Authoritarianism on the Rise

[pbrower2a]

(06-29-2021, 07:38 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(06-29-2021, 11:41 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Thanks for these posts, brower. I suspect that more people need to realize that the political divide today is a real crisis, and the choice we need to make is to reject and outvote the authoritarians who have made the Republican Party their home, and have used the system to expand their power and influence. We need to act and make this choice, lest we succumb not only to greater authoritarian rule, restricted to older white christian males, but fail to address the needs of society, which is the great danger that our authoritarian, reactionary ideology poses. Our right-wing is focused on the determination not to meet those needs, because to use government or cooperate to meet them is against their ideology. Yet only government has the ability to restrain these authorities. The apparent paradox of this, that our government is the tool to restrain authoritarianism, is played up to the hilt by the right wing, who use slogans of "freedom" to disguise their intent to destroy it. Those slogans themselves, I contend, is the greatest threat we in the USA face today.

 One to think of it, we are only a few weeks away from the golden anniversary of the infamous Powell memorandum, which didn’t really rear its ugly head until a full decade later with Reagan’s assault on the air traffic controllers. Many at the time consider RWR to be the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread. There are no doubt many who still do.

The Skowronek cycle is but one half-Saeculum, each cycle ending with a President damned to failure  at the end (Carter, Trump) who does everything in accordance with "the book" as began the then-current phase. Even with a President who is smart, innovative, cautious, and moral, like Carter, diminishing returns to public policy ensure failure; FDR started the New Deal cycle of American politics that lasted until the New Deal constituency started to die off and the youngest part reached retirement age. That is a generational angle to Skowronek's cycle. 

This is from a law journal, so it might be tough reading and it comes from when the Trump Presidency had begun. 

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/c...ontext=ilj

Quote: the current Republican President, Donald Trump, is in an especially precarious position in the life cycle of the Reagan regime. To explain this point, I will need to describe in some detail Skowronek’s analysis of the different political situations in which successive Presidents find themselves during the life cycle of regimes. Skowronek calls the progress of these various situations political time. 40 Skowronek classifies the political situation Presidents face—and therefore the kind of Presidents they are likely to become—according to whether they take office when a regime is robust or debilitated, and whether they are allied to the existing regime or opposed to it.41 

Donald Trump is a Republican who becomes President during the Reagan regime. According to Skowronek, Trump may have inherited one of four possible political situations. Reconstructive Presidents successfully overturn a weakened regime and begin a new one.42 They lead the opposition party to become the newly dominant party. Examples of reconstructive Presidents are the first Presidents in each new regime: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. Presidents who achieve such a reconstruction are usually considered as among our most successful. 43 If Trump is a reconstructive President, then he would be trying to overturn Reaganism and the conservative movement and create a new Trumpist regime.

 Affiliated Presidents are allied with the regime and take office later in political time.44 They try to keep faith with the regime’s commitments under changing circumstances. Skowronek describes them as “orthodox-innovators.”45 Examples in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime would be Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson; examples in the Reagan regime would be George H.W. Bush and George W Bush.46 If Trump were an affiliated President, he would present himself as an orthodox Reaganite who is trying to keep the factions in his party united. 

Preemptive Presidents come from opposition parties; they swim against the tide of a still powerful regime, so they must compromise, triangulate, and find a “third way.”47 Examples in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime would be Eisenhower and Nixon; examples in the Reagan regime would be Clinton and Obama.48 If Trump were a preemptive President, he would be opposed to Reaganism and the conservative movement and seek to find a third way between the two political parties. 

The final category, disjunctive Presidents, are leaders who come from the dominant party but have the misfortune to take over when the regime is on its last legs.49 Here the President tries to repair and reform a decrepit regime that has lost its coherence and legitimacy; the leader attempts this by selectively breaking with party orthodoxy in specific ways to shore up public support and reform the party’s base. But because the coalition has become so debilitated and weakened, the leader is not up to the task, and therefore presides over the regime’s dissolution.50 Jimmy Carter, the last Democrat in the New Deal/Civil Rights regime, and Herbert Hoover, the last Republican in the long Republican regime, are key examples. Disjunctive presidencies are usually regarded as failures. The following diagram sums up Skowronek’s account of the different styles of presidential leadership: 

(I can't copy the chart, so I will need to paraphrase it. Basically:

1. when the previous era is falling apart, when everything that it tries fails, then Americans have a tendency to support major, pervasive change that repudiates what preceded with extensive reforms that clear out the recent failures. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, F. Roosevelt, and Reagan exemplify this. These Presidents establish new eras. To be sure there may be major faults, but the Presidents on this list clearly got away with what would be serious faults of their eras (as with Jackson's Trail of Tears and the expansion of slavery). These are the Reconstructive Presidents. Four of the five appear on commonly-circulating currency -- the five, twenty, and fifty bills, and the one-cent, five-cent, and ten-cent pieces. (Lincoln appears twice, so I am not double-counting). 

2. if the political era is still robust, one gets an affiliated President who offers more of the same, perhaps more finely-tuned. These are reformers generally associated with the current order. Examples include Madison, Monroe, Polk, Grant, T. Roosevelt, Taft, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, and George H W Bush. These are mixed in results, but even if they are political failures in getting re-elected such may reflect the tiredness of their agenda. They are as a strict rule Establishment leaders. Grant appears on the fifty-dollar bill, and Kennedy appears on the fifty-cent piece. Grant is on his fifty-dollar bill for being the most effective Union general in the Civil War. These are "affiliated".

3. if the political order shows a few cracks, then someone from the Loyal Opposition tends to become the President. They offer an alternative that tries to smooth some excesses and mitigate some neglect. Such Presidents include Tyler, Fillmore, Cleveland, Wilson, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton. The author did not mention Obama, but I see him here. He may be a mirror image of Ike in being clearly liberal in contrast to Ike being conservative, having no military career in contrast to the Hero General Ike, and being rather young for a President instead of being old (one's sixties were old as late 1960). This is a mixed lot. 

4. finally the disjunctive Presidents are the last gasp of an aging phase of political life, one loyal to orthodoxies of his partisan coalition but generally ineffective. The previous phase disintegrates under such Presidents (diminishing returns to stale policies?)  The Federalists went into a political death spiral under John Adams; the Whigs did much the same under John Q. Adams. The Union came close to dissolution under Buchanan, and capitalism itself came close to dissolution under Hoover due to the Depression. 

There was no clear disjunctive or reconstructive President in this pattern in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  

Quote:Where are we in political time? To decide this question, we should ask which description of presidential leadership best fits Trump’s situation.52 It is unlikely that Trump is a reconstructive President. He did not run against the philosophy of Reaganism or claim that he sought to displace it. Like other Republican primary candidates, he sought to compare himself to Reagan, and his primary campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, originated with Reagan.53 He has strongly supported the religious right and nominated conservative pro-life judges vetted by the Federalist Society.54 With only a few important exceptions (to be discussed later), his policies and his judicial appointments have been very conservative and characteristic of a conservative Republican President. 55

 For the same reasons, Trump is not a preemptive President; he did not come into office from an opposition party, trying to swim against the tide of Reaganism and seeking to find a way to compromise with the dominant party or triangulate between the two parties’ positions. He is the leader of the regime’s dominant party, the Republicans. The members of his party have strongly supported him, not because they like his personal behavior or his political principles (he doesn’t seem to have many settled principles), but rather because his policies have been largely consistent with those of a very conservative Republican.56 The President he most sought to repudiate was not Ronald Reagan but Barack Obama, and if Obama was a preemptive President in the Reagan regime, it’s hard to see how Trump could be one too.57 

Trump might well be an affiliated President like George W. Bush. As noted above, after his election, Trump and his appointees have acted like very conservative Republicans on a wide range of issues. On the other hand, Trump has departed from Republican orthodoxy in several ways: his rejection of free trade, his defense of middle-class entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, and his repeated calls for huge public works and infrastructure projects. During the campaign Trump also criticized George W. Bush’s hawkish foreign policy, distanced himself from the Iraq War, and even blamed Bush for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks.58 Trump’s opposition to free trade and his draconian rhetoric on immigration suggest that although he is not abandoning the regime’s commitments to deregulatory capitalism, low taxes, and the culture wars, he is trying to renovate and repair the regime. 

He is adapting it to a changing Republican base of white, working class voters, especially those without college degrees. Trump, in other words, seems to be trying to give the Reagan regime a new lease on life, or a new shot of legitimacy, by pushing it in a strongly populist and nativist direction.59 And he is offering himself as a nonideological outsider who has the special talents to fix things. According to Skowronek’s model, this style of leadership makes him most like a disjunctive President. As Skowronek puts it:

Quote: [O]ne of the great ironies of the politics of disjunction is that the Presidents who come to office in these sorts of situations tend to have only the most tenuous relationship to the establishments they represent. Long-festering problems within the regime tend to throw up leaders only nominally affiliated with it, and in their efforts to address the issues of the day, these affiliates often press major departures of their own from the standard formulas and priorities set in the old agenda. The political effect of these departures is disjunctive: they sever the political moorings of the old regime and cast it adrift without anchor or orientation.

This description seems to fit Trump quite well. Trump fits the disjunctive pattern in a second way. As differences within the coalition become increasingly obvious and difficult to manage, disjunctive candidates argue that they are able to fix things because they have special technical abilities. For example, they might portray themselves as extremely skilled politicians (John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan), outstanding technocrats and problem solvers (Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter); or, as in Trump’s case, outstanding deal makers.61 They explain to the public that what is important is not ideological purity but the ability to get things done. As Skowronek puts it, in the last days of a regime, mastery of technique—in this case dealmaking and business acumen—“is a hallmark of the politics of disjunction.”62 Focusing on technique allows the new President to remain ambiguous about his or her positions, allowing everyone in the coalition to believe that it will get what it wants. We won’t really know if Trump is a disjunctive President until he leaves office. But many of the signs are present. And when we combine Skowronek’s account of Presidential leadership with the other pieces of evidence identified above, there is a very good chance that Trump does not represent the beginning of a new politics in America but the end of an older one.63

This is from "Winter 2019", so this article comes from about two years ago. Yes, I see Donald Trump as largely a disjunctive failure. He tried to meld ultra-conservative economics with an angry populism, and the contradictions which he did not recognize as potential trouble. He did get some reactionary judges on the Supreme Court and into federal judgeships, and he accelerated federal executions as his expression of "law and order". He is disjunctive in ways that Jimmy Carter wasn't; the warning signs should have been obvious in his business dealings, his personal life, and in rhetoric that could only divide. Trumpism is Reaganism on steroids, with none of the attempts to soothe feelings of the Opposition with kind words. Trump faulted people for failing to believe exactly what he believes. 

Trump offers the rhetoric of a shock jock such as the late Rush Limbaugh and his sybaritic indulgence as evidence of personal competence. Even his business dealings have best been described as "grazing"... putting huge amounts of effort and capital into some promising venture that he gives up on when he tires of it. Thus the Trump Shuttle as an airline (which he sold to another airline), the pitiable Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and the dubious Trump Taj Mahal Casino. How someone can lose money in a casino without letting mobsters skim it (which, in view of his friendships with figures of organized crime, seems likely) is beyond my understanding. He made a venture into education as the for-profit Trump University, not to be confused with such private non-profit universities as Cornell, Vanderbilt, Rice, or Stanford where one is expected to show promise before attending and work one's tail off to get a degree. Diploma mills are worthless. He did sort-of-OK in reality television, which reflects what Henry Louis Mencken said about mass marketing and mass culture: "nobody ever goes broke underestimating the taste of the American people". The one reliable source of income has been as a landlord, Trump having the fortune of having heavily been invested in New York City as the Big Apple became desirable again. 

Donald Trump is the most authoritarian President in our history. He has stoked much taste for it, which includes causing people to lose their inhibitions against base bigotry on ethnicity and religion and crass elitism on economics. Reagan at least took swipes at the fascistic KKK and neo-Nazi types; Trump has failed at that minimum standard of human decency. He has abandoned one part of what has been usually associated with conservatism -- respect for protocol, precedent, and the rule of law (hardly anyone could have foreseen the definitive expression of contempt for the rule of law as he egged people on to storm the Capitol) -- because Obama co-opted that. Trump cast off the genuinely conservative aspect of the Obama Administration.

It's up to Americans to repudiate him. One promising sign is that Trump's base is decidedly old. If one has an elderly clientele and one's customer base isn't being replenished, then the enterprise that depends upon loyal customers already older than average is doomed.