Hitler in the White House: The Rampage Goes On
Trump Suggests No Laws Are Broken if He’s ‘Saving His Country’: President Trump shared a quotation on social media, making it clear it was one he wanted people to absorb: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
We haven’t paid close enough attention to what Trump, Vance, and Musk are doing and saying when they justify their actions. On the one hand they simply legitimize everything they do, and if you’re in the way, you’re just going to be run over. But what’s the excuse–why not just follow the rules, run between the lines.
The answer put out constantly for us to drop our jaws over, is rather the rhetoric of decline. If Trump has said it once he’s said it a hundred times: this is a worthless society that only he can save by restoring it to greatness–that essentially means reintroducing all the legal accompaniments of slavery. As Jamelle Bouie remarked, “The segregationist intent of the president’s policy is even more apparent when you turn your attention to some of the people he has chosen to place in his administration.”
That’s putting it mildly. In plain language, Trump hates the United State of America. As for the Constitution, it’s not worthy of the paper it’s printed on; it’s just a lump shit justifying…what? It’s not at all clear why this particular “decline” extends beyond the inner cities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago…on and on, pick your candidates.The Constitution? Constitutional jurisprudence, Constitutional reverence !)–No, it’s shit; He hates it. He hates “them.” He hates us. Roberts got it right, after all: the President is King, and we nothings trail in his iron boot-heel.
What does it mean, rather, to respect the Constitution, and to feel indebted to the framers who created it, and attempt to follow out or, when necessary, improve upon their work. It’s a version of patriotism–what many persons have through the high-point of that emotion.
But Trump hates it. If we haven’t understood that, we haven’t grasped what is happening: not some over-reach, or rhetorical gas, but the absolute real thing, that this Nation is hateful not because of dropping bombs, or seizing land, or all the actions that a liberal democrat deplores while regularly protesting while yet remaining an American liberal democrat? No, because we are weak, we don’t try to destroy our opponents.
At this point we have to revert to Rachel Maddow’s concept of the “autocratic breakthrough.” There are many possibilities here–think of how many autocrats are nurtured by the planet–but the common basis is reverence for what once existed –before democracy–but to what it has degenerated: in every single instance, by demanding tolerance of the inferior, in whatever guise it is pressed upon us: diversity, equality, and inclusion worst of all.
The breakthrough, to sum up here, is to realize that, as the autocrat to come preaches, and of which his followers recognize the truth, that the USA Nation is dominated by inferior, repellent and subversive beings; and once that “fact” is recognized by a listening audience that will never retreat from the revelation–that lands with a counter-reverence bordering on or in a sense transcending, religion–there is no going back.
You–I–cannot talk people out of the revelation, any more than I can talk mobsters out of their bank-robbing endeavors. The die is cast: there yet may be a recanting among the MAGA masses, but only through their own recognitions: we who are pro-democracy will not win that argument on our own terms. What are those terms that every person I know immediately grasps on recognition?
I can begin to answer that question by referring to two copies of the Constitution, both pocket size, that I have sitting before me, in front of the computer. Everyone who accepts Trump as a leader, as a source of truth or feeling, has made the leap of being able to turn one of the world’s most quoted documents on its head: a violent insurrection becomes an inside job masterminded by the FBI–or tourists?; an act of patriotism rather than treason: a gigantic lie never to be foresworn.
So let’s look at the real thing. The first copy before me,, reissued in 2016, climaxes with a restatement of “Your Rights,” and concludes with a somewhat frightening section on “What To Do” if you’re stopped by the police, or stopped in your car, or Arrested, or Taken to a Police Station, stopped for Questioning, or even In Your Home.
It is a production, in other words, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and its ambition is, the Constitution and its ancillary Rights having been described and defined, to put the protection of Civil Liberties as equal to or even above the definitions of the main body. Not to put too fine a point on it, you could say that no act of legislation (Article I) or Administration ((Article II), or even the judiciary (Article III), can be held to supersede those protections.
The second copy, at this point very bedraggled, was published, together with The Declaration of Independence , by International Publishers in New York City, in yearly editions from 1937 to 1942: with an Introduction by one Earl Browder. To be precise, International was the official publisher of the Communist Party USA, and Earl Browder was the CP’s Chairman and the author of the Introduction: “The Revolutionary Background of the Constitution.”
Otherwise we’re looking at the same document as was the ACLU, with no language about means of production, or the proletariat, and with the Bill of Rights and Civil War Amendments highlighted. To be sure, with the War’s End and the beginning of the Cold War, Stalin had had enough of Earl Browder’s Popular Front approach, and he was removed from his position. But it’s there: the appeal to the democratic view of the world that can appeal to everyone except the Fascists who made and are making war on the USA, and are now on a world-wide rampage.
But enough of what’s happening–how can I keep clipping and reproducing the stories–one after another–that add up to a horror-story that’s a wipe-out of everything that’s gone before. How; what is the appeal?
Since without a shadow of a doubt we’re in the middle of an authoritarian breakthrough, the place to begin looking for an explanation is with the concept of “the authoritarian personality” that I’ve referenced so often in this, the Trump Era. As a label we can give to those for whom the Constitution is a document that can be either ignored, or understood only as a bastardized version of itself by those who are spitting on the real thing:–as put by, e.g., the septuagenarian seller of Trump’s merchandise, I’ve quoted earlier. “You guys know what I mean.”
Of course that’s only a description, not an explanation. As for the latter, I’ve never come across any account of the way the brain works that encompasses a biological account of moral development–never. There is, however, a sociological account that does provide exactly that, with some measure of common sense to uphold it. It’s the work of a political scientist, Herbert McCloskey, writing in the American Political Science Review in the early 1960-s who provided it, as a researcher studying ideology in the American culture.
McCloskey had two major deductions from his research. First, that what is often denoted as “ideology” that is a demand for consistency in moral and political beliefs, was largely absent from his subjects so that ideological consistency was very rare (10% of respondents, roughly). And second, that the genesis of ideological thinking was, in order: most often inculcated by parents; otherwise incoherent but largely to be generated and promulgated by the American President; and lastly. but still measurably by one’s fidelity to a political party–often, of course, influenced by parents or presidents.
In this respect, where are we now? Given this framework, where does the politics of hatred come from?
Oscar Hammerstein II put it memorably, as I’ve adverted to before:
“You’ve got to be taught
Before it’s too late
Before you are six, or seven, or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught”
That is what has happened, so to speak all at once. We have a President who promulgates hatred as a battering ram that cancels out all previous experience; that captures an entire political party, and that entered the ’24 race with a favorable disposition of demographic forces. An entire culture has been wiped out as a potentially potent ideology, and what was once relatively submerged as violent racism, and outraged masculinity, now rules everything. Women need only apply out of obedience to, or identification with men. Put together the force of anti-abortion, and the haters of transgenderism, and you have the politics of hatred and cruelty.
Looking at it from my own standpoint, I wrote five books with the word “Democracy” in the title, three of them with the word “Equality” added in one place of another. That was an “America” that was still riddled with racism: but except in the South–“Dixieland”–racism was unacceptable in popular culture during the post-War period. This waas the era of Brown vs. Board; of Roe v. Wade, of Gideon vs. Wainwright. We might say that yes, Harry Truman dropped the A-Bomb: and thousands died on both sides to enforce LBJ’s misbegotten version of Vietnam.
But still: to recognize that disaster is also to recognize how unpopular “we” were with our limited version of patriotism, so that when Pat Buchanan declared the onset of “the Culture War” at the 1992 Republican Convention, he was there at the beginning of where we are now. Creating it, more or less. By then, we were absolutely the enemy.
To return, finally, then, to the present in which we are marooned, our condition is not due to some genetic failure, or a lapse in our general conception of rationality and reason. The authoritarian personality is not born that way, but is “carefully taught” to be accepting of moral derangement as the new norm. But today, for many millions, it is no merely parental pressure nor, say, the anodyne speeches of President Eisenhower that have torn the moral world apart.
It is rather the total and irreparable control over consciousness building through lies and slanders that the Fascist forces have learned to harness. And no better way to begin that process then than to build a big lie so overpowering that will appeal to anyone prepared, say, to believe that Democrats, or black people, or feminists or transgender persons, or above all, are patrons of the Deep State; and that in the biggest most inescapable lie of all, their favored, deeply anti-democratic candidate “really” won. And even beyond that January 6 was both an “inside job” arranged by the FBI, and, at the same time, the heroic work of revolutionaries who hate the Nation, hate the State.
Thus as one Op-Ed writer put it, analyzing “the strange and irresistible power of Musk,” his fans love his narration of power as a vicarious experience of dominance. If anything, his and Trump’s bombastic flouting of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. It is government and civic life they don’t understand. Musk clarifies a scary world for them, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win. A bizarre narration of ideology and rage that even Herb McCloskey could not begin to understand.
What am I saying? Someone is going to read what I’m saying as implying that the moral intellect of those who now follow the lead of a neo-Nazi without qualm is in some way inferior.
Yes, absolutely and totally deficient in the realm of morality and ethics. To put it bluntly, one who is prepared to deprive opponents of respect and equal treatment because of their being “other” in their being or beliefs or condition, is a deranged person whose own being is incompatible with living in a society based, to some meaningful extent, on equal respect and treatment.
There are unfortunately many such who begin, perhaps, with some kind of reasonable citizenship–e.g., simply being a Republican; but then have moved on to bigger and better lies; or could not accept having lost an election; or were unfortunately susceptible to the depravities of contemporary mass communication. They are prepared for the role of submission to the Authoritarian Leader, whatever of belief and action he demands of them. They are worth only of condemnation: there is nothing that can be said on their behalf.
That a would-be Fuhrer can thrive in that milieu is a sad truth about the human condition; we apparently do not know how to change that, or as yet even deal with it.
