The Sky Seems To Be Falling... Except When You Read What Bernie Has To Say

Also: Ever Notice How Few Trump Critics, Criticize The MAGAts Themselves?

When you read about neocons and foreign policy hawks, you usually read about Robert Kagan. One of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, he’s usually looked at as a villain in American politics, although he and left the GOP to support Hillary in 2016. These days, conservative Democrats like him as much as Republicans did. He detests Trump and has seen him as a danger to the country ever since he reared his head. Kagan called him a Frankenstein Monster in 2016 and was an early voice on the existential danger of Trump’s fascism. Yesterday he followed up on that with a very dire warning: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending, urging his non-MAGA Republican readers to get out of their delusions and magical thinking and to stop the wishful thinking. “Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.”

He also warned that “Rove’s recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to support Trump if he is the nominee, even before he has won a single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. After Super Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028. Republicans who have tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of loyalty to Trump will end that show. As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be standing up to Trump then?”

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump.

…Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses… The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.

…Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.

It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, former attorney general William Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam Schiff (CA); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time— the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”

…“Communist China has their President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.” We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.

Let me stop here, arbitrarily, for a moment a remind you that Hawley can be stopped in the 2024 election, by supporting former Marine officer Lucas Kunce. Let me just say that Kagan concludesmy reminding his readers that “in conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that [a MAGA] tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care… This is the trajectory we are on now… We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.”

While the Washington Post was publishing Kagan, the NY Times was teeing up one by Pamela Paul, There’s A Bomb Under The Table, also about the threat of a second Trump presidency and how we’re not doing much about it though “we have a fairly good idea of the crippling destruction that will ensue... Trump’s first term will look benign compared with what we can expect from a second. “The gloves are off,” Trump has declared.” She blames the Democrats complacency and seems to think— magical think— that Biden should withdraw and she suggests a list of shitty alternatives, from Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom to unlikely and far-fetched better alternatives, Wes Moore and Raphael Warnock. It’s a pathetic column.

Bernie had a different kind of column in The Guardian, about “living in the most difficult moment in modern history,” Thursday, Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be? Also a warning” “Our nation and, indeed our planet, are at a critical juncture. It is imperative that we recognize what we are up against, and what we must do to move our politics toward justice and human decency... With a dysfunctional government, and growing economic anxiety for millions of Americans, 60% of whom live paycheck to paycheck, faith that our flawed democracy can respond to the needs of working families is ebbing, and more and more Americans believe that authoritarianism might be the best way forward.”

Trump, who is becoming more rightwing and extremist every day, is leading many of the presidential polls. In a recent speech, using language that echoes Adolf Hitler, Trump stated: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He also had strong praise for Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. In an interview, Trump said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, promising in another speech that he would round up undocumented people on a vast scale, detain them in sprawling camps, and deport millions of people per year.

Frighteningly, the growth of rightwing extremism is not just growing in the United States.

As the Washington Post reports, “far-right parties have taken power in Italy, extended their rule in Hungary, earned a coalition role in Finland, become de facto government partners in Sweden, entered parliament in Greece and made striking gains in regional elections in Austria and Germany.” Within the past few weeks, a far-right candidate was elected president of Argentina and a rightwing extremist party won the most seats in the election in Holland.

That’s the bad news. The very bad news. But there’s also good news.

The good news is that all across the country workers and their unions are fighting back against corporate greed. We are seeing more union organizing and successful strikes than we have seen in decades. Whether it’s the Teamsters at UPS, the UAW at the big three automakers, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) at the large media production companies, Starbucks workers, graduate students on college campuses, or nurses and doctors at hospitals, working people are making it clear that they are sick and tired of being ripped off and exploited. They are no longer sitting back and allowing large corporations to make record breaking profits while they fall further and further behind. They will no longer accept CEOs making nearly 350 times more than the average worker.

The good news is that more and more Americans are making the connections between the reality of their lives and the corrupt and destructive nature of our uber-capitalist system which prizes greed and profiteering above any other human value.

Whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents, Americans want change— real change.

They are disgusted by a political system which allows the wealthiest people in this country, through their Super PACs, to buy elections. They want structural campaign finance reform based on the principle of one person, one vote.

They are outraged by billionaires paying a lower effective tax rate than they do because of massive tax loopholes. They want real tax reform which demands that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

They are frightened for the future of this planet when they see oil companies make record-breaking profits as the carbon emissions they produce destroy the planet.

They are offended to see ten giant pharmaceutical companies making over $110 billion in profits last year, while they cannot afford the outrageous price of prescription drugs they need to stay alive.

They are shocked as they see Wall Street investment firms buy up affordable housing, gentrify neighborhoods, while they are unable afford to afford the outrageous rents being charged by their unaccountable Wall Street landlords.

They are humiliated by having to stay on the phone for an hour, arguing with an airline company machine about a plane reservation, while the industry makes huge profits.

The American people today are angry. They are anxious about their present reality and worried about the future that awaits their kids. They know that the status quo is not working and that, in many respects, the system in breaking down.

Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be? Will it be a Trumpian, authoritarian type change that exploits that anger and turns it against minorities and immigrants, blaming them for the crises we are experiencing? Or will it be a change that revitalizes American democracy, unites and empowers working people of all backgrounds and has the courage to take on a corrupt ruling class whose greed is causing irreparable destruction in our country and around the world?

There is no question but that the challenges we face today are enormous— economic, political and environmental. There is no easy path forward when we take on the oligarchs and the most powerful entities in the world.

But, in the midst of all that, here is the simple truth. If we stand together in our common humanity— Black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, gay and straight, people of all religions, there are enormous opportunities in front of us to create a better life for all. We can guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a human right. We can create millions of good paying jobs transforming our energy system. We can create the best educational system in the world. We can use artificial intelligence to shorten our work-week and improve our lives. We can create a society free of bigotry.

But here is the other simple truth. None of that happens if we are not prepared to stand up and fight together against the forces that work so hard to divide and conquer us. This is a moment in history that cannot be ignored. This is a struggle that cannot be sat out. The future of the planet is at stake, democracy is at stake, human decency is at stake.

I wish I could see what it is that Bernie is seeing that makes him sound that optimistic. It’s certainly more pleasant reading what he has to say than Robert Kagan, let alone Pamela Paul, an embarrassment to The Times. Odd that they would run some naive and banal column by her but that Bernie’s has to be published in a U.K. newspaper. Although… the U.S. edition of The Guardian has an average of 5.8 million online American viewers per day, even if the print edition only has a bit over 100,000 subscribers.