Creeping Toward Tyranny
Truthdig
The destruction of the rule of law, an action essential to establishing an
authoritarian or totalitarian state, began long before the arrival of the
Trump administration. The George W. Bush administrations invasion of Iraq
and implementation of a doctrine of pre-emptive war were war crimes under
international law. The federal governments ongoing wholesale surveillance
of the citizenry, another legacy of the Bush administration, mocks our
constitutional right to privacy. Assassinating a U.S. citizen under order of
the executive branch, as the Obama administration did when it murdered the
radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, revokes due process. The steady
nullification of constitutional rights by judicial fiata legal trick that
has enabled corporations to buy the electoral system in the name of free
speechhas turned politicians from the two ruling parties into amoral tools
of corporate power. Lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals write
legislation to legalize tax boycotts, destroy regulations and government
oversight, pump staggering sums of money into the war machine and accelerate
the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, one that has
involved looting the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars in the wake of
the massive financial fraud that set off the 2008 economic collapse. The
ruling elites, by slavishly serving corporate interests, created a system of
government that effectively denied the citizen the use of state power. This
decades-long disregard by the two major political parties for the rule of
law and their distortion of government into a handmaiden for corporations
set the stage for Donald Trumps naked contempt for legality and
accountability. It made inevitable our kakistocracy, rule by the worst or
most unscrupulous (kakistocracy is derived from the Greek words kakistos,
meaning worst, and kratos, meaning rule).
Those in the parade of imbeciles, grifters, con artists, conspiracy
theorists, racists, Trump family members, charlatans, generals and Christian
fascists, all of whom often see power as a way to enrich themselves at the
expense of the taxpayer, are too many to list here. They include former
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner,
Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (who blamed environmental terrorist groups
for the 2018 California wildfires, hired private jets to fly himself around
the country and opened public lands for mineral and gas exploitation),
former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt (who held
lavish dinners with the coal-mining and chemical executives whose companies
he then deregulated) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. This moral
swamp also contains bizarre, Svengali-like figures darting in and out of the
shadows, such as Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne
Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Anthony The Mooch Scaramucci and Omarosa
Manigault Newman, not to mention paid-off porn stars and mistresses, sleazy
lawyers and bungling and corrupt campaign managers.
At the center of this clown court is Trump, who, if the rule of law was in
place, would have been impeached on his first day in office for violating
the Constitutions emoluments clause; by violating that prohibition, this
chief executive is raking in millions from officials of foreign governments
and lobbyists who stay at his hotels and resorts and use his golf courses.
Trump not only does not attempt to mask his profiting from his office but in
corporate promotional material says that those who stay at his properties
may be able to get a photo with the president of the United States. As
illustrated by the Robert Mueller report and by Attorney General William
Barrs open contempt for Congress, Trump does not even bother to pay lip
service to the requirements of the law or the Constitution.
The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We
no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate;
an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and
concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as
Russiagate or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and
occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the
nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise. Puffed
up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and
military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the
collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies
real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of
those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who
is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the
institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.
Trump will eviscerate what little legal restraint remains. The Republican
Party, which has been transformed into a Trump personality cult, will not
stop him. Neither will the Democratic Party leadership, which thinks Trump
will be an easy target in the 2020 presidential election, a foolish mistake
similar to the one Hillary Clinton made in the 2016 campaign. That the
Democratic Party elites place their hope to regain power in Joe Biden, a
goofy male version of Clinton, is yet another example of the colossal
failure of the democratic process. It shows how out of touch the ruling
elites are with the growing social inequality, economic stagnation,
suffering, disempowerment and rage that afflict over half the population.
The old forms of political theater and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism
that buttressed the ruling elites in the past do not work anymore. Yet, the
mind-numbing presidential campaigns, begun two years before the vote and
devoid of meaningful content, are once again dominating the airwaves with
empty slogans and the posturing by carefully packaged political
personalities. This burlesque is anti-politics masquerading as politics. Its
disingenuousness, obvious to most of the country, is what made Trumps crude
taunts and ridiculing of the system so attractive to betrayed voters. Trump
may be inept, vile and a con artist, but in this system of anti-politics you
vote not for what you want, but against those you hate. And the established
elites, the Bushes and the Clintons, are loathed far more than Trump by most
of the country.
The billions in campaign funds provided to selected candidates by the
wealthy and corporations, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote,
created, before the arrival of Trump on the political landscape, a pecking
order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose
interests have priority. The amount of corruption that regularly takes place
before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential
element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of
bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted
troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not
those of the Nazis, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition
has not been liquidated but rendered feckless.
Mass culture has for decades been awash in the lies skillfully disseminated
by the public relations and advertising industries. These lies appeal to our
vanity and insecurities. They are used to sell us products or experiences
that promise an unachievable happiness. These forms of manipulation, which
confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, also were adopted by
political parties before Trump gained the presidency. The result, Wolin
wrote in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of
Inverted Totalitarianism, has been the pollution of the ecology of
politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government,
claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, god-fearing
and moral.
Armando Iannuccis movie The Death of Stalin, a brilliant black comedy,
captures what happens when self-interested narcissists, buffoons and
gangsters make the laws and rule a state. Once power is based solely on
blind personal loyalty and whim, anything, including wholesale murder,
becomes possible. Rights are transformed into privileges that can be
instantly revoked. Lies replace truth. Opinions replace facts. History is
erased and rewritten. The cult of leadership replaces politics. Paranoia
grips a ruling elite that feeds off conspiracy theories, sees mortal enemies
everywhere and increasingly lives in a hermetically sealed nonreality-based
universe. Force becomes the sole language despots use to communicate to a
restive population and the outside world.
Despotic regimes are uninterested in, and often incapable of understanding,
nuance, complexity and difference. They perpetuate themselves through
constant drama and never-ending crusades against internal and external
enemies that are presented as existential threats to the nation. When real
enemies cannot be found, they are invented. The persecution of
undesirables starts with the demonizedimmigrants, the undocumented, poor
people of color and Muslims, along with those under occupation in the Middle
East or socialists in Venezuelabut these undesirables are only the
beginning. Soon everyone is suspect.
Trumps capricious and arbitrary decisions to remove those around him from
power keep his courtiers constantly on edge. The instability fuels the
vicious court intrigues that characterize all despotism. Trumps inner
circle, aware that the only criterion to remain in power is an exaggerated
and obsequious personal loyalty acutely attuned to his mercurial moods and
temper tantrums, base all decisions on pleasing the despot. This leads to
extreme mismanagement and corruption.
The corporate capitalists who hold real power view Trump as an
embarrassment. They would prefer to put a more dignified face on the
American empire, one like Biden who will do their bidding with the decorum
of a traditional president. But they will work with Trump. He has given them
huge tax cuts, is slashing what is left of government oversight and
regulation and has increased the budgets for internal security and the
military. It may be an uncomfortable relationship, as was the relationship
between German industrialists and the buffoonish leaders of the Nazi Party,
but for the corporate elites it is far preferable to having to deal with a
Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren. Capitalists, throughout history, have
backed fascism to thwart even the most tepid forms of socialism. All the
pieces are in place. The hollowing out of our democratic institutions, which
cannot be blamed on Trump, makes tyranny inevitable.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers
Chris Hedges
