Trump's Goal Is The End Of Our Democracy

What does President Bannon want? He wants to destroy our system of government. He wants to fulfill what Grover Norquist wished for some years ago, to degrade and weaken and diminish government to the point where he can drown it in the bathtub. That’s what he outlined in his speech to CPAC the other day. He sees Trump as his vehicle for destroying our democratic form of government, our government by the people and for the people, as Lincoln described it.

Bannon sees structure and rules and systems and fair play and good government as evil. The only government he wants is government by him or someone he can manipulate. This is why there's so much admiring talk about Putin. We may learn, if the Republican Congress doesn't manage to cover it up, that Putin is operating Bannon and Trump. Like puppets, as Hillary pointed out and Trump lamely disputed.

Bannon's speech reported in the Washington Post

Many of these antidemocratic and unAmerican ideas have been there for years, spoken out loud by Republicans. Take the famous 1980 speech by Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution rubbishing the idea of letting all Americans vote and deriding “good government” as a kind of evil delusion, what he called “GooGoo.” They thought and still think democracy is a nuisance, democracy is childish, democracy is foolish and evil. They are now closer than ever to achieving their dream of making America a white Christian (sic) authoritarian state.

Video of the infamous Paul Weyrich speech is on YouTube and it is chillingly prescient.

Masha Gessen wrote an article for the New York Review of Books shortly after the election in which she warned about the ways an autocrat degrades democratic norms. She’d seen it in Russia under Putin. The playbook looks very much like the playbook of the Trump/Bannon White House.

Ron Rosenbaum, one of the best analysts we have of the psychology of the Nazi regime, wrote an equally sharp warning about Trump in the LA Review of Books. I urge you to read and share both articles.

Both these articles warn that what a determined tyrant does first is discredit and destroy the news media, beginning with the journalists who don’t take dictation but actually analyze and criticize what he is doing. Which is what journalists are supposed to do. Without journalists reporting the truth we are powerless.

Most Agree With Sanders But Understand We Can't Elect Him...Why?

Noam Chomsky discussed this democratic quandary. We agree on what we want but we also agree we cannot have it.

Most Americans agree with Sanders.

Most are persuaded he is radical and impractical.

Therefore what most Americans want and believe in is radical and impractical. And we can't have that.

This is an undemocratic problem. It may also be the key rationale of voter suppression.

Public opinion seems driven not by what the public wants but by fiat from the persuaders, the persuading class, who are employed by the people with greater wealth.

(The rich persuasions are also obeyed by those with less wealth, who own for a living on a more modest scale, whose financial security is held hostage by equity markets, the people who have retired from working life and joined––as junior members––the body of those who “own for a living.”)

This conundrum is difficult to explain in one sentence, and therefore not useful in persuading people. Fiats are one sentence.

Experience is a better persuader. The persuading class uses hard experience against us. In most cases it is hard experience their rich clients have caused.

The psychological control exerted by the people with money is our larger problem.

The defection of retired workers is understandable; their sentiments run one way but their fears dictate the safer choice of doing what their money says.

For working people the rhetorical trick works like this:

They are earning less than their parents did, but the tax burden has been shifted off of the owning classes and onto them.

This persuades them that they/we cannot afford good government and public sector spending. (Even if government-run programs and projects are less wasteful and less expensive because they’re not driven by profit.)

Their experience of lack of money persuades working people that they do not DESERVE good government and public services.

You pay for what you get.

You get what you deserve.

What you cannot afford you do not deserve.

Hence those with riches are deserving, those living in poverty deserve nothing. Working hard has nothing to do with it.

Working for a living makes you less deserving than owning for a living. In this sense Americans are participating in a violent upending of fundamental American values.

We have returned to the brutality of an earlier age.

Hillary may accomplish more in the hurly-burly of Washington politics than Bernie would. Practicality has a place. But the demands of working people, the grievances of working people, are not radical, and practical politics can solve them if we don't relegate them to second class status, which is the danger right now.

The Real VA Scandal

The Republican half of Congress wants government to fail.

So they do everything they can to make it fail. To make the systems break down, to make Americans angry at their government, the government Republicans hate, the government Republicans now control through filibuster and obstruction.

In February Republicans did everything they could to block a major funding bill to help the VA deal with the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars. And block it they did.

Call it a hostage situation. Republicans want to remove democratic government and replace it with a corporate structure run by their clients for making money.

Republicans are delighted with the VA scandal, because they set it in motion.

They started a war eleven years ago. Wars create veterans. Wars cause many thousands of amputations and other traumatic injuries which need to be treated. But Republicans in Congress didn’t want to pay for that part of the war, the aftermath.

They like veterans for parades but don’t like to pay for their healthcare.

When you defund veterans programs just when they’re needed most you are either cynical, unpatriotic or stupid. Take your pick.

The Do-Nothing Republican Congress

This current Congress is controlled by Republicans with the sole purpose of preventing the President and the Democratic Senate from doing anything constructive. Their only declared goal: to make sure Obama is a one-term president. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum are calling it one of the most dysfunctional, least constructive Congresses in American history. This NPR story draws its insights from, among others, Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who has co-authored two books on the scorched earth brand of Republican governance.

Contrast this Republican/Tea Party Congress with the Congress from Obama's first two years. Democrats achieved more in two years than any Congress since the '60s, some say more than had been acccomplished since the '30s. Democrats do things for regular people. Republicans cater to the top 1%. The partisanship has come from one side, the Republican side. All the compromising, flexibility, practicality and patient toil has been on the Democratic side. It's as if Republicans want democracy to fail rather than inconvenience their corporate clients. This Bloomberg article lists the achievements of Obama's first two years. Have we all forgotten? (And Bloomberg is hardly a liberal biased publication)

This Christian Science Monitor cites the six very big achievements Obama had with a Democratic Congress, over the intense blockade by Republicans.

This Washington Post article calls them "forgotten accomplishments".

Why forgotten––and forgotten already at the close of 2010? Because of the intense and constant abuse from FoxNews. Not only do more Americans "get their news from FoxNews" but those who do know less––less than people who don't read or watch any news at all. Consider it a nationwide brainwashing.

The sole failing of the Democratic Congress of 2009 and 2010? They didn't brag enough. They just got things done.

Contrast that with the Republican juggernaut that swept in in late 2010. The Republican goal? Same as it had been for the previous two years, but bolder and stronger. Block a recovery that Americans needed. Block reforms. Block jobs bills. Block consumer and environmental protections. (What they couldn't block they watered down.) Block increased taxes on the top 1%, whose wealth had grown in the aftermath of the financial crisis while most Americans suffered. Their goal was to make Americans angry. Discontent and anger helped them regain the House in 2010, it could help them retake the White House in 2012.

The only medicine that can help the nation recover from eight years of Bush, and now two years of a Tea Party relapse is a more Democratic Congress.

Our Bad Habit of Blaming Everyone

This series of short pieces by James Fallows of the Atlantic (one of our most astute and fairest political analysts) graphically details the absurd gymnastics the press employs to keep up the make-believe, to avoid telling Americans that one side (the Republican side) is chiefly responsible for the dysfunction in Washington right now.

Article One.

Article Two.

Article Three. They are brief, readable, and more to the point than my commentary here.

Bad habits have bad consequences. When it's a bad habit of a large institution like our news media, the consequences are enormous. To avoid showing "preference," American journalism behaves like a bad parent, blaming both children for what they know full well has one culprit. A decent family therapist could tell you what the result is. It gives permission to the Republicans to do what they like and spit in the Democrats' face, which is what they've done. Why be moderate when extremism causes no negative comment and gives greater leverage?

Why be law abiding when crime isn't punished? Why be a public-minded corporation when a predatory business model pays better and has no negative consequence? Imagine a court system that avoided a verdict on anything, blaming victim and assailant alike. Americans have come to despise political correctness that protects minorities and vulnerable people from abuse, but there is another form of political correctness being exercised today: it protects the powerful and the rich and their political handymen in the Republican Party. It's corrupting our public conversation.

Here's a quiet little article in the Washington Post, which got no traction in the big echo chamber of 24 hour cable news. It isn't the Democrats who can't get things done. It's the Republicans, resorting to the filibuster at levels never seen before in Congress, not even in the bad old days when partisans had fistfights on the floor of the House.

The go to guy for guaranteed political deadlock is Republican leader Mitch McConnell. It's strangely apt that the one true master of making our government as slow as a turtle actually looks and sounds like one. Here's another very sharp analysis of McConnellism by James Fallows.

America is being told the opposite, though. Watch the news or read a newspaper and you get the idea that the failure is being set up by both parties equally or by the Democrats who really sincerely want Obama to fail. But the opposite is true.

The Republican Party has been engaged in a 30 year effort to make government fail. To make it less efficient (government is actually far more cost effective than private contractors the Republicans are constantly touting, especially in defense operations where the private contractors have enormously ballooned the cost of waging war.) The Republican goal is to make government NOT work. To make government smaller, weaker and dysfunctional. To privatize it, which means to hand it over to corporate ownership, just as elected Republicans are owned by corporations. Do we want government by corporation? Corporations are not run as democracies. They are run from the top down. What the Republican Party wants is the end of democratic government.

Norman Ornstein, a conservative Washington observer from the American Enterprise Institute, examines the dysfunction of government and lays it directly at the feet of Republicans in this article published in Foreign Policy magazine. Obama and his slim Democratic majorities achieved a lot in two years. But getting the system to work was agony.

Ornstein: "So what went wrong? Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier. The session's legislative accomplishments occurred because Democrats maintained enough discipline -- and had large enough margins -- to enact their bills with the support of Democrats alone."

But look at the photo. The mug shot of the problem has both Democrat and Republican leaders in it. Reid who did everything he could to reach compromises and pass bills and McConnell who vowed that his one priority over four years was to make Obama's presidency a failure. The headline, too, blames both for the stubborn obstructionism of one party, muting the criticism, smudging the report, hiding the conclusions, misleading the reader. The Republicans get off easy thanks to the editor and the picture editor. Is that their job––to give Republicans covering fire?

At some point anyone who tries to work in a system so rigged toward one side becomes a sap, a pigeon, a fool. The Republicans are delighted at how angry Democratic voters are at their elected representatives. The public doesn't know what is happening. By not reporting the bad faith of the Republican Party the press becomes an enabler, an accessory to the theft of our functioning democracy. Here's a very good New Republic piece by Jonathan Cohn discussing the smoothest practitioner of false equivalency around, David Brooks.

This is not a new issue. It's been happening ever since the news media was charmed into bed with Ronald Reagan. It's distorted America's understanding of key issues, leading us to alarming levels of stupidity on science and events and economics. Most Americans now think there were WMD in Iraq; there weren't. Most Americans believe scientists are split on climate change; they are almost unanimous that it is happening and human activity is the cause. Mostly this is because news editors remove any stress or conclusion from topics covered. "Is the earth round? No one really knows, and opinions differ." We complain about bad government policy, but this foolish policy of our news media is a major cause of that. Being lied to is worse than being uninformed.

From the Washington Post, on how the news media have blamed both parties, wrongly, for the debt impasse.

Good coverage on this topic from the Washington Monthly, at the time of the Arizona shooting, when the Republican gun-rights and violent-language crowd were very aggressive and dominated the news cycle. There was a tradition among rival mobs in Chicago in the 1920s to send enormous floral tributes to the families of mobsters they'd rubbed out. I am reminded of this wonderful tradition when I hear Republicans commenting on deplorable events like oil spills and mass shootings.

Here's a round up of very good commentary at the time of the Arizona shooting spree, with astute comments by a Gulf Coast blogger.

This column by Bob Cesca discusses how the news media carefully hides Republican hypocrisy, spreading it around, damning all politicians. Apparently to avoid embarrassing Republican officeholders. What other reason could there be?

Discover magazine attacks the Republican war on science––and the media's refusal to report it. Most Americans have the wrong understanding of key scientific issues of our day, mostly because the news media have avoided informing them in clear terms. And this avoidance isn't accidental. It happens because of intense pressure from powerful industrial and religious groups and their party of choice. Galileo would have a very hard time with today's Republicans.

This excellent piece by Neil Buchanan, law professor at George Washington University, dissects a pernicious outgrowth of the False Equivalency problem: the tendency of columnists (like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times) to declare a pox on both parties and call for a third party. A stupid idea in a non-parliamentary system that already is having a hard time compromising. Friedman wrongly suggests that the middle is vacant. Any Democrat could tell you their representatives have tried so hard to find middle ground, there's some real concern they've lost track of their original principles. Until the Republicans devoted themselves to destroying our system it used to work pretty well, through compromise, and most Americans ask for and expect compromise. But because of how politics is reported, compromise is punished and extremism is given a free pass. These days it is almost entirely extremism with a Republican face.

The GOP Goal? The End of Democracy

From one of the smartest observers of politics around, the very conservative (in the old fashioned sense) American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein, comes this analysis of the political mess that Republicans have made of our democracy. Today's Republicans aren't actually conservative, they are dangerously radical. They simply do not want government to function.

This sole focus is underlined by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who states clearly that the chief goal of the Republicans in Congress is to get Barack Obama out of office. Not one of their goals, but job one. Frankly, I think it's their only goal. Which means they are very happy that the country run off the rails, that the economy collapse, that unemployment get worse instead of better, that everyone is miserable and hating each other, because all of those things further their main goal. I'm reminded of the old southern custom of barn burning. If you don't have it, destroy it. If you don't control it, kill it. If you can't own it, burn it down. We're witnessing a kind of political terrorism. The opposite of practical conservatism.

This narrow, self-defeating, self-destructive obsession is also in action outside of the Congress, in the widespread and deliberate effort by national Republicans to shut millions of people out of the voting process. Young people, old people, working people, non-homeowners, people of color, the poor, the marginalized, all are facing fierce Republican efforts to prevent them from voting.

Column in Washington Post.

A moderate blogger compares the GOP effort to Jim Crow.

Rolling Stone does a full story on the GOP vote suppression strategy.

Writing Laws by Remote Control

The income the middle class has lost over the past four decades (ever since Reagan put a kick me sign on our back) has all been funneled upward. Not all of this money can be spent at Tiffany and Bergdorff and on fifth and sixth mansions for billionaires who need more closet space. Some has been spent paying for the writing and enacting of state laws to cut taxes on billionaires and outlaw unions and deregulate corporate pollution, fraud and dangerous products. Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco created a group called ALEC which instructs Republican lawmakers how to make laws. Sadly nobody knew how elaborate the ALEC project was until an insider started feeling lousy about what he was doing and shared the story with a reporter.

Here's a great Terri Gross interview about this with John Nichols.

John Nichols has written an excellent series for the Nation magazine about ALEC and what these documents have disclosed.

Coverage and analysis from TruthOut.

Among the documents revealed through the Center for Media and Democracy, are bills prefabricated by ALEC, with help from the industry groups who wanted to have regulations gutted or consumers unprotected. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, industrial agriculture, big polluters, gun manufacturers and dealers, the private prison industry and others.

The same ALEC-written bills were proposed in multiple state legislatures, ushered through the democratic process with ALEC supervision, and passed into law, where their enactment will be overseen by judges tutored by the Koch Brothers and others. Law by remote control.

Some background on the investigation by PR Watch and the Center for Media and Democracy.

This is the Government Republicans Want––No Government At All.

Doug Grow does a good job describing the atmosphere at the state capitol. It's ugly, but the ugliness is on one side of the disagreement. The governor offered compromises; the Republicans made additional demands.

The Republican Party is happy for the government to shut down. It's exactly the kind of government they want. No government at all.

Look at the extremist policy amendments Republican legislators tried to load onto the state funding bill and you realize it's a different kind of game to them. The Republican Party has mastered the strategy of hostage negotiation. They don't want an agreement; they won't take compromise. They want everything.

Consider the key issue of government spending and government revenue. Republicans are adamant about protecting the low low tax rate of the richest Minnesotans, lower than the rest of us pay.

Republicans demand the firing of 30,000 state workers, working people with mortgages to pay and families to feed, so they can protect 7,700 very very rich people, most of whom don't work in the conventional sense at all but finance their extremely comfortable lifestyle from dividends and financial transactions. Rather than raise taxes on millionaires, rather than removing recent tax breaks in fact, the Republicans are happy to raise taxes on all Minnesotans who own homes or rent apartments.

Who is Happy With This Economy?

Do you ever wonder if the Republicans actually want the economy to fail? There's been a lot of conversation about it. The signs are pretty clear. But the media are too polite to bring that discussion into the open. Here are a few links. Not much pops up in newspapers or television news.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/playing_a_game_of_chicken_with029667.php

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79739/washington-gop-opposition-quantitative-easing

http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-being-grilled-about-muni-debt-because-republicans-want-the-states-to-collapse-2011-1

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/01/the-failure-caucus.html

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/06/24/republicans_want_america_to_fail

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/block-heads-by-digby-so-republicans-are.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/dire_news.php

http://gawker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy#!5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy

When they are honest Republicans actually say it themselves:

Another economic meltdown would do Republicans a lot of good.

An economy that doesn't recover (except for the very very rich) hurts Obama's chances of re-election.

It would spread the blame for the collapse of 2008 and make the Bush administration look less inept.

Republican clients like having an insecure, underpaid workforce that's grateful to work for less.

Republican clients are doing fine. They were bailed out. Their stocks (which many of them scooped up at the bottom of the market) rebounded. They paid themselves bonuses for this. And the less for us, the more for them. What working people don't earn, the rich get to keep. It's called a Plutonomy.

I love how the Wall Street Journal equates lavish personal spending and heavy lifting. (Some of their spending is lavished on shapers of public opinion.)

A weaker economy makes tax revenues drop. Republican clients want lower revenues because a weaker government can't regulate them.

(Just as an aside, here are some suggestions for the anti-government crowd, to help them avoid hypocrisy. A little list of the things they should do without.)

Thing is, the Republicans want government NOT to work. Democracy is a nuisance. They want to get elected to government... so they can make it NOT work.

They (in the famous words of Grover Norquist) want to drown our form of representative government in the bathtub. Goodbye democracy.

To help kill our government they are happy to run up an enormous debt and not pay for it.

And in the interests of putting fewer, richer people in charge, they'd like it if fewer people voted. They'd like a small elite deciding what a vast uninformed and poorly paid population does.

Are you following this so far?

A government that can't function is less popular with average people. This is the Republican goal. When government doesn't have the funds to function properly it makes people mad, not at the Republicans who made it not work, but at government itself, which has always been reliable. It helps to have a public that doesn't pay attention or is easily misled.

Republicans like it when government doesn't work. They've been saying this for decades. They've finally delivered and this is what we are experiencing every time we hit a pothole, every time class sizes increase, every time our tuition rates go up. Wait till our fire departments can't get to us. Wait till the government can't respond to the next flood or the next wave of violent storms. Wait till the government can't shore up the financial system or starts selling the national parks.

This bad economy can't support a decent, functioning government, and that is exactly what the Republicans want.