And if you listen to Patrick Boyle on Flashpoints, you'll understand that the
Democrats have not done what they could have done and what is necessary to have
done, to prevent Cavenaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court. What Boyle
says, makes everything else I've heard and read, pale in comparison.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2018 5:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] Creeping Fascism No Problem
for Trump’s Durable Base
I wish I had more time to really read this article in depth, but life is
spinning out of control lately in the Jarvis Reality. With Cathy's sister out
of town, we check in with her mother every day. It's about an hour and fifteen
minutes each way to the nursing home. About two hours visit. So minimum of
4.5 hours each day. We've kept our client schedule to mornings, as much as
possible, but that is another 3 to 4 hours on the days we have clients. Of
course there are the usual tasks, the horses, the job of dog sitting while
Cathy's sister is out of town, finding someone to try and figure out why, after
24 years, our water tank is drawing up gray water, etc.
But this author reminds me of all the reasons I continue to believe that our
invention of God is the root of our troubles. And while no one would defend
the idea that Donald Trump is anywhere near to being a God, neither were any of
the previous dictators down through history. But it didn't stop them from
forcing the people to believe it.
And now some of the Republican "moderates" are trying to steer Donald Trump.
They want the changes Trump's people are setting in motion, but they are just a
little bit nervous when it comes to their "leader". Ah yes my little ones.
Gather round and I'll tell you a bed time tale about a funny looking little man
with a funny mustache and a hatred for Jews.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/6/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base
President Trump at an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Ind. (Evan Vucci /
AP)
How, liberals and progressives ask with shocked amazement, can
President Trump’s supporters continue to back him? They persist even
as one piece of evidence after another emerges of his epic and
pathological gaslighting, his shameless immorality, his abject
criminality, his wild stupidity and his corruption. Then there’s his
chilling authoritarianism, his tendency toward fascism, his ugly
sexism, his textbook malignant narcissism and his nasty racism.
These flummoxed observers aren’t wrong about Donald “Don’t Believe
What You See and Hear” Trump’s terrible, duplicitous and unabashedly
Orwellian nature, but their incredulity is naive.
Yes, the evidence is clear as day—to people who pay serious attention
to evidence. Nine of every 10 Americans—and certainly a larger share
of Republicans and Trump backers—believe in the existence of God. Ask
most Americans what exactly one is supposed to believe in when it comes to
“God,”
and they will say little or nothing in the way of empirical proof.
It’s never quite clear what the concept and word mean. It’s about
faith, not evidence.
Evidence is easily devalued in a faith-based nation in which magical
thinking (a critical component of authoritarianism and hardly limited
to religious and metaphysical matters) is rife.
“Cognitive dissonance,” a mental pattern first identified by the
psychologist Leon Festinger, doesn’t help. People confronted with
evidence that contradicts their convictions don’t typically correct
their beliefs, Festinger found. Instead, they more commonly double
down on their mistaken idea rather than face the mental and egoic pain
associated with admitting erroneous thinking. The more they have
invested in and even lost from false beliefs, the more they will
respond to contrary evidence by actually intensifying their attachment
to those untrue notions. (This may help explain how Trump often seems
to gain support after talking heads, reporters and politicos call him
out for saying or tweeting something particularly
absurd.)
Right-wing media worsens the problem. A potent network of
counterfactual white Republican news and opinion outlets regularly
amplify and reinforce fact-trumping feelings and cognitively dissonant
reactions. Watch Fox News and listen to noxiously racist, nationalist
and neo-McCarthyite talk-radio hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and
Mark Levin. Nothing is clear as day across the soulless landscape of
radically conservative media, where 2+2=5; war is peace; love is hate;
corporate Democrats are Marxists; antifa is a giant mass movement
created by the Democratic Party; black football players who take knees
during the national anthem are traitors; the billionaire rentier
Donald Trump is a friend of the working man; anthropogenic global
warming is a “hoax”; and “God” wants us to burn every last fossil fuel
on earth. As Trump’s wacky post-modernist lawyer Rudolph Giuliani put it
recently, “truth isn’t truth.”
Feelings trump facts all the time in the U.S. This is true on both
sides of the major-party aisle. Talking in 2007 and 2008 to highly
educated campus-town liberal Democrats, including plenty of doctorate
holders and religious skeptics, I consistently found that facts were
of little use in trying to dent their deeply entrenched and utterly
false view that Barack Obama was a people’s champion of peace,
democracy and social justice. To paraphrase the Beatles, they had “a
feeling [about Obama]–a feeling deep inside, oh yeah.”
The so-called mainstream liberal media is itself no great champion of truth.
It perversely purveyed George W. Bush’s Orwellian nonsense about
Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction.” As I was first writing
this paragraph (last Friday), moreover, Trump’s cable-news bêtes
noires CNN and MSNBC were immersed in a seemingly endless and totally
absurd memorialization of the war criminal, lifelong imperial war hawk
and corporate neoliberal John McCain as a Christ-like embodiment of
transcendent human decency.
There’s also the selective and partisan use and interpretation of evidence.
Trumpsters know some facts very well. Tell them their president lies,
cheats and commits crimes, and some of them will remind you that Bill
Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have done the same. They’re
right about that (Obama’s apparent observance of his marriage vows
notwithstanding), even if they often get their facts wrong on how and
why those corporate Democrats (absurdly seen as Left by Republicans)
transgressed. And it’s never clear how the readily documentable fact
that Democrats do nasty things makes Trump’s epic awfulness any less awful.
Trump’s backers also cite undeniable facts of economic expansion, the
stock market explosion and a falling official unemployment rate during
Trump’s anti-presidency. But Trump boosters leave out and often deny
the fact that the expansion started under Obama. They ignore the
considerable downsides of the Obama-Trump “boom”: over-stagnant wages,
savage economic and related racial inequality, environmental
destruction, massive public and private debt, the over-concentration
of stock ownership and profits in the hands of a small minority, and
the reckless overvaluation of stocks and other financial
assets—harbingers of a coming crash encouraged by Trump’s heedless
deregulation of finance.
Trump backers seem to think the U.S. capitalist economy is
micromanaged in the Oval Office, as if Trump—who can’t even read a
basic balance sheet—is personally responsible for the business cycle he’s
been fortunate to ride.
That’s a pretty stupid thing to believe.
Speaking of stupidity, what about Trump’s real or alleged idiocy? The
“mentally deranged dotard” (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s colorful
description of Trump last summer) would probably outscore George W.
Bush (more on that dolt below) but come in below the Clintons and
Obama on standard intelligence measures. Whatever his brainpower,
however, Trump is an inexhaustible font of fatuous and inane political
assertion. Take, as one example, his frequent go-to: climate change
denial. Then there’s his claim that thousands of Muslims danced on the
roofs of apartment complexes watching the World Trade Center towers
collapse on 9/11, as well as the ridiculous assertion the U.S. is
being flooded by immigrant rapists and murderers.
These would also make the list: the preposterous charge Trump was
denied a popular victory over Hillary Clinton by immigrant voter
fraud; the ludicrous allegation Google has “rigged” its search engine
against him, and the wild-eyed contention that a small leftist
anti-fascist group (antifa) will drown the nation in violence if
Democrats take over Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Finally,
there’s Trump’s openly and insanely false claim that NBC doctored
(“fudged”) an interview he did with Lester Holt in May of 2017—an
interview in which he clearly tells Holt that he fired FBI Director
James Comey because Comey was investigating the president’s
connections to Russia. Every day seems to bring a new ludicrous and patently
false tweet or comment from “President Dunce Cap.”
Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for
much of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a
book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American
Voter.”
The book was filled with depressing statistics like the following:
● A majority of Americans didn’t know which party was in control of
Congress.
● A majority couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
● A majority didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government.
● A majority of Americans told pollsters in 2003 they believed George W.
Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam
Hussein had attacked America on 9/11.
George W. “Is Our Kids Learning?” Bush, Number 43, was an abject moron
who thought “God” wanted him to invade Iraq. The depressing fact that
a majority of Americans believed Dubya’s bold-faced lie about Saddam
Hussein’s culpability in the 2001 jetliner attacks on U.S. soil was
striking evidence for Shenkman’s assertion that “ignorance of basic
facts” reflects a “level of inattentiveness that is unhealthy in a
society that purports to be free and democratic.”
The problem didn’t go away just because the electorate responded to
the Iraq fiasco and the meltdown of the economy by putting enough of
its longstanding racism aside to place a former editor of the Harvard
Law Review—an epitome of the professional class’ education-based
meritocratic worldview who happened to be black—in the White House for
eight years. The silver-tongued and deeply conservative Ivy League
creation and arch-neoliberal imperialist Obama did facts and truth no
favors by pretending to be something he wasn’t—a progressive friend of
social justice, democracy and peace—while he dutifully helped preserve
Wall Street’s control of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.
(Orwell noted that form of pretense, too.)
Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon in early 2016, Shenkman recognized
the underlying U.S.-American disease of mass stupidity (though in
truth the real problem he was discussing was ignorance) was alive and
well in Obama’s final
year:
“
[M]illions of [U.S.] people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their
ignorance is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald ‘I
love the poorly educated’ Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a
civics teacher’s case study from hell. … From the moment he rode down
the escalator at Trump Tower … Trump has been offering simplistic
solutions. … Each proposal has been eviscerated in the media based on
the critiques of experts who have pointed out that his proposed
solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. … But his voters haven’t
cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him in one lie
after another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than any
of the other candidates, but to little effect. … It appears he can get away
with saying anything.
The rest, as they say, is history. With no small help from the
horrific and uninspiring candidacy of the ultimate establishment
politico Hillary Clinton (Yale Law, one notch above Harvard Law), the
Orwellian falsehood machine and lower-brain atavist Trump swept the
Electoral College. The president has continued his relentless war on
reality with a remarkably durable approval rate in the low to mid-40s,
largely undented even by his former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen’s
recent identification of Trump as a co-conspirator in the illegal
payment of funds for the purpose of silencing two women with whom Trump had
had extramarital affairs.
What about Trump’s authoritarianism? It is evident in his cold
disregard for the rule of law and the power of Congress and his
Cabinet, as well as his recurrent habit of praising strongman leaders around
the world.
Most liberals and progressives I know are stunned that Trump’s clear
despotism and taste for tyranny do not bother his base. But there’s no
basis for their astonishment about this. Leaving aside the fact Trump
is more showman than strongman, nobody who pays serious attention to
the relevant survey data should think that the president’s
authoritarian inclinations would be a problem for his supporters.
In December 2015, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams surveyed
1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum.
Employing standard statistical survey analysis, McMillan found
education, income, gender and age had no significant bearing on a
Republican voter’s preferred candidate. “Only two of the variables I
looked at,” MacWilliams reported in January of 2016, “were
statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of
terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the
latter.” Trump, MacWilliams found, was the only candidate in either
party with statistically significant support from authoritarians.
“Those who say a Trump presidency ‘can’t happen here,’ ” MacWilliams
wrote in Politico, “should check their conventional wisdom at the door. …
Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing
the opportunity.”
A year and a half later, a poll conducted by political scientists
Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56 percent of Republicans
support postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump and
congressional Republicans advocate this to “make sure that only
eligible American citizens can vote.”
This brings us to Trump’s racism, evident from numerous statements of
his before and during his presidency. Is it a problem for Trump backers?
Know any other good jokes? Trump’s disproportionately Caucasian base
is fused by an embattled white racial identity. This Trumpian “make
America white again” heart- and mind-set holds that whites are
becoming a minority targeted by discrimination and “politically
correct” liberal and leftists have been turning the nation’s politics
and policies against white values, culture, needs, rights and
prerogatives. This curious “reverse discrimination” victim whiteness
(devoid of evidence for its claims) informs the Trump base’s
understanding of the meaning of the word “corruption” in ways the
liberal writer Peter Beinart recently captured in the Atlantic. For
Trump’s base, Beinart writes, the idea of corruption isn’t so much about
politics and the law as it is about racial and gender purity:
“
Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that
Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. …
Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption
means less the violation of law than the violation of established
hierarchies [of race and gender], their behavior makes more sense. …
Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that [Hillary] Clinton was
the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more
damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about
Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional
gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in
service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.
Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump
didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many
Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anti-corrupt—because what
they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the
corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle
against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera
[the “illegal immigrant” accused of murdering the young white woman
Mollie Tibbetts in rural Iowa two weeks ago]—Trump isn’t the problem.
He’s the solution. [Emphasis added.]
But, of course, it’s not about racism, nativism, sexism or
authoritarianism when it comes to understanding Trump’s base. White
racial and gender identity and authoritarianism have long merged with
and cross-fertilized each other. Last May, political scientists Steven V.
Miller and Nicholas T.
Davis released a working paper titled “White Outgroup Intolerance and
Declining Support for American Democracy.” Their study found a strong
correlation between white Americans’ racial intolerance and support
for authoritarian rule. “When racially intolerant white people fear
democracy may benefit marginalized people of color,” NBC News
reported, citing the Miller and Davis paper, “they abandon their commitment
to democracy.”
The Trump base’s bigotry and its leanings toward authoritarianism are
not separate problems. They are inseparably linked. When Trump calls
Mexicans murderers and rapists, when he rails about the need for
building a wall, when he denounces the media as “fake news,” when he
disses judges and the rule of law and juries, and when he praises
authoritarian leaders, he is appealing to the same voters.
The most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016
Trump electorate produced so far has been crafted by political
sociologists David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley. In an article
published in Critical Sociology last March, Smith and Hanley found the
white Trump base was differentiated from white non-Trump voters not by
class or other “demographic” factors (including income, age, gender
and the alleged class identifier of
education) but by eight key attitudes and values: identification as
“conservative”; support for “domineering leaders”; Christian
fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against
blacks; prejudice against Muslims; prejudice against women, and a
sense of pessimism about the economy.
Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for
domineering leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic
pessimism.
They were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who
promised to respond punitively to minorities perceived as
“line-cutters”—“undeserving” others who were allegedly getting ahead
of traditional white Americans in the procurement of jobs and
government benefits—and to the supposed liberal “rotten apples” who
were purportedly allowing these “line-cutters” to advance ahead of
traditional white American males.
Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of
intolerance regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two
sides of the same Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump’s
base was “the defiant wish for a domineering and impolitic leader”
linked to “the wish for a reversal of what his base perceives as an inverted
moral and racial order.”
Is Trump’s narcissism a problem for his backers? Not really. As
psychologist Elizabeth Mika noted last year in an essay titled “Who
Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism”:
“
The tyrant’s narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who
project their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of
self and his promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and
the stronger their support. … Through the process of identification,
the tyrant’s followers absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine
themselves winners in the game of life. This identification heals the
followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also tends to shut down their reason and
conscience.
If that sounds anything like “creeping fascism,” that’s because it is.
As political scientist Anthony DiMaggio recently observed:
“
There are too many red flags in public sentiment to ignore the threat
of creeping fascism. Ominously, one of the strongest statistical
predictors of support for Trump is the desire for a strong leader who will
‘crush evil’
and ‘get rid of the rotten apples’ who ‘disturb the status quo.’ Half
of Republicans say they trust Donald Trump as a more reliable source
of information than the news media—more reliable even than
conservative media outlets. Nearly half of Republicans think media
outlets should be ‘shut down’ if they are ‘broadcasting stories that are
biased or inaccurate,’
raising ominous possibilities regarding precisely who will act on such
allegations. … The cult of Trump is not an abstract phenomenon, but
one that has real implications. … The danger of fascist creep is also
seen in the support from most Republican Americans for shutting down
the 2020 election, so long as Trump declares it necessary to combat
fictitious voter fraud.
Conservatives’ acceptance of this conspiracy theory continues,
unfortunately, despite the president’s own ‘voter fraud commission’
being disbanded after failing to find any evidence of it.
Is Trump’s “creeping fascism” a problem for his backers? Leaving aside
the interesting debate among liberal and left commentators about
whether Trump is a real or creeping fascist, it is unlikely that more
than a small number of Americans could provide even the remotest
outlines of a working definition of what classic European fascism was
or what fascism more broadly defined is in the world today. It’s hard
for people to reject something they know little or nothing about
regarding its existence and nature (even as they are thinking and
acting in accord with some of the phenomenon’s key characteristics).
As the dangerously declining superpower that is the United States
moves at an accelerating pace, under Trump, into a period that
deserves to be called at least pre-fascism, it is an even better time
than usual to heed George Santyana’s warning: “Those who cannot learn
from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Paul Street
