America Is Authoritarian by Design
Supporters cheer President Donald Trump as he arrives at a campaign rally in
Erie, Pa. (Evan Vucci / AP)
So often, underlying structures and institutions of oppression escape
serious scrutiny amid our country's most high-profile political dramas. Take
the recent conviction of Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer
caught on tape four years ago firing 16 shots into 17-year-old Laquan
McDonald.
From its soul-numbing kill tape to McDonald's family shown and quoted
repeatedly across local media, the trial's coverage took on an almost
theatrical tone. We heard from the victim's family members, the officer's
wife, and the activists celebrating the verdict in the streets. Television
cameras zoomed in on the sorry face of the sad killer, right up to the
moment he was led out of court as a convicted murderer.
Largely left unsaid was how Van Dyke's crime was merely a ripple-if an
especially provocative one-in a deep sea of racial oppression engulfing
Chicago and the nation as a whole.
Before the trial concluded, a veteran Chicago activist and radical
commentator told me he'd heard that "Van Dyke will be thrown to the mob" as
"a kind of token" to pacify the city's black population and take the heat
off a racist police state. Indeed, the danger of the McDonald-Van Dyke drama
and its guilty verdict is that it will function as a safety valve, helping
the city and nation's entrenched racist patterns and institutions maintain
their legitimacy, helping spread the illusion that the "system works."
But it doesn't work for millions of disproportionately poor black people.
Ask the families of Milton Hall, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray,
Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland and the growing list of mostly young
African-Americans unjustly killed by American police officers and prison and
security guards-all on tape. Ask the hundreds of black Chicagoans who have
been terrorized into signing forced confessions for crimes they didn't
commit. Ask the many thousands of black people serving long sentences in
Illinois prisons after they were convicted for drug crimes-the type of
crimes that whites commit more frequently and without remotely comparable
rates of arrest and prosecution.
Ask the millions of black people living in American communities where jobs
and doctors' offices, green spaces and full-service grocery stores, decent
public schools and mental-health facilities, public libraries, sit-down
restaurants and countless other public and private resources are
unavailable-and where police forces (see this 2017 Department of Justice
investigation of the Chicago Police Department) function like an invading
army of marauding terrorists, a grave threat even to children.
Look at the persistence of huge black-white disparities in income, wealth,
poverty, joblessness, health, education, home-ownership, surveillance,
arrest, sentencing, incarceration, criminal marking (the "new Jim Crow" of
racially disparate felony branding), voter disenfranchisement and more
across the U.S.
The repressive policing practices that Van Dyke took to a shocking level are
all about keeping blacks savagely separate and unequal. He was tried and
convicted only because his crime was caught on tape and exposed through the
dedicated efforts of independent activist-journalists and street protesters.
Those activists who helped bring Van Dyke to justice know this all too well.
A young Chicago black man interviewed by one television reporter downtown
during the "celebration" march said he had "no sense of victory." The city
still feels to him like "a prison" where he's constantly under the watchful
eye of the police, especially when he steps outside of the inferior parts of
town to which most black Chicagoans are residentially consigned.
It's for not nothing that the post-verdict marchers tempered celebratory
chants ("We Made History!" and "The People, United, Will Never be Defeated,"
for example) with chants noting that it's "the whole damn system" that must
be taken down. Van Dyke may be headed for prison, but they are aware that
the racial oppression that plagues "global Chicago" and the nation is still
very much intact.
A second case in point is the passion play that unfolded last spring over
creeping fascist Donald Trump's vicious policy of separating migrant
children from their parents as they cross the southern border. Cable news
viewers saw highly emotional and personalized reporting on the trauma
inflicted on Latinx families. Trump and the Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency were portrayed in a most unfavorable light,
eliciting liberal and progressive outrage along with activist action that
led to the reunification of many of the families torn apart by the Trump
administration's cruelty.
Beyond these dramatic stories, media consumers heard the usual timeworn
calls for "comprehensive immigration reform" and clear "paths to
citizenship." Notice, however, what escaped critical examination. As during
its breathless coverage of the "unaccompanied minor" migration crisis in
2014, the corporate media this year has had little to say about the
following ways in which the United States has helped make Mexico and Central
America unlivable for many of its people:
.Flooding these nations with cheap, subsidized U.S. agricultural exports,
devastating campesino communities in the name of "free trade."
.Using so-called free trade agreements to force the privatization of
government enterprises, the deregulation of corporations, the slashing of
social budgets and the displacement of communities by foreign mining
projects.
.Intensifying drug gang violence and power by advancing the militarized "War
on Drugs."
.Accelerating climate change, which has ravaged Central American coffee and
corn production.
.Funding and equipping authoritarian and violent, mass-murderous "Third
World fascist" regimes (including a right-wing junta the Obama
administration helped install in Honduras toward the beginning of 2009) and
forces allied with U.S. and business interests in Central America.
Thanks to the media's failure to provide any of this essential
historical-hemispheric context, the great majority of Americans are unaware
that the United States has a moral obligation to take in and otherwise
assist Central American immigrants and refugees seeking to escape situations
made hopeless by U.S. intervention and policy.
A third example is the recently completed and all-consuming melodrama over
Trump's successful elevation of the openly partisan and reactionary thug
Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. There was some early discussion
of Kavanaugh's role as a crafter of legal "justifications" for George W.
Bush's torture practices, his position on behalf of U.S. presidents'
immunity from prosecution (likely the reason Trump nominated him in the
first place) and a past ruling of his indicating that he will tip the high
court against Roe v. Wade. Soon, however, the confirmation spectacle was
overshadowed by Kavanaugh's horrific behavior as a late adolescent and young
man, as well as his lies about his past as a serial drunk and alleged sex
offender. The nation sat riveted as Kavanaugh faced off in a television
showdown with a woman, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of
attempted rape.
It is disgusting almost beyond words that a likely sexual predator and
obvious dissembler will render judgment on matters of solemn legal,
political and societal relevance for a generation. But as troubling as
Kavanaugh's personal history and untruthfulness are, it's been even more
troubling to see them render important questions about abortion rights,
presidential immunity from prosecution, and torture virtually meaningless.
Equally distressing has been our continuing failure to address the
authoritarian absurdity of essential political and judicial institutions
crafted by 18th-century slave owners and merchant capitalists for whom
self-governance was the ultimate nightmare. Why in the name of anything
remotely akin to democracy should Kavanaugh and his eight high court
colleagues hold these powerful positions for life? That constitutionally
ordained silliness is owed to the slave-owning Founders' stern determination
to "check and balance" popular rule.
How does a right-wing Republican majority in the U.S. Senate get to confirm
a militantly anti-democratic, sexist and partisan hack to the highest court
in the land when U.S. public opinion stands well to the left of both
Kavanaugh and the GOP on countless policy issues, including union rights,
affirmative action, environmental regulation, campaign finance, abortion,
the need for viable third and fourth parties, gun control, same-sex
marriage, taxation and more? This can happen in no small part because the
ludicrously venerated U.S. Constitution assigns two U.S. senators to each
U.S. state, regardless of differences in population.
Red Wyoming, home to more than 573,720 Americans, holds U.S. senatorial
parity with blue California, where 39.5 million Americans reside. That's one
U.S. senator for every 19.5 million Californians versus one U.S. senator for
every 287,000 Wyoming residents.
Just one of New York City's five boroughs, Brooklyn, has 2.6 million people.
If Brooklyn were a state and U.S. senators were apportioned there at the
same populace-to-senator ratio as Wyoming, Brooklyn would have nine U.S.
senators. (It's unlikely that a single one of them would be a Republican.)
The following 13 states together have a combined population of roughly 34.4
million: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Together
these 13 red states send 26 Republicans to the U.S. Senate. California, with
5 million more people than these 13 states combined, sends two Democrats to
the upper chamber of Congress.
The predominantly Democratic and half-black District of Columbia is home to
693,972 people, more than all of Wyoming and just 46,000 fewer than that of
Alaska. That it is denied a single U.S. senator and serious representation
in the House of Representatives is preposterous.
This profoundly undemocratic apportionment system means that the Republican
Senate majority answers to a disproportionately white, rural and reactionary
section of the electorate. Due to "a growing population shift from the
agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast," journalist
Daniel Lazare noted last year, it is mathematically possible now to "cobble
together a Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of
the popular vote."
Other such anti-democratic traditions include, but are not limited to:
.An Electoral College that "triples the clout of the eight smallest states
and doubles that of the next six" (Lazare). This ridiculous system has
ensured that two (2000 and 2016) of the last five presidential elections
have gone to the popular vote loser.
.Rampant gerrymandering that tilts state legislatures and the House of
Representatives far to the right of the populace.
.Strictly scheduled and time-staggered elections, combined with absurd
propaganda telling Americans that they get real and significant policy
"input" by selecting from a narrow spectrum of major-party contenders once
every 730 or 1,460 days.
.A Supreme-Court-mandated campaign finance system that, according to
political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, all but guarantees
government policy reflects the "wishes of those with money, not the wishes
of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose
among the pre-approved, money-vetted candidates for federal office"
(emphasis added).
The openly plutocratic domination of U.S. politics (explicitly validated in
the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley v. Valeo and 2010 Citizens United
decisions) is no small part of why the Democrats function as a dismal,
corporate-centrism in the face of the Republicans' horrifying drift toward
an Amerikaner fascism.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party's control of all three branches of federal
government makes an abject mockery of the Founders' claim to have pre-empted
tyrannical government with a system of institutional "checks and balances."
What do "checks and balances" mean when the same party controls the
executive, legislative and judicial institutions and the opposition offers a
pale facsimile of the same? What is a "constitutional republic" whose high
court has helped hand the keys of state power over to the holders of
concentrated wealth?
Presiding over this failed state, of course, is Donald Trump-the perfect
avatar for a corporate, financial and military oligarchy systematically
pillaging the state. Without denying Trump's myriad evils, we would do well
to heed Chris Hedges' eloquent reminder that the Insane Clown president is a
symptom, not the cause, of societal problems that go far deeper than his own
shallow life. From Hedges' aptly titled new book, "America: The Farewell
Tour":
"
The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has
agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White Hose of
the demagogue Trump. A creeping corporate coup d'etat has destroyed our
two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education.
It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia.
It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our
industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the
lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that
provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages
in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.
This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy.
Self-identified liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these
values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across
the country is a revolt not only against the corporate system that has
betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very
dangerous. It will allow the radical right to cement into place an
Americanized fascism.
Postscript:
Last Thursday, as Florida and Georgia emerged from the wreckage of Hurricane
Michael, cable news buzzed over a strange soap opera unfolding in the Oval
Office: Troubled pop star Kanye West had presented the president with a
model "iPlane," explaining, "This is what our president should be flying
in."
West delivered a strange 10-minute soliloquy that touched on his own bipolar
disorder, the 13th Amendment, Adidas, Chicago, and Trump as a national
father figure who embodied the "male energy" he had missed in his childhood.
While dozens of media personnel arrayed around the president's desk snapped
pictures and took notes, West explained his decision to wear a red "Make
America Great Again" baseball cap:
"
You know they tried to scare me to not wear this hat. My own friends. But
this hat gives me a different power in a way. You know my dad and my mom
separated, so I didn't have a lot of male energy in my home. And also I'm
married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It's
beautiful though . you know I love Hillary, I love everyone. Right. But the
campaign, 'I'm With Her' just didn't make me feel, as a guy, that didn't get
to see my dad all the time. . It was something about when I put this hat on,
it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman. That's my favorite
superhero and [you] made a Superman cape for me. . Also, as a guy that looks
up to you, looks up to Ralph Lauren, looks up to American industry guys,
nonpolitical, no bullshit . and just gets it done.
It was a sorry spectacle in which one narcissistic personality celebrated
another as a straight-shooting "American industry guy" who "just gets it
done," even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that
we're galloping toward the end of human civilization as we know it.
At the end of Kanye's disturbing oration, Trump smiled broadly. "I'll tell
you what," he said, "that was very impressive."
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League.
