Fascism
I’m nostalgic for the days when you could tell the difference between a message announcing a Cabinet appointment and a trollish shitpost.
Separation of Powers or One-Man Rule?
The GOP will have the House too?! If so, the question becomes, does the GOP party leader, the orange dementor, control both chambers of Congress? Or will some of these folks remember that they control a separate branch of government? In the Soviet Union, the General Secretary of the Communist Party ran the show. Is that what the GOP wants? Or are they just enjoying a ride on the winning candidate’s coattails? I’m sure lots of them can be kept in line with threats of physical harm or the release of komprimat, and others could be bought off with spending largesse (read: corruption) by the government and by would-be beneficiaries of government contracts.
Wild cards: How narrow is the GOP majority in the House? Will GOP replacements for the big rotten cheese’s cabinet picks be able to beat Democrats in those districts?
“Idiocracy,” dir. Mike Judge (2006) 📽️
One of the great prophecies of human history—practically a holy text at this point.
It is extraordinary just how utterly unsuited the people are that the next president is assembling for his cabinet. I suppose the senate will rubber-stamp them all without further ado. Loyalty to Mr. Huge Crowds über alles, as they proved in both his impeachments last time around.
@Infrogmation asked on Mastodon what Mussolini was wearing on his nose in an image I had reposted. I didn’t know, but now I do thanks to @Infrogmation: Il Duce got a bloody nose in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1926. Talk about history rhyming! 👀
Have moved from sadness about the November 5 result to frustration and now anger.
Besides acting as a windfall for the privatized segment of our mass incarceration system, mass deportations will offer plenty of opportunities for bribery, blackmail, denunciation, vigilantism, even enslavement.
Timothy Snyder, “What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?,” The New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2024.
Worried about Mr. Orange Face's Effect on The Military
How effective will the American military be after the next administration wreaks havoc on the Pentagon so that the president might have the loyalists he needs in order to command them as he sees fit, including even direct them against the American people? How much material and moral corruption will these measures lead to? May the military’s talent pool be deep and ethical enough to survive the corrupting onslaught of what’s coming. Mr. Huge Crowd’s pardoning of war criminals last time round suggests how little he understands military morale and discipline. We know what he thinks of expertise, and he paid no price for disrespecting our fallen.
Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition
I doubt I’ll have the bandwidth to follow the machinations in Washington’s halls of power, as I did during the previous administration. I got out of the habit under the current one because I was exhausted, didn’t feel threatened, and ended up living a twelve-hour drive away. And now I want to focus on the parts of my life and world where my individual agency, talents, and interests might be leveraged for things more constructive, more life-affirming.
First, though, I’ll allow myself to imagine some of the worst coming our way, just to get the darkness out of my mind and into words: the destruction of the regulatory state and of our public medical, environmental, climate, and weather research infrastructure; the violent and cruel erasure of entire communities; the enslavement, indentured servitude, or other forms of abusive exploitation of people without papers under the “protection” of unscrupulous employers, landlords, neighbors, and government agents; the creation of a new generation of Hoovervilles inhabited by people with no health insurance, no immunizations, and pensioners whose Social Security checks and Medicare benefits no longer keep them housed; preventable contagious diseases killing our children; lawfully mandated medical malpractice killing girls, women, and trans men with the bad luck to become pregnant; the loss of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and community members to exile, to self-harm, and to the violence of bullies given license by their chosen leader; the possibility that insulin might grow out of my reach; the knowledge that Medicare will never cover the costs of help with elder care while I still need such help, and while private equity funds squeeze what they can out of old folks homes, leaving them woefully understaffed, their populations vulnerable to contagious disease, inattention, and abuse.
It doesn’t have to go this way, not even under the next president. But do we think a GOP-controlled Senate will respect the filibuster the next time around, if they manage to get the House too? Isn’t that just one more convention that the next president can demand they drop? And have any of them demonstrated even the slightest willingness to defend their institution, sure in the knowledge that they are part of a separate branch of government? GOP representatives in the House are no better, as they demonstrated during the previous president’s two impeachments.
American presidents have enormous amounts of power, and now, it seems, controlling the party and the mob will give the next president even more. Or will some Republican legislators put their constituents ahead of the slash-and-burn ideologues? What groups will they decide government might have a role in protecting? Of course, the House could still flip Democratic. Some Republicans could develop a conscience. Or the ambitions, incompetence, and contradictory aims, values, and beliefs of Orange Face’s supporters could lead to lots of friendly fire and delays.
Caveat: the GOP marched in lockstep to regain the presidency, but we have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. It’s possible they prefer to carry out dissent internally. It’s also a sure thing that Mr. Red Tie will keep all eyes on himself, with lots of help from the media, while the poisons are concocted in Congress and in other parts of the executive branch.
The fact that Trotsky, Mussolini—and Goebbels, too—had all started as journalists created its own sort of dynamic with the correspondents. The politicians liked turning the tables, deploying the reporter’s bag of tricks to their own advantage: turning on the charm, trading information without giving too much away, polishing the quotations attributed to them. For their part, the reporters put themselves, at least imaginatively, in the politicians’ shoes. I want power . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
I never thought I’d be reprising this post from February 2017. Even the dominant color of this 1926 Mussolini cartoon is on point. 🍊
Sometimes I wonder how the former reality television star’s malevolence, laziness, and insatiable hunger for praise would play out in a second term. What would his version of fascism look like? Anne Applebaum’s depiction of Autocracy, Inc. is informative. I also picture competing ideologues, opportunists, and grifters vying for influence and ill-gotten gains.
What I can’t imagine is a coherent mass movement to support whatever the orange one’s authoritarian instincts manifest. But politicized justice, state violence, mob rule in places, unnecessary suffering by lots of people… Yes, that is easy to imagine. Incremental, inconsistent, and arbitrary abuses. Loud curfew notices on phones in areas of mass protest. Piss-poor morale in the military… Ima stop thinking now.
Am thinking Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) will make for a good read in these dangerous times. 📚
“Autocracy in America” – a podcast by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.
This is a fascinating and deeply unsettling listen by the authors of books indispensable for understanding the current moment: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024); and Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). 📚
A remarkable indictment: “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’" by John D Miller (head of marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal for some 25 years), U.S. News, Oct. 16, 2024.
Russia Wants to Muzzle Childless Cat Ladies
The Russian parliament is discussing a law to ban so-called “propaganda of childlessness” with fines up to $4,300 for individuals. Will that help to solve the country’s demographic crisis?
“What’s behind Russia’s plan to ban ‘child-free’ ideology?,” DW, Sept. 28, 2024.
It’s almost as if they were pandering to Vance – or drinking from the same batch of Kool-Aid.
Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024), chap. 1.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, last section.
“Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested." by Jordan Green, Raw Story, July 10, 2024. – Surreal report. The big orange ass attracts the freakiest henchmen.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
Important historical context for this week’s unconscionable immunity ruling: Sean Wilentz, “The Dred Scott of Our Time”, NYRB, July 4, 2024, archive.ph/qJ1xx (archived version so anyone can read about this vital topic)