frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit in the round 1 of his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. They lost every one of those cases because they weren’t able to present a single piece of evidence in support of their claim of election fraud.

These frivolous lawsuits were round 1 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. That attempt failed, but it wasn’t the last round in Trump’s fight to overturn the election that he lost. Round 2 consisted of a demand to Vice President Pence that he use his position as President of the Senate to throw out the electoral college votes the states had submitted to the Senate and to declare that either Trump won the presidency or declare the election void. I am no fan of Mike Pence, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude for telling Trump that he did not have the legal authority to do such a thing. He refused to comply with Trump’s demand in any way as he presided over the Senate’s certification of the election results. Round 2 of Trump’s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election thus failed just as round 1 had.

So Trump instigated round 3, the incitement of violence against the United States Senate, in fact against the Constitution of the United States that Trump had sworn to protect and defend when he was inaugurated as president. He called on his supporters to come to Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, the date when Congress would convene to certify the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States. He told them there would be a “wild time” in Washington that day. As the Senate was convening to perform its constitutional duty, as pro forma as that duty might be, Trump held a big rally near the White House and just up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. In his typical manner, he whipped the crowd into a frenzy against the Senate and against Pence, repeating lie after lie about how he really won the election. He told them to march to the Capitol. They did. They tried violently to stop Congress from performing its constitutional duty. Mostly thanks to Vice President Pence, round 3 of Trump’s attempt to stay in power through unlawful means failed just as rounds 1 and 2 had.

Thus our nation experienced the gravest threat to our form of government since the Civil War, and we witnessed the first attempt by anyone to overturn the results of a free and fair American election by force. That attempt failed, thank God; but that day we saw a fascist president resort to strongarm tactics in what amounted to an attempt to overthrow American democracy. Back in 2016, when Trump was elected president, it never occurred to me that our more than two hundred year old tradition of respect for the electoral process and the nonviolent transfer of power would end after the next presidential election. It certainly never occurred to me that the duly elected President of the United States, the fascist Donald Trump, would play a key role in bringing those noble traditions to an end. Yet that is what happened in our nation’s capital city on January 6, 2021.

I can no longer say what I said in my earlier post about violence never having played a role in the transfer of the presidential office. I can no longer say what I said then about American fascism not having anything like Hitler’s brownshirts. Organized groups of violent American fascists like the Proud Boys played a central role in the January 6 assault on American democracy. Our political culture has descended to a depth I not only didn’t think I’d ever see but that I thought we were incapable of reaching. Well, I did live to see it, and there seems to be no bottom for the outrages of our American fascists. It appears they will stop at nothing to grab power. And we can thank Donald Trump and his incessant stream of lies about the 2020 election for bringing American fascist scum out of the shadows and making American fascism almost if not quite socially respectable. My conclusion back in 2016 was correct. Donald Trump is an American fascist. Now I know that he is a far worse fascist than I thought he was. My bad. I’ve tried to correct it here.

Donald Trump is an American fascist, but just what is a fascist? Historically speaking, the word comes from the political party and movement led by Benito Mussolini during and after World War I in Italy. The word “fascist” derives from a symbol of power in ancient Rome that consisted of a bound bundle of rods with an axe head protruding from it. It became the symbol of Italian fascism. Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922 and destroyed what had been a democratic government.

For many decades now, we have associated the word fascist less with Mussolini than with Adolf Hitler. Mussolini inspired Hitler. Adolf Hitler was an absolute nobody until the mid to late 1920s. He was never prominent at anything other than leader of the Nazi party. He had been a corporal in the German army in World War I. He tried to be a successful artist in Vienna but failed. He came to prominence when, in 1923, he led an attempt to seize the government of the German state of Bavaria by force. That attempt failed, but Hitler served only a short time in jail for having led a violent insurrection against the government. While he was in jail he wrote Mein Kampf, an appallingly badly written book that lays out the plans for dictatorship and extermination of Europe’s Jews and others that Hitler planned to carry out if he ever got the chance. He got that chance in 1933, when German President von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor, thinking that the traditional conservative forces in Germany could control him. They were wrong. As we all know, Hitler proceeded to plunge Europe into Europe’s most destructive war ever and to carry out the Holocaust, surely the greatest sin against humanity anyone has ever committed.

Is Donald Trump an American Hitler? His biography has little in common with Hitler’s. Trump was born into money. His father got him started in the real estate business in New York City. He claims to be a wildly successful businessman and to be very rich. He wasn’t as successful a business man as he claims to be. He has filed bankruptcy several times. He and his organization have been found liable for massive violations of New York state business law. No one outside of his inner circle knows how rich he really is. He is a shameless self-promoter. He gained national prominence through a television show called The Apprentice on which he played a very successful businessman. He neither held nor ran for any political office until he announced his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Adolf Hitler clearly had some sort of personality disorder. So does Donald Trump. He is a narcissist who cares only about himself, his wealth, and his having political power. It is not clear, at least to me, where Trump came up with his fascist politics, but he certainly has them.  

It is now 2024, and we have another presidential election in November of this year. Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president once again. He has managed to turn the Republican Party, once called the Grand Old Party, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Dan Evans, into a political entity that has no purpose other than to put Donald Trump back in office. It walks in lockstep with Trump the way the Nazi party walked in lockstep with Adolf Hitler. There are former Republicans who oppose Trump, but there are no current prominent Republicans who do.

Trump once said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would not abandon him. That appalling statement is being proved true. Trump hasn’t shot anyone or had anyone shot yet, but on the day before I wrote this essay, a jury in the case of New York v. Trump found Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of the felony of falsifying business records in the first degree. As of May 30, 2024, Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Yet every Republican politician the press has quoted on the subject has attacked that verdict and the case in which it was brought as fraudulent and rigged. Trump claims that the judge in that case is corrupt, something for which there is not a shred of evidence.

It remains to be seen what this guilty verdict does to Trump’s support among the American public, but the Republican Party is marching in lockstep with Trump once again. It’s prominent politicians don’t so much say Trump was innocent of the charges against him, which he clearly wasn’t. Rather, they attack the American system of criminal justice that produced the guilty verdict in the first of Trump’s several criminal indictments to come to trial. The Republicans’ attack on the rule of law is a purely fascist action. Shortly after Hitler came to power he essentially got Germany’s parliament to suspend the law and give Hitler unlimited power. If Trump becomes president again, he will almost certainly take actions as close to Hitler’s as he can get away with.

Trump and his MAGA movement are conducting an assault on an foundational principle of American democracy, namely, the rule of law. They reject the tenet of that rule that says that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Fascists reject democracy, and the MAGA movement is fascist. Trump has said, in effect at least, that he does not support the constitution of the United States. He wants to replace American democracy with his own authoritarian rule. He wants to fill the federal government not with qualified public servants but with sycophants whose loyalty is to him not to the constitution or the American people. January 6 represented a grave threat to American democracy. November 5, 2024, the date of the next presidential election, presents an even greater threat to the American way of government. If Donald Trump wins that election, and it looks very much like he could, American democracy may never recover.

If Trump loses the 2024 presidential election, will his supporters, who include members of violent militias, use force in an attempt to put him back in the White House? There is no way to know, but they used force on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to keep him in the White House. If President Biden beats Trump in 2024 the way he did in 2020, our nation will have to be prepared to counter violent attacks on government institutions and officials. Nothing is beneath Trump or his vehement supporters. It is a characteristic of fascist movements to try to seize power by force when they cannot do it legally. We face a threat to our freedoms and to our democratic system of government like none we have faced since the Civil War, which ended over a century and a half ago. Will American freedom face and defeat that threat? Maybe, but I wish I were confident that it will.

On Trump's Guilty Verdict

 

On Trump’s Guilty Verdict

On the afternoon of Thursday, May 30, 2024, a New York jury found former President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts against him that were at issue in that trial. Trump is guilty of falsifying business records for the purpose of illegally influencing the 2016 presidential election. The legal issue in the case was a bit convoluted. Under New York state law, falsification of business records without more is a misdemeanor. That Trump did it in violation of election law made it a felony. Trump, of course, has always insisted not only that he is innocent of these charges but that the system is corrupt and “rigged” against him. Immediately after the jury returned its verdict, Trump said that the case was “a disgrace.” Was it? Let’s look at how that case came about to see if there is any merit to that claim.

Trump insists that the United States Department of Justice under President Biden is biased against him. The Manhattan District Attorney, however, is a New York state official not a federal one. He has no direct connection to the US Department of Justice nor is he responsible in any way to the US Department of Justice. District Attorney Bragg brought this case against Trump under New York state law not US federal law. There is no evidence that the US Department of Justice was involved in this case in any way other than as a source of documentary evidence. Any complaint Trump may have against the Department of Justice has no bearing on this case.

The Manhattan DA presented the case to a grand jury of ordinary citizens of Manhattan. That grand jury determined that there was probable cause to believe that Trump had committed the crimes with which he was charged. That indictment by the grand jury led to the trial that finished on May 30, 2024. There is no evidence that there was anything unusual or out of bounds in this process. The New York state legal system worked the way it is meant to work, the way it works for and against every other criminal defendant.

The Manhattan DA brought the case to trial under the indictment of the grand jury. Trump had legal counsel at all stages of the trial from pretrial motions to the verdict. The case was assigned to a judge in the ordinary way. If anything, the trial judge was more lenient with Trump than he would have been with any other defendant when it came to Trump’s multiple violations of so-called “gag orders” the court had issued. A jury of twelve jurors and eight alternates was chosen from a large pool of ordinary citizens of Manhattan. The presentation of evidence by both sides of the case proceeded as the presentation of evidence always does in a criminal trial. There was nothing extraordinary about it.

The jury returned its verdict. Its verdict makes Trump a convicted felon, but it isn’t the end of the case. The trial judge has scheduled sentencing for July 11, 2024. After sentencing and once a final judgment is entered, Trump will have the same right of appeal as any convicted criminal defendant would. There is no reason to believe that there will be anything improper about the post-trial proceedings in this case.

In none of this is there any evidence that the charges against Trump were brought in any way that violated New York state law. There is no evidence that the judge conducted the trial in any way that violated New York state law. Yet Trump continues to insist that the case against him was unfair, unjust, a disgrace, and rigged. He insists that the judge was corrupt. I can think of only one thing that could possibly be true that would case any shadow of doubt on the fairness of this case.

Trump claims that the case was brought by Democrats for political purposes. I would be surprised if either Manhattan DA Bragg or the judge in this case ever voted for Trump, but I have no way of knowing how or even if they voted in previous elections. For the sake of argument, though there’s no evidence to support the assumption, let’s assume that the District Attorney did bring the case for political reasons. Let’s assume that the DA and the trial judge are both rabid anti-Trumpists. Would that being the case change anything significant about the case?

It might mean that the DA brought a case he would not otherwise have brought. Would that make a difference in the case? Trump could claim selective prosecution, although that’s a defense that’s either very difficult or impossible to prove. Moreover, it’s hard to see how this case could be selective prosecution because it is unique in the annals of American jurisprudence. No former president of the United States has ever been charged with a felony before. As far as we know, no American president other than Richard Nixon has ever committed a felony before. There is no one in this case or any other case who has done what Trump did here and certainly no other possible case in which the defendant would be a former American president.

But let’s say the Manhattan DA did bring the case against Trump because he hates Trump. Would that change any of the facts of the case? No, it would not. Would that change any of the law of the case? No, it would not. Would that change any of the procedure in the case? No, it would not. Would that change the jury instructions in the case? No, it would not. In fact, in those instructions, if the judge made any mistake it was to overstress the truth that the burden of proof was on the prosecution and that the defendant didn’t have to prove or disprove anything. The judge repeated the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” many times in his instructions, and he gave the jury a legal definition of “reasonable” that, I assume, was consistent with New York state law. Moreover, the DA did not try the case himself. Other attorneys of his office did.

So, it seems clear to this outsider that there was nothing legally improper about the case of New York v. Trump. Trump certainly will file an appeal of the judgment against him, something he of course has every right to do. I have no idea what appealable issues he will raise. I can’t imagine a New York state appellate judge paying any attention to Trump’s unsupported claims that the prosecution was unjust and the trial was rigged against him. Issues on appeal are invariably legal issues not factual ones. When I was a lawyer I was taught that in an appeal you first make the court want to rule in your favor, then you give the court a legal hook to hang its decision on. I can’t imagine why any appellate court would want to rule in Trump’s favor, but even if it did, it would have to have a plausible legal basis for a decision in his favor. We’ll just have to wait and see how Trump’s appeal in this case comes out, but there is no reason to believe that the court will handle the appeal in any improper way.

Today is a day that will appear in books on American history for as long as anyone is studying American history. For the first time ever, a former president of the United States has been found guilty felony crimes.[1] All of those felonies relate to an attempt to keep relevant information from the American public before an upcoming presidential election. They were all part of a scheme by the presidential candidate of a major American political party to subvert American democracy. I’ll admit that I hate Donald Trump and the threat he poses to American democracy; but even if I didn’t hate Trump, the facts and the law of this case would be what they are. At least some justice has finally been done with regard to Donald Trump. It is an outrage that it has taken this long for justice to be done. It is an outrage that none of the other three criminal indictments he faces will come to trial before the November, 2024, presidential election, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Even without convictions in those cases, former President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump is now a convicted felon. Let all the people shout: At last!

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[1] Richard Nixon certainly committed felonies while in office, but President Ford’s pardon of Nixon meant that he was never tried for those felonies. Had he been, the verdict against Trump would have been the second such verdict not the first.

The American Struggle

 

The American Struggle

I have read two books that have very similar theses. They are The Soul of America by Jon Meacham and Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson. Both of these historians present American history as a constant struggle between those who support the values of the Declaration of Independence and those who want to discard those values for their own benefit. Both authors consider the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence to be a statement of the principles on which this country was founded. Those words read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence has never actually been part of the law of the United States. Its drafters didn’t intend it to be a legal document. They intended it to be a political document declaring the independence of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain. Many authors, including Meacham and Richardson, treat it as one of our nation’s founding documents, and I suppose that in a way it is. It is a profound if also problematic statement of certain basic principles upon which we like to think our country was founded.

I say that the Declaration of Independence is problematic because at least two serious shortcomings are either obvious on the face of the document or appear from the context in which that document was adopted. First, the Declaration uses the word “men” to designate those who are created equal. Some might say that “men” is a generic term for all humans, but it is highly unlikely that that’s what the men who signed the Declaration of Independence intended. In their world, women had no rights at all. They were, essentially, first the property of their fathers, then the property of their husbands. They had no voice in public affairs. In no way were they equal to men in that world.

The second shortcoming isn’t as obvious on the face of the document but is just as important. It says “all men” are created equal, but the drafters of the Declaration, including its principal author Thomas Jefferson, did not consider all men to have been created equal. Many of them, including Jefferson, were enslavers of Black men, women, and children. In no way did they consider Black human beings to be the equals of white human beings. Some of the enslavers among them may have had moral qualms about slavery, but few if any of them felt badly enough about owning other human beings as chattel property to stop owning other human beings as chattel property.

Thus, it is possible to romanticize the Declaration of Independence. It is a stirring statement of truth, except perhaps that nothing is really self-evident. Yet this country got off to a start that had little or nothing in common with that statement. The notion that white people are superior to Black people has been in this country since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to what became Virginia. White supremacy has been a core element of American values from the very beginning. So was androcentric misogyny. Our so-called “Founding Fathers” didn’t think that the First Nations people of North America were really human either. Slavery, the racism in which it was grounded, and sexism are inseparable aspects of the American vision from this country’s earliest years as British colonies until today.

Both Meacham and Richardson see American history as an ongoing struggle between the values of freedom and the anti-values (my word, not theirs) of slavery, white supremacy, and male supremacy. That struggle intensified in the 1850s, when a significant number of northern whites began to demand the abolition of slavery and northern public opinion turned against that diabolical institution. After the 1860 presidential election, the struggle erupted into civil war. The Union, which had begun the war fighting to preserve the Union but came to be fighting to abolish slavery, won.

Right after the Civil War the nation did some good things. It passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. It passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which does several things. It provides that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. It provides that no state shall “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” whatever that means. And it says: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Those last two provisions, known as the due process clause and the equal protection clause, are mainstays of constitutional law today and have been for a long time. The Union adopted the Fifteenth Amendment. It guarantees the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race, color, or condition of prior servitude, that is, because a person was once enslaved. It was adopted to give Black Americans the right to vote. It provides that Congress has the right to enforce it by appropriate legislation.

All of which is very well and good, but it certainly didn’t stop Southern white supremacists from creating the system of discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow. Beginning in 1877 with the North’s abandonment of Reconstruction, white supremacists, mostly but not exclusively in the states of the former Confederacy, restricted the rights of Black Americans in every way they could. Richardson calls what they constructed a “hierarchical” system that placed whites over Blacks. Especially but not exclusively in the South, the anti-values of white superiority became the order of the day. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment, Southern whites effectively stopped Black citizens from voting from at least the 1870s into the mid-1960s.

The struggle between the values of the Declaration of Independence and the hierarchical values of those who opposed them took on another form in roughly the 1880s and 1890s. At that time, large corporations like Standard Oil and several others controlled both the American economy and the American political system. A very few men became immensely wealthy while those who worked in their factories lived in poverty and squalor. The humane values of the Declaration of Independence rose up to oppose the defenders of that system. President Teddy Roosevelt became a “trust buster,” breaking up monopolies in various fields. Efforts began to improve the lives of the working poor. Frances Perkins was a leader of that movement. She later became FDR’s Secretary of Labor and was a major architect of FDR’s New Deal. In opposition to the New Deal, many who Richardson calls advocates of hierarchical national structures turned to fascism. There were a lot of American fascists in the 1930s, and they came closer to taking power than most of us are aware of.

Declaration of Independence values asserted themselves after World War II. Black and Indigenous Americans who had fought for the country in the war began to demand that the government protect their rights. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others led the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress and signed them into law. The country seemed to be moving in the right direction.

But then. Then came Richard Nixon. Employing what he called his “southern strategy,” Nixon appealed to Americans who opposed the expansion of civil rights that had been taking place since the 1930s. He pandered to Southern racists, and he won. That he did was bad enough, but then came Ronald Reagan. For most of American history, the federal government has been, at least to some extent, the defender of civil rights and the agent of constructive change in the country. Reagan told people the government isn’t the solution to your problems, it is the problem, a statement that Reagan may or may not have believed but that was demonstrably false. In 1980 this country inexplicably made this former B movie actor president. We haven’t recovered yet.

The hierarchical forces in this country, to use Richardson’s term, have now reached a zenith of power and prominence in the MAGA movement led by Donald Trump. That movement is clearly fascist in a way no American movement with any hope of electoral success ever has been. Adherents to that movement are looking to give up their liberties in order to be ruled by a strongman who, he promises them, will restore white men to the positions of exclusive power in this country that they once held but have been losing at least since the 1960s. Trump and his MAGA movement do not believe in democracy. They do not believe in civil rights for Black, Brown, and other non-white Americans. Trump wants to be an American Vladimir Putin. He wants absolute power. He wants everyone who works in the federal government to swear loyalty to him not to the constitution. Declaration of Independence values are threatened today in a way they have not been since 1860. Donald Trump is the greatest threat to its better angels that this country has faced since South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.

Will Declaration of Independence values reassert themselves? Can they defeat Donald Trump and his mobs of violence-prone supporters? Can they even survive at all? I wish I could say with confidence that the answers to those questions is “Yes.” I can’t. Trump has whipped up such a large number of American fascists and fascist supporters that he may well win the 2024 presidential election and be back in power. If he does, he will try to establish himself as an authoritarian ruler on the model of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. His doing so would be radically anti-American, but it is what millions of Americans apparently want him to do.

I cannot fathom how bleak my country’s future will be if Trump wins in November. I don’t expect him to build an American Auschwitz. I don’t expect him to commit genocide, though he is now talking about building camps to house the enormous number of people he says he will arrest and deport, something that is at least a faint echo of Hitler’s death camps. I do expect him to destroy our relationships with NATO and other American allies. I expect him to gut the federal government, claiming that he is eliminating the “deep state” of anti-American people who, he claims, have infiltrated every aspect of that government. I expect him to nullify every environmental and worker safety law he can and to try to get Congress to nullify the ones he can’t. I expect him to continue his campaign of turning the federal judiciary into rot by nominating ideologues not good legal minds for federal judgeships. I expect women along with racial and sexual minorities to lose much of what they have gained in recent decades in their respective liberation movements.

I believe that our only hope of surviving another Trump presidency is that Declaration of Independence values may rebound against oppressive forces the way they have in the past. Those values have survived concentrated assault from American fascists and fascist types before. That those values are still alive among us gives us, I guess, a ray of hope.

But those values have never faced anything like the voting power of the MAGA movement. And of course, Trump doesn’t have to win a majority of the popular vote to become president again. The way most of our small population states will vote for anyone with an R after their name can give Trump an electoral college victory even if he loses the popular vote. That’s what happened in 2016. The back and forth of American history between Declaration of Independence values and anti-American values may give us some hope. I sure wish I felt more strongly that that hope could overcome of hatred and fear of the MAGA movement. May it be so.

It's Damned Near Time to Panic

 

It’s Damned Near Time to Panic

May 25, 2024

It’s just over five months until the 2024 presidential election, and I am on the verge of panic. The American fascist Donald Trump has been on trial on a felony charge for around one month. The Manhattan prosecutor thinks Trump committed a felony, and he thinks he can prove that he did beyond a reasonable doubt. He wouldn’t have brought the prosecution if that weren’t what he thinks. Yet Trump is still the presumptive Republican nominee for president this year. Neither the felony charge for which he is now on trial nor any of the other three felony cases pending against him has hurt his standing in the polls. True, polls are polls not votes, but that Trump’s support hasn’t completely collapsed is very nearly beyond comprehension. That is hasn’t can only mean that our body politic is sicker than we ever suspected. You’d think that cheating on your wife with a porn star, buying her silence, and then breaking the law to cover up the fact that you did would torpedo the political career of any American politician. Time was when it would have. Cheating on his wife destroyed the political career of John Edwards, a man in whom some of us had placed a good deal of hope. Screwing Stormy Daniels, paying her off to keep silent, and then falsifying business records to cover up the payment has not destroyed the political career of the one American fascist who has ever been president of the United States. Astonishing. And appalling.

Trump’s first term as president was an unmitigated disaster. He won the office through Russian interference in our election. He totally botched the country’s response to the COVID pandemic costing our country hundreds of thousands of lives. He spent most of his energy, such as it was, consolidating his personal control over the federal government, demanding personal loyalty from all federal employees, and firing anyone who wouldn’t give it to him. That’s what he did to the director of the FBI though that man had certainly helped him get elected through a strategically timed announcement about an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Like every Republican president, Trump signed legislation slashing taxes for rich people, thereby increasing the federal deficit and doing nothing to stimulate the economy. He cozied up to Vladimir Putin and took that Russia fascists word denying election interference over that of his own intelligence services. He damaged our relations with our long term allies and made it essentially impossible for anyone in the world to trust us ever again. He politicized the Department of Justice and tried to turn it into his personal law firm. When he lost his bid for reelection, he incited an insurrection in an attempt to stay in power illegally. Trump was surely the worst president this country has ever had.

A second Trump term as president would be worse. It would be worse because Trump would do even more than he did his first time around to turn the United States government into a fascist dictatorship. He does not believe in democracy, he believes only in winning. He does not support the constitution, he supports only his personal power. The Trumpist movement is the current and the strongest manifestation of fascist movements in this country that go back as far as the 1850s (though the term fascist didn’t exist then) and has been active in our politics since the 1930s. As the demographics of our country have changed, that movement has only grown. Putting Trump in office again might well make it permanent and destroy American democracy altogether.

The Trumpist movement is irrational if not insane. There is not one shred of rational justification for it. Yet it lives on. It refuses to die. And now there is a real chance that this country, through collective insanity and indifference, will put Trump back in the White House. His major opponent is President Biden. Biden is not a strong candidate. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for how good a president he has been, and he’s too old to be president, or at least an awful lot of Americans think he is. There is no way he can handle Israel’s war in Gaza without losing significant support from one element of the Democrat’s coalition or another. Will the 2024 presidential election mark the end of American democracy? Will it be the end of our long history of constitutional government? Will it put an end to the legal principle that no one is above the law? All of those things might well happen if this country reelects Donald Trump, especially if it also gives him Republican majorities in both houses of congress, which it very well might.

It is damned near time to panic. It is damned near time to start thinking about how we will live under an authoritarian government with Donald Trump at its head. It is damned near time to start looking at which other countries would let us settle with them if we couldn’t take it and decided to leave. If Trump is found guilty at his current trial and that verdict does not scuttle his campaign, it will be time to panic indeed.

On Possible Trump Verdicts

 

On Possible Trump Verdicts

May 24, 2024

Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan will end next week. Closing arguments are scheduled to begin on Tuesday. We don’t know if they will end on Tuesday, though if I were a juror I would hope they would. After closing arguments, the jury will begin its deliberation. There is no way to know how long they will take to reach a verdict. It was a fairly long trial with a good deal of testimony and documentary evidence. There is no way to know before it is announced what it would mean if the jury reaches a verdict quickly. There is no way to know what it means if the jury takes a long time to reach a verdict. The whole country, I suspect, or at least most of it, is highly anxious for this case to end and for us to know what the jury decides, which of course makes no difference in what the jury will do. It will, at the very least, be interesting when we do learn what the jury’s verdict is. No former president has ever been tried for felonies before. This jury’s verdict will be an historic first.

Trump is charged in this case with the felony of falsifying business records for the purpose of committing or concealing another crime. Under New York law, falsifying records without more is a misdemeanor not a felony. The prosecution in this case apparently contends that Trump falsified the business records to cover up a violation of state election law. As I understand it, the prosecution must prove the falsification and the cover up beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not have to prove the underlying crime beyond a reasonable doubt, and the jurors don’t have all to agree on what the underlying crime was, just that there was one.

There are, I think, three possible verdicts the jury could reach, though I’ve never heard any supposed expert on TV talking about one of them. The jury could acquit Trump of all charges. Given what we know of the evidence that was presented in court, this one seems unlikely, but you never know. The verdict in this case would be “not guilty.” It wouldn’t be “innocent.” Technically speaking, all a not guilty verdict means is that the jury found that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The defendant may well still have done what he was charged with, it’s just that the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove it. All the jury would say is “not guilty.” At least in its verdict, the jury would say no more than that though the jurors could probably explain the verdict further after they are discharged if they wish.

Or the jury could find Trump guilty as charged. At that point, Donald J. Trump, former president of the United States of America and Republican candidate for the presidency in this year’s election, would be a convicted felon. Think for a moment about how monumental that would be. Our governments operate under written constitutions at both the state and the federal level. The federal constitution has a balance of powers written into it in an attempt to stop any one branch of the government from controlling either of the other two. But constitutional democracies work only if the people who hold office under them are decent people who are committed to protecting the constitution, something our president swears to do in the presidential oath but Trump did not do when he was president. We’ve had really bad presidents before, but we’ve never had one of them ever be a convicted of a felony. A guilty verdict in this case, whatever its fate on the appeal Trump would surely file, would be historic indeed.

I believe that there is a third verdict the jury could reach. At least I know that this verdict would be possible under Washington state law, Washington being the state in which I live and in which I practiced law for many years. If New York state law is like Washington state law on this subject, the jury could find Trump guilty of the lesser included offense of falsifying business records without an intent to commit or conceal another crime. In that case, Trump would be guilty only of a misdemeanor not of a felony. Many of us would find this verdict disappointing, but I suppose convicting a former president of a misdemeanor is rather significant in its own right.

Trump’s reaction to two of these verdicts is easy enough to predict. If he is found not guilty he will proclaim that the verdict proves that the prosecution was a political witch hunt done by Democrats to interfere with his chances of being elected again. This prosecution is no such thing, but truth has never stopped Trump from saying anything. So if he is acquitted he will crow. He will excoriate the prosecutors and the judge for having tried him in the first place. He will say the verdict proves that he didn’t do what the prosecutor said he did. A not guilty verdict doesn’t necessarily mean that, but Trump will certainly claim that it does, an most Americans will believe him. A not guilty verdict would no doubt improve Trump’s chances of winning our upcoming presidential election.

If the jury finds Trump guilty as charged, he will scream bloody murder. He will continue to rant and rave about the case being a Democratic witch hunt carried out only for political purposes not for legal ones. He will continue to play the victim, and millions of his supporters among the American people will believe him. He will file an appeal as soon as he can. I have no way of knowing what his grounds for appeal would be; but even if he has none that anyone else would take seriously, he will certainly appeal. A guilty verdict may or may not negatively affect Trump’s chances of winning the election in November.

I find it harder to know how Trump would react to being found guilty of a misdemeanor but not of a felony. That would be a sort of a forty-sixty compromise decision. It would give a little something to the prosecutor and a bigger something to Trump, acquittal on the charge that could have landed him in jail for up to four years. Trump would perhaps claim that he was exonerated because he got off on the felony but that the prosecution was still illegal and his conviction on the misdemeanor was politically motivated and invalid.

As nearly as I have been able to determine from the television coverage of this trial, the case has proceeded according to the usual laws and court rules that govern such trials. The prosecution has to meet the very high standard of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction. Trump, all of his squealing to the contrary notwithstanding, has been given all of the due process rights every criminal defendant has. New facts can, of course, always come to light, but as of now there seems to be nothing irregular about Trump’s trial. That, however, matters to Trump not at all. The truth never matters to him. Only his personal power matters to him. We have no way of knowing what the jury will decide. Perhaps we’ll find out next week. I sure hope we will.

On the Importance of Truth

 

On the Importance of Truth

Donald J. Trump was, tragically, inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20, 2017. It was obvious from the television coverage of the event that the crowd at his inauguration was rather small compared to other inaugurations, especially Barack Obama’s January, 2009. Immediately after the event, Trump and his people announced that the crowd had been the biggest one there had ever been for a presidential inauguration. That statement was an obvious lie, but Trump and his people kept repeating it. Trump’s flunky Kellyanne Conway told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that the claim represented “alternative facts” and that it was not Todd’s job to question them. Those of us who saw even a little bit of the TV coverage of the inauguration were dumbfounded. We couldn’t understand why Trump and his people kept repeating a claim that was so easily disproved that no rational person would believe it.

At the time, perhaps we thought, well, it’s just about the size of a crowd at a public event. Who cares? We were hopelessly naïve in that thought. What we didn’t realize was that extremist Republicans had been insisting for years at least that facts don’t matter. What matters is what the right people say about the facts. These neoconservative, proto-fascists believed that they could create whatever reality they wanted simply by repeating lies often and vociferously enough. Joe McCarthy had done it in the early 1950s with his claim that the federal government was infiltrated by a huge number of communists, a claim for which there was no evidence whatsoever and that was demonstrably false. Ronald Reagan had done with his claim that his supply side economics, which his vice president George H. W. Bush had called “voodoo economics,” would raise the standard of living for everyone. The George W. Bush administration had done it with its unproven, and false, claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Trump had tried to do by repeating and repeating the demonstrably false claim that Barack Obama was not a native born American citizen. We didn’t realize that the neo-fascist political movement in our country that had put Trump in the White House didn’t care what the truth was. They believed that they could form the truth into what they wanted it to be. Sadly, they weren’t wrong.

I hold a PhD in history. I got it a long time ago, 1977, but the training I received is still with me. I was taught that the historian’s goal is to determine wie es eigentlich gewesen, German for how it actually was. Historical research, I was taught, is a search for the truth. The historian may interpret the facts she discovers; but she must first of all discover and present the actual relevant facts, and her interpretation must be grounded in and be true to those facts. For the professional historian facts matter. Truth matters.

After I received my PhD, I earned a law degree, a JD. I practiced law for many years. Mostly, I practiced civil litigation. A lawyer’s job is to argue a case in the way most advantageous to her client, but at trial a jury is told they must decide the case based on the facts presented at trial and the law as given by the judge. In litigation, facts matter. Some say the adversarial procedure of a trial is a search for the truth. It doesn’t necessarily feel like that to counsel in the midst of a trial. For counsel a trial is mostly a search for a victory for one’s client. Still, seen from a more objective perspective that that of a trial lawyer, a trial is in a sense a search for the truth. In litigation, truth matters; and part of the lawyer’s job is to discover what the facts of the case actually are so that she can craft a case based on those facts to her client’s advantage.

Truth matters. True facts matter. People can disagree about what the facts of a particular matter are. What they cannot legitimately do is make up facts that are in fact not facts but lies. To a considerable extent, reality is what it is. Reality may or may not be what a person wants it to be, but that doesn’t mean that a person can change reality from what it is to what the person wishes it were. Yet that is precisely what American fascists like Donald Trump are doing today. The American system of legal justice isn’t perfect, but it is the best such system there ever has been. By far the majority of people who work within it do so honestly and with integrity. The law is not, or at least ought not be, political. Prosecutors make decisions on prosecutions based on the facts and the law not on lies about the facts and the law. Yes, a particular attorney general, US attorney, or local district attorney may have an interest in prosecuting certain types of cases more than other types of cases; and that preference may be political. But politics do not make an innocent person guilty or a guilty person innocent. Politics do not justify a prosecutor in prosecuting an innocent person or not prosecuting a guilty one.

Today’s American fascist movement led by Donald Trump disagrees with everything I just said about the importance of truthful facts and the nature of legal prosecution. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the Manhattan district attorney, the Fulton County district attorney, or the US Department of Justice is prosecuting Donald Trump with no facts and no law to support their case. The facts and the law of those cases (with the possible exception of the law in the Manhattan case) are not really in dispute. The facts of those cases are what they are. The law in those cases is what the judge presiding over the case or, later on, a court of appeals determines it to be. Politics have nothing to do with it.

Donald Trump is convinced that he can convince enough Americans of a different reality in the criminal cases against him to get him elected president again. He energetically asserts over and over again that each of those cases is a political “witch hunt,” by which he apparently means a hunt for something that doesn’t exist. Yet even if we assume that each of the prosecutors in Trump’s criminal cases is coming after him because they don’t like him or his politics, that reality would not change the facts and the laws of the cases. The facts of those cases are the facts of those cases. The truths of those cases are the truths of those cases whether the case is politically motivated or not. The evidence the prosecution can present in a trial is the evidence the prosecution can present in the trial whether the prosecutor’s motivation for bringing the case is political or not, as is the evidence the defense can present in a trial.

There isn’t a shred of evidence that the authorities who are prosecuting Trump for multiple felonies are doing so without evidence or without knowledge of the law. But Trump and his acolytes believe that they can convince a significant number of Americans otherwise just by saying over and over again that the cases are political witch hunts. They believe they can create alternate facts about the matter that Americans will accept and that will mold reality to be what they want it to be. Sadly, they are not entirely wrong about that.

Alternate facts aren’t facts, they are lies. Alternate reality is not reality, it is a lie. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes cannot survive on actual truth. They must create a lie that people ill believe. Hitler’s lie, or one of them, was that the Jews caused all of Germany’s problems when in fact they caused none of them. Stalin’s lie, or one of them, was that the country was full of counterrevolutionaries who were out to undo the great Bolshevik victory that began in 1917 when in fact there were hardly any such people there at all. Donald Trump’s big lie, or one of them, is that the United States is a country of carnage and despair that only he can remedy. Of course this country has problems. It has serious problems that require serious solutions. It is, however, not the disaster that Trump has convinced millions of Americans that it is. More significantly, Trump’s proposed solution to those problems are not solutions to anything. His claims that they are solutions are lies. But then, Trump doesn't care about solutions. He cares only about power.

The tragedy is that Trump is making all his lies in a context that leads millions of people to believe him. Our country is changing, and it has been changing significantly at least since the 1960s. Our demographics are changing. White, Christian men are losing the positions of power and privilege that they exclusively held in the past. Millions of them feel dispossessed. Many of them feel they are losing control and being left behind. Trump plays to their fears, their angers, and their prejudices to drum up support for his authoritarian, fascist, anti-American answers to their problems.

The actual facts of America’s reality don’t matter to Trump or his followers. Those facts include that the country is changing. What they don’t include is that an authoritarian president can take America back to the 1950s, or 1920s, or 1890s the way Trump tells people he can. No authoritarian president can bring back slavery or Jim Crow, which Trump clearly would do if he could. No authoritarian president can force women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen and bedroom where Trump clearly thinks they belong. No authoritarian president can put white, Christian men back in the positions of power and privilege they exclusively held for most of our country’s history. Those are facts, and they matter. They matter a lot.

I have spent my professional life in professions in which the facts matter, in which the truth matters. Donald Trump cares not one whit about actual facts. He cares not one whit about the truth. He is gaslighting the American public into believing facts that aren’t factual and truth that isn’t true. Our great American heritage of democracy and civil rights, imperfect as it has been, may be lost as a result. Truth matters. I just pray that the actual truth will eventually prevail over Trump’s lies. I wish I had more hope that it will.

In Praise of Socialism

 

In Praise of Socialism

“Socialism” is dirty word in my country. Neoconservative and American fascist politicians use it to condemn public policies that benefit the American people rather than the American economic elite. They use it as a scare tactic. Very few Americans actually know what socialism is. They equate it with communism, about which they know as little as they know about socialism. From about 1947 to 1991 the US engaged in a “cold war” against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which most Americans equated with Russia. The USSR was, of course, a communist country. It was ruled in totalitarian fashion by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). There is no doubt that Soviet communism was a very bad thing. From 1917 to 1953, most of that time under Josef Stalin, the CPSU had led one of history’s most destructive terrorist regimes.[1] The US adopted a strategy of containment to keep Soviet-style communism from spreading around the globe. That’s why we fought wars in Korea and Vietnam.

There has never been a strong communist movement in the United States.[2] There were more communists in this country in the 1930s than there were thereafter. The Nazi treaty with the Soviets of 1939 drove many American communists out of the party. In the 1950s unscrupulous politicians conducted a “red scare”. Demagogues like Joseph McCarthy made wild claims about the number of communists in the agencies of the United States government. There was no evidence to support McCarthy’s claims whatsoever, but a great many Americans were so afraid of the USSR and Soviet communism in those years that the facts didn’t matter.

There had been a bit of a socialist movement in this country at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Eugene Debs was a leader of that socialist movement. He ran for president several times, but he never got more than around six percent of the vote. In her book Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson suggests that he really wasn’t a socialist in the sense of wanting to nationalize the means of production. He just wanted the government to work for the people rather than for the capitalists.[3]

American politicians and capitalists who opposed the New Deal began calling governmental programs designed to benefit the people at large socialist in the 1930s. People we usually characterize as conservatives (who may or may not actually be conservative) have made that charge against every social welfare or public infrastructure program in which the federal government has engaged ever since. They did it, and do it, not because they understand anything about true socialism. They do it because they know that the American people don’t know anything about true socialism but are scared to death of it.

What is true socialism? Its roots go back to Karl Marx, the economic theoretician who was active in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps Americans wouldn’t find socialism so scary if it weren’t associated at all with Marx, but it is, historically at least. Marxist theory was a reaction against the way European capitalists, especially British ones, were exploiting and abusing their work force in the many industries active at the time. He stood squarely in line with a European philosophical school that went back to Auguste Comte. Comte was a philosophical materialist. That is, he believed that only the material was real. Marx was also a disciple of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who posited that history progresses through a dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Marx combined these two schools of thought into what he called dialectical materialism.

Marx believed that economics controls every aspect of human life. More specifically, he believed that everything in life was determined by who owned the means of production. In his world that meant the capitalists. Private entrepreneurs owned the factories, the land, and the mineral resources of every industrialist country. Therefore, they called all the shots. Everything else in a country was determined by its relationship to the means of production. In Marx’s time, everything in Great Britain and other industrialized nations worked for the benefit of the capitalists.

Marxism was revolutionary. That is, Marx said that history progresses through a series of revolutions. Those revolutions were always violent. Capitalism as a means of ownership of a country’s means of production came from revolutions against earlier, feudal systems in Europe. Marx called those revolutions bourgeois revolutions, meaning that they were conducted by and for the benefit of what was at the time the middle class. The French Revolution was primary example for Marx of a bourgeois revolution. That revolution was indeed violent.

Marx posited that the next revolution would be a revolution of the working class, which he called the proletariat. Workers of the world would rise up against their capitalist oppressors. They would expropriate the means of production so that the people not the capitalists owned them. After the proletarian revolution there would a period Marx called socialism in which all vestiges of capitalism, indeed all vestiges of social classes, would be eliminated. Once that was done, the world would enter into a final stage that Marx called communism. In that phase, all of the means of production would be owned communally by all the people. The economy and everything else about a country would then work for the benefit of the workers, who in the communist system would be the only class there was. This scheme is where the terms socialism and communism come from.

Marx hardly advocated nonviolence. He thought violence would be necessary to root out the capitalist class and turn the means of production over to the proletariat. Followers of Marx participated in violent revolutions across Europe in 1848. The existing powers crushed all of those revolutions. Marxists continued to believe, however, that a successful proletarian revolution was inevitable in industrially advanced countries. They expected the first successful proletarian revolutions to take place in Germany and/or Great Britain. Those anticipated revolutions, however, never took place.

Marxism appealed to many people across the globe because it gave an understanding of how capitalist exploitation of workers would be overcome and promised a culmination of human history in a world of peace and economic justice. It appealed to many nineteenth century Russians for exactly those reasons. A Marxist political party arose in Russia called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Early in the twentieth century it split into two factions called the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.[4] Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks. He introduced a couple of new concepts into Marxism. One was his contention that imperialism represented the highest stage of capitalism. The other was that the workers’ political party, which he thought his party to be, had to consist of the most class conscious members of the proletariat. This notion developed into the Leninists seeing the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as the infallible representative of the proletariat. Here were the ideological underpinnings of the Stalinist terror.

The proletarian revolutions that Marx thought were inevitable never took place. There was a revolution in Russia that claimed to be Marxist, but it didn’t fit the Marxist ideology. Russia was still mostly an agrarian nation in 1917, and Marxists have never really figured out what to make of peasants. Initially under the leadership of Lenin and then under Stalin, what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union became an instrument of totalitarian oppression of the entire nation in the name of advancing the interests of the working class.

In western Europe most Marxists began calling themselves Social Democrats, a phrase that also appeared in the original name of the CPSU. In Germany the Social Democrats came to be led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They led the Social Democratic Party of Germany, known as the SPD. They attempted a revolution after World War I but failed. The SPD then evolved into something quite different from a party committed to a Marxist revolution. Over time, the SPD became one of the two major political parties in Germany, something it still is today.

Today the SPD and the similar parties in most European countries are not revolutionary. They are, rather, democratic parties. They participate peacefully in democratic elections in their countries. They advocate and, when they can, enact public policies that benefit the people of the country rather than only the country’s wealthy industrialists. In Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere they have created systems of universal health care and free or low cost higher education. They advocate the improvement of the working conditions for industrial and other workers, but they do not nationalize industries. They create tax systems that do not favor the wealthy the way the American tax system does.

Today, European socialism functions essentially as the more progressive of the major political parties in a country. The SPD, for example, is more progressive than its major political rival the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. There is nothing scary about European socialism today. Though they both trace their origins back to Karl Marx, European democratic socialism has nothing in common with Soviet communism. It is thoroughly committed to democratic systems of government and free, democratic elections.

In the United States today we can divide our political landscape into two opposing camps. The people of one camp advocate governmental policies that benefit the people as a whole. The people of the other camp advocate governmental policies that benefit the wealthy, both wealthy individuals and large, wealthy corporations. The Democratic Party is the major political party of the first camp. The Republican Party is the major political party of the second camp. The policies of the Democrats are more favorable to more people than are the policies of the Republicans. The Republicans sometimes cover their policy of cutting taxes for the wealthy by saying that doing so will increase production thereby creating more jobs and improving everyone’s standard of living. All of the evidence shows that this is not true, but saying it allows the Republicans to work for the wealthy while saying they are working for everyone.

The Democrats are substantially better for the people than are the Republicans, but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders and maybe a few others, the Democrats are not socialists. They do not advocate truly socialist policies. For instance, they have not even advocated a universal health care system supported by taxes. They have done nothing to make higher education affordable for everyone.[5] They have taken only half measures to protect the environment. They have not raised the federal minimum wage in decades. They have not made our tax system equitable. They have done nothing to stop corporations from paying top executives obscenely large compensation packages while underpaying their employees and overcharging consumers. They spend as much money on the military as the Republicans do. Because we finance elections only through private donations, the Democrats are as dependent on big money donors as the Republicans are, and few Democrats advocate changing that system. They are better on civil rights than the Republicans are, but that isn’t necessarily saying much. Systemic racism still sullies our country, and the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything to root it out. They have attempted only half measures at best to stop America’s pathologic mania for guns.

This country desperately needs a nonviolent socialist revolution. It needs to elect politicians at all levels who will pursue socialist policies. American socialists must be as committed to democracy and nonviolence as the European social democratic parties are. I will never advocate violence. But so much about this country is simply an outrage. We are the only so-called developed country in the world without a universal health care system. We have an enormous wealth gap between a very few obscenely rich people and all the rest of us. We spend an indefensible amount of human and fiscal resources on the military. We engage in unconscionable military activity all over the world. We have hundreds of thousands of unhoused people. Day care for children is so expensive, and the minimum wage is so low, that many people cannot afford to work. We continue to destroy the environment of the only planet we have to live on.

And all of this is true primarily because the policies of our federal administrations, whether Republican or Democrat, have not been sufficiently socialist. Neither party will make the wealthy pay a fair share of taxes. Politicians of both parties have to grovel for money for their electoral campaigns.[6] Both our culture and our laws tell business owners that their primary, indeed at times it seems their only, duty is to make as much money as possible. Big corporations justify their unjust practices by saying they have to maximize the return for the shareholders. Big corporations fight worker unionization tooth and nail because, heaven forbid, if there were a union, they might have pay their workers a fairer wage.

A government with a socialist orientation, whether it called itself socialist or not, would address all of these and other problems far more effectively than either of our major parties does today. Socialism really is nothing more than a political orientation toward the good of all of the people and not just of the wealthy people. But reactionary forces will continue to scream “Socialist!” at any policies that work for the good of all of the people, and most Americans will continue to be horrified by that word. Most of them couldn’t define it accurately if their life depended on it, but never mind. They will continue to make it a scare world that entrenched powers can use to stop any real social or economic progress in this country. Oh that such were not the case! We will never be a truly healthy nation until we become far more socialist than we are today.

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[1] Americans equated the USSR with Russia, and Russia was by far the dominant nationality in that country. Josef Stalin, however, was not Russian. He was Georgian, from a region located in the Caucus Mountains south of Russia that had been part of the Russian Empire and became one of the Soviet Socialist Republics. It is today an independent nation, His last name was actually Dzhugashvili, definitely a Georgian name not a Russian one. Of course he learned to speak Russian, but people say he always spoke it with a Georgian accent. Still, the terrorist regime he led was indeed dominated by native Russians. Under Stalin, the Soviet government killed at least as many people as Hitler did in Nazi Germany and the lands it conquered. After 1956 the CPSU conducted a sort of de-Stalinization campaign that removed all trace of Stalin from public view everywhere in the country except, that is, in Georgia. I was in Georgia in the summer of 1968. Stalin was everywhere. Cab drivers had pictures of him in their cabs. Our Soviet tour guide took us to a Stalin museum in Stalin’s hometown of Gori. I could explain the Georgians’ love of Stalin only by thinking that they must be saying, “Yes, he was a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch, and boy did he kick some Russian butt.

[2] My father was a brilliant man who was a history professor at the University of Oregon for his entire career. He was from a tiny town in North Dakota called Sheldon. Also from that town was a recognized poet named Tom McGrath, who had been a friend of my father’s as they grew up. He was a communist, as far as I know a member of the American communist party. He’s the only American communist I have ever met.

[3] Richardson, Heather Cox, Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America (Viking, New York, 2023) p. 26.

[4] The terms come from the Russian words for “more (bol’she)” and “less (men’she).” They refer to a particular vote in the Party that the faction led by Vladimir Lenin won though only a minority of party members supported him and his radical view of Marxism. Lenin used his victory in this one vote to start calling his faction of the party the Bolsheviks. The people who lost that vote made the colossal mistake of letting themselves be called Mensheviks.

[5] President Biden has, somehow, managed to forgive a certain amount of student debt, but higher still costs an enormous amount of money. That’s why there is student debt in the first place.

[6] I write in the 2024 political season. If I contributed to every Democratic candidate who has hit me up for money on Facebook, I’d have to file bankruptcy.

It Never Occurred to Me to Think

 

It Never Occurred to Me to Think

We are living in a time it had never occurred to me to think I would ever see. We Americans say our country is the world’s oldest democracy. We have claimed to be a beacon on a hill for the rest of the world to see and to navigate by. We claim that we have always defended democracy around the world, as slim a hold on the truth as that claim may have. Our country began with this bold declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” I know, of course, that my country has never lived up to the claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, much less that all people are. Still, it is revolutionary statement of a vision my country has been trying, in fits and starts, to live into ever since July 4, 1776.

My country’s government is formed by the Constitution of the United States. The country adopted the Constitution in 1789 and amended it shortly thereafter to add the first ten amendments, which are known as the Bill of Rights. It creates a republican system of government in which decisions are made by representatives of the people, or at least of the people who were allowed to vote or select senators, not by hereditary monarchs and their appointed officials. The Constitution establishes a government of divided powers in which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches act as checks on each other’s power. As amended, the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state, freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It guarantees each person’s right to due process of law. It eventually was amended to forbid slavery and to give women the vote, though it took far longer than it should have to include either of those provisions in the document.

There has been only one time in our country’s history when a large number of Americans turned against the country’s system of government. It was when a number of southern states seceded from the union in order to defend their system of race-based slavery. A civil war followed. There have been other anti-democratic movements in the country’s history. There were, for example, a significant number of American Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. Though they included various members of Congress, the Nazis never came very close to taking over the government. There have always been American communists, especially in the 1930s. They have never posed any kind of real threat to American democracy.

Most Americans today, including my aging generation, grew up in a country that regularly held free and fair elections. We have had elections at every level of government, from local city elections to elections for president of the United States. Polls may have predicted the outcomes of those elections, but we have never known the actual result of any election in advance.

Until around 2016 we have taken the fairness of America’s democratic elections for granted. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes were things that happened in other countries not in ours. We fought World War II against German Nazism and Japanese imperialism. We conducted a decades long “cold war” against communist totalitarianism. We fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam against communist takeovers. The Vietnam war was a colossal disaster that we never should have fought, but at least the enemy was communist not democratic.

Until quite recently, right wing authoritarianism seemed to be a thing of the past. Germany today is staunchly anti-Nazi. Japan still has an emperor, but the country is democratic and peaceful. Left wing totalitarianism is still around. Communist totalitarianism ended in Russia on December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. China remains the world’s largest totalitarian nation by far, but it is (or at least claims to be) communist not fascist. Nominally communist regimes still exist in Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, but they are all minor players on the world stage. There have always been authoritarian regimes in different countries, but until recently it looked like democracy and freedom were spreading across the world.

Then came today’s neo-fascist movements. We see them in control of countries in Russia and in Hungary. In Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has created a right wing authoritarian system of government that has suppressed the civil liberties of all of the people of the country. Viktor Orban has done the same in Hungary. These regimes are neo-fascist not communist. We thought World War II did away with fascism. We were wrong.

So far, no neo-fascist or other authoritarian movement has taken over the government of the United States. But until recent years it had never occurred to me to think that an authoritarian takeover of our federal government was even a remote possibility. Donald Trump and his legion of followers have changed that reality. We now must consider that a Trumpist, MAGA takeover of the United States is a very real possibility.

There is no doubt that Donald Trump is an American fascist. He, like all fascists, does not believe in democracy. Trump leads a movement that has engaged in massive illegal activity in an attempt to undo the result of the free and fair 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost but goes on insisting that he won. They have even engaged in a violent insurrection at the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the result of that election. Trump calls the insurrectionists patriots. They aren’t. He calls those arrested and held in jail hostages. They aren’t. He says there are fine people among armed white supremacists. There aren’t. He says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, a neo-Nazi statement if ever there were one. They aren’t.

During his term as president Trump tried to turn the US Department of Justice into his personal law firm. He almost succeeded. Attorney General Barr turned against Trump only when Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became so absurd that no rational person could believe them and the illegality of Trump’s efforts to overturn that election was unmistakable. If he becomes president again, Trump will appoint an attorney general who will enable a politicization of the Department of Justice and let Trump use it to persecute people he considers not to be just political opponents but outright enemies; and for Trump, all opponents are enemies. The Supreme Court justices he appointed have already made it possible for that court to take away a constitutional right for the first time in American history. If Trump becomes president again, every constitutional right we have will be at risk.

Trump believes in democracy only when he wins or his sycophants running for offices other than the presidency do. When he or any MAGA Republican loses, Trump proclaims loud and often that the election was rigged and a Trumpist victory was stolen. In other words, he does not believe in democracy at all. He believes only in his own power. He has said that when he becomes president again he will be a dictator, but, he says, only for one day. We know that he will be as much of a dictator as he can get away with for as long as he is in office.

The Republican Party used to be respectable albeit wrong on many policy issues. It used to be the party of big and small business. It used to represent the shop owners on Main Streets across the country. There used to be decent Republican politicians. There used to be Republican politicians who believed in civil rights. No longer. Now Trump’s MAGA movement has taken over the entire Republican Party, at least at the national level and in many states. Republicans used to believe in democracy. Now they don’t, or at least MAGA Republicans don’t, and they control the entire party. Politicians like Nikki Haley who ran against Trump in early Republican primaries have fallen into line and say they will vote for the man they had excoriated during their campaigns.

Until recently, it had never occurred to me to think that a major American political party would become anti-democratic, but the Republican Party has. How did that happen? It happened the way historian Heather Cox Richardson says authoritarian regimes always gain power. In her book Democracy Awakening, on page xii, she says: “Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind.” That is precisely what has happened in this country.

Until recently in the United States white men were exclusively in charge of essentially everything. They ran the government at every level. They ran the economy. They ran the churches. As recently as the 1960s nearly every member of Congress was a white male. Until Barack Obama was elected in 2008, every American president had been a white male. White men were preferred employees everywhere. They didn’t have to worry much that a woman or a person of color would get a job they had applied for. It was also true that a working class white man with a job in manufacturing or related industry made enough money to give his family a decent way of life. White men were privileged in every aspect of American life. They ran the country, and they knew it.

Now all of that has changed or at least is changing. Women get jobs that earlier in American history only a white man would get. People of color get jobs white men have applied for that they never would have gotten in earlier times. Women and people of color get elected to public offices they have never held before. The faces on TV include many women and people of color. Television advertising features mixed-race couples, something we never saw in earlier decades. People of color make up an ever growing percentage of the American population. There is no doubt that the demographics of this country are changing in ways make a great many white American men uncomfortable at best.

So they turn to Donald Trump as someone who promises them that he will reverse those changes and restore the privileges white American men perceive themselves to be losing. They know that he is a racist, so he will stop the rise of Black Americans. They know that he is an androcentric misogynist so he will stop the rise of women and get them out of the marketplace and back in the home where these men believe they belong. A great many white American men believe that the large number of people crossing our border with Mexico seeking asylum are a threat to them. Most of them are people of color. So Trump promises them he will not only seal the border to keep them out, he will deport the millions of them who are already here.

All of that is music to the ears of people who have lost the positions of privilege they once held. Those Americans by the millions fall for Trump’s authoritarian lies. Most of them are white men, though a great many women follow them into Trump’s arms (both figuratively and literally). These Americans may or may not know that nearly everything Trump says is a lie, but even if they do, they don’t care. He says what they long to hear. Like all authoritarians and totalitarians, Trump uses false analyses of issues and unfulfillable promises as bait to lure the people of the country into his trap. To get them to be willing to sacrifice their liberty in hopes of regaining their lost positions of power and privilege.

We are now in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign. This coming November this country will reelect either President Biden or former president Donald Trump, the man who is certainly guilty of multiple felonies committed in connection with his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Yet in this coming presidential election we face more than a choice between legitimate Democratic and Republican candidates for president. We face a choice between democracy and authoritarianism if not outright totalitarianism. We will decide whether the enormous bloc of white voters who live in fear of losing out will delay this country’s movement in the direction of freedom or not. Whether this country will hold to its democratic traditions or not.

Many of us who see the danger Trump presents wish we had a stronger Democratic candidate for president than Joe Biden. Biden has accomplished much as president, but Biden’s age works against him, though he isn’t that much older than Trump. Because of the crimes against humanity Israel is committing in Gaza and his lukewarm opposition to those crimes, Biden faces losing the votes of both Jewish Americans because he has acted too strongly against Israel and progressive Americans like your humble author because he hasn’t reacted nearly strongly enough. We hear that Biden is losing support among Black and Hispanic Americans. He is a competent but flawed president who may well lose the coming presidential election to the American fascist Donald Trump.

It had never occurred to me to think that such a thing could happen in my country. Sure. We’ve had bad presidents before. The fallen Republican hero Richard Nixon was a terrible president. The Republican hero Ronald Reagan was one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had. We still haven’t recovered from the damage he did to this country. But not even Nixon or Reagan was a fascist in the way Donald Trump is. Russia has no tradition of democracy at all, so Vladimir Putin isn’t hard to explain. America has a democratic tradition nearly 250 years old. I guess I always tacitly assumed that that tradition would shield us from the authoritarianism that is so prominent in the rest of the world both in the past and today. I was wrong. Everyone who made that assumption was wrong.

Will we succumb to the siren song of American fascism? It’s too early to tell. We do know, however, that we face a very real risk of that happening. That we would face such a risk used to be unimaginable. Now it is our national reality. It never occurred to me to think that we would ever face the risk we face today. We all need to think about it now.