The GOP Discovers Fascism...And Likes It

The Republican leaders who a few months ago were calling Trump dangerous and extremist and bigoted and irrational are now lining up to support him. Maybe what this tells us is the Republican Party has been an authoritarian party for a long time. Fascist in all but name.

They are an obedient party. A shameless party. A party that ignores corruption and worships wealth and arrogance. When Deep Throat instructed Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money” this is where it was leading. The Republican Party has gotten there at last.

The news media is doing its careful balancing job, where they refuse to report the insanity, bigotry and extremism of one candidate until they can invent something that makes the other candidate look just as bad.

The media message is “All politicians are dangerous, extremist, bigoted and irrational” so watch and laugh but get ready for the worst to happen.

They don’t report the policy differences (BORING!) they report the bickering, the tweets, the gossip, the bogus allegations. Trump is a master of the game of bogus allegations: he makes them ten at a time and is never called out for lying, and his lies quickly become the main story, turning the news cycle into a trash fiction contest.

Here are a few top national political observers bluntly admitting the F-word is the proper label for Donald Trump. He is a fascist.

This Is How Fascism Comes To America by neoconservative Robert Kagan in the Washington Post.

America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny by conservative Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine.

The Dangerous Acceptance Of Donald Trump by liberal Adam Gopnick in the New Yorker.

There is still time for America to regain its sanity, but the 24-hour news cycle will be pushing insanity and unreason from now till November. FoxNews has gotten into the tank with Trump. The major networks report his excesses as if they are perfectly normal and reasonable and emphasize the continuing debate in the Democratic Party as if it an embarrassing failure to get in line and follow the leader. As if politics demanded an obedient public.

Those of us who remember Nixon might try to think Trump is no worse than that, and we survived that episode.

We survived it because it was not this extreme.

Nixon had a political resumé and was part of a fairly reasonable right-of-center political party of country clubbers and members of the chamber of commerce. Trump's resumé is a circus of bankruptcies, tax evasions and cynical corruption. There is no set of values in Trump's history, except property values, which he routinely inflates or hides or lies about to fool investors and avoid taxes and evade creditors. His business life has been one long confidence trick, or a series of confidence tricks. His personal life has been a series of confidence tricks too. His vulgarity is shocking––mocking a man with disabilities––in front of a national audience; making suggestive sexual comments about his own daughter and bragging about his penis size––in front of a national audience; slurring women, veterans and one minority group after another––in front of a national audience. How vulgar can a national figure get?

It's hard to imagine anyone more uncouth than Trump. And yet conservative church leaders are saying God demands that His followers vote for Trump. Trump who shows no familiarity with Christian values, and only contempt for all other religions. But it would be "unseemly" for the national news media to criticize one party's candidate without condemning the other equally. Their "standards" require "balance" but balance is a lie. There is no equivalence here. The Republican Party has disgraced itself but as long as its leaders and the news media refuse to notice this disgrace all will be well. And they may win the election by pretending all is well.

The leaders (can we call them leaders?) of the Republican Party think they can control this goon. Their only hope may be that their long campaign to degrade government, to make it weak and dysfunctional, has worked well enough that Trump will be installed at the head of a government that has no power at all. Our country has been a long, interesting experiment in democracy, but the founders never anticipated an experiment this deranged or cynical.

Another Case of False Equivalency

Frank Bruni has an interesting essay in today's New York Times, and "Compliance" sounds like an interesting movie. Mr. Bruni discusses it carefully and intelligently, but I have one large problem with Bruni's analysis. Maybe it has to do with his carefulness. His description of what transpires in the movie points up the film's political and philosophical overtones, but Bruni carefully lays these overtones at the doors of both parties. Both political parties behave like this, he says. He does list several examples of Republican credulity, but then he strains to find one that tars the Democrats too. "Rope them all in. It looks fairer."

He is like a mother who comes into a room, finds one child beating up the other, and punishes both equally. Sometimes one side is more wrong than the other. Sometimes one side is far more wrong than the other, and dangerously so. This is one of those times. Both of our political camps aren't equally extreme. Both sides aren't equally dishonest.

More importantly, both sides in this current political climate are not equally devoted to top-down, witch-hunt, fully-armed, purity-test, lock-step orthodoxies. To suggest this is ludicrous. As Will Rogers said "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." Democrats are almost comical in their habit of disagreeing with each other and departing from uniform beliefs. Sometimes it seems Democrats would rather question an instruction than win an election. No Democrat I know would behave like the obedient jackboot manager in the film Compliance.

Millions of Republicans would. Republicans punish deviation. When the call goes out, Republicans fall into line. Republicans are the party associated with fruitcake ideas like birtherism, arming school janitors, irrational fears of the UN's black helicopters, notions about Moses and Abraham living among dinosaurs, magical beliefs about rape and homosexuality and unregulated capital markets being protected by "invisible hands" (or is it fairies and elves?) They are also the party most willing to adopt draconian methods to enforce their beliefs. Voter purges, electrified fences, depriving the poor of food and healthcare for the crime of being poor.

Fruitcake ideas (like those in the movie) are the ones most in need of draconian, top-down enforcement because they are vulnerable to critical thought.

Nick Kristof wrote about this in March of this year. (I'm bothered by the tendency of newspapers to publish scientific research not as news or analysis but as opinion whenever it takes an unfavorable or disparaging view of conservative thought.) John Stuart Mill wrote that Conservatives were not stupid, but stupid people tended to be conservative. I think this is instructive. It might explain why conservatives follow their leader, their conservative leader, more obediently than liberals. They like others to do their thinking for them, but draw the line at any thinking that questions their old fashioned orthodoxies or the monied power structure.

Granted, their obedience has its limits: if the president or other elected official is black or Hispanic or gay or Democrat or pro-labor or Unitarian or believes in science or has won a Nobel in economics, Republicans are widely instructed to disobey him or her, oppose everything they propose, block every majority proposal they side with––even to the point of harming themselves and harming the common good. There are Republicans in some parts of the country (recently in Texas and Virginia) who urge armed revolution agains the government if it isn't Republican. Who do the managers in this little movie most resemble?

The Republicans we grew up with are almost uniform in their embarrassment and despair over the newer, weirder, more extreme, power-and-gun-hungry Republicans. So asserting that this weird movie is interestingly true and true about both political parties is a bizarre distortion and downright dishonest. If one family member shows signs of dangerous insanity we don't institutionalize them all. We use the rational to distinguish the irrational, and rational people try to enforce reason with reason, not with irrational, draconian methods. When we give equal respect to extreme and moderate we become more extreme. When we give equal respect to right and wrong we encourage wrong. Bruni, in trying very hard to be fair, has distorted the true shape of things. This is the kind of phony fairness that makes cynics of us all.

A Different Kind of Strike

From Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's.

"A series of psychological studies appeared recently showing that the rich are quantitatively less nice than others. My object in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, is to ask how that might be remedied, how the rich might be made nicer. My answer:

"Let us consider a different sort of strike, one that might help the emotionally arrested rich in their time of need. I propose a twenty-four-hour refusal to fawn. A servility strike. A day without deference..."