Month: June 2020

It is fair to describe Xi, Duterte, and Bolsonaro as strongmen. But are they fascists? Again, let’s go to the definition:

1. Xi is definitely not a fascist. First, as a Marxist, he cannot be a reactionary; he looks forward to a brighter future, not a mythological glorious past. Second, while he is undoubtedly a nationalist, that appears to be more of a tool of governance and base mobilization than anything else. Finally, Xi is constrained to a large extent by the institutions and ideology of the Communist Party. He doesn’t have anything like Putin’s freedom to change course.
2. Duterte, with his glorification and use of violence, clearly meets the extraconstitutional means test, but he’s not a reactionary, and he’s really kind of a wimp in dealing with his neighbors. He’s not a fascist, either.
3. Bolsonaro is undoubtedly a reactionary. He doesn’t appear to be much of a nationalist. He hasn’t really relied on extraconstitutional methods yet, but there are persistent rumors that he may be planning a coup with the help of the military. Keep your eyes on this one.

Various publications are reporting this morning that the GOP is contemplating a police reform bill. This is a truly stunning development, even though you can be sure that there will be nothing to it in practice, just as there is never any substance to GOP gun control initiatives.

Why is this important? Because it is the Republican Party that we are talking about here, folks. The party of swagger and the big dick! The party of the Second Amendment people! The party of strength! The party of shoot first and ask questions later! The party that holds the gun in one hand and the Bible in the other, and sees them as one and the same! The party with the reactionary base which must always be obeyed!

McConnell, Trump, and the rest must be reading the polls and getting very, very worried. Maybe base mobilization isn’t, in fact, the way to win national elections.

Is Putin a fascist? Let’s go to the three elements in the definition and see:

1. REACTIONARY: Putin unquestionably plays one on TV. The fact that he waited about ten years to emerge as one suggests that his stance is far more opportunistic than truly ideological, and is mostly for foreign consumption. Daily life in Russia doesn’t look like something out of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The record here is mixed.
2. NATIONALISM: Check. Bring back the Russian Empire! Make Russia great again! Just ask the Ukrainians, Georgians, and Syrians.
3. EXTRACONSTITUTIONAL MEANS: Putin rigs elections, maintains control over the mass media, uses law enforcement and the judiciary for political purposes, and murders his opponents when he thinks it necessary. On the other hand, the constitution remains in place, and he occasionally shows it some lingering respect by trying to amend it or working around it. In short, while Russia is hardly a liberal democratic state in practice, it retains some of the forms of one.

On balance, I would call him a fascist rather than an illiberal democrat, but it is a debatable point. We will know more when he finally leaves office; a successful fascist is a harder act to follow than an illiberal democrat.

Left to his own devices, Trump would undoubtedly withdraw from NATO. Legally, he can do it with a year’s notice. Would he try it in a second term, when he is only minimally accountable to anyone?

He might, but his views are outside of the GOP mainstream in this instance, and the one area in which Republicans in Congress have shown some willingness to break from him is foreign policy. I think you would see a veto-proof majority oppose the withdrawal if it became a reality.

It is more likely that he would just use his powers as commander-in-chief to throw sand in the gears of NATO and watch it come to a halt. Hey, it’s working with the WTO–why not?

What would a perfect fascist look like? Here are some ideas:

1. He would be a man, of course. Fascism is a manifestation of toxic masculinity.
2. He grew up in a family that was declining in its economic and social status. They blamed both the people above and below them for their plight.
3. He has a deep sense of grievance about his lack of social status. His anger about it fuels him every step of the way.
4. He served in the military during a war that his country lost. He never got over it. He blames outsiders and their domestic accomplices for his country’s decline.
5. He is a very effective speaker, not in an inspiring way, but in his ability to voice the anger and fear he shares with his supporters.
6. His family was religious, and he makes a big display of observing the forms of traditional religion, but he really only believes in power. For him, religion and traditional values are just an essential mechanism for protecting the wealthy and socially powerful from unwanted change from below and from outside.
7. He is good at dividing and deceiving his enemies. For him, truth is just the servant of power. He lies and changes positions on a dime where necessary to advance his interests.
8. He is single-minded and completely ruthless in dealing with his opponents.

Draw your own conclusions.

Trump apparently plans to move thousands of American troops out of Germany for no reason other than to express his disdain for Europeans in general and the Germans in particular. Why does he feel this way?

Three reasons:

1. His grandfather was a German draft dodger. He views his German origins with embarrassment; he even claims to be Swedish on occasion. His contempt for the German government is just another way of denying his roots.
2. In his view, the US ultimately lost World War II, because, instead of plundering what was left of Germany and Japan, we welcomed them back as allies and permitted them to become economic competitors. As he sees it, they have been ripping us off for years.
3. He despises Angela Merkel. They mix like oil and water. First, she is a woman, and he can’t stand the thought of treating a woman as an equal. Second, she is the superego to his id; she can’t and won’t swagger the way he does. Third, she’s always patronizing and lecturing him about liberal democracy and human rights. He thinks those ideas are just eyewash; that history is made by great men such as himself; that only military and economic power matter in the real world; and that the Europeans use “shared values” as a cover for their mostly successful efforts to steal our wealth and our jobs.

So where would this relationship go in a second term? For that, tune in tomorrow.

Illiberal democracy is a new concept. I believe the term itself was coined by Viktor Orban. How does it differ from fascism?

An illiberal democracy retains the forms and protections of liberal democracy on paper, but makes them practically meaningless by corrupting or subverting them. The will of the majority is frustrated in elections by gerrymandering and government control of the media. Law enforcement and the judiciary are weaponized against the government’s critics through the appointment of blatantly partisan public officers. Freedom of speech and association are limited through regulatory harassment and the acquisition of popular media by friends of the government. Government supporters get subsidies; opponents don’t. And so on.

Illiberal democracy is a way station–but to what? Poland and Hungary need money from the EU and protection from NATO, so they push the envelope as far as they think they can go, and no further. Will the EU finally take effective action to reel them in, or will they ultimately devolve into openly fascist states? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m not optimistic.

To the left, the problem is rising economic inequality, and the enemy is the 1 percent, who have gained disproportionately from technological change and globalization over the last few decades. An array of statistics supports this argument. To the right, however, the problem is not inequality, but the lack of social mobility, and the enemy is the 10 percent–the professional elite who exclude others from their class by marrying each other, living in gated communities, refusing to get divorced, not ruining themselves with drugs and alcohol, and battling furiously for advantages for their kids. They are hypocrites, say the right; they adhere to Christian values without actually believing in Christianity.

The logical question to ask Douthat, Brooks, and the rest of these right-leaning pundits, is what is your solution to this “problem?” Do you want the 10 percent to start taking drugs and getting divorced? Do you want them to stop caring about their kids? Is your plan to convert them to a conservative brand of Catholicism, and then impose their values on poor red people? These ideas are every bit as absurd as they sound.

The left-leaning intellectual class, by and large, is willing to tax itself for the benefit of red people. That isn’t the answer; red America wants to reduce the size of government, not increase it. As best I can tell, the only realistic response is that red people want the intellectual class to admit that they enjoy their wealth and privileges, not due solely to temperance, talent, and hard work, but largely to luck. They just happened to be standing in the right place when the knowledge economy came into being. If they lived in South Sudan or Yemen, all of that talent would avail them nothing. If the apocalypse comes, and everyone has to live off the land and fend for himself, they will all fall by the wayside, while the red people will manage to survive.

OK. I admit it. Red America, does that make you feel better? Will that get you off my back? Can we talk about the 1 percent now?

It is a word that is much used today–but what exactly does it mean? Here is my definition, which does not come from a dictionary:

The pursuit of reactionary nationalist ends through extraconstitutional means.

By way of elaboration:

1. Not all reactionaries are fascists; in fact, in this country and Europe, most of them have been willing to live by the rules of liberal democracy in the recent past. All fascists are reactionaries, however. They all look back to an idealized previous version of the state in question and seek to recreate it through any means necessary.
2. Nationalism and reactionary politics have not always been intertwined. In the early 19th century, nationalism was primarily a progressive strain of thought. Today, however, nationalism is typically set up as an antidote to a liberal “globalist” order controlled by multi-national corporations and self-seeking, patronizing intellectual elites. As a result, it is usually associated with small business owners and blue collar workers desperately struggling to maintain their small social, legal, and economic privileges within their society.
3. The “extraconstitutional means” primarily involve violence, of course, but the principal point here is that a proper fascist doesn’t accept any limits on his power, or any institutional barriers between himself and the nation he supposedly embodies. There are no such things as checks and balances in a fascist state, concepts of universal human rights do not exist, and the law serves only to implement the will of the leader, as it may change from time to time.
4. A cult of personality is usually part of a fascist state. A properly organized system can get by without one, however. No one ever said Franco was a charismatic figure.

Many commentators, myself included, have noted the similarities between the current events and 1968. The self-styled “law and order” candidate prevailed 52 years ago; is the same result inevitable this November?

No, for several reasons:

1. Nixon was not the incumbent. Trump is, and he is a uniquely divisive figure; swing voters will hold him responsible for the chaos. He is the arsonist, not the fireman.
2. The violence has been much more muted than it was in 1968, and is less threatening to the average American.
3. The injustice involved in Floyd’s death is obvious to everyone. Even Trump and McConnell admit that.
4. A majority of the electorate has moved to the left on civil rights issues. Many of the demonstrators are white. There is no threat of some sort of race war here.

The bottom line is that a vote for Trump is a vote for more of the same. Is that what the American people really want? We’ll see in November.

Mark Zuckerberg has the best of both worlds; he operates what amounts to a vast international public space for private profit with minimal governmental regulation. He makes money off of material provided by his consumers, while taking no legal responsibility for it. He also uses his resources to devour any would-be competitors.

Given the size and reach of Facebook, the way it polarizes and tribalizes popular opinion, and the immense political influence it gives to Zuckerberg personally, this situation is unsustainable; Facebook ultimately will collapse, be broken up, or be regulated as a public utility. For now, however, Zuckerberg is fighting a mostly successful rear guard action to maintain the status quo by zigging and zagging between the demands of his employees, the left, and the right and promising solutions that never materialize.

Do you despise Facebook for the damage it is doing to our political system? Do you think something needs to be done, but despair of any effective regulation from Washington? The good news is that the remedy is in the hands of its consumers. If they express their objections by quitting, the problem will disappear regardless of what happens, or doesn’t happen, in Washington and Brussels.

It’s up to us. Do you want to spend the rest of your life measuring your personal value by the number of likes you get? Do you want to limit the damage done by foreign actors in our elections? Do you want to put an end to the easy dissemination of extremist ideas, both right and left? You know what to do.

The reduction in the national unemployment rate came as a pleasant, and even shocking, surprise to many pundits and economists. I’m really not sure why; things were bound to improve to some extent when the lockdowns ended. The Economist has referred to the new condition as the “90 percent economy;” I call it an “equilibrium.” Either way, what happens next is what really matters, and it depends primarily on consumer confidence, not the speed at which the remaining restrictions are removed.

The bad news is that the GOP is already taking the good news as a reason not to help state and local governments and to cut off supplementary unemployment benefits. You can anticipate an unpopular reduction in services and unnecessary job cuts, as well as more pain for the unemployed, in the near future.

The good news is that deliberately prolonging the recession to starve the innumerable small state and local beasts and to stick it to the unemployed will cost the GOP in November. Now that’s a reason to cheer!

On the 45th president Trump.

Jim Mattis has made him a grump.

A loser, he says.

He was picked by the prez

So who gets the blame when he’s dumped?

DOMINATION

Domination

It’s my life.

Count my wealth.

A red hot wife.

________

Domination

Come again?

Though she’s old

She’s still a ten.

___________

Domination

Men with guns.

Killing looters?

All in fun.

____________

Domination

That’s my game.

It’s my way

My path to fame.

___________

Domination

Will to power.

We approach

My finest hour.

____________

Domination

Think it sucks?

Too bad, Jack.

You’re out of luck.

____________

Domination.

Democrats?

Socialists.

Not where it’s at.

__________________

Domination.

Envy me.

‘Cause there’s plenty

More to see.

_________

Domination.

Go, big red!

If you’re not

You’re likely dead.

___________

Domination.

I’m the man.

Think you’ll stop me?

No one can.

___________

Domination.

Here’s the end.

I’m on top;

You’re not, my friend.

Trump has already justified his inept response to the virus by arguing that no one saw it coming. In point of fact, everyone did but him. He made a deliberate choice to downplay the threat in order to maintain confidence in the markets. Pay me now, or pay me later: he’s suffering the consequences today.

But even if the impacts of the virus had been completely unforeseen, he wouldn’t be entitled to any sympathy, because dealing with unexpected problems is part of the job. Jimmy Carter didn’t anticipate the Iranian revolution. Reagan and Bush 41 didn’t plan for recessions. Bill Clinton didn’t run for president promising to bomb Belgrade. Bush 43 might have been a reasonably decent president but for 9/11. Obama didn’t run through the primaries promising to save us from a huge recession. Why should Trump be any different?

Because he’s Orange Jesus, I guess.