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When Truth No Longer Matters

by Philippa Kaur 4 September 2021, 09:28

An effective communicator with a questionable past builds a successful campaign as an outsider disinterested in everyday, run-of-the-mill politics. He smartly taps into the fears and anxieties of voters and projects himself as the only person who can fix the supposedly broken system.

Despite warnings from ex-associates and journalists regarding his sociopathic behavior, he decries the media and political opponents as unpatriotic. Policy wonks and veterans in his party are sidelined to create a personality cult unmoored from any ideology. Social media is used daily for dog-whistle rhetoric to promote the cultural supremacy of his ilk.

Donald Trump Proves That It’s the System, Stupid

By blaming all the socio-economic ills on outsiders, previous administrations and “others,” he builds a narrative of victimhood. His devoted followers start living in an alternate universe. Once in power, he uses his bully’s pulpit to undermine all democratic institutions.

Riding Out the Storm

You would be forgiven for thinking that this was about Donald Trump. But this is the story of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. The similarities end there, however. While the United States managed to pull back from the brink after the Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6, Indian democracy is in a dangerous downward spiral.

To understand these divergent trajectories of the oldest and the largest democracies in the world, it is instructive to examine the key differences between Trump’s and Modi’s personalities, the maturity of democratic institutions in the United States and India, and the histories of these two republics.

In the US, Trump’s effort to subvert democratic institutions has been well documented, with commentators still writing about how close the country had come to a constitutional crisis in his final days in office. Trump tried his best to manipulate all the American institutions, but there was rarely any method to his madness. Unlike Modi, he was more interested in vanity than power.

On a given day, he could draw lines on a map for petty reasons and undermine the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association or brazenly call the officials in Georgia and ask them to “find” enough votes in Trump’s favor to reverse the election result in the state. As much as Trump and his partner-in-crime, Attorney General William Barr, tried, they could not corrode the integrity of the system beyond a certain point.

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Despite Trump’s vilification, the media stayed strong and kept hammering home the truth. While Trump tried to use the judiciary to run down the clock on several grave constitutional issues, scores of judges, including several appointed by the president, stood up to him when it mattered the most. The legislature impeached but failed to convict him twice. However, when push came to shove, it certified the votes and declared Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.

Barring a few minor missteps, the FBI withstood a concerted pressure campaign from Trump and his allies. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Election Commission, the intelligence agencies, vast bureaucracies and diplomats around the world kept their heads down and rode out the storm. With more than two centuries of experience, most American institutions have learned the importance of guarding their turf.

Taming the Bureaucracy

In India, on the other hand, while running his home state of Gujarat before becoming prime minister, Modi had perfected the art of taming the bureaucracy to his will, manipulating or marginalizing the media and polarizing the electorate for his narrow purposes. While he did deliver on a few key infrastructure promises, he also carefully crafted a larger-than-life persona around himself. As soon as he became prime minister, he stopped interacting with the media.

Well before facing reelection in 2019, he enacted an anonymous political funding system and used it to build a formidable social media propaganda machine to fabricate an alternate universe for his voters. Behind the scenes, he methodically started dismantling the democratic checks and balances. While Trump’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might not have been intent on destroying American institutions, Modi proved to be more like McConnell than Trump — someone playing the long power game.

While previous governments of opposing parties were often guilty of undermining democracy, the brazenness and the cold, calculating manner in which Modi has approached it are astonishing. By using obscure parliamentary maneuvers, the prime minister has repeatedly sidelined or manipulated the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, to pass laws that have long-term and far-reaching social consequences.

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In addition to passing questionable constitutional amendments to enact his anonymous political funding scheme, the Right to Information Act (the equivalent of the American Freedom of Information Act) was amended so that those ensuring public access to non-classified government records lost their independence. As a consequence, it became increasingly difficult to shed light on the government’s opaque decision-making.

The enormous war chest built through anonymous political donations, the government’s sizable advertising budget and the threat of central investigative agencies were used to browbeat most of the media outlets into submission. A top Election Commission official who took a stand against Modi’s incendiary rhetoric in the run-up to his reelection was reassigned to the Asian Development Bank, headquartered in the Philippines.

The Reserve Bank of India, in charge of the country’s monetary policy, has been repeatedly coerced into taking unsound policy decisions and covering up for the government’s fiscal and economic policy failures. Policymaking powers of at least two states, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi, have been curtailed through potentially unconstitutional means, disturbing India’s federal structure. The military has been repeatedly co-opted for Modi’s photo-ops to promote phony nationalism. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has been a mute spectator, keeping on hold the hearing of cases related to some of the most pressing constitutional issues.

As the unfolding global Pegasus spyware scandal indicates, Modi has probably compromised the judiciary’s independence as well. By allegedly hacking the phones of everyone from political rivals, constitutional authorities, judges, their staffers to activists, journalists and even his own ministers and friends in the private sector, Modi seems to have established an Orwellian surveillance-coercion state in which it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the power of his executive branch.

Opposite Paths

Why have India and the US embarked on such opposite paths? One reason is the difference between the two leading men themselves. A devoted foot soldier of right-wing Hindu majoritarian ideology, Modi rose through the political ranks and served more than two terms at the helm of the state of Gujarat before running for the highest office in the land. He had carefully studied all levers of executive and bureaucratic power and, along with his deputy, Amit Shah, had already gained notoriety as one of the country’s most ruthless politicians.

While both ran their campaigns as outsiders, Trump’s understanding of the government machinery was limited. As former National Security Adviser John Bolton recently pointed out, Trump is incapable of staging a coup because he lacks the attention span required for it. With no discernible political acumen, Trump was incapable of looking beyond the next news cycle or his narrow self-interest.

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The American system dodging the Trump bullet and the Indian system crumbling under Modi also reflect the wide gulf in their socio-cultural values. By insisting on universal adult suffrage from its inception, the founding fathers of the Republic of India expressed tremendous faith in the citizenry and future leaders despite a severe resource crunch, a moribund economy and near-total absence of infrastructure for health, education or even basic transportation.

While giving every adult the right to vote is hailed as a quintessentially Indian revolution, and rightly so, it has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has dismantled the centuries-old feudal social structures and slowly empowered historically oppressed castes. On the other, limited institutional capacity and lack of appreciation for their independence among voters have made the Indian system susceptible to demagoguery in the short run. This will change as India becomes more prosperous and internalizes the benefits of decentralizing power, but that brings into sharp relief Modi’s betrayal of his mandate.

Fledgling Democracy

At 75, India is still a fledgling democracy. It has already gone through one emergency under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when all institutions, state and national elections, and fundamental rights were suspended amid near-total media censorship. While the Supreme Court took corrective action after the emergency, widespread poverty and, until recently, low levels of literacy have hampered rapid institutional capacity building in India. Corruption is endemic to all branches of government, making them easy targets for manipulation.

In its short history as a republic, the socialist economic model adopted by India’s pre-1990 governments has also created a new feudal system in the form of political patronage. With the government tightly controlling the economy, politicians became the new overlords picking winners and losers. As the initial euphoria and idealism following independence faded, criminals came to dominate politics. Corruption became the mainstay of political life.

While these might be birth pangs of any new republic — and might find parallels in the early decades of the existence of the United States — complacency and arrogance of the Indian National Congress (INC), India’s GOP, has fueled the rise of Modi.

A Modi-fied India Has Weakened on the World Stage

In the 1970s and 1980s, a 21-month-long national emergency, followed by legislative action favoring minorities to protect the INC’s own vote banks, had led to resentment among the Hindu majority. Instead of correcting some of these historic wrongs to move the discourse to a liberal center, Modi has swung it to the extreme right. He has not taken any overt steps that resemble the emergency that Indira Gandhi declared in 1975. Instead, he has chosen covert means to slowly and deliberately dismantle the Indian system of governance.

More importantly, while Gandhi’s methods were largely populist, Modi has added toxic majoritarianism to it, making this movement more dangerous, with potentially longer-lasting consequences. For someone who claims that he developed his political consciousness during the emergency, Modi’s assault on the liberal system that enabled his rise from humble beginnings is truly ironic.

A leader who promised to decentralize power and dismantle India’s new feudal system of political patronage now presides over one of the most centralized decision-making structures. When the framers of the Indian Constitution chose universal adult suffrage, they also expected elected leaders to nurture democratic institutions until they can stand on their own feet. Modi’s betrayal of that mandate, more so than Gandhi’s, will affect India for a generation, if not longer.

Dark Phase

Lastly, while the American system was built on an ethos of “don’t tread on me” and a desire to keep government out of people’s lives, historical factors like entrenched feudalism and extreme cultural diversity made India choose a cradle-to-the-grave approach to governance with a strong central executive.

Americans instinctively question authority and are suspicious of the government, whereas Indians, by and large, have tremendous faith in the government as a source of good and are still coming out of the shadows of colonialism. American society values individual liberty, privacy and agency, while Indians gravitate toward collectivism and fatalism.

Perhaps the most telling indicator of this difference was the fact that Trump’s approval rating never crossed 45% while Modi commands favor among 60% to 70% of Indians despite his mismanagement of the pandemic, a series of foreign policy failures and the economic destruction under his watch.

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Indian democracy is going through a dark phase, and all eyes are on the Indian Supreme Court to see if it will push back against Modi’s draconian executive branch. Even if the courts start asserting their independence again, India will pay a steeper price than the US did under Trump before it becomes a healthy democracy again. For the sake of their own democratic future, one can only hope that Indians start questioning their government more, hold it accountable and insist on securing privacy and liberty.

While fast, centralized decision-making might seem seductive in the short run, India will reap long-term benefits if it can turn its latent admiration of developed Western countries into a deeper appreciation for the checks and balances that enable their stability. Against all odds, India has stared down some of the toughest challenges so far. With some more patience, if it can focus on building institutional capacity and spreading awareness about their importance through rapid upgrades in the quality of education, it will live up to its potential of becoming a liberal, democratic counterweight to China.

Meanwhile, supporters of republican values in the United States will do well to learn from the goings on in India and count their blessings, or institutions, that helped the union survive Trump. In early August, as members of the House committee investigating the failed insurrection of January 6 heard gut-wrenching testimonies from Capitol Police, some of their Republican colleagues held press conferences blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the tragic events.

As the January 6 commission has reconvened and subpoenaed scores of records from the government and private phone companies, Trump and his congressional supporters are back at it again, claiming executive privilege and threatening private companies with consequences if they cooperate with the commission to prevent it from shedding light on the truth.

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The GOP leadership is keen on winning back both the houses of Congress in 2022 and knows the damage this fact-finding mission will do to electoral prospects. Some pushback or false equivalence is par for the course in this political game. However, the brazenness of the lies and fealty to Donald Trump more than six months after his ignominious While House exit is mind-boggling. Without condoning the messy last days of the US war in Afghanistan, they can take a leaf out of President Biden’s book to square with Americans about the systemic risk Trumpism poses to the system.

As national attention shifts from the Afghanistan war to other domestic and foreign policies, insisting on the truth by supporting the January 6 investigation, even at the cost of losing one election cycle, would be a small price to pay for the conservatives to preserve the republic.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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Beating Back the Far Right
by Philippa Kaur 15 February 2021, 15:05
After four years of shock, confusion and paralysis, the United States is finally taking action against the far right. Perhaps most dramatic has been the de-platforming of Donald Trump: the suspension of his Twitter and Facebook accounts and the targeting of his prominent followers across social media platforms. Even a few months ago, such a radically sensible action would have been inconceivable. Kick a president off of social media?
But such are the indignities visited upon sore losers. Not surprisingly, these moves have significantly decreased the amount of misinformation in the public sphere and made it that much more difficult for white nationalists to organize actions.
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The events of January 6 also led to Trump’s second impeachment. The Senate trial, which took place last week, may not have resulted in a conviction, but it forced the Republican Party to choose between upholding the Constitution and supporting a president who tried to overthrow democracy.
The penalties for remaining the party of Trump are slowly beginning to mount. The corporate world has moved against the ex-president by canceling events at his resorts and hotels and suspending financial services with his company. Several high-profile donors have abandoned the most vocal congressional adherents of the phony election fraud narrative, like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Not only has Simon & Schuster canceled Senator Hawley’s book contract, but the chief promoter of MAGA texts at Hachette — who published screeds by Donald Trump, Jr., Corey Lewandowski and Jeanine Pirro — was recently fired.
Some politicians have faced steeper penalties. For their participation in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, West Virginia State Delegate Derrick Evans was pushed to resign and Jorge Riley was forced out of his position in the California Republican Assembly. At the federal level, House Democrats and 11 of their Republican colleagues recently voted to strip Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. That seems like a mere slap on the wrist for someone who has promoted the assassination of her political opponents. But it’s something.
A defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, all of whom spread conspiracy theories about the company’s voting machines used in the 2020 election, has already claimed one success. Fox canceled Lou Dobbs, one of its many factually compromised show hosts. Dominion is readying another round of suits against as many as 150 targets including Newsmax, One America News Network and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
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The Justice Department has opened up “domestic terrorism” cases against a number of the participants in the January 6 insurrection. Congress is beginning to consider new legislation on federal penalties for domestic terrorism.
The campaign against the far right isn’t exactly a full-court press. Greene continues to push Trump-like pronouncements on Twitter, and all the attention she’s gotten in recent weeks has only enlarged her platform. Corporate boycotts are not affecting the bottom lines of politicians like Hawley, who depends more on individual donors (he actually saw a big increase in donations after January 6). Trump retains his hold over much of the Republican Party, especially at the state level as the censures of Liz Cheney in Wyoming and Doug Ducey in Arizona indicate.
In other words, the far right is down but not out. The much-feared round of violence at the state level in the wake of January 6 did not happen. Rallies and marches in support of MAGA or Trump or QAnon have not materialized. When Twitter suspended Trump’s account, a demonstration outside the company’s San Francisco office brought out dozens of police officers and exactly one protester. But neither the Proud Boys nor the white activist militias have disbanded. And according to a poll at the end of January, 64% of Republicans would join any party that Trump sets up.
Even as the US establishment begins its tentative detox of the public sphere, the handwringing has also begun. The de-platforming of Trump has raised concerns over the tyranny of unregulated social media giants. The campaigns to limit the platforms of Hawley and Greene have generated a fear that the silencing of minority opinions will be applied to radical voices on the left as well. Critics worry that the labeling of the January 6 insurrectionists as “domestic terrorists” will inevitably be used against communities of color and others protesting racial inequities.
The threat of white nationalist movements is not hypothetical. Four years of Trump have provided ample evidence of what can happen when these movements gain mainstream legitimation. But the anxieties over how “cancel culture” can be applied to the left and communities of color are also legitimate, as erstwhile football star Colin Kaepernick can readily confirm.
The Biden administration has already begun its de-Trumpification of the US government by reversing the previous administration’s policies, removing Trump appointees and cutting off high-level access for right-wing crazies like Giuliani, Steve Bannon and members of the MAGA media.
But the banishing of the far right back to the fringes of American society is going to require a different set of strategies. And here, the United States could learn a few lessons from other countries.
Quarantining Politicians and Parties
Although several European countries ban Nazi or neo-Nazi parties, a more effective tactic to reduce the political influence of extremist parties that fall just short of fascist has been to quarantine them. In Belgium, for instance, the major parties have an informal agreement not to partner with Vlaams Belang, a far-right Flemish nationalist party. This agreement became increasingly difficult when Vlaams Belang received the second most votes in the last parliamentary election in 2019. Austria abided by a similar “cordon sanitaire” until 2000, when the conservative People’s Party invited the far-right Freedom Party into government. The European Parliament has nevertheless borrowed the cordon sanitaire strategy to prevent members of the far-right Identity and Democracy bloc from holding any key posts such as the presidency of committees.
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In Germany, the major parties have similarly avoided any coalition arrangements with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). But the German government, presided over by the conservative Christian Democrats, has deployed another interesting tactic against the AfD. Last spring, the country’s domestic intelligence agency declared one wing of the AfD “extremist” and placed its leaders under surveillance. “But many saw in Thursday’s announcement a step toward broader measures targeting the entire Alternative for Germany party, setting the stage for a battle between the state and a party whose influence has steadily grown even as it has radicalized,” writes Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times.
In Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn grew to become the third-largest party in the parliament. The government successfully pursued a legal strategy to criminalize the organization, charging it with murder, racketeering, illegal possession of firearms and attacks on migrants. In the end, 37 members of the party, including 17 MPs, were convicted of crimes and imprisoned. By the 2019 election, the party couldn’t get enough votes to have even one representative in parliament.
If Trump ends up creating a new political party, a public pressure campaign could be mounted on the Democrats and Republicans to follow a strict policy of no talks, no committee assignments and no joint actions with any entity that Trump touches. Whether the disgraced ex-president follows through on his threat, a similar approach should be applied to all Republicans who continue to embrace a “stop the steal” agenda. Biden should make clear that his efforts at bipartisanship should exclude those who believe his administration to be illegitimate.
Purging the Far Right from Security Forces
When the National Guard was called in to secure the Capitol for Inauguration Day, two members were removed from duty because of possible ties to right-wing extremist movements. This additional vetting was deemed necessary because nearly one in five participants in the January 6 insurrection had links to the military. As a first step in addressing the longstanding problem of far-right proselytizing, the new head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, has already notified the armed forces to conduct a one-day stand down to address extremism in the ranks.
The United States could learn from the example of Germany where the country’s special forces, Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), had become a veritable haven of far-right sympathizers. The working group investigating the KSK discovered “soldiers who expounded unconstitutional views, a ‘toxic leadership culture’ among superiors, and the unexplained disappearance of 62 kilograms of explosives and large quantities of ordnance from KSK depots.” As a result of the investigation, the German government disbanded one entire company of the KSK and reorganized the remaining units. It has also tightened its screening process.
In the US, only thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and other efforts to bring accountability to policing did the FBI begin collecting data in 2018 on the use of force in law enforcement. The next step is to purge police ranks of racist extremists, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Hate Speech and Digital Controls
Because of First Amendment protections, the United States does not have any hate speech laws. However, such provisions can be found in the private sector, such as universities.
Other countries, however, have sought to penalize hate speech in a number of different ways. Germany has outlawed “incitement to hate” or Volksverhetzung, which applies to verbal attacks on national, racial, religious or ethnic groups but also, according to a 2020 ruling, the denigration of women. Denmark, too, has recently expanded its hate speech law to include extremist language directed at gender identity and gender expression. Since the 1970s, New Zealand has had a law on the books criminalizing the incitement of “racial disharmony,” and the government has been considering additional measures following the Christchurch killings in 2019.
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But legislating against hate is notoriously tricky. Canada repealed a hate speech law that tried to balance a commitment to free expression with equally strong commitments to multiculturalism and equality (but has more recently explored reviving it). France passed an online hate speech law last spring only for the country’s constitutional court to strike down large portions of it.
Dealing with hate speech became even more urgent when the far right discovered how to use social media to recruit, organize and inject its messages into the conservative mainstream. In the US, the home of the largest social media platforms, there has been no move to legislate against extremist content online as long as it isn’t criminal (like libel, threats to kill or child pornography).
Rather, in typically American fashion, policing has been left to the private sector, which determines who to “de-platform” and what posts to take down. Initially, the mainstream social media platforms only suspended the accounts of those on the lunatic fringe, like Alex Jones of InfoWars infamy or Milo Yiannopoulos formerly of Breitbart News. Facebook and Twitter were reluctant to take a more proactive approach to white nationalists not only for fear of being labeled “censors” but because it would also have meant banning Republican politicians who voiced similar sentiments.
By 2020, however, Facebook and Twitter reversed themselves because politicians like Trump were openly challenging American democracy. Well, actually, Trump and his cohort had been doing so from day one, thanks to an indirect assist from the social media giants. But after the November election, Twitter and Facebook could rationalize their moves because Trump had become a lame-duck president.
De-platforming demonstrably works, whether measured by the bankrupting of Milo Yiannopoulos, the reduction of an audience for groups like the Islamic State and QAnon, or the virtual disappearance of Donald Trump from public discourse. It doesn’t qualify as censorship, since Twitter and Facebook are not public spaces. They are corporate spaces, and the corporation decides who speaks there, just like The New York Times decides who to publish.
But this raises two problems: To whom are Twitter and Facebook accountable? And why aren’t there rules governing the internet more generally, since the web is certainly a public commons?
Facebook instituted an oversight board last year that looks at decisions with an eye toward possibly overturning them. Three of the first six cases have involved hate speech. Here’s one of them: “A user posted two screenshots of tweets by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, which said ‘Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.’ Facebook removed the post for hate speech violations, but the user’s appeal indicates they wanted to spread awareness of the prime minister’s ‘horrible words.’” Perhaps more consequentially, the oversight board will soon make the call on whether to restore Trump’s Facebook account.
As for generating rules for the web more generally, that’s a tougher challenge, given the anarchic, libertarian spirit that has presided over the enterprise since its inception. But here’s one interesting “fix” that New Zealand has instituted: Any Kiwi who views extremist content online is now automatically directed to websites that help people leave hate groups.
Going After Terrorists
For two decades, the US has conducted a “war on terror” largely against “radical Islam” in countries like Afghanistan and Syria. It has ignored state supporters of such groups, like Saudi Arabia, when they’re allies, while going after governments like Saddam Hussein’s that were mistakenly identified as al-Qaeda boosters.
Meanwhile, the US government largely ignored home-grown, right-wing extremists who organized with near-impunity particularly during the Trump era. So, why are some people unhappy about calling the right-wing extremists who overran the Capitol on January 6 “terrorists”?
“The use of these words only elevates a harmful counterterrorism framework that has historically been used to target Arab, Muslim, and Black communities,” writes Rania Batrice in The Boston Globe. “Call them white supremacists. Call them a violent, murderous mob. Call them insurrectionists. Call them fascists. Call them traitors or treasonous. But please remember that the words used have an impact on broader, already oppressed communities.”
I am sympathetic to this argument. But is it not problematic that the Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list does not include any far-right extremist groups? A number of these outfits — the Proud Boys, the Atomwaffen Division, the Base — have an international presence. Canada just labeled all of them terrorist outfits. An FTO designation would permit greater international cooperation to disrupt the global networking of the far right.
Yes, I’d like to see the United States criminalize white supremacy and fascism. But the terrorism designation, for all its problematic history, focuses not so much on words but on actions. And in the US, it has historically been easier to go after the far right for what it does, not for what it says.
Whatever language we use, however, it’s critically important to keep up the pressure to delegitimize the far right. Extremists are trying to maintain a toehold in power via Hawley, Greene and others in the hopes that Trump will run again or some equally malign candidate will emerge in 2024. It’s time to resurrect a global anti-fascist consensus to name, shame and throw these guys out of the game.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Trumpism After Trump: The Wrong Person at the Right Time?
by Philippa Kaur 10 February 2021, 17:01
A few days before the Senate was due to vote on whether to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on charges of inciting insurrection, an article in The Washington Post’s opinion pages boldly proclaimed that “Trumpism is American fascism.” Equating the Trump phenomenon with fascism is nothing new. The comparison started with his election in 2016, feeding a cottage industry over the next four years. At the time, most academic experts on fascism vehemently disagreed. In August 2020, for instance, a prominent Georgetown University historian raised the rhetorical question, “How fascist is President Trump?” The response followed, stante pede: “Not that much.”
The arguably most important reason for dismissing the fascist charge was that scholars of fascism did not want to contribute to what Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has called “symbolic inflation” — the fact that invoking Adolf Hitler has led to a process where the “value of ‘Hitler’ as an admonitory signifier has become progressively devalued over time.” Examples abound. Jörg Haider, for instance, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) who propelled it to international prominence in the 1990s, was routinely associated with Hitler.
How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?
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It was only in the aftermath of the assault on the US Capitol that one of the most eminent contemporary scholars of fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, came out to state that “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
A Diagnosis of Decline
Behind this reassessment of Trump(ism) is the fact that those who invaded the Capitol on January 6 had no qualms about engaging in violent actions. In fact, by now, it has become obvious that many of the insurgents considered violence a perfectly acceptable means to advance their agenda. The Proud Boys — recently labeled a neo-fascist terrorist group by the Canadian government — add a whiff of squadrismo to the mix. The squadristi (this picture is taken at the Foro Italico, a piazza in front of the Olympic stadium in Rome, depicting an armed squad heading out for a punitive expedition) were Benito Mussolini’s armed goons routinely swarming out to the countryside where they terrorized socialists and trade union leaders.
Squadrismo was informed by a “palingenetic vision of politics” that was also at the heart of Mussolini’s version of totalitarianism. The term was originally coined and developed by Roger Griffin, another leading expert on fascism. Griffin defines fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, where “palingenetic” refers to the myth of rebirth, revival and regeneration provoked by a profound sense of decline, decay and decadence. It follows that fascism is revolutionary and, thus, by definition, the opposite of conservatism. The last thing fascists are interested in is defending and preserving the status quo.
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From this perspective, there can be no doubt that Trumpism has certain affinities to fascism, to put it cautiously. The very slogan that informed Trump’s 2016 campaign, “Make America Great Again,” reflects the palingenetic spirit of fascism. It serves both as a diagnosis and a promise. A year ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat gave a sense of how the diagnosis might go. In his view, the United States, if not the whole Western world, suffers from decadence, manifested by “forms of economic stagnation, institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition at a high stage of wealth and technological proficiency and civilizational development.”
There undoubtedly is much truth to this diagnosis. In fact, a Pew survey from early 2019 revealed that a significant majority of the American public shared this view. When asked about their expectations 30 years into the future, a majority thought that the United States would lose importance on the world stage; that the country would be saddled with a huge national debt; and that socioeconomic inequality would be even higher than at the moment. At the same time, the vast majority of respondents had little confidence in the capability of the country’s elected officials to meet these challenges. In fact, more than half of respondents thought that “Washington” had a “negative impact” on finding solutions to the country’s major problems.
Various studies from 2020 provide further confirmation of the perception of decline. A Brookings Institution preview of the results of the 2020 Census, for instance, painted a picture of stagnation, both in terms of population growth and mobility. A U.S.News analysis of the most recent findings of its annual country rankings found widespread skepticism that more than three years of Trump had made the country “great again.” In fact, compared to the previous year, more Americans thought the US was corrupt: at 31%, a 5% increase on 2019. At the same time, the number of Americans who thought their country was “trustworthy” declined from 61% in 2019 to 55% in 2020.
Finally, according to a Pew study from early 2020, most American Christians have come to believe that their religion has lost, and continues to lose, influence in American life. Worse still, most also believe that there is a fundamental “tension between their beliefs and the mainstream culture.” This is particularly galling given the fact that at one time in the not-so-distant past, Christian culture was mainstream culture. Not for nothing, in 2016 and 2020, (white) evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Something Like Fascism
Diagnosis, however, is relatively easy. Coming up with a genuine remedy is a fundamentally different issue, provided it goes beyond trite platitudes couched in catchy sloganeering epitomized by Trump’s MAGA campaign. “Make America Great Again” is one of these slogans that sound good but are fundamentally meaningless in the true sense of the word. As such, it is part of the new type of “simulative politics” characteristic of contemporary Western-style democracy, a politics staged as an organized spectacle, the “embodiment of a reality style of politics,” as Douthat puts it, by a president who was “performing a drama that doesn’t necessarily have strong correlates in the real world.” All of this makes Trump a “cartoonish imitation of something like fascism,” a “weird, internet-enabled simulacrum of fascism.”
The carnivalesque mise en scène of the storming of the Capitol — a pastiche of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, itself a symbolic act given there were only seven prisoners held in the fortress — lends some credence to Douthat’s interpretation. Exemplary here is the “almost-farcical” case of “Elizabeth from Knoxville” who thought she would take part in a revolution only to get Maced (and complain bitterly about it). The farce, of course, goes only so far, given the very real violence resulting in material destruction and the loss of life. It is at this point that the simulacrum turns into reality, exposing the potential of genuine fascism hiding behind the ludicrousness and absurdity of the last days of Trump.
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Trumps’ departure has not diminished the potential. Quite the contrary: His ignominious exit has added new fuel to the anger and resentment among many Americans that propelled Trump to the presidency in the first place and has done nothing to assuage diffuse political disenchantment or weaken latent authoritarian inclinations. In fact, an authoritative empirical study from June 2020 found a “substantial minority” of Americans being open to “authoritarian alternatives.” In late 2019, around a quarter of US survey respondents expressed support for a strong leader “who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections.” Overall, it concluded that between a “quarter and a third of the American public flirt with the idea that an alternative to democracy would be a good thing.”
The study does not disaggregate the results along color lines. It stands to reason, however, that a majority of those yearning for a strong leader are white voters, the very same voters who constituted the bulk of Trump’s loyal supporters. White Americans have always considered themselves the only true embodiment of the nation, rooted in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, which was only gradually extended to Europeans of other Christian faiths. In fact, for much of the 19th century, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy were considered less white than Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock and, as a result, subject to discrimination.
Over the past several years, the universe of white American identity and pride has come crashing down. For one, as numerous projections have pointed out, by 2045, white Americans will have become a minority in what they see as “their own country.” The result has been both growing white “racial anxiety” and the beginnings of a sociocultural and sociopolitical backlash against the rise of visible minorities, reflected in the support and vote for Trump. Secondly, there is the seemingly inexorable decline of Christianity’s influence in American society. Over the past few decades, American Christians, and particularly white American Christians, have progressively lost their “cultural dominance” and, with it, the assumption, as the editor of a prominent Christian news outlet put it, “that people are like us and people understand us, and people accept us.”
Finally, there is the notion that the United States is the greatest country in the world and, therefore, predestined and entitled to assume the leadership of the Western world. This was certainly true in the postwar period, given the essential threat posed by the Soviet Union. Today, it is a rather iffy proposition, as the skepticism of a majority of the American public about the country’s position in the world clearly shows.
The Trump years have severely tarnished the American image among the country’s key allies. The trade war with China exposed American weaknesses in the face of a new challenge to its supremacy. The pandemic, and particularly the way it was handled, only made things worse. In late 2020, a mere quarter of the German population and around a third of the French had a favorable view of the United States. In the UK, traditionally America’s closest ally in Europe, only around 40% saw the US in a favorable light.
Fertile Ground
If there has ever been fertile ground in the United States for the kind of palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism Griffin has identified as the core of fascism, it is now. Fertile ground, however, is not enough. It takes the right enabler to translate the mixture of anxiety, resentment, political disenchantment, the flirting with authoritarian alternatives and the yearning for revival and the reestablishment of the “natural order” into political action. Trump might have appealed to some of these sentiments. However, in the end, the combination of egocentric narcissism and mental slothfulness assured that he would never amount to more than a cheap pastiche of the likes of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.
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This is not to say that Trump was nothing but a fleeting moment in contemporary American politics. Quite the opposite. Trump might have been the wrong person at the right time. His impact, however, is enduring. It is reflected most prominently in the direction large parts of the Republican Party have taken. Whereas in the not-so-distant past Republicans championed various culture-war causes, from opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to the promotion of school prayers, today, a large number of Republican officials on the federal, state and local levels have adopted positions that lean in the direction of Trump-style subversion of the American democratic system. As Chris Hayes has recently put it in the pages of The Atlantic, the fight these days between Democrats and Republicans is less about policy, where under the impact of COVID-19 “the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy — and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.”
Even after the shock of January 6, Republican officials continue to feed into the politics of anger and resentment that was at the heart of the assault on Congress. Yesterday, as the Senate voted to proceed with Trump’s impeachment 56-44, just six Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in the move to condemn the president’s role in inciting an unprecedented domestic assault on American democracy. With 17 Republican votes needed to impeach Donald Trump, a reckoning is unlikely.
The temptation to harvest white resentment for individual gain is too strong and, with it, the temptation to follow the lure of some form of post-fascist fascism, American-style. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel with the provocative title, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis, of course, thought fascism was a possibility, even in the United States. It might be a good idea to give his book a second look.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?
by Philippa Kaur 28 January 2021, 17:22
A recent The Economist cover pictured the 46th US President Joe Biden in front of the White House with a cleaning mop. The lead, “Morning after in America,” projects that “The outlook for America looks grim, but that could quickly change.” The venerable publication proclaimed from its powerful pulpit that Biden “should stick to his folksy brand of dogged centrism which is so well suited to the moment.” That gives him the “best chance of success.”
The Economist sees good reasons for Biden to succeed. With interest rates so low, the government can virtually borrow for free. This means the Biden administration could roll out a $1.9-trillion stimulus. This could fund a polio-style vaccination program, extend unemployment insurance and expand child tax benefits. An infrastructure bill and investment in clean energy to combat change could create new jobs for the 21st century.
Held Together With String, Can America Hold?
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The Economist’s ebullient optimism might come from the fact that it has been on the winning side of history since its inception in 1843. For more than 178 years of its existence, it stood for Pax Britannica. For the last few decades, this blue-blooded British publication has pivoted to be a trumpeter of Pax Americana. This has led to errors in judgment such as its infamous support for the 2003 Iraq War.
In January this year, The Economist may be making a similar misjudgment. It is prematurely heralding America’s journey to what Winston Churchill memorably termed “broad, sunlit uplands” by using shoddy facts and specious reasoning just as it did in 2003. Its assertion that the US banking system looks sound is not backed by evidence. Its claim that “the economic pain is not widespread” is ridiculously untrue.
On Capitol Hill
On Wednesday, January 6, I read about a mob besieging Capitol Hill as I sat at my desk less than four miles away. Against the advice of my American friends, I left to see firsthand what was going on. They told me the white supremacist mob would beat me to a pulp. I ignored their advice because I was curious. I got off at the Archives metro stop and mingled with Donald Trump’s supporters. Some were heading to the Capitol, while others were walking away from it. Prima facie, the people walking around were not much different than at other Trump demonstrations.
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Although I lost count after 23, I am sure that I spoke to more than 50 people. They were all friendly, sociable and deeply distressed. They told me repeatedly that I was the first journalist who had cared to speak with them. They said that mainstream media was filming them but did not want to listen to them. They asked me whether elections were rigged in India. When I responded that India solved the problem of rigging by creating an independent election commission, some piped in that the US should have one too. That is certainly not what I expected to hear.
To be sure, I met the saner members of the crowd, a mix of what Douglas Murray has called “the strange, the sincere, the silly and the sinister.” I stayed on Capitol Hill grounds talking to one person after another. At some point, tear gas bombs started going off on the terrace and the curfew hour started drawing nigh. I finally beat a retreat and started walking down to the L’Enfant Plaza metro station. Someone stopped me, exchanged words and offered me food. I took a sandwich, granola bars and water while declining the chips. Instead of getting beaten, I had been welcomed and even fed. Even as I sat in the metro and later worked at home, the images and the words of the day stayed with me. Needless to say, I did not sleep well. In fact, I was so troubled that I hit writer’s block and was unable to put down my thoughts on paper coherently for days.
Even though I have long been a critic of Donald Trump, I have been cognizant of the power of his appeal. While explaining Trump’s victory in 2016, I gave facts and figures about increasing income and wealth inequality in America. I also pointed out how social mobility has been falling. For most Americans, life is tough, and prospects for their children increasingly bleak. In 2017, CNN reported that 6 in 10 Americans had savings of less than $500. The great American dream has become a terrible American nightmare for far too many families.
Every Trump supporter I met on January 6 spoke about being left behind. One supporter claimed to be a Catholic bishop from Kentucky. He proudly posed for a photo at my request and blessed me when we parted. The bishop had done missionary work in India and had been to my ancestral hometown of Varanasi. He waxed lyrical about how the political system was broken. The man in holy robes said those on Capitol Hill have long stopped caring about the American people. Instead, they now represent special interests with money.
The Pain
When I think about what the bishop said, I find it hard to disagree. As per CNBC, the 2020 election spending was nearly $14 billion, more than double the 2016 sum. It is an open secret that members of Congress spend more time raising money than legislating. There are numerous studies about declining congressional oversight and surging presidential power. Such has been the divide in Congress that it has been impossible to pass meaningful legislation for a while. Too often, legislation is bloated, poorly drafted and caters to those who can lobby hardest for their interests. Like many other democracies, the US has turned disastrously dysfunctional.
Although most people I met were white and working class, I ran into members of minority communities as well. A preacher of South African origin was singing paeans to Jesus and to America. I ran into two ladies who had immigrated from Vietnam and the Philippines. They believed that Trump was the only leader who could stand up to China and bring back law and order. When I asked if I could photograph them, the Vietnamese lady bolted, taking her friend along.
Later that evening, my friends were referring to the crowd as a “bunch of pigs.” They were appalled by the scenes they had seen on television and what they had read on their smartphones. In their eyes, those in the crowd were not protesters. They were rioters, seditionists, insurrectionists, terrorists and perpetrators of a coup. They were guilty of breaking down democratic institutions, if not treason. They deserved arrest, trial and punishment. Given that the day’s attack on the Capitol was the first in the nation’s history — bar the British invasion of 1814 — their indignation at this assault on their democracy was understandable.
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But they were not on Capitol Hill that day. What I saw is that President Trump, his son, Donald Jr., and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, played pied pipers. They riled up the crowd that turned into a mob and overwhelmed Capitol Police. Most people in the mob were misguided instead of malevolent. When I spoke to them, it was clear they had no plan of action unlike those who actually plan a coup. As historian Timothy Snyder observed in his tour de force for The New York Times, “The American Abyss”: “It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.” At the end of the evening, the mob inevitably melted away. I met families on their way back to Alabama, truck drivers returning to Texas, old ladies headed back to Georgia and even plumbers returning to Democrat-run New York. They had come to Washington, DC, to be heard, stormed what they saw as a modern-day Bastille and were going back to their daily lives.
What struck me most was that everyone I spoke to was convinced that they did not matter to the system and their votes did not count. Since that fateful day, a question has played repeatedly in my mind: When people genuinely believe their votes do not count, what stops them from taking up arms?
A Strange New World
After January 6, I have followed my father’s advice and gone back to the past to peer into the future. A 1987 edition of The Republic with crinkling yellow pages and my brother’s fading notes has made me think. In the words of the late classicist Sir Desmond Lee, Plato was living in “an age which had abandoned its traditional moral code but found it impossibly difficult to create a new one.” Athenian democracy had forced his tutor Socrates to drink hemlock. It had degenerated into chaos and dissension. Needless to say, it did not survive.
A few centuries later, the Roman Republic perished too. At some point, oligarchs took charge. They controlled almost all the land. Form triumphed over substance, and democratic institutions decayed. Populists emerge to lead the mob. One of the better known was Tiberius Gracchus, who attempted agrarian reform, assembled a mob on the Capitol but was clubbed to death in the Senate.
Unlike that long-forgotten Roman revolutionary, Trump did not bring in any radical reform for the people but, like the ancient populist, he has overreached. After years of profiting from Trump’s mass following, Twitter not only silenced him but terminated his account. A political leader who had just got over 74 million votes was obliterated from his favorite public platform by a private company in a jiffy. For all its faults, The New York Times is considered the “newspaper of record.” Its support for the CIA-led 1953 coup in Iran or the case the newspaper made for the 2003 Iraq War is in the public domain. By deleting Trump’s profile, Twitter has demonstrated that a corporation now arbitrates over what constitutes the public domain.
It is not only the question of what constitutes the public domain but also the issue of freedom of speech that is problematic. America’s fabled First Amendment “protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” For years, internet giants have claimed to be platforms with no editorial responsibility. The First Amendment has been their first defense against allegations that they were letting falsehood, hate and toxic propaganda run amok. Unlike traditional newspapers, these social media platforms did not restrict what people could say. Suddenly, they have changed tack.
After Trump evaporated from Twitter, more was to follow. Amazon Web Services abruptly kicked out conservative social media platform Parler from its servers. Google and Apple also banned the app. They argued Parler incited violence, breaching their terms and conditions. Like Trump, Parler was effectively shut down in minutes. The companies might have had good reasons to do so. However, the action raises uncomfortable questions. Who decides what is free speech? Is it the legislature, the executive, the judiciary or a billionaire-controlled Silicon Valley company?
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The First Amendment “guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.” Nothing restricts companies from curbing freedom of expression. When the constitution was drafted, big companies did not exist. Today, the situation is dramatically different, and no equivalent of the First Amendment protects Americans from censorship by big companies.
It is now transparent that the balance of power in the US lies with the big corporations. Its CEOs wield far greater power than governors, members of congress, senators and, at times, presidents. In 2008, Barack Obama won a historic election by getting nearly 69.5 million votes. In American history, only Joe Biden, with more than 81 million votes, has gained greater support in absolute numbers than Trump. Still, Twitter has summarily deleted his profile. Not only Trump supporters but also many of his opponents are uneasy with this decision.
The Left-Behind
Despite his crass, erratic and boorish behavior, Trump improved his voting numbers in 2020. He won 36% of the Latino vote, an increase of 4% compared to 2016. Despite Biden’s Catholic faith, Trump won 50% of the Catholic vote, with 57% of the white Catholics casting their ballots for him. The easy explanation is Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, the anti-abortion Catholic who studied at Notre Dame, to the US Supreme Court. However, something more might be going on. Trump increased his support among other minorities such as black men and Asians as well.
Why did so many Americans vote for Trump? I got the best answer from some militia members in West Virginia. In an article in November 2020, I mentioned how they conceded that Trump was an unsavory character who lies incessantly, but they credited him for telling one big truth: Things had turned much too ugly for far too many people like them. Far too many Americans have been suffering for much too long, and politicians from both parties have been pretending things are hunky-dory, denying grim realities.
When Trump speaks about making America great again, he is appealing to nostalgia by using one of Ronald Reagan’s lines. He is also acknowledging that things are not so great for many Americans. He is feeding off the anger many Americans feel for what his recently pardoned adviser Steve Bannon has called “the permanent political class.” Bannon is an Irish Catholic from a working-class family who voted Democrat. This Navy veteran graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Goldman Sachs. Then he went rogue.
Bannon is the ideologue who threw his lot with Trump to smash the status quo. He entered politics by launching the right-wing news site Breitbart. Instead of targeting Obama and the Democrats, he went after the Republican establishment because he saw them as traitors to the American working class. Bannon masterminded Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, something Bernie Sanders tried but failed to achieve with the Democrats.
Bannon consistently makes the case that trade and immigration are two sides of the same coin. Both suppress workers’ wages. Companies can move factories from Michigan to Mexico for cheaper labor to improve their profits and share prices. When foreigners flood in, whether it is Latinos who mow lawns or Indians who write software on H-1B visas, companies do not have to hire Americans for the same jobs. They can and do pay foreigners less than their American counterparts. Companies do well and so do their shareholders. Executives do better: CEO compensation has soared 940% since 1978. American workers do not. Like Native Americans and African slaves in times past, they are now the left-behind.
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Many economists and politicians ridicule this argument. They stress that immigrants bring in skills that are in short supply. They point to the likes of me who turn entrepreneurs, raise capital, create jobs and boost the American economy. It is true that immigrants give the nation a unique strength. Like Rome, America can draw in the best and brightest of foreigners to give it an edge. Yet not all immigrants are necessarily terribly talented. Many of them are cheap cannon fodder for the unremitting American economic system, where people’s health care is tied to their job, holidays are rare, and 13 million work more than one job. These immigrants increase labor supply and decrease the wages of ordinary Americans.
To add insult to injury, it is these beleaguered workers who have bailed out banks after the financial crash of 2007-08. Both Republicans and Democrats sang from the same hymn book to prevent a recession from turning into a depression but did nothing to curtail or curb the financial class from behaving badly. Only one top banker went to jail. More importantly, taxpayer money ended up as bonus payments for some of the executives who had caused the crash. It was a classic example of capitalism on the upside and socialism on the downside. As a hedge fund manager told me off the record, the bailout was, Heads I win, tails you lose — with “you” being the American taxpayer.
Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements opposed these bailouts. They had different philosophies and belonged to two ends of the political spectrum, but they opposed what was a fundamentally unjust government policy. The bailouts were accompanied by quantitative easing, which in simple terms means the central banks cutting interest rates to virtually zero and then flooding the economy with money by buying bonds on the market. The rich have gotten richer. The poor find themselves priced out of the market. Many on both the right and the left have lost faith in the system.
A Very Modern Feudalism
During the COVID-19 pandemic, things have gotten worse. The central bank may be printing money, but it is only ending up in the hands of big boys. After the 2007-08 financial crisis, banks prefer to lend to large businesses or those with guaranteed incomes to reduce credit risk and avoid another meltdown. This means that cash flows into a few big rivers instead of many small streams. Even as small businesses are closing down, the stock market is touching the stratosphere. As William Shakespeare memorably penned in “Hamlet,” “The time is out of joint.”
Such is the state of affairs that even the Financial Times, a paper of choice for the financial elite, is sounding the alarm. On January 3, its Washington correspondent Edward Luce argued that easy money and fiscal gridlock were leading to populism. Today, the top 10% of Americans own 84% of all shares in the US, with the top 1% owning half. About 50% of Americans own almost no stocks at all. As pointed out earlier, they do not have $500 in savings. It is many of these Americans who form the support base of Trump and Sanders.
America today is in a similar situation as Rome during the era of Tiberius Gracchus. The rich were grabbing land from poor farmers and using slaves from Carthage to work their estates. The republic where all Romans were citizens with a say in the affairs of the state was fraying. Rome was creating an imperial economy where the elite grew richer through plunder of conquered territories like Spain and Carthage as well as cheap labor from newly enslaved populations. This made the Roman farmer and worker largely redundant. The Roman plebeian was so exploited and powerless, that he slipped to subsistence or below-subsistence levels of income. On the other hand, the elite grew wealthier and wealthier.
Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius Gracchus attempted reforms, but both were murdered. The Populares rose up to champion their reforms to redistribute a bit of land, ameliorate the plight of the urban poor and reform the political system. The Optimates emerged to fight for the status quo, which preserved the supremacy of the Senate over the popular assemblies and the tribunes of the plebeians. This bitter discord was similar to the Athenian republic Plato found himself in. Roman divisions eventually led to the rise of Julius Caesar.
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This ambitious general believed the dysfunctional system to be leading to ruin. Taking sides with the Populares, he sought to reform the system and redistribute wealth to the plebeians. The Optimates did not budge, a civil war resulted, and the collapse of the Roman Republic ensued.
Both in Athens and Rome, rising inequality and deepening discord obliterated the common bonds that made democracy possible. In America, inequality has reached feudal dimensions. Technology is destroying thousands of working-class jobs while creating far fewer highly paid ones. The “frightful five” — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google — control the internet and large swathes of the economy. They are strangling the small and medium-sized businesses.
Furthermore, Big Tech’s algorithms, filter bubbles and echo chambers have led to a post-truth world of fake news, conspiracy theories and more. People cannot even agree on basic facts. The constant deluge of data has put their minds in Brownian motion, and they have lost the ability to focus or sift fact from fiction. The irony of the current situation is that the leaders of these companies are self-proclaimed liberals, avowed philanthropists and cheerleaders for progress. Yet they have unleashed Frankensteins that have wrecked journalism, destroyed discourse and damaged democracy.
What Lies Next?
On Monday, January 18, I ventured into the city once again, again against the advice of my friends. I got off at L’Enfant Plaza metro station yet again to walk north and found the streets deserted and the National Mall sealed. I walked for an hour from one checkpoint to another. Eventually, a police officer told me that instructions were changing all the time and I was better off taking the metro. When I did take the metro, it stopped far away from the heart of town. Clearly, 25,000 troops and all the police were not enough to guarantee security in the capital. Authorities took the view that shutting down access to the heart of town was necessary too. The security arrangements seemed a bit of an overreaction but understandable given the events of January 6.
On January 20, I watched the inauguration with some American friends. Some were delighted to see the back of Trump and were celebrating with mimosas already in the morning. With Trump gone, many hoped that the populist genie could be put back in its bottle. I wish I had the same sense of American optimism. I simply cannot forget that despite a raging pandemic and thousands of deaths, over 74 million Americans voted for Trump. They are not going away.
As ancient republics demonstrate, populism flourishes when inequality increases. In tough times, people are also more likely to turn against those they see as threats or competition. In 1873, the US suffered its deepest depression to date. Cotton prices crashed and unemployment rose. A disputed election of 1876 led to the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the reintroduction of racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. A campaign of intimidation and violence kept black voters away from the polls for decades to come. Only in the 1960s did the historic civil rights movement end segregation, but black people remain poorer and die earlier than their white counterparts.
In addition to black people, another group suffered after 1873. The 1860s had been the time of the California Gold Rush and the First Continental Railroad. The Irish alone were unable to supply enough labor. Therefore, the 1868 Burlingame-Seward Treaty “ensured a steady flow of low-cost Chinese immigrant labor,” toiling primarily in goldmines and on railroads. The emerging trade unions saw Chinese workers as competitors who lowered everyone’s wages, and so opposed immigration. The Chinese worked for less money and worked harder. They also worked in areas where whites refused to work. White society at that time did not want people of color around. The labor movement was able to crystallize that latent racism.
The media played its part. William Randolph Hearst’s papers popularized the phrase “yellow peril,” and the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. This was the first legislation in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration. And this was the Gilded Age. Rapid economic growth led to millions of European immigrants streaming onto American shores. This lowered the price of labor, and workers suffered. At the same time, the concentration of wealth continued apace, with robber barons and speculators making fabulous fortunes.
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The Gilded Age also led to the emergence of a left-wing agrarian movement called the People’s Party. They came to be known as the Populists, a word that has stuck with us to this day. Despite doing well in the 1896 election, the party eventually disbanded, but some elements of its program were adopted by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It is important to note that this party drew support from white Protestant farmers who were losing out to industrialization, urbanization and mass immigration.
While they advocated many measures of public welfare, the Populists were anti-Semitic, conspiracy-minded and racist. They offer a good insight into what America’s near future might look like. As the predominantly white working-class suffers, some of its members are more likely to wave Confederate flags, blame blacks for sponging off welfare and oppose immigration from Mexico, India or elsewhere. This enrages many urban liberals who argue that the white working class is not the real oppressed. It is Latinos, blacks and Native Americans who have suffered much more. Instead of complaining, members of the white working class could just mow lawns, clean homes or serve coffee. Also, these liberals are furious that many members of the working class pick on poor Mexican immigrants, not rich Wall Street bankers.
This urban elite misses an important point. Many Trump supporters are acting in the same ways as Populists in the 1870s who focused as much on the Chinese as on the robber barons. Part of the reason is simple. Like the robber baron in the 19th century, the banker is not a tangible part of most American lives. He is a character from movies such as “Wall Street” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The aggressive banker and the ruthless entrepreneur are archetypes that American culture apotheosizes. They represent the Nietzschean Übermensch, who deserves devotion, not just admiration, in a cult of success that is deep-rooted in America. That cult explains why Harvard has a school of government, not of politics. Success is non-negotiable, a Socrates-style failure unacceptable.
In contrast to the Übermensch who controls the commanding heights of the economy but is rarely seen in the flesh, Mexicans are ubiquitous. They work longer for lesser pay. Every office or apartment building I have visited across the country has had Mexicans or other immigrants from Central America doing the cleaning or taking out the rubbish. They look different, smell different and speak a different language. They excite insecurity. That insecurity rises when increasing numbers compete for fewer jobs.
American elites like immigration for both emotional and practical reasons. After all, America is a land of immigrants. They provide America with cheap labor, technological talent and entrepreneurial energy. Those with capital enjoy having access to all three. It boosts returns on capital. In contrast, the left-behind want less competition and higher wages.
Biden has his task cut out for him as president. An increasingly unequal America with declining social mobility is seething with rage. The rich have turned rentiers, profiting off quantitative easing and rising asset prices. Those without capital or connections can no longer move up in society. The stock market is a bubble waiting to burst. America cannot ignore the last four years, and a significant proportion of the 74 million who voted for Trump have lost faith in the system. Many of them have guns. This is no time for dogged centrism. It is time for bold political and economic reform that decreases inequality and increases social mobility. If Biden fails, a modern-day Julius Caesar will inevitably emerge to bury yet another dysfunctional democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?
by Philippa Kaur 13 January 2021, 16:59
What the hell is happening in the US? Let’s rattle off some of the obvious: political intractability, sectarian entrenchment, tribal mentality, partisan violence, radicalization, conspiracy theories, reality deficits and even an attempted coup d’état. As strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, most of us have spent our careers assessing conditions abroad. What we commonly look to identify are the political, security and economic environment that allows us to measure the relative stability of a specific country or region.
From there, we develop baselines that hypothetically stress these conditions, indicating the potential for instability. When these conditions exist in prolonged disparity, indicators and warnings start to present themselves. Sometimes, they are glaring and obvious; other times, they are subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the indicators and warnings have been flashing red for some time in the United States.
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This is not to say that domestic intelligence and policy professionals spread across federal and local law enforcement were completely oblivious to them but rather that self-assessment is the hardest form of assessment. Americans typically lack the ability to reflect inward and analyze their own biases, prejudices and subjectivity against the prevailing political, security and economic conditions, especially at home. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol proved this.
Knowing this — even when we won’t admit it — what are we looking for as we assess this new political and security reality? Nothing has changed the underlying conditions between the storming of US Congress and today, and with a third of Trump voters claiming sympathy with the attempted coup, we’re in for a rough road ahead. Assessing this situation as strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, however, gives us some insight to help structure our thinking for what might come next.
Political Intractability
Countries manifesting instability have moved past the point of political entrenchment into the realm of political intractability. The former is used by politicians seeking to legislate by obstruction, while the latter is driven by underlying grievances that have become too extreme to resolve. With millions of Trump loyalists and Republican lawmakers still beholden to a president who refuses to concede his defeat in a fair election, there are not many opportunities to seek effective political resolution — especially when one side refuses to accept the legitimacy of the incoming administration.
Democrats, on the other hand, are completely resolute in their plans to impeach Trump and remove him from office with little more than a week to go before his term officially ends. Neither party is willing to back down, and there is no mechanism at any level seeking meaningful de-escalation. This means tensions will remain elevated, grievances solidified and positions hardened, giving leaders on both sides an inordinate amount of power to antagonize around their own political goals and objectives. As we saw last week, the destructive power of this can be harnessed and directed with relative ease.
Law Enforcement Failures
One of the measurements we always gauge stability against is the competency of the security forces, including law enforcement and the military. There were so many law-enforcement and intelligence failures last week, that it is almost impossible to pick a starting point. In fact, one could make the argument that the failures were so extreme as to suggest complicity, which might prove true in time.
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As we now know, intelligence was discarded and ignored. In just one example, an FBI field office in Virginia issued an internal memo on January 5, warning that radicalized extremists were headed to the capital to commit “war.” As The Washington Post reported, “Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.” The shocking implicit bias inherent in the author’s assessment points to the absolute failure in accurately identifying contemporary threats of this nature.
In addition, there are now currently two Capitol Police officers suspended and 10 more under investigation. We have all seen the videos of cops taking selfies with the rioters, opening gates and providing assistance in the halls of Congress. This failure is not just tactical. It would be naive to believe that the same politics that powered the events of January 6 are not working their way through law enforcement agencies across the country — more so since Trump has unreservedly backed the police during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that cops from Virginia, Washington and Pennsylvania are currently under investigation for being part of the Capitol Hill insurrection.
Reality Deficits
Communications and the media, especially when it comes to social networking platforms, are the forward edge of all modern conflict dynamics and play a key role in the stability of a nation in crisis, either reassuring anxious citizens or agitating the same population into action. We are now locked into an endless cycle of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, pushed by media channels and social networks that are fueling vast conspiracy theories such as QAnon. These so-called filter bubbles have become so extreme that they have distorted reality, compelled radicalization and created an echo-chamber lifestyle for those who feel politically disposed of.
Politicians openly supporting QAnon have been voted into office. One such politician has even been accused of tweeting the exact location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the storming of Congress. Unfortunately, as we learned during the propaganda war with the Islamic State, the advantage is always with the home team. While shutting down social media channels is a temporary solution, it does not address the root causes of radicalization and only increases the sense of grievance, forcing these networks into new digital spaces that are harder to monitor. Indeed, since last Wednesday, extremists have already moved to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram to plan new actions ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.
White Supremacy
Assessing ideologies unique to specific countries and regions is an important tool in measuring stability. Here in the US, there is no more malignant and pervasive ideology than white supremacy. There is a reason why newly elected Republican Representative Mary Miller, one day before the coup, felt comfortable giving a speech on the steps of Congress positively referencing Adolf Hitler.
Everything that cascades from white supremacy, including white grievance, remains the single largest threat the US currently faces. In a report from October, the Department of Homeland Security said that white supremacists “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report identifying that 41 of 61 terrorist plots and attacks recorded in the first eight months of this year were perpetrated by white supremacists. All of this indicates that right-wing extremists continue to have the motivation to plan and execute acts of violence.
Since President Donald Trump is heavily invested in the politics of white supremacy and, given the intersection it shares with conspiracy theories over his election loss, there is nothing to suggest that this kind of extremist violence will abate any time soon. Furthermore, law enforcement does not have a particularly strong track record in disrupting threats that originate with white supremacist groups, even going back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. This is in stark contrast to the nearly 1,000 recorded incidents of police violence against the Black Lives Matter protesters just last summer, indicating a heavy bias in assessing threats from groups such as these.
Economic Hardship
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Economic anxiety is a potent motivator in driving instability, if not its single most important indicator. It is important to remember that the events on Capitol Hill took place against the backdrop of the pandemic, economic hardship and a government paralyzed by intractability. Almost 22 million Americans have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, and the Pew Research Center found at the end of September that half of those people still remain unemployed.
While the coronavirus remains politically neutral, the economic messaging between the two sides has been deeply partisan and tribal, casting both as victims of the other. Nothing raises the stakes for instability like people believing their lost livelihood is the fault of another group. Combine this with the government’s horrifying mismanagement of the pandemic, a nonsensical economic assistance package and ongoing conspiracies surrounding the virus, and you have all of the ingredients for continued tensions and hostility among different factions of the political spectrum.
There are traditions and customs that have proven effective against future instability. These include the military acknowledging the rightful transition of power, the courts upholding the rule of law and election officials not succumbing to executive pressure to alter election results. But these safeguards are only as good as the people behind them, and without any national platform to de-escalate and with tensions at this level, the potential for overreach and miscalculation is unavoidable. Should there be another spectacular event like the coup attempt of January 6, then groups on both sides will retreat deeper into fringe positions where their only recourse will be more violence as a means of perceived self-protection.
Each of these indicators and their subsequent warnings alone would be enough to raise the worry levels of a strategic intelligence or foreign policy professional assessing a volatile situation abroad. Unfortunately for us, this time, the turbulence is not in some faraway place, but at home.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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