The Only Solution to America's Political Crisis
Paul Street
Fabrizio Spano / Flickr
Hardly a day has gone by over the last two years when one hasn't been able
to learn of yet another soul-numbing outrage on the part of President Donald
Trump and his administration. The stories have been relentlessly disturbing:
.Trump's suggestion of moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and civil rights
protesters in Charlottesville, Va.
.The vicious separation of children from their migrant parents at the
southern border.
.The concoction of a fake national emergency involving invading criminal
immigrants to divert taxpayer dollars to the building of a wall on that
border.
.The shutdown of the federal government, inflicting economic terror on
millions of government workers, in the name of that white-nationalist
political vanity project.
.The assault on international law regarding the right to asylum, combined
with the callous cutting of aid to desperately poor Central American states
where U.S. policy has long fueled the misery that feeds northward flight.
.The accelerated ecocidal deregulation of fossil fuels, combined with the
denial of anthropogenic climate change and the handing over of vast swaths
of the nation's public land to corporate pillagers.
.Repeated sadistic efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act's provision
mandating that insurance companies cannot deny health coverage to people
with pre-existing conditions.
.The holding of presidential campaign rallies where Trump calls reporters
"the enemy of the people" and purveys xenophobic lies about invading armies
of Mexican and Central American rapists and drug dealers coming to despoil
the United States.
.A plan crafted by the president's top political adviser, Stephen Miller, to
conduct a giant "shock and awe" sweep-up of thousands of migrants in 10
large U.S. cities.
.Trump's suggestion that any attempt to remove him from office will spark
violence from "tough guys," including "bikers," police officers and the
military.
.Trump's determination to run cover for a Saudi monarch who ordered the
vivisection of a Washington Post reporter.
.Trump's reckless sign-off on the export of nuclear technology to the
absolutist, arch-reactionary Saudi regime.
.Trump's brazenly false and repeated claim that the Mueller report is a
"total exoneration" of his presidency, when that report concludes by saying
precisely the opposite and in fact is a referral for impeachment.
Most recently, the White House is engaged in chilling and open defiance of
Congress's clear constitutional power to oversee and investigate the
executive branch. In a recent hearing held by federal Judge Amit Mehta on
the administration's lawsuit claiming that Congress possesses no legitimate
power to obtain Trump's financial records, Trump's lawyer, William Consovoy,
argued that Congress lacks authority to investigate and publicize possible
wrongdoing by the president. An incredulous Mehta asked Consovoy if this
meant that Congress's investigations into Watergate and Whitewater (here we
night add the Iran/Contra affair and more) were unconstitutional. Consovoy
hemmed, saying it would depend upon the basis for those investigations. It
was "straightforward," responded Mehta: "Congress was inquiring into
possible violations of the law by the president."
"In that case," Consovoy said, "then yes, perhaps Congress did overstep its
authority."
The president, in short, is above the law, according to his lawyers.
Piecing all these and countless other horrific stories about Trump and his
presidency together, anyone with any basic knowledge of fascism, past and
present, can easily and correctly identify him as an aspiring fascist
leader. It is rare, however, for liberal corporate media operatives to go
all the way with the F-word-fascism-when it comes to describing Trump.
Their silence here is ironic. Worried talking heads at MSNBC-an outpost of
the Democratic Party's reigning corporate establishment-and across the
liberal punditocracy warn frequently and loudly about what they consider the
Democratic Party's "socialism problem." They do this even though just a
small handful of Democrats (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
Rashida Tlaib) identify as "democratic socialists." They fret over the
socialist menace despite the fact that all these "radical" Democrats mean by
"socialism" is capitalism with some long overdue Western- and northern
European-style social reforms.
Meanwhile, the party in power is headed by a white nationalist authoritarian
buoyed by a significantly fascist base. The norm-smashing president is
moving from fascist-style politics to fascist-style policy with audacious
speed and zeal. His politics and policies draw heavily on the classic
fascist notion that the nation is menaced by a big, radical left-a notion
that liberal media is helping spread with its warning against Democratic
"socialism."
Two other mainstream media silences deserve mention in the age of Trump. The
first is the absence of any serious discussion of how fundamentally
defective the American social and political system was-and is-to allow
someone like Trump to rise to power and stay there. The dominant media
beyond Fox and right-wing talk radio appear to think that everything was
fine and democratic when Barack Obama sat in the White House. In the
mainstream telling, Trump and his minions enter the stage of history almost
out of nowhere, as if dropped from outer space-or by Vladimir Putin and
Russian military intelligence. Trump, his agents and his backers are
portrayed as deviant anomalies, strange products of weird quirks in the
election cycle, including supposedly potent "Russian interference in our
democratic elections."
This is nonsense. Trump is as American as apple pie. He is the latest poison
icing on the cake of an American fascist nightmare that has been cooking in
the homeland's hidden ovens of neoliberal race-class oppression for decades.
He is the ugly outcome of a long process of social, cultural and political
decay that has been underway since at least the mid-1970s. He reflects our
failed, oxymoronic "capitalist democracy"-what Noam Chomsky has cleverly
called "really existing capitalist democracy: RECD, pronounced as 'wrecked.'
"
It was the neoliberal nothingness of corporate Democrats, with their abject
subservience to Wall Street and corporate America and their cold-blooded
globalist betrayal of the working-class majority, that demobilized the
nation's majority-progressive voting base and opened the door for the
reactionary populist Trump to shock the world (including himself, though not
Steve Bannon) in 2016. But, deeper still, the Democrats' dismal centrism
reflects the wildly disproportionate power of concentrated wealth in a
plutocratic winner-take-all social and political order in which the
democratic promise of elections is trumped by the unelected dictatorships of
money and empire (no Russian assistance required). This trumping continues
regardless of which party or configuration of parties holds sway in federal,
state and local government.
You won't hear about the deeper system that hatched Trumpenstein on cable
news, where, as leftist historian and journalist Terry Thomas told me in
January:
"
The Trump fiasco allows the inauthentic opposition [Democrats] to sit around
and smugly refer to themselves as "the adults in the room," as if that's now
all that's required. There's no need for Bernie or radical change, we just
need someone who is not mentally ill, an "adult in the room." The Democrats
act like we've got this covered because we're sane and the Orange Dumpster's
not, our point has been proven, so now just give us power again, and we'll
put everything back together, nothing more needed. But the truth is
glaringly obvious: how flawed and fundamentally dysfunctional must the
system be to allow something like this to happen?
