The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do
With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in
the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political
freedom.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec 28
(L-R): Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim
Cook and Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY,TOBIAS
SCHWARZ,ANGELA WEISS,MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the
previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement
over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms,
sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty
lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize
authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and
sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to
exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor
Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S.
presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much
less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the
streets to pacify their own citizenry.
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But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for
failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means
of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by
Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In
March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and
some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke
the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it,
too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting
demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is
not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that
erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom
Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass
deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened
to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order
anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use
tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk
to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for
failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
USA Today, June 2, 2020
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday
narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for
themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing
campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his
policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them
to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or
withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall).
No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump,
let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied.
Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media
stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or
state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias
waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s
administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than
a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and
ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal
ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much
wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the
prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly
predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies
— enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands
not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate
themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult
themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will
reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice
Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic
transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due
process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in
late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of
bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war.
With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four
years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not
ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in
the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and,
more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent
national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when
journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in
outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at
the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration
camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not
ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages”
from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually
authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S.
media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws
(but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism
unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
PolitiFact, Jan. 10, 2014
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was
really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines,
bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to
mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an
ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that
Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup”
consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread
voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never
previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn
certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely
plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of
the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and
irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them
out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting
plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and
military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed
and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it
existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less
unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
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Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had
been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study
concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a
small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this
concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable
political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the
U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and
organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent
impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average
citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide
substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories
of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic
egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and
candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could
become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would
contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be
replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have
been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A
combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth
to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically
increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths
close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
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The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses
across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants.
“Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the
height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the
world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,”
reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world's super-rich reached a new peak during the
coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC
and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around
the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69
trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in
2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small
businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and
other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a
time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Washington Post, May 12, 2020
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate
giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are
thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and
Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and
shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19
pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well
as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to
nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism.
Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse
from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and
donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their
benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but
rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small
competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn
millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple
jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists:
this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a
hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state
interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small
handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were
already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have
accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns,
prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative
“relief.”
________________________________________
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these
rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook,
Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their
primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai —
has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant
is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of
information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense
data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on
Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before.
We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather
than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we
rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And
exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to
unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as
has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our
political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and
alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them
foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets
and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of
social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen.
Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared
before the Senate: "The issue is not that the companies before us today is that
they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that they're leaving too many
dangerous posts up."
Caleb Howe @CalebHowe
Sen. Ed Markey at tech hearing says: "The issue is not that the companies
before us today is that they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that
they're leaving too many dangerous posts up." mediaite.com/a/wyfky
October 28th 2020
107 Retweets291 Likes
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media
failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of
incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one
of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several
years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who
had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the
perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their
newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also
because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to
assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key
positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the
new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon
Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in
return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and
debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now
consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them
and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies,
domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired,
censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the
corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an
unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to
exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so
divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in
the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from
the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years
shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without
realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to
consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate,
and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming
about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very
right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that
danger.
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