Well, this Thanksgiving week, I was thankful that Viceroy Trump, who ran for re-election as president mainly to keep himself out of jail, is less likely to get help from the courts than ever, because believe it or not, Republican judges didn’t all buy the legal argument of “Biden votes aren’t legal, so just hand me the election, cause I’m Donald Trump, and I always get my way and I’ve never been told otherwise.” In a general overview, as of November 23, “at least” 38 cases have been filed nationwide and “at least” 26 have been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, including the Pennsylvania case Trump v. Philadelphia Board of Elections, in which the plaintiffs argued that Republican observers were not given access to ballot tabulation, and after Trump’s attorney had to admit that Republicans had a “non-zero” number of vote observers, the judge asked them, “I’m sorry, then, what’s your problem?” And then over the weekend we had the hilarious news that after Team Trump paid $3 million for a recount in Wisconsin, it actually ended up giving Joe Biden more votes.
At this point, the attempt to “stop the steal” by performing an actual steal is done. Not just done: Well done with ketchup.
That of course doesn’t stop scaredy-cat liberals and centrists from worrying that the next fascist can look at what Trump did and make a more serious effort to take over. It’s not an invalid fear in itself. After all, in the short term, Trump is doing everything he can to make his sheep not only doubt the results of this election, but elections in general, turning them against anything that isn’t his brand of cult of personality. And more broadly, the level of support that Republicans got downballot and the fact that Trump did get more votes than last time indicates a real audience for a political movement that is not what we once called “conservative” but is actually reactionary.
But I’ve already gone over why Trump in particular and the Republicans in general are not a good comparison to the Nazis. “Given how many Americans either actively support “alt-right” racism or just don’t care, the real danger of Trump’s election was there was a chance that Trump could have done just as well as Hitler – if in fact he had done just as well as Hitler. Most Germans didn’t really care about (or hate) Jews as much as they cared about getting their jobs and their country’s prestige back. The comparison of the Trump Administration to the Nazi regime would hold up better if the Leader of the movement had even Adolf Hitler’s level of emotional maturity and common sense. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
I’ve often thought that it’s an insult to call Trump a Nazi. It’s an insult to the Nazis. At least Hitler could run an economic recovery for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.
Fascism trades on a reputation for competence. This is of course exaggerated. Anybody who wants to bust the illusion of Nazi German efficiency just has to read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But again, they lasted six years before starting World War II. Mussolini actually lasted a lot longer than that, and Franco ended up dying of old age. The perception is that the fascists just get what they want by bypassing all the petty rituals of democratic government and debate, which is good if you’re a “traditionalist” or other reactionary who perceives a culture war that’s going against you. This disdain for liberalism and power-over-principle mindset is shared by Leninists, even if they have the radically opposite background and goals.
Maybe if there was somebody who had the more appealing features of Trumpism – being an “outsider” who actually WAS going to “drain the swamp”, control immigration and get our trade balances and domestic industry back in order – I might back that person. I have less confidence that that could happen though. Just as most of Trump’s “pro-life” cult are less concerned about prenatal and child care and actually saving innocent life than they are in using abortion as a club to demonstrate their self-righteousness, most of Trump’s appeal is based not on reason and policy, but emotion. Trump has such a huge bond with his audience because they’re the same needy, entitled, emotional personality type that he is. They knew damn well that Mexico wasn’t gonna pay for a wall; they just wanted to HEAR it. So the problem with Trumpism in practice is the same reason that Trumpism in theory isn’t going to work: Whatever genuine substance there might be in Trump’s stated agenda from a right-wing standpoint, the political success of Trump was not based on substance, but on appeal to dysfunction.
This is why despite my qualms about the Democrats and establishment Republicans, I never got on the Trump train, cause I’m Las Vegas, and he’s Atlantic City, and I’ve watched this guy be an obnoxious failure for literally decades.
If this is fascism, I like to call it “whiny fascism.”
The idea that Trump could have “used his powers for Good, not Evil” or that he was put in office to do anything other than be Trump, reminds me of what is probably the most hilarious single panel in a superhero comic ever. It’s when Spider-Man is in the Savage Land and has to confront Sauron, a mad scientist who’s used his genetic wizardry to turn himself into a humanoid pterodactyl. And he explains his mad scheme to turn the rest of the human race into dinosaurs like himself, and when Spider-Man realizes that this technology could work, he says “Wow, that’s amazing! But with your science, you could do something constructive! You could cure CANCER!” And Sauron says, “But I don’t WANT to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”
Adam Serwer said that for the Trump Organization, “the cruelty is the point.” It would be just as accurate to say that the failure is the point. Trump won because he bonded with a certain spectrum of people who, despite their individual privilege or lack thereof, still cast themselves as put-upon victims because they belong to a cultural establishment that is currently unfashionable. And they wanted Trump to do what he’s done his entire life: fail upward, making life that much worse for everyone else, yet continue to get away with it. It was their revenge on a system that wouldn’t let them get away with individual failures. The fact that they are among the people being hurt by Trump’s incompetence doesn’t matter, because now their identity fusion is so complete that as long as Trump is winning, whatever he does is okay. However, Trump is no longer winning, and without immunity from prosecution, he may no longer be able to get away with his shit.
We can already see where the Republicans’ apparently invincible coalition is showing cracks. Trump, in his way, is determined to make sure that if he doesn’t have the White House, no one else will get to enjoy anything – including Republicans. His campaign to make The Church of Jesus Trump Latter-day Suckers doubt the validity of the election in the long-term is intended to undermine Joe Biden’s authority as President, but in the short term it really serves to undermine those voters’ faith in the election process at exactly the point that they need to get people out to the polls in Georgia to re-elect their two Republican Senators in a runoff, because if they both lose, the Democrats get an even 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Given Republican obstructionism, Democrats probably still won’t get to actually do much in the Senate, but that technical majority would mean that Democrats control important committees, and it means that Mitch McConnell would no longer be Majority Leader. And it would just be the SADDEST thing in the world to see Mitch McConnell cry.
And that’s all because a lot of people, not just Trump, can’t seem to understand that an election that did so well for Republicans down ballot did so badly for Trump. Trump himself can’t seem to understand it. Granted, there’s a truly AMAZING scope of stuff that he can’t understand, but it is confusing. There was a really good article about the Michigan recounts from Tim Alberta in Politico last week. When Trump called Michigan state Republican leaders to the White House, “As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.
“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
But as I said last time, it’s actually fairly simple once it’s explained: The presidential election, even if it isn’t a straight national popularity poll, is the only federal election where everyone in the country votes in the same race. All the other races are statewide for Senate or per Congressional district. So even if the presidential votes are determined state-by-state, all the winning candidate has to do is get enough high-elector states. Last time, Hillary Clinton didn’t get those “firewall” states that Trump took, and Biden took them back. This is perfectly consistent with Trump winning Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, where other Republicans also won.
This goes along with the simple point that it was indeed possible for conservative voters to vote for their favorite Congresscritter down ticket but either vote Biden or not vote for president at all. Given the huge increase in votes for both Democrat and Republican presidential tickets, this split-ticket voting isn’t the only factor in the result, but it was a factor. In a local Pennsylvania news article several voters were interviewed and told reporters that it came down to trusting their local Congressman and not trusting Trump. “Jim Hagan, 68, of Chalfont, Bucks County, has a simple answer. His distaste for Trump did not extend to others in the GOP. ‘Although I voted for Mr. Trump in the previous election, I was very dissatisfied with his performance,” he said. “I think he completely dropped the ball on the COVID thing.’
“Hagan is a longtime Republican. He’s retired now, but his old job in the chemical industry allowed him to do a lot of international travel. Lately, he said, he has mourned what he sees as a loss of U.S. standing on the world stage. This cycle, Hagan said he voted for Biden and one other Democrat: Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who kept his seat.
“I like the way he does the job,” he said of Shapiro. “He’s very professional at it. He doesn’t seem to play partisan politics in the job, and I thought he was very proactive in doing the right thing for the people of Pennsylvania.” The mixed results were also reflective of the fact that in this election, Pennsylvania no longer uses the ‘straight-ticket’ voting option where a person can just choose the slate of candidates offered by their party all the way down. One political analyst said “returns in at least some counties showed higher turnout for the presidential race than down-ballot ones, which means some voters must have voted for president, but kept the rest of their ballot blank.”
Which indicates that on some scale the opposite problem may occur in some voting areas, where people are more enthused to turn out for the presidential contest than the other races. And that’s part of the problem Trump is creating for the cult of personality that used to be a mainstream political party. In the Politico article, Tim Alberta said: “(as mailed and early votes came in), two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.” He cites the case of Ronna McDaniel, nee‘ Romney, who was an experienced and respected figure in Michigan politics, but “(that) changed after Trump’s 2016 victory. Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable. Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.”
This has of course extended to the post-election period, where McDaniel told confidants she had no reason to suspect voter fraud but nevertheless felt obliged to enforce the Trump dogma: “If this sounds illogical, McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job. It’s bad enough that despite an enormous investment of time and resources in Michigan, McDaniel was unable to deliver her home state for the president. If that might prove survivable, what would end McDaniel’s bid instantaneously is abandoning the flailing president in the final, desperate moments of his reelection campaign. No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.”
The article describes how one of the two Republicans on the Michigan election certification board voted with Democrats (while his Republican colleague abstained) and received actionable threats that required the involvement of the Michigan State Police. The former Republican state party head who recommended him to the board is now out of favor in the next race for the chairmanship because he had recommended the guy who refused to go along with Trump’s scheme. But this need to subordinate facts to political loyalty is not working, or not working with enough people, in the Great Lakes states Trump needed to turn the result, and it is actively working against the Republican Party in Georgia. “Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud. It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”
Because it doesn’t matter how conservative the two Senators are or how conservative the Secretary of State is or how conservative Governor Brian Kemp is, the Trumpnik definition of “conservative” is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says.” If he says the moon is made of green cheese, your only choice is to say it’s American or Swiss. And then of course he’s going to say it’s Monterey Jack, and you’ll be cast into the Abyss. You can’t keep up even if you wanted to. And I think a huge part of why the institutional Party is pushing back on Trump’s need to deny reality is that they’re getting sick of trying to keep up. At the same time, a large section of the Party IS still trying to do so, because they don’t see any other options.
This gets to a broader point that I don’t think the Left gets and that the Right is not willing to acknowledge. For any political movement to really get anywhere and really have popular support in this country, people have to imagine it as synonymous with mainstream opinion. The Right was a lot more successful in this regard under Reagan and even the Bushes than it is under Trump. In 1984, Reagan didn’t need to cheat or make the courts step in to hand him the Electoral College. He won 49 states the old-fashioned way. Even after Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton felt obliged to say, “the era of Big Government is over.” If the Right is so obsessed with the Left dictating the terms of the “culture war”, and so obsessed with letting politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around, it is a tacit admission that they are losing the majority. The Republican Party of 1980 and 2000 may have been propped up by Religious Right reactionaries, but neither they nor the Beltway politicians would have come begging to Trump. Because they wouldn’t have needed to. Now they do.
Put directly, if Republicans and their ideas were still as popular as they were under Reagan or even under GW Bush, they wouldn’t need Trump. They had more mainstream support when they could still appeal to both the financial class and blue collar folks, but for several years they’ve been playing this game where they had to appeal to the most fire-breathing fanatics to win primaries then tack to moderates and the investor class to win general elections, and by the time the Tea Party turned into MAGA redcaps, they’d managed to catch on. In the meantime they’d managed to alienate most people who weren’t either redcaps or in the financial class, and the only reason this “Big Tent” still holds together is that Donald Trump is the only Republican who can seriously pose as both an elitist and a populist.
When the redcaps and the more sensible people had the same goals, everything was great. For them, at least. But now that the fortunes of elections have diverged for Donald Trump and his party as a whole, the Republican rank and file are now being asked to choose between the two. It seems as though Trump and his family are trying to head off the potential issue, with Trump announcing that he’s going to be campaigning in Georgia for the Senators, but it’s still causing damage. And the fact that he let things get to this point just confirms that he sees the Party as something that serves his interests and not vice versa. Which may be another reason some Republicans are no longer that supportive.
It gets back to that old Vox website question of whether Trump is a fascist. And while at the time, and even after a 2020 update, the expert consensus was that while Trump is an actual danger to democracy, he can’t be called a fascist because fascism is a collectivist movement and Trump is too much of an individualist to create such a movement. That may seem like little distinction given how many individuals are willing to subsume themselves in Trump’s cult of personality. But to the extent that Mussolini and other Fascists did explain their philosophy, it is an explicitly collectivist movement which foremost holds that one must have loyalty to something greater than oneself, namely the State. Trump clearly doesn’t have loyalty to his own party, let alone America. Reagan may have given us the 11th Commandment, but the First Commandment of the Trumpnik is “I am the LORD thy Trump, thou shalt have no principles above me.”
Howling emotionalism, a perpetual sense of victimhood and a need to pick on the weak may be prerequisites of fascism, but they are not traits exclusive to fascism, and they are certainly not the only defining traits, especially if you want your fascist paradise to actually succeed. The other thing the movement needs, again, is actual popular support. Republicans used to have that, but now that they don’t, the only way the sane people can have a national platform is to attach to Trump’s cult of personality. But that means becoming the Party of Trump, and it’s pretty clear that a party that consists ONLY of Trump and his priorities isn’t going to get anywhere with the rest of the country, especially when so many people have clearly decided they can have the Party without Trump.
All of which means that Trump, or even “Trumpism”, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an unlikely vehicle for the success of American Fascism. For one thing, the fact that events have shown fascists what to do and what not to do in pushing authoritarianism now means that more liberal people also know what methods could be used to undermine democracy, and they will now have the opportunity to be on guard.
But that assumes they will take advantage of that knowledge. Ay, there’s the rub.
For all our talk about how America has a written constitution, as opposed to an “unwritten constitution” of precedents like Britain, the real danger that Trump represents wasn’t his approach to the election, because everyone knew he was gonna stamp his little feet and whine if he didn’t get his way. The danger was how much of the apparently sacred system of government was really just a set of “norms” and when approached by a thug with no norms or sense of the sacred, all our written laws are useless. Because the “norm” is that nobody enforces them. We have never dared to have a political apparatchik defy a congressional subpoena – until now. We have never had a president since Nixon refuse to release his tax returns – until now. We have never had a president refuse to put his business assets in trust – until now. We have never had a president flout the laws against nepotism that were put in place after JFK made Bobby Kennedy Attorney General, because the fact that the laws existed meant no president wanted to take the political risk for flouting them. But now we know there is no political risk.
Even before Trump, the “guardrails of democracy”, such as the Congress and the media, have been far too deferential to the president and far too indulgent of the idea that the president can do whatever he wants because he’s the president. And if my liberal friends would tell me that Obama relied on executive orders precisely because of Republican obstructionism, that just reveals the problem. This government, like the Roman Republic it was based on, has no counter to a squabbling and dysfunctional Senate other than to give the executive officer more and more power. This is a nation of men, not laws.
That is the real problem. That always HAS been the real problem.
The fact that the closest thing we’ve had to a fascist leader in American history is a whiny little child just stands to reason, because the President of the United States, Trump notwithstanding, is by far the most spoiled head of government in the developed world. We let the president do more things than any other head of government would do. And while Donald Trump may not actually like to work, and according to some sources was shocked that he did get elected, once he did become president, that status fused to his identity the same way the redcaps fused to their hero, because if the premise of the modern presidency is “the president can do whatever he wants, because he’s the president”, this status became the most objective rationale for Trump’s existing desire to believe “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, because he’s Donald Trump.”
And in terms of that old cliche, “government should be run like a business”, well, most major companies these days are run as corporations, which means they are collective entities, not the private concern of one individual, and are technically responsible to shareholders. Trump has never run a corporation. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. If one were to apply the analogy of a corporation, if Trump is the CEO, he technically has a Board (Congress) and shareholders (voters), but they don’t hold him accountable. Of course, ultimately “shareholders” did hold him accountable, but only after the Republican Senate directly abnegated its responsibility to do so under impeachment. But that’s what happens when half of the Board members think the CEO is their boss and not an officer subject to their review.
Needless to say, you do not want a government that caters to the mindset of a Donald Trump and is run the way Donald Trump runs his businesses, but that is exactly what we have. It’s just that nobody noticed it was a problem before because up until now the President was not to the government what a malignant tumor is to the body, only without the brains.
Of course, given that Democrats themselves are loath to give up the premise of an unaccountable president when it’s THEIR guy in charge, the idea of limiting the office may seem a bit much. But then, when impeachment happened, a lot of them discovered that even such laws as there are have no provision for enforcement. That needs to change. We need to make sure that Congress has real subpoena power, meaning the legal authority to enforce it. We need to lift this bullshit unwritten privilege that the FBI isn’t allowed to indict a sitting president, as if the most powerful person in the world with access to the most sensitive information should be the only American who’s not under surveillance. We need to STOP SENDING THE MILITARY TO WARS WITHOUT A DECLARATION OF WAR. In other words, we need the rest of the government to do its job and not let the President do everything.
And given that Democrats will be the Senate minority or only technically a majority, I don’t count on them getting such reforms through the Senate in the next few years. Unless of course, Texas finally goes blue along with Georgia and that whole “Southern Strategy” the Republican Party has been based on for the last fifty years just crumbles.
It ought to be a really simple lesson, but apparently it isn’t. So briefly: If you don’t want the President to be a fascist dictator, then don’t let him have that level of power, even when he’s on your team. And if you don’t want an all-powerful government destroying your freedom and rights, then don’t let the government become all-powerful.