Category Archives: current events

“Moderates” have to get into the fight for democracy

The men who drafted and fought over the blueprint for the American experiment in democracy began with the famous words “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” and then set out a plan they hoped would establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to the people and the people’s posterity. Of course, at the time, “the people” was understood to exclude the majority of humanity, women were to have no political say, Blacks were not universally considered human, let alone part of “the people”, indigenous Americans were excluded as were poor “white” men and many others over the years.

After the bloody Civil War the constitution was amended to include former slaves, and anyone else born in the United States, as citizens with Privileges and Immunities subject to Equal Protection by the federal government. Immediate steps were taken, notably by the Supreme Court, to thwart this change, but it is written into the Bible of American democracy and would eventually, almost a century later, after decades of court battles and bloody street protests, become enforceable law. Of course, it would be more than half a century after the end of the Civil War, after a long fight, before women got the vote, but the animating idea of “a more perfect union” seems to have been that democracy is an evolving work in progress, infinitely perfectible.

Resistance to this progress has always been the work of reactionaries, conservatives, the organized right. In every era they united to oppose the evolution of democracy. Their game is always perpetuity– keeping things as they are and making sure the status quo never fundamentally changes. Some have advanced shrewd arguments for their view that the way things are is about as good as it can be, advanced theories that showed the dangers of including everyone in democracy, they raised the terrifying specters of Socialism and COMMUNISM. Others simply did the grunt work to make sure people they didn’t like couldn’t vote, couldn’t get their day in court, couldn’t stand on rights guaranteed to them in the constitution. The most intellectually ambitious reactionaries created high-minded philosophies to justify their reactionary views. The Originalists, for example, hold a judicial philosophy that minimizes the radically democratizing changes to the Constitution made after the Civil War, always harkening back to the “intent of the framers,” the original wealthy white men who hammered out the original slavery-protecting “Originalist” Constitution almost a century earlier.

There are scholars who point out, with ample proofs, that the post-Civil War Constitution is a radically redesigned blueprint much more in line with a modern, ethnically diverse, largely urban, non-slave holding democracy than the unamended Originalist version. Radicals on the left want to create fundamental change in their lifetimes, not just plant seeds that will germinate a few generations from now. They recognize that time is running out to fix a badly dysfunctional system. “Moderates” are the “reasonable” compromisers who advocate a middle ground, some changes are needed, they concede, but change is best achieved in small, sometimes imperceptible increments.

Reactionaries, for whatever reason, always seem more energetic, better funded, more fanatical, more devoted, better organized, more relentless and readier to resort to any means necessary to achieve their aim of keeping things just the way they are. The reactionaries of their day said “fine, you have the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — we have States’ Rights!” and one of the rights of those states was to find workarounds for the new prohibition against slavery (the clause “except as punishment for a crime” came in handy), the Supreme Court helped out with the 14th, leaving virtually every detail of federal citizenship in the hands of the states until 1964, and, as for the right of American-born Blacks to vote… whell, there are ways to squash that shit, right at the polls. if they don’t get the message with the damned lynchings and having their damned homes burned to the ground. As for blocking all federal legislation to stop lynching, or enforce the unalienable human rights (in a democracy) we call Civil Rights, we have the filibuster!

Adam Jentleson, who recently wrote a history of how the filibuster, almost always used to advance slavery and then segregation, came to cripple the Senate, had an op-ed in the NY Times the other day entitled When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights? He begins by setting out all that Biden has accomplished with a mere 50 votes in the Senate, deftly sidestepping the filibuster to provide funds to fight Covid-19, to give economic relief to millions, to lift millions of children out of poverty. He then points out that racism at law has always required, under the filibuster, a supermajority to rein it in.

During the Jim Crow era, the Senate held long, contentious debates on the bills that built the middle class, such as Social Security or Medicare, but none of those bills needed to get a supermajority to proceed. By contrast, popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes and fight workplace discrimination faced endless filibusters, and were blocked by supermajority thresholds. While Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats aren’t intentionally recreating such an unfair system, in practice, they are, perpetuating the same double standard that upheld Jim Crow for almost a century.

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His essay is worth reading. He continues:

But they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. In March, during his first speech on the Senate floor, Senator Raphael Warnock argued that “no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of our democracy.” If Senate rules happen to preserve what Warnock called “Jim Crow in new clothes,” just as they preserved the original version, they must be reformed. For Democratic leaders, this means finding the political will to never again allow bills that guarantee equal access to voting and representation to suffer unequal treatment.

Recall that on the day Warnock was declared the winner of the Georgia runoff for Senator, a mob carrying the Confederate flag stormed the Capitol, injuring 140 Blue Lives Matter officers in hand to hand combat to prevent the final certification of the winner of the presidential election. Reactionaries will always do whatever it takes. If it takes a lynch mob, so be it. The hopped up grunts, as always, will go to prison, meantime, we get what we need — a violent, galvanizing argument to rally our side.

All the rest of us have is law and the enforcement of law. If a parliamentary rule prevents any action in the Senate, if even one defiant member of the opposition party registers an intention to “filibuster”, there has to be a way to fix this. Jentleson, a former Senate staffer, offers a workaround to those who claim, incorrectly, that the filibuster is about protecting “bipartisanship.”

[S]enators can reclaim their right to shape the rules of the Senate even when doing so runs afoul of the parliamentarian, a staff member whose influence has grown dramatically in recent decades as senators lost faith in their ability to interpret Senate rules. Up until now, senators have enthusiastically abused the spirit of reconciliation while adhering, with comic devotion, to its letter; they use it to pass trillions in spending but studiously discard the provisions the parliamentarian deems insufficiently “budgetary,” such as a minimum wage increase. But only senators and the vice president preside over and vote in the Senate, and they have final say over what gets included in reconciliation bills. Rather than acting as automatons who simply read the rulings that the staff hands them (literally), they can include civil rights in the forthcoming reconciliation bill and, when the parliamentarian rules against it, Vice President Kamala Harris can issue her own ruling countermanding the parliamentarian. Fifty senators can sustain Harris’s ruling and pass voting rights, without ever having to vote to alter the filibuster itself.

Senators can also simply reform the rules to ensure that civil rights bills are treated equally. Given the Senate’s ugly history of blocking such legislation, there is ample justification for targeted filibuster reforms to ensure that civil rights bills receive majority votes.

Of course, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose ending the filibuster, and imbue bipartisanship with lofty importance. But at the end of the day, it is up to Mr. Biden to bring home the small number of votes needed to end the tiered system that forces voting rights legislation to garner supermajorities in the Senate, while other bills sail through with just 50 votes.

Biden has the bully pulpit now and Jentleson argues that he must do everything in his considerable power to rally his party to the cause of protecting voting rights, federal enforcement of which has been systematically dismantled by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court. If the many Republican state voter suppression laws are allowed to stand unchallenged (except in courts where resolution of the issues is years away) then we will have, in the next election, a gerrymandered Republican majority, in the House and likely also in the Senate (two for each state, populations be damned). Then, under existing parliamentary rules, anything else Biden has planned will be subject to the mockery of an obstructionist right-wing joke. Ta ta to bipartisanship and democracy, both. Welcome to the One Party United States of Charles Koch and friends.

. . . it is impossible to look at the effort Mr. Biden has devoted to voting rights until now and conclude that he is pulling out all the stops. His heart does not seem to be in this fight. Instead of pressing for the reforms necessary to pass these bills with 50 votes, he has defended the filibuster, while his administration has been challenging civil rights leaders to “out-organize” the Republicans who have implemented systematic, state-sanctioned voter suppression. Many find his stance naïve. “‘Just count the jellybeans’ is a helluva strategy,” political analyst Bakari Sellers tweeted in frustration.

He concludes:

The effort Mr. Biden poured into infrastructure shows what genuine commitment from the White House looks like. While the president has given one major speech dedicated to voting rights, he has held numerous speeches and events on infrastructure, sending the signal that the issue is a top priority. His cabinet and staff practically camped out on Capitol Hill. By late July, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein, his staff had held at least 998 meetings and calls on infrastructure; the office of legislative affairs had held 330 meetings and calls with members of Congress and their top aides in the previous month alone.

Mr. Biden has invited comparisons to President Lyndon Johnson, but Mr. Johnson paired accomplishments like Medicare with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, as now, the task was deemed so daunting that some cautioned against investing too much of the president’s political capital in the effort. By the time of his assassination, President John F. Kennedy had let segregationists take civil rights hostage to his top domestic priority: a tax cut.

But when Mr. Johnson’s advisers counseled him to give up on civil rights, too, he shot back, “What the hell is the presidency for?” He personally intervened to get the civil rights bill to the floor, then forced his former mentor, fellow Democrat and self-avowed white supremacist, Senator Richard Russell, to lead a filibuster for roughly three months, betting that he could crack an obstructionist front that had remained solid since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Mr. Johnson had to deal with more than a few reluctant senators — most of those filibustering the civil rights bill were Democrats. To beat them, Mr. Johnson did not use magic powers. He simply spent months working every angle, relentlessly.

If Mr. Biden fails where Mr. Johnson succeeded, he will have left intact the system of legislative segregation that preserved Jim Crow. Whatever else he accomplishes, that will remain part of his legacy.

The president may try everything and fail. But the stakes are so high, he has to try.

As Joe Biden himself has said many times — come on, man!

No consequences for murder equals a license to kill

If a bullying kid never faces consequences for terrorizing and beating up classmates, it is permission to the little fuck to continue bloodying noses. If a terrorist organization is free, for a century, to lynch people with the winking cooperation of local authorities — after the federal government has been taken out of the anti-terrorism law enforcement equation by the Supreme Court — why WOULDN’T they continue terrorizing and making examples of anyone claiming their federally guaranteed constitutional rights? The main reason society punishes things like murder, rape and torture is because if you don’t punish these things they simply become normal.

Ezra Klein recently made a good point about the lack of consequences for the architects of our generally disastrous (if always highly lucrative) military slaughters abroad:

The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

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So, on the right, and even among the moderate, corporate, conflict averse mass media, Biden is to blame for problems with a largely successful civilian evacuation after a military withdrawal negotiated by Trump, a supremely artistic deal that included the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters in a negotiation that did not include the democratically elected government of Afghanistan. Anything goes wrong, it’s the fault of the illegitimate, corrupt, mentally challenged, defeated clown who botched the perfect peace deal (after stealing a landslide victory from the rightful winner)!


The latest episode of Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast (with fellow historian, Joanne Freeman, an expert in the Revolutionary War period) called Treason(ish), comes to mind.   


The main takeaway, for me, is that lack of accountability, lack of consequences  — for things like violent treason — ALWAYS ensures the same kind of behavior.   Guarantees it, really.

As part of the surrender that ended the Civil War Grant allowed the defeated Confederate army to keep its guns and go home with a gentleman’s promise they wouldn’t use the guns to continue the armed insurrection.  None of the Confederate generals who massacred surrendering black troops during the war were ever charged with anything (outside of the Nazi-forerunner, Henry Wirz, who ran the notorious Andersonville death camp, and who was executed for his devilish crimes).  No leader of the Confederate rebellion faced any sort of terrible consequences. Many served in the US federal government after the war, continuing their dogged fight for race-based superiority. 

Heather:

So one of the things that jumped out at me when we were going to go ahead and do this episode was a song that is sung in the south in 1866, immediately after the war, it was called, I’m A Good Old Rebel and it went like this: ‘I hate your Spangled Banner, your great republic too. I hate your Freedmen’s Bureau, in uniforms of blue. I hate your constitution, your eagle and its squall, and a lying thieving Yankee, I hate the worst of all. 300, listen to this, three’… I’m sorry, I live this stuff.

Joanne Freeman:

Go for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

‘300,000 Yankees lie moldering in the dust. We got 300,000 before you conquered us. They died of Southern fevers and Southern steel and shot. And I wish it was 3 million instead of what we got.’    Can you imagine that after the Revolution and that entering American culture in that period?

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The only consequences faced by anyone in the south after the Civil War (aside from Klan leaders locked up by agents of the brand new Department of Justice, awaiting trial, until the Supreme Court quickly decided they were not really subject to federal law) were faced by American Civil War veterans who fought for the USA — Black ones, routinely massacred any time they tried to assert their newly “guaranteed” constitutional rights.

Heather:

I’m going to say that while I would like to talk about the way the government worked and the way the laws worked in that period and we need to, what really jumps out to me in this period is I’m so glad you’re sitting down, culture.

Because what really matters in the determination of the way this is going to play out is the fact that when Ulysses Ulysses Grant for the United States goes ahead and accepts the surrender of The Army of Northern Virginia from General Robert E. Lee. He does so with minimal punishment. He lets the men keep their firearms on their own words saying they’re not going to continue to fight. He says, go ahead, go home and plant your crops because I know everybody in the South is starving as they were. And he believes that being lenient is going to bring these people back into society. And interestingly enough, a number of the leaders at that point including people like Wade Hampton are like, well, I wasn’t there, I didn’t give my word, I’m going to go run a guerrilla war, which they don’t actually do and that’s itself an interesting story. But what he sees, what Grant’s sees as being magnanimous, because everybody is really going to want to be in this together, really quickly gets reinterpreted on the Southern side as being, look, see, they knew we were right all along.

We had the better argument, nobody dared to stand up against us because we were the ones with the moral argument. And you can see really quickly in the summer of 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by a Southern sympathizer, the idea that they’re going to literally assassinate the leader of the opposite government, the government that won the war, and there’s not going to be any kind of backlash in a legal sense against that. Of course, John Wilkes Booth is killed in the manhunt for him and they do actually hang the people that are believed to be responsible for Lincoln’s death, a number of them. But that’s it. That and Henry Wirz who ran the Andersonville Prison camp, they’re the only executions of Confederates after the war. But again, one of the things that keeps me up at night is there are tons of executions after the Civil War, tons of them, but they’re of African-Americans who fought for the United States government.

I mean, you look at the whole picture here. It was an incredibly vengeful period, but not of the victors against the losers, the other way around. And one of the things I think that really drives that is the idea that the government had represented first by Grant and then after that, by Andrew Johnson who took over after Lincoln was assassinated, that everybody’s got the right idea, everybody wants to get along, we can do this and all be friendly and the people who wrote things like the Good Old Rebel song have every intention of taking every step that they can, and they continue to push that envelope until they essentially re-take over the south after 1877.

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Makes me wanna holler.   We have “controversial” public monuments to violent traitors who committed war crimes they were never tried or punished for, instead they have literally been put on pedestals as immortal American heroes.  150 years after the Confederate surrender a ragtag mob of outraged Trumpists carry the flag of bloody treason, (laundered by an army of influential historical revisionists, into an innocent, totally non-racist, banner of “States’ Rights”), into the halls of Congress after fighting the Blue Lives Matter cops in brutal hand to hand combat — to violently stop the joint session of Congress in its constitutional duty to finalize the election of the next American president.   Now it’s time, says the Trumpist GOP in one voice, to just turn the page.   What could go wrong? 


A good start, although grossly belated and susceptible to eternal additional delay

The news broke the other day that the House Select Committee on Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot (he owns it, no matter what spin you put on it, its purpose was to extra-legally keep him in power based on a lie, Trump organized it, publicized it, incited it, walked down to the Capitol with his private army…) is finally casting a wide net to learn how many people were involved in the planning and execution of this premeditated attack on constitutional government in the United States.

Me, personally, I’d have convened this Select Committee on February 1, after the GOP came together as a bloc to disappear and defend the January 6 MAGA riot. The long delay in getting a serious investigation started is deadly to the case, at least to the diehard 39%, since most Americans of all political persuasions view the events of nine months ago as irrelevant ancient history.

The clock is also ticking on that razor thin Congressional majority. The replacement for anti-filibuster reform senator Diane Feinstein (D-Ca), 88, for example, will be appointed by Gavin Newsom’s replacement as California governor, if anything happens to her, as the GOP exploits the odd Recall Law in that state to once again replace a Democratic governor, this one elected with a more than 60% majority. Any of the forty-six assorted clowns running to replace him will get to be governor if recall gets 51% of the votes and they get more votes than the others.

Still, this step toward accountability and truth by the January 6 Select Committee qualifies as good news. The list of people whose records are sought is exhaustive, as it should be. Here’s a sliver of the hundreds of Trump-related people whose phone and online information from the days leading up to, and including, January 6 have been requested:

It’s fairly clear that many of these people had knowledge of, or were directly involved, in perpetrating or trying to stop (as Jared and Ivanka both claimed they were doing on January 6th) the MAGA riot at the Capitol. It’s also fairly clear that many of these people will fight to the death in court, as Trump and his ilk ALWAYS do, to delay the release of this politically poisonous information for as long as possible. Their legal fees will be paid by obscenely wealthy Nazis who will arrange to make these fees tax deductible donations to apolitical non-profit corporations.

Congressional subpoenas are no longer viewed, on the right (since Barr had Trump assert the blanket preemptive privilege that the Bagpiper pulled out of his ample, crusty ass), as legal commands to appear, backed by the ability to enforce them by sending the Sergeant-At-Arms to arrest you for contempt, but as partisan political tools deployed simply to harass and embarrass political enemies. The ability to drag out legal proceedings for years to block legitimate investigations into areas of vital public concern demonstrates the urgent need for former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner’s Interbranch Dispute Resolution Court. Two weeks, issue fully argued and decided — obey the fucking subpoena. Until we have this court, we’re as fucked as a nation that no longer has an enforceable Voting Rights Act that can guarantee the constitutional right to vote to all citizens.

As Democrats deliberate and try to do the right thing in a political system under sustained attack by literal fascists (first a polite request, then, two weeks later, a subpoena, then a long court battle) Trumpists are busy all day, every day, stirring the shit pot, passing new voter restriction laws, laws restricting the teaching of historical events that would make White Christian children feel bad, promulgating new anti-vaccine and anti-masking rules and blaming Biden for the chaos in Afghanistan and the massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths from the Trump variant.

One of the fiercest defenders of Trump’s “landslide victory” over Joe Biden has recently called for Kamala Harris to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove the mentally incompetent Biden from his illegitimate office. Madison Cawthorn is the name of this freshman Congressman and sophomore piece of shit. See, it’s all just partisanship, showmanship, brinksmanship! GO TEAM!

The Roger Stone-Donald Trump controversy explained | Roger Stone | The Guardian
Seig Heil, baby!

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s detailed discussion of modern autocrats jumps back and forth in history, from strongman to strongman, throwing an illuminating light on the gross consistency of the strongman playbook. She lays bare the always intimate symbiosis between the strongman and the wealthy elites he courts during his rise and rewards for keeping him in power. If you are a member of a wealthy elite, and your strongman doggedly protects your privilege, what else do you really need from government? On the other hand, for the average citizen, the thrill of committing violent mayhem against local and foreign “enemies”, with the blessing of Dear Leader, is about all you get, outside of stirring propaganda, confirmation of your hatreds and autocratic rule. Every strongman requires obscenely privileged wealthy backers and squads of angry men, standing back and standing by, to intimidate and bloody all enemies.

At random from this great book, when Italian rogue, whoremaster, construction, media and advertising magnate Silvio Berlusconi took power in Italy in 1994, after running as the candidate of the first corporately created political party, Forza Italia (a one stop corporate influence shop that had clubs all over Italy, ran his marketing campaign, auditioned candidates, lobbied government, etc.), he refused to divest himself of control of his huge business holdings. He appointed his daughter, Marina, to run the holding company that controlled his major businesses. In this way, as far as he was concerned, he’d solved the entire question of conflict of interest and government ethics, he simply made a bold political, not technically illegal, move nobody could stop him from making. This was when he first became Prime Minister in 1994. More recent examples of this same thing, by strongmen and would-be strongmen, immediately leap to mind.

Accordingly, Ben-Ghiat wastes no time making a connection that needs no mention, instead moving on to talk about the way the strongman’s rogue nature draws people to him. He thrills them by proclaiming strict law and order for enemies, and complete impunity for himself and his cronies.

Strongmen often demonstrate their power and virility by flaunting their ability to have unlimited sex with a parade of women. Ben-Ghiat describes the practices of Muammar Gaddafi and his bunga bunga rooms. Berlusconi credited Gaddafi for the term, which to strongmen means unlimited sex, with or without consent. Berlusconi loved the term bunga-bunga and used it to describe his own sex parties [1]. Gaddafi’s bunga bunga room was more of a rape room, for good looking teenaged girls picked out of crowds by a special team always on the look out for young beauties. Berlusconi consorted with a more professional class of women, he was very wealthy, didn’t mind paying for sex, and had a reputation as a rascal to uphold. Other recent strongmen have the professionals they pay for sex sign binding non-disclosure agreements in exchange for hush money.

This embrace of hyper-sexuality and entitlement to sexual gratification is part of the patriarchal “macho” cult of personality myth of the virile strongman, you know, you can walk right up and grab ’em by the pussy, really, seriously. Transgressing the law, and the norms of polite society, is intoxicating to mobs, and a sexual thrill to men who envy the leader’s power to command sex. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t go into detail about Mussolini’s sex life, aside from noting that he was at it for a good part of every day (in ten minute intervals, apparently) and that the cheering crowd was an unfailing aphrodisiac for the priapic womanizer El Duce. Ben-Ghiat includes this sexual predation as part of the strongman’s universal drives: to accumulate bodies, territory and wealth. Again, brings many things from not long ago to mind.

Ben-Ghiat notes that strongmen can tolerate women in power, but only if they are subservient to the strongman. She describes the misogyny that Angela Merkel faced whenever she met with a strongman. Berlusconi made her wait, standing in front of his deak, while he took a long phone call. He referred to her as a “unfuckable lard ass” (the Department of Justice is currently defending an American former president for delivering a more delicate version of the same line, directed at a female journalist he also called a liar, at a press conference, part of his “official duties”). Trump refused to shake Merkel’s hand. Putin made her wait for hours and then, knowing her fear of dogs, unleashed his dogs near her. The German Chancellor said of Putin “I know why he has to do this, to prove he is a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”

This terror of their own weakness is the driving secret of every strongman. Ben-Ghiat asks “who would the strongman be without the crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.” The pageantry that is the hallmark of every strongman regime “plays to his bottomless need for control and adoration. Of course, having it all is never enough for men who live in a secret state of dread at losing everything. Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility he is pursued by the demon of fear. He’s wary of the people he represses… of individuals who can prosecute him, of elites who can turn on him and of enemies who wish to remove him from the face of the earth.”

Only a strongman understands his fellow strongmen on this level, which is why they tend to validate each other publicly. It is all love between macho strongmen. The love of the crowd reassures them. We all recall the “lovefest” of January 6 when some of the best people, in one of the largest crowds in history, got a little carried away kissing and hugging the police in their overwhelming adoration of our recent strongman. We could all feel the love.

Wait a second, you say mass media magnate Berlusconi fought to stay in power to avoid prosecution? Berlusconi, as Prime Minister, had the power to get Italian Public Television hosts fired for saying things he didn’t like, though he owned the three most popular television stations in Italy, featuring scantily clothed women, he had no direct control of these public TV hosts. Exploiting corporate conflict aversion he was able to remove critical voices from the mass media, effectively silencing public critics. He managed to remain unaccountable for many arguable crimes, bold risks, committed before and after taking office, though his top minister was later imprisoned for Mafia ties and a few others faced legal consequences, just not Silvio. Other strongmen have not done as well as the Italian forerunner of Donald J. Trump. Some ended badly, Saddam, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Hitler.

Every strongman must successfully exploit the mass media of his day to gain power and control public opinion. Radio was a boon to Mussolini and Hitler (as it was to FDR here), TV to more modern strongmen. “Social media” is today’s coin of the realm for strongmen. Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (gruesomely murdering and dismembering a prominent critic with complete impunity) employs a gigantic army of internet trolls (“the flies”) spreading every message useful to his glorious, reformist rule and drowning out anything critical (MBS also doesn’t hesitate to imprison or butcher critics and rivals, clearly).

In regard to the internet age, a sobering realization dawns when thinking of our once and future Unitary Executive, Donald J. Trump. He could never have become president, in spite of his genius, in spite of being a self-made millionaire at age eight and all the rest, without the unregulated, powerfully influential battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook. Before the ubiquity of internet echo chambers, before TV (which gave us JFK), the technological breakthrough for early modern stongmen was mass produced affordable radios. Mussolini and Hitler were pioneers in live radio broadcasts of their live mass rallies. It was amazing the effect leaders could have on millions listening at home, by delivering a direct message to each individual citizen in a compellingly personal way. “Social media” is the most directly “personal” form of mass messaging yet. Look, the leader spells just as badly as you do, LOL!

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment, saw at once that Hitler in the studio, trying to do radio, was a complete dud. Wooden and not the faintest bit charismatic in front of a studio microphone, Hitler’s rally-stirring genius only blossomed when the human geiger counter began to work a crowd into a frenzy. Goebbels only aired live Hitler performances, where his beloved idol really shined. The Fuhrer’s mesmerizing live performance was helped by body language training from a top German actor, he also worked with a skilled hypnotist, studying techniques to hone his native talents, constantly tweaking his Hitler brand, which Goebbels lovingly produced. Talk about reality TV.

Ben-Ghiat notes that for many it is intoxicating to commit criminal acts with impunity. “The special psychological climate that strongmen create among their people, the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power, endows life with energy, purpose and drama.” This criminal culture filers down from the top. “Making government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the contagion effect. So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals and murderers available for service.”

African strongman Mobutu hired the public relations/lobbying/political consulting firm of Paul Manafort and self-proclaimed rat-fucker Roger Stone to launder his corrupt, bloody reputation for the rest of the world.. Manafort’s job, immediately prior to volunteering to work for free as Trump’s campaign manager, was grooming Russian oligarch-backed strongman Viktor Yanukovich [2] to become strongman president of Ukraine. After Yanukovich was elected a massive anti-corruption movement ousted him from power, he fled Ukraine (to Russia) and was replaced as president by the young Jewish lawyer, comedian, TV star and anti-corruption candidate Volodymyr “I need you to do me a favor, though” Zelensky. Manafort was never prosecuted for his direct, secret dealings with the Russian secret service in connection with their help in Trump’s 2016 election campaign, but was convicted of other felonies, for which he was later pardoned by the president he’d loyally served, and refused to incriminate. As was Stone, Flynn, Bannon and a rogue’s gallery of other icons of transgression and polished criminals including Michael Milken. Y’all know the drill.

In relation to the strongman’s need for experienced criminals and dirty-tricksters, Ben-Ghiat cites Hannah Arendt for the proposition that “murderers were most likely to survive in Nazi death camps, not least because the SS appointed criminals to be be capos in charge of disciplining their fellow prisoners. Criminals proved to be some of the Nazis best torturers since they were highly imaginative when it came to pain.” Pinochet was a big believer in torture, with the official backing of the US government that made his rise to power possible.

Strongman states are chaotic, violent and destructive, yet they claim economic growth superior to what is available under democracy. Some categories of people prosper under a regime that helps cronies and financial elites concentrate capital and privatize public goods. Non-cronies and ordinary citizens better just get on line for the rallies and cheer loud as hell for the strongman.

Ben-Ghiat turns to Arendt again:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and ficion, i.e. the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false, i.e. the standards of thought, no longer exist.”

Every strongman harnesses the power of mass media to influence and intimidate, dismantle the public’s ability to think critically, and create the ideal subjects of strongman rule. All the strongman needs, beyond that and massive financial backing, are a few people with public gravitas who can harness the law, as Bill Barr did for Trump, to advance the strongman’s needs. Ben-Ghiat describes Barr’s March 2020 attempt to get Congress to declare a state of emergency (Covid-19) to allow him to detain, indefinitely and without trial, members of the Left who he accused of “a systematic shredding of laws and undermining the rule of law.” [3] Barr told cops that he was engaged in an “unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society.” He sure was, but only certain ones.

From a bruising, norm-busting presidential campaign, to Trump’s Bannon-composed America-first “American Carnage” State of the Union, which Dubya called “weird shit”, to the January 6 MAGA riot Trump organized, incited and defended after losing the election he claims to have won in a landslide, Trump and his allies followed the strongman playbook step by step. Create an inhuman enemy bent on destroying society, an existential threat, offer yourself as the only savior, keep your war chest full of dark money, control the mass media to convince masses that black is white, up is actually down, use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate the thoughtful, who tend to hesitate and deliberate rather than taking the bold, violent action the strongman is always ready to inspire, et, viola, you are on your way to creating a strongman state.

Ben-Ghiat points out that for strongmen politics is always personal. She notes that all strongmen are also “personalists” holding no real ideals beyond what is best for them personally. “Thirsty for profit and holding a propriety view of office, personalist rulers exploit their nation’s natural and human resources for economic gain.” Bolsonaro warned indigenous communities that they must adapt to his exploitation of their Amazon rain forest habitat or disappear. “Trump’s authoritarian bargain with elites — profits for them, political support for him — motivates his administration’s enthusiastic embrace of climate change denial.” She notes that as of May 2020 he’d rolled back a hundred environmental regulations, greatly increasing profits for his most highly polluting donors.

Strongmen, like all perpetuators of unfair systems, require maximum opacity for their most controversial operations to flourish. Here’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ending with a nice snapshot of corporate media’s famous “conflict aversion”, and its tacit support for the status quo, no matter how grotesque:

“To counter authoritarianism we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government. At the heart of strongman rule is the claim that he and his agents are above the law, above judgement and not beholden to the truth. Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick, elections, is less reliable. New authoritarian states often simulate democracy. The nominal democracies governed by personalist rulers often act like autocracies. In Trump’s America, as in Berlusconi’s Italy, the legal and the illegal, fact and fiction, celebrity and politics, blend together until nothing means anything anymore and everything is a confidence game. The corrosive effects of the shift away from standards of accountability and truth were evident in the reaction of CBS news journalist Nora O’Donnell to Trump’s January’s 2020 State of the Union speech. Although the speech contained numerous false statements about economic growth during his presidency, O’Donnell hailed it as ‘a triumph by the Reality TV president, a master showman at his best’.”

Everyone of these motherfuckers, in their day, a master showman at his best.

[1]

A century later, the term bunga bunga became popular again as part of a joke on the internet.[7][n 1] This joke was then narrated by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his dinner parties (in a version which featured, as prisoners, former ministers from the centre-left opposition party led by Romano Prodi).[8]

This expression was then frequently quoted by the Italian and international press during the 2011 investigation surrounding Silvio Berlusconi’s child exploitation acquiring a quite different meaning as “an orgy involving a powerful leader”; it was allegedly taught to Silvio Berlusconi by Muammar al-Gaddafi,[9] who was also the unwitting originator of the phrase Zenga Zenga.

In Italy, the term “has become an instant, supposedly hilarious, household expression”.[10]

Recent explanations disagree on its meaning, or perhaps illustrate the range of its reference. It “is said to be a sort of underwater orgy where nude young women allegedly encircled the nude host and/or his friends in his swimming pool”,[11] “an African-style ritual” performed for male spectators by “20 naked young women”,[12] or erotic entertainment of a rich host involving pole dancing and competitive striptease by skimpy-costumed “women in nurses’ outfits and police uniforms”,[13] the prize being prostitution for the host.[14]

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[2]

Ukraine was by no means the roughest place Manafort ever worked. His roster of clients going back to the 1980s has included Congolese and Filipino dictators, along with a guerilla leader in Angola. But even this range of experience did not make the Party of Regions an easy customer for Manafort. The reputation of its leaders had been stained with blood since at least 2000, when some of Yanukovych’s political patrons were implicated in the murder of Georgy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who was abducted and beheaded that year.

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[3]

Yet while the world is consumed by this pandemic and when he thought no one was watching, Attorney General William Barr proposed granting himself immense, permanent powers extending far past the needs posed by this threat.

For example, the proposal grants Barr personally the power to ask any chief judge to hold a citizen, “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.” What qualifies as such disobedience or emergency is left, once again, to Barr. So Barr would be able to hold any American—man, woman or child—indefinitely at his own discretion, whether related to COVID-19 or not, without trial.

The proposal also prevents people with COVID-19 from even applying for asylum. The most vulnerable populations around the world, including children with credible fear for their lives whom we are required under the Refugee Convention to protect, would be needlessly turned away.

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Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I will be updating this book report soon to include some of the fascinating details historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out in her playbook for dictators. In the meantime I highly recommend this insightful book to anyone interested in the historical parallels to the autocratic challenge we face today in the USA! USA!!!!

The author, in going back and forth in time between Mussolini, Pinochet, Putin, Saddam, Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Franco, Hitler and company, presents the unaltered playbook that every one of these “strongmen” uses. It is uncanny how every one of them use exactly the same reality- bending techniques.

The Strongman playbook she lays out is remarkably consistent over the century it has been in use. Every one of these Law and Order Strongmen employs criminals and ambitious sociopaths to subvert the rule of law, intimidate and silence critics and favor and shield those who enable the dictator’s unchallengeable rule. Loyalty and personal use to the Strongman become the sole benchmarks for personalist rulers, like our most recent former president, when hiring henchmen.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat ends her book describing the essential weakness of the Strongman and the path citizens of conscience must take when facing the rise of a Strongman:

The Trump variant

Let’s call the US Delta variant of Covid-19 what it is: the Trump variant.

For the many months the Orange Polyp was downplaying the pandemic hoax and scheming with his allies to fix the election in every way they could imagine, he kept touting the vaccine his scientists were creating in record time. Once we have the vaccine, he promised, this long nightmare will quickly be over. To everyone’s shock, it turned out he was lying.

After record voter turnout decisively ousted the Orange Polyp from office there was a new burning issue for his faithful 39% to rally behind, demonstrated for them again when their leader’s landslide victory was stolen from them by a cabal of Communist Nazis, criminal Blacks and traitorous GOP leaders, all funded by Jew pedophile cannibals – you can’t trust anything the illegitimate government does!

After losing the presidential election in 2020, by a decisive margin, while his party made gains in the House and held most of their ground in the Senate, his rage led him to badmouth the vaccine (which he took secretly, like the entire FOX staff, like forceful anti-vaccine governor Greg Abbott). No longer the Trump miracle that his Operation Warp Speed had produced, taking the Biden Vaccine was strictly a matter of personal freedom.

In conservative regions of the country that take their personal freedom goddamned seriously, the high Covid infection and death numbers, the overwhelmed ICUs, are directly related to low vaccine rates and the reckless anti-science mandates of their GOP state leaders. Note, when discussing personal freedom from government coercion, how many of these right wing Trumpist governors are preventing the personal freedom of those who accept the science and want people to take every precaution against the newly resurgent Trump variant. Inconsistency is never a problem to people who cling to their anger.

Of course, there is a sort of rationale for choosing not to take the vaccine, as there always is when masses surrender logic to the will of demagogues. It’s kind of thin, given the real, ongoing risk of infection and death, and the vaccine’s success in protecting people from death by Covid, but it is a rationale. Government mandates are tyranny, pure and simple. Being forced by the government to wear a mask in public, after all, is just like being made to wear a yellow Jewish star on your coat back in Nazi times. Needle Nazis want to inject you with an unproven drug that will make you one of them. Getting jabbed with the unproven Fauci Ouchi or wearing a mask are both matters of purely personal choice that nobody has a right to judge anybody about. Just because 99% of the hospitalizations for Covid are unvaccinated folks doesn’t prove shit — you can’t just trust that this unproven vaccine works simply because Biden and Fauci claim it does!

Lately the chorus against anti-vax shaming from the 60% who are now vaccinated, and angry that the Trump variant is surging out of control, has grown. You can’t persuade people that what they’re doing is stupid, selfish and reckless, these pundits tell us, by using words like “stupid,” “selfish” and “reckless”. You see what the Left is doing by judgmentally blaming those unvaccinated people who are infecting their children and dying for being dumber than piles of shit? It doesn’t work, pundits remind us urgently.

A gentle reminder: proof itself doesn’t work, for people ready to believe alternative facts. In an election Trump’s party did very well in, particularly after the four disastrous years of his incompetent, corrupt and often criminal administration, somehow only the presidential ballot was rigged, corrupt, fraudulent. It doesn’t faze anyone at the Polyp’s mass spreader events that there is not a shred of proof of this wild assertion. See, to MAGA nation it’s obvious the fucking Blacks and the Jews who control them were determined to get rid of the greatest White Christian ever to rule the modern USA come hell or high water, and with their unlimited power and vast Jew money they had the ability, and the criminal viciousness to do it. Close to 40% of our fellow Americans see it this way, the vast majority of Republicans accept this alarmingly counter-factual alternative fact.

Of course, it can be seen differently. Until the former and future president is indicted and tried, for, at minimum, obstruction of justice (check out the impressively consistent pattern and practice which demonstrates his unflagging intent) and interference in the election (roll the tape of him badgering the Georgia Secretary of State to find him a measly 11,780 votes), it is well to remember that this Delta variant surge is the fucking Trump variant.