I now use the word “Nazi” for the right wing extremists who are currently calling the shots here in our exceptional nation.   I know the word has an intemperate, hyperbolic ring to it, but hear me out.   Many governments have been oppressive, autocratic, several were/are openly fascist.   The Nazi regime stands head and shoulders above all these because of their openly racist criminality (draconian racial laws, death squads, death camps and so on) in the name of an imaginary ideal: to purify the blood of the most exceptional “race” in history.   A hallmark of Nazis everywhere is their willingness to see millions die in order to achieve their goals.  As that unimpeachable expert on Nazi philosophy and practice, Dr. Josef Goebbels, once remarked during the war: if we win, history will regard us as the world’s greatest benefactors, if we lose we’ll be remembered as its most notorious criminals.  

The American Extreme Right is animated by many of the same sentiments that ignited the Nazi revolution.  It is based, largely, in racism, organized hatred, a stilted “meritocracy” based on loyalty and anti-democratic obedience to the will of a superior being, an infallible leader.  In a pinch they don’t care how many of their “enemies” need to die so that they might prevail, a characteristic their ilk demonstrates daily in this pandemic we’re currently all trying to survive.

In 1954 the Supreme Court belatedly, almost a hundred years after a decision stating that blacks could not be citizens or possess any rights “the white man is bound to respect”, ruled that segregated education is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of “non-white” Americans.   Recall at the time lynching was still practiced in many parts of the country.   The National Guard had to be called in when schools were integrated, by a few brave children, to protect these kids from being murdered by screaming crowds of outraged racists.

Almost immediately a small group of wealthy reactionaries formed the extremist John Birch Society in reaction to this indignity.   They got up and running, Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers among them, in 1958.   They were appalled that Negroes were given full rights at the stroke of a pen by the Supreme Court, a court they were convinced had been taken over by Communists.   They were against the “mongrelization” of our country that would be caused by equal civil rights for all citizens and the likely “race mixing” that would result.  The Birchers were the ultimate anti-communists during a period of anti-communist hysteria.  The John Birch Society was a lunatic fringe group, considered nut jobs by most Democrats and Republicans of their time.   Now they are basically running the United States of America in the form of the current lockstep Republican party led by Mr. Trump, Mitch McConnell and their plutocrat sponsors.

Of course, I have skipped a few steps.  One of the first political campaigns Charles and David Koch undertook was an anti-integration campaign in North Carolina. They used some of their vast wealth to get their candidates on the school board and implemented policies that allowed white parents “school choice.”    This school board was able to immediately re-segregate the district’s schools and did considerable damage to the educational opportunity in the poorest, blackest schools before it was voted out.   This tells you a lot about the agenda of guys like the Koch boys.

They spent millions nationwide fighting minimum wage laws.  They spent tens of millions on influence machines from “think tanks” that informed and later dominated public debate on every issue (think “climate skepticism”) to colleges and universities who took their donations in exchange for promoting their ideology. They funded the campaigns of anti-union politicians.   They supported laws restricting voting in state after state, in order to increase their chances of victory for wildly unpopular anti-government policies.   They were big funders of the Federalist Society, a national legal fraternity dedicated to creating a cadre of solid, right wing federal judges to rule in favor of industry, deregulation, curtailment of underclass voting rights, protecting the rights of employers, landlords and fetuses and other issues important to protecting the privileges of the wealthy and powerful.  Why millions of the powerless go along with this agenda is a perplexing mystery.  The chance to vent their anger and hatred, and feel superior to others in comradeship with fellow travelers, seems to explain some of it.

A lifetime ago I enrolled, briefly, in a PhD program in history with a concentration on the Nazi regime.  I wanted to understand how an ignorant, violently opinionated sociopath could take over a famously civilized nation and order the murder of, among millions, my entire family.   I took it somewhat personally, I admit.  I quickly got into a fight with a professor about who supported the Nazis.  I’d read about the wealthy reactionaries and aristocrats who, early or late in the Weimar Republic, threw their support behind the regime that would protect them from Marxism, provide some of them with slave labor (Bayer among them) and the rest of them with generous protection of their privileges.  

The professor, an American who retained a bit of his German Jewish accent, a somber and well-read historian, told me dismissively that I sounded like Hugh Trevor-Roper, a freewheeling, acerbic British historian who shared my view, apparently, to great controversy [1].  I understood that this was a sophisticated way of calling me an unlearned, wildly opinionated crackpot.   I surmise that the professor was offended by Trevor-Roper, as apparently other Jewish historians were [2].  During my semester as a PhD candidate I quickly came to understand the role of politics in the writing of history, and began to read it differently.  I had to concede to the outraged professor that perhaps many of the wealthy did not throw their support behind Hitler until he was Fuhrer, which I thought was fair enough.   

You don’t need an active conspiracy to have a world of shared goals with like-minded people, if you have overriding interests in common.   The segregationist, anti-minimum wage, anti-union, anti-regulation, voting rights suppressing Kochtopus (they control dozens of influential institutions, Charles Koch’s favorite is called The Institute for Humane Studies) has a lot of very wealthy fellow travelers who are not specifically on board with all of their anti-humane, anti-democratic policies.  

You have very wealthy people who might be considered socially liberal, someone like Jeff “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Bezos, who are on board with many of the core reactionary beliefs of many of his fellow billionaires, primarily that he has a absolute right to every penny he can put into his portfolio.   Unions, hated by the Kochs and their ilk, are forbidden in Bezos operations.    Bill Gates, Bezos’s fellow billionaire philanthropist and smartest man in any room, like Michael Bloomberg, share many of the features of the Koch belief system — fighting for monopoly control of their industries, promoting chosen projects they can throw vast sums of money into (for Gates “charter schools” was one) to create a good, philanthropic public name, and when in power, having cops throw random black kids against the wall (Bloomberg) as a way of “fighting crime.” 

It’s easy to hate people who wake up every day burning to increase fortunes they already could not spend if they lived to be 1,000 years old.  I find it easy, anyway.  But when they promote policies that ensure that the poor will stay poor, and die in numbers as large as necessary to preserve the status quo that advantages the super-privileged, and spend millions to convince the credulous that there is something in this grotesque arrangement for them too, well, in my book these fucks, regardless of their well publicized “philanthropy”, are straight up evil.   Nazis, if you will.

[1]  Trevor-Roper’s most widely read and financially rewarding book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler‘s bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler’s dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  

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Echo of history with Mr. Trump’s hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  Pence and Kushner, for example, vie for control of the “response” to the plague currently killing many Americans.

[2] The American historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The Holocaust and Historians (1981) delivered what the British historian David Cesarani called an “ad hominem attack”, writing that Trevor-Roper in his writings on Nazi Germany was indifferent to Nazi antisemitism, because she believed that he was a snobbish antisemite, who was apathetic about the murder of six million Jews.^[28] Cesarani wrote that Dawidowicz was wrong to accuse Trevor-Roper of antisemitism but argued that there was an element of truth to her critique in that the Shoah was a blind-spot for Trevor-Roper.^[29]

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Janine Jackson, criticized for her often snarky tone by the friend who recommended her excellent podcast to me, lays out an insightful analysis of the scope of America’s larger problem– conflating the financial health of the corporate “persons” who control the nation and the actual health of the actual human citizens of the nation–here.

You have the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, urging his workers to altruistically give up accrued sick days for their ailing low-paid colleagues in his operations.   Massive no-strings bailouts to the very corporations that are destroying the planet (fossil fuel, fracking, airlines) to ensure their economic health while ordinary citizens must content themselves with incoherent platitudes and partisan drivel.   There are no plans to safeguard the millions who are incarcerated, including the thousands in privatized immigration cages, of course.

You have the incoherent, angry president having his Secretary of State announce the tightening of sanctions on Iran, even as Iran is an epicenter of Coronavirus.   

Jackson correctly describes the situation as a crime scene.   Which is, of course, only true if you consider the rights of ordinary humans as important as the rights of the legal fictions that actually run our country and the world.   Here she is, and here is the transcript of this informative episode, with a side order of appropriate snarkiness:

The coronavirus is highlighting existing faults and fissures in US society.  Stark evidence of government priorities and their impact is coming fast and furious: $1.5 trillion is available instantly for loans to banks, but there’s no plan to protect incarcerated people, in jails, prisons or migrant detention centers. Congress can’t seem to act on assistance that reaches all the people who need it, and Jeff Bezos—the one with $111 billion—wants Whole Foods workers to share their sick leave.  Immediate tests for celebrities without symptoms—yes; reconsideration of devastating sanctions on Iran and Venezuela—absolutely not.  It’s a crime scene that’s setting up social economic justice work for the next many years, and calling for dogged, humanistic reporting that doesn’t “ask what questions this all raises,” but instead demands better answers.

the rest of the episode

Can former Vice-President O’Biden defeat Donald Trump in November 2020?  We will see, it appears.   He recently urged voters to go out, wait on long lines and cast votes for him in primaries held during nationwide public closures to slow the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.   Biden and the DNC want to sew the Biden nomination up and end the debate and disunity among Democrats, plague be damned!   If you’re healthy, Biden idiotically tweeted, you have nothing to fear.   Go out and vote!

We are four months from the Democratic National Convention in July, twice as far from the actual presidential election.   What is the rush to anoint the chosen opponent to Trump without hearing the details of his actual policy positions?   No matter.  Would you rather have Biden or that Hitler-wannabe Trump?   No brainer! Shut this puppy down, say Biden’s surrogates, in the name of uniting to defeat Trump, the People have spoken!  

My fear is that this deeply flawed candidate with a compromising and anti-progressive policy record on many things [1] and a tendency to smoothly peddle untruths [2] will lose to an even more shamelessly proficient lying sack of shit.

This tweet summed up a lot in a few words:

On the other hand, like the oppressive and one-sided contracts we are all required to agree to when using any product or service (thank you, John Roberts), this substandard crap is the best we are fucking entitled to.   Get used to it, because well-paid people who know much better will always decide what is best for us in a corporately controlled democracy.  

That’d said, when the time comes, obviously, we all have to hold our noses and vote to support whichever corporately sponsored candidate runs against Trump.

If Trump winds up beating Biden like a drum next November, or even ekes out a surgical 10,000 vote, Facebook-algorithm-assisted Electoral College mandate, you may begin to think of history differently.   A brutal loop, that, with small variations, plays forever in favor of the most ruthless among us.    

The beauty part?   There is nothing you can do about it, we are told over and over again, except be very afraid and vote for another, less toxic, idiot in hopes of safely returning to politics as usual.

[1]  Biden’s consistent pro-corporate work on bankruptcy, predatory credit card practices, support for the Saudi war in Yemen (world’s current number one humanitarian crisis– but good for American munitions makers and their shareholders), mass incarceration, The Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, taking repeated positions for freezing or cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.  

In addition, as a friend put it nicely, Biden is “dumb as a bag of rocks”.

[2] a short list of recent Biden lies:  his claim to have graduated in the top of his class in law school, 76th out of 85 — pretty close;  his repeated untrue story about being arrested in South Africa while visiting Mandela; his claim during the recent debate with Sanders that he can name all nine of Sanders’s Super PACs– when challenged by Sanders to do so he snorted “come on!” — he tends to laugh off direct, uncomfortable questions with that winning, affable bullshit artist smile of his.

Biden did not run, as I mistakenly wrote a week or two ago, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, though one delegate loved him so much that a vote was cast for him at the 1984 convention.  In 1988 Biden “inadvertently” plagiarized a very fine speech by a British Labor Party politician (he wished afterwards that he’d simply added the guy’s name before passing off his quotes as his own).   He dropped out after the story broke, but got almost 1% of the delegates at the convention.

The Electable Mr. Biden’s 2008 run (from Wikipedia):

During the campaign, Biden focused on his plan to achieve political success in the Iraq War through a system of federalization. He touted his record in the Senate as the head of several congressional committees and experience in foreign policy. Despite a few notable endorsements, Biden failed to garner significant support in opinion polls, and was marred by controversial comments made while campaigning. He ultimately dropped out of the race on January 3, 2008, after coming in fifth place and capturing less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus.^[4]

Of course, this is not 2008.  This is Germany in the fall of 1932.   Unlike the current president, Mr.Biden has given no indication that if he could, he would become Hitler.  Biden has not openly expressed hatred of any ethnic or religious group.   He is famous for his public affability, in stark contrast to the snarling psychopath who, during a frightening pandemic, is busily tweeting about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Benghazi, and his renewed determination to finally get to the truth about the most dangerous woman in America, outside of Rosie O’Donnell.    

Of course, we could do worse than Biden (Trump).   We also deserve better (any one of several of the other Democratic candidates).  The time will come, because the scales are heavily weighted in favor of corporate interests, whose voices speak infinitely louder than everybody else’s combined, when we will have to hold our noses and vote for this seemingly pleasant chap who has also authored and supported some hateful laws and policies (Crime Bill,  Welfare Reform, War in Iraq, et al).   That time is not yet.   At the very least, Biden needs to be pushed as far as possible from his smiling cooperation with former segregationists, his draconian positions toward poor people, his generally vague policy positions, his inability to apologize for something as grotesque as his part, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in allowing Anita Hill to be publicly humiliated and her testimony dismissed.

To me, Biden’s inability to apologize for not protecting Hill during the Clarence Thomas “high tech lynching” is the single most despicable thing about this affable, smiling man whose best friend was the coolest black dude to ever inhabit the White House.   Joe’s ready to challenge critics to fist fights, as he did last week while campaigning in a factory when someone questioned his commitment to the sacred Second Amendment.  Saying to Hill “I wish there was more I could have done”– when he was chairman of the committee whose members did their best to publicly humiliate and discredit the woman who came forward to testify about her sexual harassment at the hands of the Black Klansman, merits a swift shot in the kisser.

Of course, most politicians are self-aggrandizing scumbags, many are outright psychopaths, no question.   Still.   We deserve better than this guy, though, obviously, even he is way, way better than this unredeemed sicko we have there now.  When the time comes hopefully two out of three Americans will hold their noses and click Biden, rather than the immature, churlish man who has made America so great, for the chosen few, these last few years.  If Biden wins by 15,000,000 votes, it will make a statement.   Even if Trump’s quants once again game the Electoral College, this time by a total of say 8,000 votes in three key states (as opposed to his whopping 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate in 2016).   

Remember, boys and girls, there was a very good reason the final say of who will be the president was left to the wealthiest citizens.  Left up to the majority, the right of the richest to employ slave labor might have been in trouble decades before the Civil War!

Some tropes never go out of style.  If, for example, you in any way criticize the corrupt excesses of the largely unregulated “Free Market” and the political culture that enables them, most often you will be shouted down as a Communist, a Red, an apologist for the mass murders of Mao, Stalin, a defender of a failed ideology, an Un-American who hates our freedom.    It is an idiotically un-nuanced counter-attack to legitimate criticism of a power structure that openly favors the liberty of a few super-privileged individuals over the best interests, or even mere survival, of the vast majority of the earth’s population.   

You would think that an attack so simplistic, stupid and one-sided would simply stop working over time.  You’d be wrong to think that.   Some tropes never go out of style.   Check out Mike Bloomberg, a hideous modern-day avatar of the Eternal Jew of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example.    As despots have proved over and over, if an argument is made continually in the mass media, spoken by everyone, even some dissenters, and repeated in endless variations, the argument itself need not be particularly coherent to find itself on everyone’s lips.

The argument, for example, that Bernie Sanders could never be elected in America because he represents a vicious and failed extremist ideology that America finally defeated once and for all,  is advanced in sometimes subtle ways.

Here’s a nice one two punch from yesterday’s New York Times, often cited as the even-handed journal of record:

So, we can see now, reading the thoughtful, nuanced, authoritative account in the NY Times,  that really only desperate people, America’s biggest losers, cling to the appeal of this Democratic Socialist and his promises to continue fighting for greater justice for all.   Most reasonably successful people, of course, (and it goes without saying) will have a more nuanced view of what’s really  important in the upcoming existential battle to unseat President Caligula.   They all know that “moderation” is the only way to defeat an “immoderate” presdient.   

As for Sanders’ call for paid health care as a human right for all Americans (including those hopeless desperados who are his loyal base) ?  The New York Times has that one covered too — won’t happen, forget about it, losers:

The great Jeremy Scahill lays out, with great clarity, how Red Baiting works and how it’s being used against the Sanders campaign, here   in less than ten minutes.   Very much worth taking in.

I would weep for my country, but I’m too busy creating new dance grooves on my tenor ukulele and channeling the spirit of the martyred saint of the fucking First Amendment ,Mr. Lenny Bruce…