Trump, Bannon and the Coming Crisis

[pbrower2a]

(02-01-2017, 10:25 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: Source  http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/

David Kaiser Wrote:Thursday, January 26, 2017
As I see it

We are a week into the Trump Presidency, and it is taking shape more rapidly than any since Franklin Roosevelt's.  That is no accident: both men took office in the midst of a great crisis or Fourth Turning, as described and predicted by Bill Strauss and Neil Howe about 25 years ago.  Both represent the death of an old political order and both are determined fundamentally to reshape America.  This has excited some Americans and worried a great many others, especially in the blue states.  As usual, I find my own feelings to be quite different from those of many others.  We are just beginning the rule of Trump, but I would lay to lay the groundwork for future analyses with some observations.

1.  Talk that Trump "is not my President" is silly--unless one wants to secede from the union.  Whatever your politics, if you are an American citizen you have one and one president at all times, and right now, he is it.  He was clearly elected, albeit without a plurality of the popular vote.  (We have no idea, by the way, how he and Clinton would have done if they had actually been competing for the popular vote of the whole nation, and we never will.)  He is legally exercising the powers of his office, which are indeed very broad.  He also disposes of friendly Congressional majorities, just as Obama did in 2009.

Now the Republicans clearly intend to undo as much as they can of the last 85 years of American government.  Much of the New Deal is already gone.  The SEC does not effectively regulate markets and the NLRB has not been able to protect the rights of labor for some time.  Antitrust laws, which the New Deal vigorously enforced, have been a dead letter for quite a while, and the government is not an employer of last resort.  Social Security (which was significantly increased under Nixon) and Medicare, which is 50 years old, may be severely modified.  The Republicans have announced plans to eliminate agencies such as the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, which, frankly, serve Democratic constituencies.  There is also talk of abolishing the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, although I am pretty sure that was established by law in the 1950s and I can't imagine that even this Congress would abolish it by law.  They also plan a new round of budget-busting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Now like it or not--and I certainly don't--the Republicans have used our Democratic processes to reach the position from which they can actually make these things happen.  It is characteristic of fourth turnings that engaged people stop caring about process and start caring about outcomes.  Lincoln used implied war powers to do unprecedented things during the Civil War.  FDR was prepared if necessary to proclaim a dictatorship when he took office, and said so in his inaugural address.  He was also ready, at one key point, to defy a Supreme Court decision if it did not go his way.  On the other side, the Confederacy, of course, took up arms to defy the Constitution of the US, and many elements of American society viewed FDR as anathema.  Those of us who still believe in our democracy, however--it seems to me--must not deny the Republicans the right to put their beliefs into practice.  That is how democracy is supposed to work, and that is how I hope new Democratic leadership will make it work when and if they have secured majorities.  Like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, Trump will probably try to stretch executive power beyond the law, but the courts and Congress successfully restrained those men, and they still provide legal rccourse now.  But much of what Trump wants to do--including, sadly, the deportation of immigrants--is well within our legal traditions, and ardently supported by large parts of our populaton.

And let's be frank: the Democratic side of the fence is particular vulnerable because it has won some of its greatest victories in the last 70 years or so not through the legislative process, but through the courts.  Brown vs. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Oberkfell v. Hodges were three decisions that reshaped important areas of American life without consulting the electorate or the national legislature.  Now I happen to believe that the legal case at least for Brown and Oberkfell was very strong--even if I would have preferred to see Oberkfell decided on equal protection grounds--but at least the first two of those decisions have probably mobilized more voters in opposition to them than on their behalf.  And that is a big reason for the political mess in which we find ourselves today. 

"The only cure for the ills of democracy," a great governor of the early twentieth century frequently said, "is more democracy," and I agree.  In blue America, in academia, and in the major media the principles behind these decisions are regarded as sacrosanct and unchallengeable.  But the inhabitants of the red states are citizens too, and they have elected leaders who have never accepted some or all of those decisions.

2.  Partly because of the attitudes I discussed in (1), the breakup of the country, or violence between the federal government and local authorities, has now become a possibility.  Immigration is the flash point here.  It is, of course, disgraceful that Republicans have for so long refused to do anything to legalize the status of millions of immigrants who are actively contributing to our society and who have lived here for at least a generation.  Yet if we believe in the rule of law, and in the supremacy clause of our Constitution, I do not think it is in the power of big-city mayors to shield illegal immigrants from action by the federal government, any more than it was in the power of southern governments to stop integration.  Already President Trump is also threatening to exceed his own powers with respect to this conflict.  He has warned of cutting off all federal aid to "sanctuary cities," even though the Supreme Court in 2012 ruled that the federal government could only punish local authorities for infractions in this way by withholding money specifically related to those infractions.  In my opinion, it's entirely possible that Steve Bannon, in particular, would be glad to unleash an armed conflict against liberal municipal authorities.  Those authorities must ponder their courses of action carefully and try to enlist Congress in solving a very real problem.

3.  Finally, as I indicated last week, another problem of a different character faces us.  Like William II of Germany, Donald Trump may rather quickly turn out to be intellectually and emotionally unfit to be President of the United States.  His decision to push for an investigation of non-existent massive vote fraud suggests that he is counting on the federal government to act out his irresponsible fantasies.  The ABC interview that will screen this evening is not reassuring.   If serious bipartisan opposition to Trump emerges, I think it will be on those grounds.  But if Democrats want civic virtue to prevail over partisanship among Republicans, they had better set a good example.

David Kaiser was one of the stars of the old site... until the trolls made him uncomfortable. He has his blog, and he leaves no room for comments. If I am to comment, I do so here. I disagree little with him. 

A few comments:

1a. I am amazed not only of how low my expectations of Donald Trump as President would be, but that he has undercut my expectations so badly. To say that he is 'not my President' is to deny that I am an American. For the next four years, I would rather be something other than American. It's not just that I expect to find political life pure offense in America; at least if I were Chinese I would not feel guilt at what the people of my country chose as leadership, for they did not choose their leadership.

If I had dual citizenship in some country not a Hell-hole I would take advantage of the 'alternative citizenship'.

1b. To be sure, the erosion of the process that really made America great has been severe, undercutting the foundation of the certainties that most of us once had. Such began well before the current Crisis. We cannot have government better than ourselves as a people or the elites that we have. We lost much when the universities abandoned the objective of liberal education that offered some values that both enhanced the effectiveness of society but also gave people the means of challenging the system for its flaws.  Simply among African-Americans, such figures as disparate in time as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. used the lore of the Enlightenment to challenge the vileness of white supremacy. The educational system that teaches no values can still allow people some intellectual rigor (that never left the first-rate universities) and technical prowess, but such is not enough. There must be more to life than sex, mind-altering substances (whether booze or cocaine), entertainment, material gain and comfort, and bureaucratic power -- like having the soul that allows one to reject those on principle for something even nobler. All too often we are the swine before which pearls are cast. Maybe we can accept such in people who win the lottery -- but if people unable to make personal choices of self -denial for some noble principle dominate business, academia, culture, politics, and the professions, then we are in for very bad times.

Something must have gone very wrong for so much as 46% of the American electorate to vote for someone with the ethos of a juvenile delinquent. That 46% prevailed, and look what we have.

1c. If Donald Trump can offer his 'alternative facts' as reality that we must accept as an exercise in patriotism, then we can expect the contradictions to lead to a gigantic blow-up, implosion, or meltdown. I see every day under his Presidency much like an inmate of a prison seeing his term as one more day to count down until the world becomes much better -- even if the prison does more to make me less competent to deal with the 'outside' world. I can imagine a man who governs as much by executive order as by proposing legislation transforming America into a political order much more like those in China or Russia than anything that any American can know -- unless born into a dictatorial order like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Iran,  or (if one is old enough -- the Jim Crow South if one is black and from the South).

If we get through this mess without the establishment of a totalitarian order or a nuclear World War III, then we may do what is best with a Crisis Era -- making radical changes that shore up democratic processes. Our democracy was safe so long as people who knew where the seams were chose to not drive the metaphoric equivalents if bicycles through them to evade them. This time we have people ruthless enough to drive the metaphoric equivalents of eighteen-wheel trucks or jet aircraft through them to rend the seams completely.

We may need something like the Constitution of the German Federal Republic, an document established to ensure that people of consummate ruthlessness and no morals cannot rip the seams. To be sure, such came too late to prevent the worst nightmare that a political order could ever become -- but if I had to choose where to live based upon my fear of becoming a political pariah and prisoner, Germany or the USA, I would now pick Germany.

1d. If we are to challenge the Trump nightmare, then we have a precedent -- the Civil Rights struggle of southern blacks -- within our own culture as part of our heritage. We still have relics of a civil society, which is more than I can say of people who had to struggle to liberate themselves from Communist dictatorships. We can find means, like entrepreneurship, to evade the economic power of the government and the giant corporations who practically own it through the lobbyists who wield the real power in both Houses of Congress, a reality that happened before Donald Trump became dic... excuse me, President. We can expect even worse under Donald Trump than "taxation without representation" as Patrick Henry saw it in 1776 -- taxation with neither representation nor service. We have a President who, if he were to be honest about himself and his agenda, would say "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask not what you can do for your country; ask instead what your country can do to you!" in a sick twist upon the famous line from the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy. Sure, we may start with a more decent and creditable version of the Tea Party Movement...  but Donald Trump and those around him lack the decency, humility, and integrity of Barack Obama. Evil people can be extremely self-righteous, convinced of the rectitude of their evil agenda.

1e. The Enemy is no foreign, exotic Evil Empire like Tojo's Japan or a culturally-related, but politically-perverse Evil Empire like Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy. The Enemy could well be the scorpions in our collective soul, tendencies of racism, militarism, economic hierarchy, superstition, and sadism that surface this time. Those scorpions were always present, awaiting some weakness of spirit and some electoral freak that might unleash them. The rhetoric of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and out struggle against three Evil Empires at once are all relevant again. We get at the end of this Crisis what Abraham Lincoln called for in 1861 as the Union rifted into the two most powerful enemies then possible, "a new Birth of Freedom", or our country goes into the cesspool of chaos and despotism.

2. As with those who resisted Jim Crow in the 1960s or geriatric Communism in the 1980s, we who believe in the ideal of freedom will need allies. If the white middle class had political values analogous to those of the black, Hispanic, and Asian components of the American middle class, then America would not be in the mess that it is in. For the next four years, liberals in big-city and some state governments may be the only ones to stand up for democracy that the Republican Party now believes means "obey us or face severe consequences". A plurality of Americans rejected Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election for reasons that seemed well justified then and still do. 

It is telling that 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and It Can't Happen Here are selling well. Many Americans now recognize a phrase as "alternative facts" as a form of Newspeak, the debasement of culture as a theme in current reality, and Donald Trump as an analogue to the fictional Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip.



I could go that far with Donald Trump. Warren Gamaliel Harding had ties to only one possible conflict of interest, and that had no foreign connections. He fornicated, but apparently much less than Donald Trump. Warren G. Harding was an ordinary man given extraordinary responsibility, and he handled it badly. But in twelve days Donald Trump has done far more harm to American than Warren G. Harding did in just short of 28 months.  

3. The comparison to Wilhelm II is a worthy scare.