Hitler 5–Shock and Awe
Prologue:
My first courses in American politics were in Junior Year of college, in 1953. As a preceptor at Princeton several years later, I can a classroom lecture for the first time, and was a fellow at The Woodrow Wilson School for some years before moving to Smith College as member of the Government Department. In 1967 I created a course titled “Problems in Democratic Theory” and taught it every year afterward for forty years at Smith and then the New School.
I. Along the way I made many friends among students and colleagues. I was a mainstay of the Caucus for a New Political Science within the American Political Science Association, about which I can say, in retrospect, that with most of us, “democratic political thought” entailed some mixture of liberal democracy and democratic socialism. Call it an ideology or a philosophy: in practice it meant, in the title of a piece I once wrote in The Nation magazine (having joined the Editorial Board in the ‘70’s): “A Few Kind Words for Liberalism.”
This essay expressed what was essentially a Left wing of Democratic thought, based on an unyielding commitment to political equality, as in: The Pursuit of Inequality, Retrieving Democracy, and Equality and Democracy. This version of political thought culminated in a 2009 essay (co-authored with Drucilla Cornell) titled “Rethinking Democracy: The American Case,’ the mordant and dominant theme of which was that “democracy” is in a constant struggle with oligarchy for survival. That had always been clear, but the period featured constant manifestos (the most famous being the Port Huron Statement) all of which were given voice by Martin Luther King: The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice.”
If you didn’t believe that, you were in the wrong business. If you did in some sense believe it, you could go on teaching and writing as most of us did. All my friends and colleagues and students with whom I had close contacts, operated on that–call it a supposition–that justified action. Even after the election of 2026-which we could blame on the Electoral system, Hillary having outpolled Trump in the popular vote–we all continued along that path: Biden’s reincarnation of LBJ seemed to justify it.
II. And then the heavens thundered, and no tsunami, hurricane, volcanic eruption, nuclear blast, whatever–all came down with a roar that outdid every wildfire we’d ever imagined. All of us indeed. I have friends and acquaintances, academics, historians, writers, artists, philosophers: and not a single fucking one of us, not one, not even to the stalwarts of MSNBC, had the faintest idea of what was actually going to happen: the absolute nadir of what used to be democracy. The smashing of everything.
What are we dealing with?
Here speaks an elderly woman who sells Trump merchandisee:
“I hope that we can truly and honestly understand what it means to, first, have our economy stabilized. I think that we should be protecting babies. I think that you guys understand what I’m talking about there. And, you know, just freedom of speech, protecting things like that. The left has been so gung ho about just taking away rights and trying to demolish what it means to be an American.”
As to that: I” JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER … I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the “QAnon Shaman” as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint that day, posted on X. And then he went on to post that his next plan was to buy guns.
And so, “The newly signed law comes days after a New York doctor was indicted in Louisiana for prescribing and sending abortion pills to someone in the state. The charges represented an escalation in the fractious battle between mostly Republican-led states that ban abortion and Democratic-led states seeking to protect or expand abortion access.”
No no no There is no “fractious”–i.e. troublesome — escalation: there is only the all-out, never to be compromised, assault on the Rule of Law and a bold expansion of Totalitarian rule. Do I exaggerate?
Right out in the open, J. D. Vance Says ‘Judges Aren’t Allowed to Control’ Trump’s ‘Legitimate Power.’ Do we want to ask what makes political power “ legitimate:? Well, the “judges” are mostly applying the 1st Amendment: “ just freedom of speech, protecting things like that, as our interviewee put it. “The left has been so gung ho about just taking away rights and trying to demolish what it means to be an American.” We see in front of u two absolutely incompatible umderstandings of the American way.
For our interviewee it means defining and embracing the absolute rule that J.D. Vance has defined for all time: totalitarianism, the asserted power of an absolute ruler over people’s lives. To clarity, at the risk of being an “intolerant Leftist,” it means taking away any right, even of millions upon millions of persons, that the Trump cultist condemns on his authority, with no recourse to–oh yes, rights and liberties.
And to be perfectly clear, it means having a morality of hatred and cruelty, with which no compromise is possible. With all her cutesy-po rhetoric, she is a vile human being. That is the definition of what it means to be Donald Trump, and all who follow him: not by the way, a “majority, just a thin edge. But enough for the cultists. The pleasure taken by the worst cruelties–how to define that? It is something unleashed for which there is no excuse; something rotten to the core. Or I should say, something so depraved, that setting out on that path, it winds up that you can support one depravity after another. Hidey-ho.
Yes, like this one: “Trump Administration Flips U.S. Position in Supreme Court Transgender Case, Trump Signs Sweeping Executive Order Targeting ‘Gender Ideology’ in Schools.”
Hitler would cheer to find such landsmen taking over the most powerful of all democratic nations in the name of White Power. I have a dozen or more quotations like that one. Is there any way in which any of them could be prevented; is there anything that Trump and Musk, combined, can not destroy?
Offhand I can think of nothing,, because there is no countervailing power on deck, whereas all initiative, and all violence, are at their control. Judges can temporarily halt all the decimations of the rule of law, but then what? As Andrew Jackson famously responded to a Supreme Court opinion forbidding the Government’s removal of the Cherokee Indians from their tribal lands, “John Marshall has given his opinion, now let him enforce it.” Sounds familiar, no? And now we know what Vance thinks of the Law to which his wife’s life is devoted. Destroy, destroy.
Who can reconstruct the federal work force? Who can put together the immigrant families torn apart by the forces of sadism? Who can undo the deliberate destruction of non-Americans by the obliteration of AID, tearing loose all medical treatments for which the US is the primary source even in Africa and parts of Asia. Trump rides the Horse of Death. Let’s think long and hard about that.
